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6 - The Artifice of Trust: Reputational and Procedural Registers of Trust in North Indian “Informal” Finance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Ajay Gandhi
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Barbara Harriss-White
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Douglas E. Haynes
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Sebastian Schwecke
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
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Summary

This chapter studies the operation of trust on financial markets in the North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi). It emphasizes an interpretation of trust on markets as an artifact and artifice based on an experiential category of practical knowledge used to handle exchange under conditions of high uncertainty, and identifies two distinct patterns in its handling, marked as procedural and reputational registers of (handling) trust. The first case analyzes the difficulties faced by locally operating banks in the mid-twentieth century to shift from reputational to procedural registers of handling trust, using banking advertisements and other archived material. The second case outlines the shifts in the manner reputational registers of trust are used in extra-legal money lending in the wake of Indian legislation against these financial practices, contrasting an ethnographic study of contemporary practices to historical sources on money lending in the first half of the twentieth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
, pp. 147 - 178
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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