Community and Public Culture The Marwaris in Calcutta

Community and Public Culture: Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments
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Many persons have been of assistance to me in the course of my research and writing. First, I would like to thank the granting institutions that made my research possible. Foreign Language Area Studies scholarships provided me with opportunities to study Hindi, both before and after my fieldwork, at the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Institute of Indian Studies Hindi Program, and the University of Chicago. Financial support from the University of Michigan International Institute, the University of California Berkeley Professional Program in India, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan enabled me to conduct research in India for about twenty months between September 1994 and March 1997. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Herman Dunlop Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, and a University of Michigan Dean's Candidacy Fellowship provided additional support. A Gutenberg-e Award from the American Historical Association enabled me to do two more months of research in India during the summer of 2000, and provided generous financial support during the writing of this book. Professor Robert Darnton provided excellent guidance on writing an electronic book in the field of history. The direction given by my editor, Kate Wittenberg, along with the staff of epic, has been invaluable in the formation of this book. I also gratefully thank the staffs of the India Office Library (now part of the British Museum and Library), the National Archives of India, the West Bengal State Archives, the National Library of India, and the many public libraries and reading rooms for their assistance to me. This book started out as a doctoral dissertation in the interdepartmental program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. Nicholas B. Dirks, Thomas R. Trautmann, Fred Cooper, and Sumathi Ramaswamy provided direction, support, and guidance as I developed my ideas. Other scholars that gave me useful guidance during this time include James Ackerman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, David William Cohen, Juan Cole, David Frye, Peter Hook, David Ludden, C. M. Naim, Gyan Pandey, Roger Rouse, Lee Schlesinger, Clint Seeley, Dina Siddiqi, Tahsin Siddiqi, Ann Laura Stoler, Lynn Thomas, Luise White, and Eleanor Zelliot. Leola Brennan, secretary of the University of Michigan Anthro-History Program until her retirement in 1998, deserves thanks for the administrative help she provided to me over the years. Many people in India offered friendship, advice, and guidance in my research. I would like to especially thank the dozens of Marwari families in Calcutta and Delhi who opened their offices, shops, and homes to me, and were willing to share the sometimes very personal details of their lives. I am grateful to all the people who took time out of their busy days to participate in formal interviews and informal conversations, and who gave me a window on their perspectives about Indian, Calcuttan, and Marwari society. As is standard in anthropological research, however, one's so-called "informants" must remain anonymous, to protect their privacy. But, as is the convention in history
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writing, I have included names of and details about well-known people, whose accomplishments are part of the public record.
Professor Gautam Bhadra of the Centre for Studies in Social Science in Calcutta served as my unofficial research supervisor during my fieldwork and has been both an intellectual guide and a friend. His intellectual accomplishments and intricate knowledge of Indian history, combined with his remarkable generosity and patience as a teacher, have helped me immeasurably in my work. In addition, I would like to thank the many people who offered help to me during my fieldwork, including Sapna Bhattacharya, Pallabi Biswas, Mr. and Mrs. Rishi Jaimini Kaushik Barua, Debi Basu, Hena Basu, Mundira Bhandury, K. P. Bose, Bashona and the late Dwijesh Chakrabarty, Soumya Chakrabarty, Susanta Chakrabarty, Shilu Chattopadhyay, Pratima Dutta, Katia Fairbanks, Anjan Ghosh, Sweta Ghosh, Susanta Ghosh, Omkar Goswamy, Saroj Kaushik, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, P. T. Nair, Debashish Nayak, Alka Saraogi, Ashok Seksaria, P.C. and Mridula Seth, Sushila Singhi, Sutapa Dhar, Chandralekha Ghosh, Rajat Kanta Roy, Sulagna Roy, Aditi Sen, Laxmi Subramaniam, Silu Thakur, and the Ladies Wing of the All India Marwari Federation. My research in Calcutta was greatly enhanced by the friendship of other AIIS fellows: I would especially like to mention Sheila Dutta, Gerry Forbes, and Jason Fuller.
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The work of writing was made all the more pleasant by colleagues and friends in Chicago, Iowa City, and San Antonio, places I lived when writing my thesis and then this book. My work on issues of identity and difference in Calcutta was deeply shaped by conversations I shared with Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose intellectual and personal engagement in the familial and affective lifeworlds of middle-class Bengali society gave me valuable insight into Bengali and Indian society. In addition, Eliza Kent, Caitrin Lynch, Matthew Hull, Nicole Ranganath, and Laura Ring each gave apt and useful comments. Colleagues and friends in Iowa, where I was a visiting professor in the history department at the University of Iowa during 1999-2000, made for an exceptionally pleasant academic work environment, and I would like to express my warm appreciation to Jenny Anger, Gautam Ghosh, Paul Greenough, Elizabeth Heineman, Tal Lewis, Linda Kerber, Philip Lutgendorf, Catherine Rymph, Johanna Schoen, Despina Stratigakos, and especially Jael Silliman. Carolyn B. Brown generously provided expert advice on rewriting. Many friends at UTSA and in San Antonio have offered friendship and intellectual support, and I would especially like to mention Antonio Calabria,
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Brian and Paula Davies, Daniel Engster, Kirsten Gardner, Harvey Graff, Patrick Kelly, Juliet Langman, Jon Lee, David Libby, Vicki Mayer, Laura Mitchell, and Wing Chung Ng. UTSA graduate students Carlos Acosta, Dennis Fisher, and F. Michael Rollins provided helpful research assistance. A close group of friends and family has provided stimulation and support, reminding me of the world beyond academia. Becky, Melinda, Sherri, the Croones, Gaelyn, Laura, Eric, Sue, Kate, Anne, Ellen, Lynne, and Bernstein all deserve mention for providing pleasant distractions from my writing. My family has been a powerful source of encouragement and support. My parents George and Gretchen Hardgrove, and my brother, George W., have always encouraged me in my academic work. My parents even made the long journey to visit me in Calcutta, happy to escape the winter and eager to find out what kept their daughter away in India for so long. My only regret is that my grandmother, Mildred Tangen Grosenick, did not live to see this electronic book come to fruition. She died on January 1, 2001. I do not believe that she ever worked on a computer or looked at websites on the Internet, let alone read a book on-line, but I think that she would have been pleased to see it. I often thought of my grandmother while I was far away during my fieldwork, especially while interviewing Indian women of about the same age. I have wondered how she might answer similar questions about kinship, lineage, and community, and what it meant to be Norwegian in Minnesota. I dedicate this book to her memory. Versions of selected chapters appear elsewhere, published as separate articles and a forthcoming book chapter. Chapter 3 appears as an article "Merchant Houses as Spectacles of Modernity in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu." Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 36 No 1. forthcoming, 2002; and will be reprinted in Sumathi Ramaswami, ed. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. New Delhi: Sage, forthcoming 2002. A portion of Chapter 5 appeared as Anne Hardgrove, "Hindi Literature as a Political Space: Marwari Women's Fiction in Calcutta," Economic and Political Weekly (April 3, 1999): 804-806. Chapter 6 appeared as Anne Hardgrove "Sati Worship and Marwari Public Identity in India," Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 58, No. 3 (August 1999), pp 732-752, and is being reprinted with permission of the Association for Asian Studies. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos were taken by the author.
Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997
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Community and Public Culture: Preface
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Preface
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This book explores the historical and cultural processes by which people under colonial and postcolonial rule come to regard themselves as part of a "community," sharing a particular local and panregional ethnic community identity. The focus of this ethnohistorical case study of community formation is a wealthy and controversial migrant business community in Calcutta, the Marwaris. Although the Marwaris are arguably the wealthiest and most successful business and industrialist community in India, they have earned a contested national reputation as a community that is socially and politically conservative, corrupt, clannish, and even backward in the social values they espouse, particularly in matters relating to women. This perception has in fact been so pervasive that in sources such as Molesworths Marathi-English Dictionary (1857) the term Marwari is defined as applying "allusively to a cunning and knavish fellow." 1 This one example speaks volumes about how deeply the word "Marwari" is associated with negative connotations in the minds of non-Marwaris.
My study of community-formation among the Calcutta Marwaris 2 challenges theoretical paradigms in the social sciences that suggest that the affective and supposedly primordial ties of community are antithetical to capitalism and modernity. Colonial capitalism in India did not always destroy community; in fact, as in the case of the Marwaris, it sometimes created it. Colonial capitalism provided the particular enabling context for the emergence of a modern Marwari identity. The starting date of my study, circa 1897, marks the burgeoning use of the term "Marwari" as a category in Calcutta public life, as the result of community agitation against colonial antigambling legislation. The closing date, 1997, marks, with fortuitous symmetry, the year that I finished my fieldwork research and returned to the United States to begin writing my dissertation.
As a community whose public identity is characterized and marked by the very central contradictions of modernity, the Marwaris present a challenge to current social science explanations about community formation in public life. This makes them a fascinating and yet difficult case to write about. On the one hand, they are a strongly capitalist community whose identity has emerged in the last century through transregional flows of capital and migrations of traders. On the other hand, in forming their own public selfimage under the conditions of colonial and postcolonial capitalism, the migrant and diasporic Calcutta Marwaris do not present themselves as an outcome of modernity. Instead, they have drawn extensively on the idioms of seemingly naturalized patriarchal sentiments of lineage, gender, extended family, and kinship, along with expressions of regional loyalty to their imagined homeland of Marwar, in Rajasthan.
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By negotiating their modernity using the primordialized language of community, and not the language of a bourgeois public sphere, the Marwaris are quite unlike their generally less business-minded, middle-class, Englisheducated Bengali bhadralok neighbors, who championed a national colonial modernity through state intervention and legislation. The Bengali bhadralok, acclaimed for their modernizing efforts in education, literature, and universal legislative social reform under the sponsorship of the colonial state, have long been hailed as the harbingers of an Indian modernity presumed to be valid for other Indians who may not shareand may sometimes even actively contestthose same bourgeois cultural values. By virtue of their strong cultural capital in Calcutta, the Bengali bhadralok have been extensively written about by contemporary scholars and as such have implicitly set the norms for other people whom Bengalis routinely label "non-Bengali." My study is partly aimed at rectifying this bias in scholarship, and attempts to articulate how other groups have negotiated the processes of modern selffashioning in Indian public life. In fact, looking at the Marwaris as one of the "Others" against whom Bengali bhadralok identity is defined may shed light on the actual historical peculiarity of the Bengalis as colonized Indian subjects.
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My study of the community identity of the Calcutta Marwaris engages academic debates of the last two decades about the rise of public culture and the production of community and locality under the flows of capital and migration. Historians and anthropologists working on the topic of colonialism, in India and other places, have identified the production of new or changed community identities as one of the primary effects of colonial rule. Extensive research on how the colonial state used objectifying techniquessuch as the census and ethnographic surveysto classify colonized people has demonstrated that this colonial knowledge shaped the way that colonized peoples saw themselves and constructed their identities. 3 At the same time, historians of India such as Ranajit Guha have cautioned scholars not to regard the state as an all-powerful arbiter of "social facts." 4 While still acknowledging the unequal and unjust power relations characteristic of colonial rule, Guha focuses on areas of appropriation and resistance, where colonized people often found their own means of negotiating the dynamic configurations of colonialism and modernity. Guha urges historians to rethink our descriptions of colonial modernity so that we do not write Indias history as merely an echo of the modernity of the colonial masters.
Guha's characterization of the colonial state as consisting in "dominance without hegemony" has been a point of departure for my inquiry. Though the colonial state is not absent from my analysis, I am most interested in looking at instances in which Indians acted (or at least thought that they were acting) as the makers of their own history. I want to examine how Indians negotiated their own sense of difference among themselves, along lines of ethnicity, region, and gender, in areas where the British were not obviously
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in hegemonic control. Although my thinking about the production of colonial knowledge has been influenced by scholars such as Nicholas Dirks, Ann Stoler, Bernard Cohn, and Edward Said, 5 I have also been influenced by ethnohistorical work such as that of E. Valentine Daniel, Talal Asad, Ranajit Guha, and the Subaltern Studies collective, who have questioned the ways that scholarly narratives of the colonial encounter have been overly influenced by Eurocentric understandings. 6 I hope to bring these two perspectives together.
One final note on my argument relating to dominance without hegemony is pertinent here. My making an appeal for the creation of historical narratives that are not dominated by the discourse of the colonial state should not be mistaken for a throwback to Orientalist-style accounts in which the state is given a passive role in the construction of culture, knowledge, and power. This has not been my intent. This does not mean that I will be describing the internal life of the secret trading networks among Marwari businessmen and what they did when the colonial state was not looking. Nor will I be looking at what it means to "be Marwari" in the way that Daniels study is about "being Tamil." 7 Rather, to illuminate discourses and practices of the Marwari community in colonial and postcolonial India I focus on the interstitial space of public life between community and the state. 8
Based upon my ethnographic and archival research on the Calcutta Marwaris, I argue that communities are enacted by performances of identity in public life that draw upon idioms of kinship and family. These performances cut across the divide between public and private, and provide challenges to theories about public culture that rely on explanatory devices such as the invention of tradition and the imagination of community. The very gendered articulations of lineage, family, and gender roles in public and political representations of the diasporic Calcutta Marwari community, it turns out, are not so easily explained by these conceptual tools of analysis.
My interest in the history and anthropology of India dates back to the middle of my undergraduate years at Carleton College when I enrolled in Professor Eleanor Zelliots course on the history of modern India. One course in Indian history soon led to another and another, and in 1988 I spent a fascinating year in Pune, Maharashtra on the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) India Studies program. Though at the time I would never have considered this experience to be anthropological fieldwork, it was without a doubt a foundational experience in my later graduate training in the history and anthropology of India. After starting graduate school in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan in 1991, I made two more trips to India over summer breaks to get reacquainted with friends from my ACM days, investigate potential field sites and dissertation topics, and to concentrate on
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learning Hindi and Urdu. These early fieldwork experiences form my own personal historical backdrop to the archival and fieldwork research presented in these pages.
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I started my "official" fieldwork in 199495, with a research fellowship from the now-defunct University of California, Berkeley Professional Studies Program. I went to New Delhi to do research on the development and effects of the professionalization of domestic education on Indian women, with the idea of focusing on the institutional history of a prominent home science college, the oldest in India. I was interested in examining how aspects of domesticity and colonialism had become routinized in formal educational curricula. During this research I became aware of an impression among some students that the field of home science and domestic education in general has been especially popular among Marwaris and baniya (middlemen trader) communities. 9 I began to read more about the histories of business and trading groups in order to make sense of why particular communities would make cultural and financial investments in the professionalization of domesticity. The connection between trading groups and the professionalization of domesticity was not an outcome I would have predicted before I began my research.
In the process of sorting out these connections, I learned just how closely discourses and practices of public, private, domesticity, kinship, and community identity in modern India have become intertwined. I found that the Marwaris are a group with a complicated and often troubled relationship with their own public identity and with the attendant discourse of domesticity that forms a surprisingly large dimension of their public presence. The site of my research on domesticity and public identity then shifted from a college institution of home science to the Marwari community in Calcutta. In Calcutta, where I ultimately did most of my fieldwork, the term "Marwari" connoted a very prominent, contested, and relatively unresearched social identity. I returned to India in 19961997 for another year of fieldwork on a junior fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. During this research period in Calcutta, Professor Gautam Bhadra gave generously of both his time and ideas from his expertise in Indian history to guide me in my research efforts.
My own role as a scholar clearly had an impact on my attempt to study or define Marwari identity in Calcutta. Because of the multivalent quality of the ethnic tag "Marwari," and its often demeaning connotations of stinginess and corruption, I had to take great care in the ways that I deployed the term in both public and private settings. This meant that I could never directly ask anyone if he or she was Marwari. My first attempts to do exactly thisto ask people, "Are you a Marwari?"ended in mutual embarrassment and occasional insult. I eventually learned to wait until the person might use the term "Marwari" to identity himself or herself, and then I might cautiously follow
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suit. Some people, recognized by others to be from the most prominent Marwari families, rejected the term "Marwari" entirely, insisting instead to be called a Rajasthani, an Indian, or a Calcuttan. Ethnic identity, I discovered, was a highly contentious matter. Even though I was not studying a "community" in the more common sense of the term, as signifying the politically explosive context of Hindu-Muslim communal violence, I found that people do not necessarily always control the ethnic tags that label them. And yet these ethnic tags, though contested, provide the means by which Indian public culture is constituted and represented. Appointment Anthropology My ethnographic methodology among Marwaris, at least among the wealthiest families, usually consisted of "appointment anthropology." 10 I never called anyone up "cold," without having first had a proper introduction from someone else, either with a letter or preferably a phone call. These introductions, I felt, helped grant me both social legitimacy (I could hope to be taken seriously) and also social protection. Getting started on this networking process took time. I was initially introduced to a prominent Marwari writer by a Bengali filmmaker friend, and from my acquaintanceship with this woman made contacts with others. It was very difficult to meet the most prominent industrialists because they were often out of town, very busy, and/or could not be bothered spending time with a graduate student from the University of Michigan. Still, using "appointment anthropology" I met dozens of families, many of whom were socially, economically, or politically prominent, with connections to the various public and private institutions of the city that I was interested in researching. I often started out by meeting people in their offices. Families might later invite me to attend weddings, community association meetings, or to come over to their houses for tea or meals.
Before I started my research, I expected an "interview" to be a situation in which I would sit down with one other person, ask probing questions, one following from the other, and easily get all the answers. Experience proved that "conversations" was perhaps a better name for what these encounters were. I usually had to wait a long time to see someone. Then the person would receive and sometimes make phone calls, deal with unexpected situations and crises, leave the room and return again, while others would come in to chat, and snacks and tea would be served. This was merely an introduction. In addition, my questions always had to be flexible enough to accommodate the mood, temperament, and personality of the host. Sometimes people revealed skeletons in their closets, perhaps confident that I was enough of an outsider to be harmless or unable to spread rumors. More often, it was very slow and difficult to establish trust with people who were already quite adept at managing the flows of information about themselves. I could never, for example, get very detailed information about business matters, and when I would tell people later on that I was not interested in business, they would be more relaxed in hearing what I had to say.
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During much of my "appointment anthropology," I spoke to most Marwari men in English, aware that their English was often better than my Hindi, and, more important, aware that Indians are especially sensitive and statusconscious about proving their ability to speak English, particularly with foreigners. Yet my four years of studying Hindi prepared me to have detailed conversations with many Marwari women (and a few Marwari men) who did not, could not, or would not speak in English. Though wealthier women in their forties and fifties were often completely fluent and at ease in English, those over about sixty years of age or lower-middle class women were generally unable to speak in English with me. At the time I sensed that they felt embarrassed about my speaking to them in Hindi, which they may have seen as a form of necessary condescension on my part. Since I was generally only invited to come over to meet Marwari women during the day, while their husbands were at work, there were often few English-speaking people around. So these women were often relieved when an English-speaking person entered the room so that they could halt the conversation. My grasp of spoken Hindi during my fieldwork was strong enough that I never had to rely on an interpreter. The introduction of an interpreter, either Marwari or Bengali, would have greatly constrained the already very formal relationships that I developed with Marwari women and men. On my very first interview, my conversations with two sisters extended into the early evening, and they asked if I would have my dinner there. I paused for the sake of politeness thrilled that this might be an occasion when I would have a chance to meet and observe the entire joint familyand gratefully accepted. It was hard for me to hide my disappointment when one sister replied, Fine, you tell me when you are ready, and the servant will bring your food out here to the living room. There was no question, it seemed, of getting beyond the front sitting room into the more intimate areas of the house. Putting Away My Notebook There were things that I could do, however, to try to ease my way into the lives of Marwaris, particularly when meeting women. The single most important strategy that I used was to put away my notebook, that time-honored sign of academic and anthropological research. It would have been impossible to establish any kind of trusted relationships with people had I wielded paper and pen at first encounter. 11 Not having a notebook was simply a concession to normal everyday behavior during social occasions. I did not want to present myself to people as only a researcher. So, during my initial meetings with people, I generally carried neither a big notebook nor any other object, such as a tape recorder, to make notes. I kept a bit of paper and a pen in my handbag, in case I felt it was imperative to write down the name and telephone number of a potential contact. If I felt it was important to have a second meeting, I would then bring a small tape recorder along and request permission to make tapes. Only a small handful of people were willing to be taped, and though I was initially disappointed at hearing a refusal, I realized that tape recording
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drastically limited the range of subjects people were willing to discuss, particularly in terms of touchy subjects such as inter- and intra-community relations.
I became quite conscious of the importance of how people manage the information that they are willing to share with an outsider, including an American graduate student. People are extremely secretive about anything to do with money or business, and my information on these matters in this book comes primarily from secondary sources. But in terms of managing ethnographic encounters, there were other things at stake. Many people, especially Bengalis, expressed their cynicism to me about fieldwork research: people could easily "lie" to me during the interviews. Indeed, it was true that at times people would say things that directly contradicted information that I had gathered from others, from written sources, or even things they had told me themselves. Yet I realized that even seemingly false utterances have a useful truth value for the anthropologist. It did not always necessarily matter whether the information people gave was literally accurate. Cultural meaning is always contained in every intersubjective utterance regardless of whether we perceive it to be true. The reasons people might have said what they said, as much as what they said itself, could be mined for useful information. Even an outright lie (to take the least charitable interpretation) contains cultural information useful in cobbling together a sense of how people make a public representation of themselves and/or others in shaping the symbolic boundaries of community. Friends and Informants My ethnographic encounters were not all in the mode of appointment anthropology. I especially enjoyed getting to know three young Marwari women, two of whom were friends with each other. During the many pleasant afternoons that I spent with them, I was cognizant of how much their own processes of self-reflection and cultural analysis were parallel and often very informing to my own thoughts and observations.
The three women were in their early 20s, unmarried, and from middle-class families, with a spread of income levels, residential locations, personal aspirations, and family relationships. For all of them, the question of marriage loomed as a very central concern, but one that was often only indirectly expressed. Their anxiety about marriage articulated itself in more immediate concerns, particularly over their families preparation of marriage "biodatas" to show prospective grooms families, and also over money. What each of them negotiated, in some sense, was the waiting time in which their families struggled to amass the many thousands of rupees for their dowries. 12 Having finished college, they needed to have activities to put down on the biodata to show that they had kept busy, but without becoming so overly educated that no Marwari boy would want to marry them. The more educated the girl, the more money the boys family would
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generally demand. Because Marwari boys do not usually study past the MBA level, it is almost unheard of for a Marwari woman to go to graduate school at all, even for a masters degree, let alone to do a Ph.D. Except in a very small number of cases, graduate study would only be undertaken after marriage.
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Rani Jaipuria (I have changed the names of all for reasons of confidentiality) lived four lanes over from my apartment in the traditionally Bengali neighborhood of Lake Gardens. I met her through a female Bengali film director friend of mine who was a friend of Ranis brother. Ranis father was ill with a terminal disease, and her brother was the only wage-earning member of the family. When I returned to Calcutta in the summer of 2000, one of Ranis friends told me that Ranis father had been cheated out of his share of the family business by his brothers, and some of his illness and depression could be attributed to this major disappointment. The Jaipuria family lived in a very cramped apartment, consisting of a kitchen, combined bedroom and living room, and a side room where the father sat. Inside, the main piece of furniture in the big room was a double bed in the middle of room, where Rani and I would sit and talk. Rani had just finished college and was studying computers at a prominent local technological institute, hoping to find a job in computing. She had relatively more independence than many Marwari girls her age, perhaps because her father was ill and her family was struggling financially and needed additional income. Rani spoke impeccable English, and also knew Hindi quite well.. She offered to help me by verifying translations of articles that I did from Hindi, and was happy to assist me, though she always refused to accept any payment.
The second woman, Rimi Pilania, lived in a small but very nice apartment in a new building in a fashionable area of Calcutta. Rimi had lived in Calcutta after her family moved there from Bihar. Besides Rimi, the household consisted of her mother and father, a younger sister, and an older and recently married brother and his wife. Their living room was furnished with the typical upper-middle class ornate sofa at one end, and a gaddi mattress at the other end. 13 The flat had two bedrooms for the conjugal couples, and an alcove off the living room where Rimi and her sister slept. Rimi had studied Hindi for her B.A. degree and at the time of my fieldwork was working on an M.A. in Hindi literature. She wrote and published short stories and was thinking about doing a Ph.D. She told me that her father did not know for a long time that she had started doing an M.A. and hit the roof when he found out: How on earth could he afford the dowry if she had an M.A.? It was already so much trouble trying to find the right boy. If she did end up doing her Ph.D., she said, it would have to be kept a secret from her father for as long as possible.
That was not the only secret. Rimis father and brother never knew about my existence either. Rimi and I had originally met at the house of the son of a prominent Marwari freedom fighter in the independence movement, and we
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exchanged numbers. She told me not to call on Sundays or in the evenings, when her father would be at home, although I was never clear about the exact reasons. I respected her wishes. Obviously, he would not have liked it. To my surprise, Rimi was the one to first call me to see about getting together, and she invited me over to her house. I subsequently visited her many times, often having lunch with her, her sister, sister-in-law, and mother, along with any relatives who might be visiting or had dropped by, but again, only on weekdays. Rimi was not very confident about speaking in English, and so we communicated in Hindi. She sometimes told me about the dynamics in her family, especially stories about her new sister-in-law, and often was more interested in asking about America than talking about her own life. The family priest came by regularly to do puja, as did another man who described himself to me as a marriage brokersomeone who kept tabs on others and played matchmaker for a select group of families.
During the days, when her father and brother werent around, Rimi was quite independent and went out for shopping, movies, and to visit friends, especially other writers. (After I left Calcutta, she wrote to tell me that she had enrolled in harmonium lessons, an activity that many young women do to acquire some talent in music while they wait to get married.) Whenever I visited Rimis house, we allquite literallyshared our lunch of heavy chappati, yogurt, lentil dal, and a couple of hot vegetable curries, together dipping our fingers into the same piles of slightly bittertasting food off of the same stainless steel thali plate. The first time I was presented food in this way, with the expectation that we would all eat off the same large plate, I was a little shocked and wondered whether I could manage such intimacy with people with whom I really was not that intimate. In four years of living in a variety of places in India, I had never heard of this or seen it done. This very intimate sharing of food, akannaborti (literally, eating the same food), is a euphemism for joint family and a ritual marker of the closeness of the extended family and the lineage known as the kul. Normally, in other Indian cultural contexts, joint families speak of maintaining closeness by eating from the same hearth/cooking pot, but not necessarily from the same plate!
Rimi knew that I was looking for a research assistant to help me read Marwari family histories written in Hindi and promised to help find someone. One day, we arranged to go to the old Marwari neighborhood of Burabazar to meet a friend of hers, Amita Patodia. Rimi and Amita had studied together at Shri Shikshayatan, the Marwari womens college founded by community social reformer Sitaram Seksaria. Amita lived in a very large, old, decrepit building off a narrow lane, a typical dwelling for the area of Burabazar, standing opposite a Jain primary school; the building was not divided up into separate flats for bourgeois nuclear families. An unlighted, damp, and mildewed stairway led to separate rooms set off dark and narrow hallways. Amita and her family had a couple of these rooms, although they were not joined together in a private flat and were scattered all over the building. Amitas mother died when she was young, leaving her and an older brother. Her
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father then married a much younger woman, and they had another daughter together before he died. Amitas brother worked as a trader in a traditional gaddi (a traders office; literally, mattress) in Burabazar and would sometimes come from his office for lunch. Amita, I, her step-sister, and step-mother shared our food from the same large thali plate. In other dark and proximate rooms were various uncles, aunts, and other relatives who ate separately. Amita had her own room in the flat, where we sat and talked. A very bright and good-natured young woman, Amita was happy to do some research work for me so that she could earn some money. Working outside the house would have been out of the question. She did all the work inside her bedroom, in the afternoons and at night, when others slept. When I visited her, we discussed the research work, and she often drew connections between the research themes with many examples from her own life. Like Rimi, Amita preferred to speak in Hindi with me and sometimes consulted a dictionary when we reached an impasse. The first time that I paid her, she held the money in her hands and told me proudly that it was the first money she had ever earned for herself. She said that she really did not want to have to ask her uncles for money. After I left Calcutta, she asked me to write to her in care of her brothers gaddi, not at the house where I had paid my visits. The uncles, it seemed, should not come to know of my existence.
25
The time I spent with these three women, and the relatively greater depth in which I got to know them, served as the backdrop to my archival and historical research as well as to my appointment anthropology. But even the intimate act of eating off of the same plate with them was still a far cry from actually "living among the Marwaris" around the clock. The fact that my very existence was kept secret from senior male family members speaks volumes about the ways that these women managed their daytime relationships in ways very different from when family men were present. Proximate but Distant Neighbors: Bengalis of Calcutta Originally, I thought I would try to find an accommodation as a paying guest in an upper-middle-class Marwari household, but initial inquiries revealed that no such family would accept the idea of my paying money for hospitality. One rather destitute Marwari family, struggling to maintain their nowdecrepit mansion in Bollygunge, approached me with the idea, but they charged too much and insisted that I follow a curfew of being home by 7 P.M. every day. I found the atmosphere of the household depressing, and in hindsight I feel lucky that I turned them down. This family managed to keep tabs on my whereabouts during the rest of my time in Calcutta and phoned me a number of times asking whether I could help them out financially. So instead of living among Marwaris, my home life was enmeshed in the lives of middle-class Calcutta Bengalis, a cultural milieu in which many of my observations of Marwari life were formed. I ended up always living in lower-middle class Bengali neighborhoods. The fact that I was not directly studying Bengalis changed my relationships with them; I found people to be
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quite relaxed. They could be themselves with the knowledge that I was not going to be scrutinizing (and later writing about) their every action. I sometimes lived as a guest in Bengali households, and for a long time had my own apartment in the middle class Bengali area of Lake Gardens in South Calcutta. I became close to the neighbors in my apartment building, with whom I frequently visited. I would sometimes drop in on them and watch television in the evenings. When one neighbors father died, I was also included in funeral rituals, which are restricted to close family members and friends. I learned to speak and understand Bengali well enough to live comfortably in a lower-middle class Bengali neighborhood. This intimate participation in the affective worlds of middle class Bengalis provided me with both a comparative angle and also a vantage point for understanding the significance of the Marwari presence in Calcutta.
My various Bengali friends, whom I knew from America or from previous visits to India, emphasized to me how careful I should be around Marwari men, whom they claimed had terrible reputations as lecherous, untrustworthy, and uncouth. These Bengalis believed it could be physically dangerous for me to stay with a Marwari family. One person told me how a relative had been fatally poisoned in a Marwari household in East Bengal. Most of the warnings, however, were about the possibility of unwanted sexual advances from Marwari men. My friends warned me that because of the incredible economic power of the Marwaris, I would have little protection from the police in case anything should happen. I listened carefully to these cautionary tales, to which I had a number of reactions. Mostly, I took them as hilarious representations of their ethnic others. I viewed these Bengali warnings about the Marwari male penchant for lechery and rape, in particular, as exaggerated extensions of their perception of a Marwari "rape" of Bengal. This is a good example of how ethnic, economic, and social identities could become intertwined.
During my research I was conscious that I would not be able to claim that I had "lived among the Marwaris," even though I visited Marwari households several times a week. To a certain extent, practical considerations were paramount. Although I was on a generous fellowship, I simply could not afford to live in a palatial house in posh Marwari localities. Nor did I choose to live in Burabazar, the congested, polluted, and absolutely chaotic area of northern Calcutta that middle class and poor Marwaris call home. I turned down invitations to stay as a guest in Marwari households, reluctant to give up the relative independence offered by living among Bengalis. But since no other Marwari family offered me a place as a paying guest, and I did not want to keep moving from household to household as a short-term guest, I had to make the most of what access I could have to Marwaris. My visits to wealthy Marwari homes were generally structured and formal and I almost never casually "hung out" in Marwari households. Even with my three young Marwari friends, I was not invited to visit in the evenings, when the men would be home. I did, however, get to know several members of the ladies wing of the All India Marwari Sammelon (Federation) and visited them in
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their homes as well, after joining and participating in their social reform organization. Because my research was done not with the traditional immersion among the people one studies but instead among their Bengali neighbors, my study remains largely an ethnography of Marwari identity in public life as framed by the Bengali experience. I do not claim knowledge about processes of imagination or invention that may be going on inside the Marwaris heads. Rather, I restrict my analysis to what I call their public "performances" of identity.
Though it would be an exaggeration to say that Marwaris and Bengalis live in two separate worlds with no social interaction, the communities do remain socially quite distant, despite their physical proximity in the congested city of Calcutta. Many of the Bengalis that I encountered in everyday life were fascinated to hear about my research because they themselves did not know much (or did not really care to know firsthand) about the Marwaris. I was surprised, in fact, to find out how little even most Calcutta academics knew about the group that had essentially become their citys primary economic benefactors. My discussions with Bengali neighbors and friends prompted many stories and animated discussion. My interchanges with Bengalis about my work helped give me a sense of how identity is relationally defined that became a central part of my research.
30
Besides interacting with Marwaris and middle class Bengalis, I also spent time in international academic circles, among other foreign and Indian academic researchers I met during my fieldwork. I was hardly isolated from the transnational subculture of academic life. This third circle of friendships and acquaintances, much akin to my American life at home, proved to be both personally and academically sustaining during my eighteen months of research in India. I spent part of my time socializing with other academics in Calcutta, almost always speaking in English with a sprinkling of Bengali, discussing academic work in seminars at the University of Calcutta, holding reading groups, going out to eat, and enjoying adda (gossip). Giving formal presentations of my work while in the field, and getting immediate and detailed feedback, greatly helped to shape my ideas and the course of my research. I also had numerous visits from American friends and family, including my parents. In fact, bringing my parents along on appointment anthropology helped increase my credibility, though they themselves know little about India. In the presence of my parents, people were much more forthcoming with information, documents, invitations, and contacts. In a community that especially values kinship, my parents became part of my own performance of identity. Archival and Historical Sources In addition to my appointment anthropology and the time I spent with Marwari friends and the women in the Marwari Federation, I did considerable amounts of archival research. There was no single written archive that was easily available for my study. The official records of the colonial eralocated in
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the India Office Library in London, the National Archives in New Delhi and the West Bengal State Archives in Calcuttawere important English-language sources for understanding the relationships forged between the community and the state. I researched English, Hindi, and Bengali materials in the India Office, the National Library of India, the Library of Congress, and in Indian public libraries, private collections, and the institutional libraries of schools, cultural, and philanthropic organizations. Bengali materials became important in understanding the relational qualities of identity formation. I learned written Bengali well enough to research and locate texts on my own, which I then had translated by a Bengali research assistant.
My knowledge of written Hindi became important when I realized how little has been written about Marwaris in English, especially on social issues. Most histories of Marwari families, and even Marwari business for that matter, have been written in modern standard Hindi. Any words in Marwari were noted as such in the texts. I encountered a few older sources on business families from Rajasthan written in old Marwari, which I could not understand, nor could my research assistant. Hindi, for all practical purposes, had become the lingua franca of the diasporic community. During the home visits, some of the wealthiest families handed me their own published family histories, written in Hindi, outlining in detail the accomplishments of their extended family or lineage (kul). These books describe the life events of the most successful family members, usually originating with some prominent ancestor who first became involved with business and then migrate to a colonial urban center away from Rajasthan.
My research on the Calcutta Marwaris took me to several unexpected places, which I describe in this book. I ended up visiting and researching a number of curious sites, from imaginary homelands with abandoned painted ancestral mansions in Rajasthan to the rain-gambling courtyards tucked deep in the crowded lanes of the Marwari neighborhood in Burabazar in Calcutta. My ethnographic research in particular led me into the lives of Marwari women, where I witnessed everything from housewives engaged in domestic science of the home, to high-powered business executives overseeing business dynasties, to even the highly controversial worship of sati (widow burning). In each of these casesand othersdescribed in the pages that follow, I seek to explain why I argue for the use of the term "performance" to explain the cultural and historical processes by which people make claims on particular markers of identity in civil society and in public life.
Notes: Note 1: J. T. Molesworth, Molesworths Marathi-English Dictionary (1857; reprint,Bombay: Bombay Educational Society Press, 1991).Back.
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Note 2: Throughout this book I use the terms "Calcutta Marwaris," "Marwaris in Calcutta," and "Marwaris" somewhat interchangeably. This is because Indians do not perceive any "cultural" difference between Marwari identity generally and Marwari identity in Calcutta. As I will show, Marwaris are not easily identified with any one particular place. However, I use the term "Calcutta Marwaris" when I am making historical claims about Calcutta in particular. Back. Note 3: Bernard Cohn has been exemplary and inspirational in this regard. Bernard Cohn, "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia," in An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987): 224254.Back. Note 4: Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony,"Subaltern Studies 6 (1989): 210309.Back. Note 5: Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993);Ann Laura Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).Back. Note 6: E. Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Talal Asad, "Are There Histories of People without Europe?" Comparative Studies in Society and History 29:3 (1987); Ranajit Guha et al., eds., Subaltern Studies, volumes 110 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).Back. Note 7: Daniel, Fluid Signs.Back. Note 8: Frederick Coopers recent work on decolonization in Africa, which treats the intersection between colonial and African discourses of labor as "a limited space of mutual intelligibility and interaction," provides a very useful model. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xii.Back. Note 9: This view, however, has been contested by some home science professionals, but the association was what initially interested me in the Marwaris.Back. Note 10: I borrow this term from T. M. Luhrman, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), vii.Back. Note 11: I am grateful for this advice from economic historian Omkar Goswamy, who introduced me to a number of prominent Marwari families in New Delhi.Back. Note 12: One of the women has recently completed writing a novel on this
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subject.Back. Note 13: The gaddi is literally a mattress or floor cushion.Back.
Page 15 of 15
Community and Public Culture: Introduction
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Introduction
1
For more than three hundred years, migrant merchant traders have traveled from Rajasthani villages to towns and cities across northern and eastern India, as well as into Russia and Central Asia. Though these migrant traders came from villages scattered all over eastern Rajasthan, belonged to a variety of trading lineages, and identified themselves by various subcastes as well as by religious labels such as Hindu and Jain, by the late nineteenth century these traders also acquired the multivalent and largely unwanted ethnic tag "Marwari." The Marwaris became especially prominent in Bengal, where they quickly became a formidable economic ruling class under colonial rule and even more so in independent India. It would be misleading, however, to imply that Marwari migration has involved one-way journeys from a trader's home village to a permanent stopping-point. In fact, most merchant travelers have made both temporary and long-term stops and stayed in various provincial towns and villages on their journeys outward. Several of the Marwari traders, ostensibly from Rajasthan, may have been from lineages that had already spent several generations in places like Hariyana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, and Murshidabad before coming to Bengal, and ultimately to Calcutta. At the very heart of my study is the curious fact that the overwhelming majority of these heterogeneous migrants, regardless of their original lineage and where and how long they stopped en route, did become identified by and would themselves eventually adopt the community name Marwari. The very earliest wave of migrants to Bengal that eventually became identified as Marwari were the Saharwale Oswal Jain merchants of Murshidabad. They began their migrations to Bengal starting at the end of the seventeenth century. Saharwale literally means resident (wale) of the city (sahar), or hailing from Murshidabad. 1 The establishment of the mint at Murshidabad in the early eighteenth century made it into the capital of Bengal. Even though Calcutta has long since overtaken Murshidabad as the major city of Bengali finance and commerce, the term Saharwale does not refer to Calcuttans, but to merchant traders whose families spent generations in Murshidabad. The Oswals were considered by colonial ethnographers to be the "Rothschilds of India," having earned prominence as bankers and financiers to the Mughals. Said to have originated in and emigrated mainly from Bikaner, the Oswal merchants set up a colony in the town of Azimganj in Murshidabad, north of Calcutta, where they built noteworthy temples along the Bhagirathi river. 2 The head of this community of merchants was given the hereditary Mughal title Jagat Seth ("Banker of the World") while serving the
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Mughal Nawabs of Bengal up until the end of the reign of Siraj-ud-Daula, the last Nawab of Bengal, who was captured and killed after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. After the murder of Siraj-ud-Daula Murshidabad declined and many of the Oswal Saharwale eventually came to Calcutta in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They began to intermarry with other Oswal and Jain groups, and other traders, and to this day both claim and contest the ethnic identification "Marwari." 4 It has been perhaps more important for the later Marwari arrivals to claim the saharwales as Marwaris: in this way a deeper historical and perhaps legitimizing connection with Bengal can be claimed. The Marwaris in Calcutta and other cities have the reputation of having become particularly wealthy, earning their fortunes through banking, money lending, and as traders, brokers, and speculators in commodities such as jute and cotton. Through their intricate networks of trading and credit, they established strong relationships with one another and formed a trading group. C. A. Bayly notes that these trading connections and mercantile intelligence were formed by linkages through marriage and kinship, perceived later on as forming a caste community, as well as though credit networks between intercaste groups. 5 The pre-existence of these commercial linkages helped the once very heterogeneous Marwaris form a community in civil society as Marwaris under the aegis of the colonial state. Traders and Industrialists
5
The Marwaris are renowned all over India for having emerged in the nineteenth century as the most prominent group of migrant baniya (intermediary traders, or middlemen) for the British. The growth of this capitalist trader class in late nineteenth-century India was facilitated by the changing nature of the Indian colonial economy. British economic expansion penetrated existing trading networks, and changing land settlement policies necessitated the payment of taxes in cash rather than in kind, resulting in greater commercialization of agriculture. Since there were no formal banks to provide credit at the time, Marwari traders were drawn to the countryside as moneylenders. There was an extensive system of hundi bills of exchange, which worked somewhat like our modern checking accounts. A hundi was a written order made by one person for payment to another for a certain sum. The exchange, honoring, and discounting of hundis rested on networks of trust, which created important transregional linkages as well as opportunities for the accumulation of wealth. 6 As traders, many Marwaris amassed enough surplus capital to also become moneylenders, and as such facilitated British commercial expansion. 7 In becoming the conduits for colonial capitalism, the Marwaris migrated from their native Rajputana (then a series of princely states not under direct British rule) to places in British India, where they gained substantially from participation in trade, banking, and commerce.
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Though the community has traditionally been mostly traders, since the 1930s some Marwari families have emerged as industrial giants. At present it is estimated that Marwaris control as much as sixty percent of Indian industry, forming an industrial presence easily exceeding that of the Parsis and Gujaratis, groups perceived as "more modern" than the Marwaris. The Monopolies Inquiry Commission of 1964 reported that ten of the largest thirty-seven industrial houses were held by Marwaris, and only two by Parsis. 8 The wealth and assets of the Marwari Birla family may be on par with or even exceed that of the J. R. D. Tata family, who are leading Parsi industrialists. 9 As of 1986, the Birlas, the Singhanias, the Modis, and the Bangurs (all Marwari business houses) accounted for a third of the total assets of the top ten business houses in India. 10 Colonial Knowledge Despite their tremendous influence on the Bengali economy in both trade and industry, the population of Marwaris in Calcutta has historically been disproportionately small compared to other groups. From the censuses dating back to the colonial period, Thomas Timberg has compiled the following data on portions of major urban populations born in Rajasthan, with the numbers listed in thousands. 11 1901 1911 1921 1961 Calcutta 14 15 30 36 Bombay 7 12 20 52 Hyderabad 1 6 4 Kanpur 3 3
Despite the broad umbrella category "Marwari," it is not easy to determine exactly how many "Marwaris" were in Calcutta at any time. Many Marwaris feel that the term is usually used pejoratively and have not liked to identity themselves that way. For instance, some identified themselves by their subcaste and did not use the ethnic tag "Marwari." The ethnographic classification of various castes as being "Marwari" has direct links to the census-taking operations of the colonial state. The Bengal Code of Census Procedure for 1901 defined Marwari as "a trader from Rajputana. Includes Agarwalas, Mahesris, Oswals, Seraogis, etc. The true caste should in all cases be entered" [my emphasis]. 12 Reflected in this statement is the sense that Marwari is an operative and yet vague and unreliable umbrella term by which to classify migrant trading communities.
10
Out of a total population of 1,485,582 people in Calcutta in 1931, the census notes that there were 4,023 Marwaris, 5,249 Agarwals, and 9,100 Baniyas.
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Why those 4,023 Marwaris would have called themselves Marwaris rather than by their subcaste is an interesting question. Furthermore, since people commonly deployed the term "Marwari" in ways that did not align with the census categories, such as in using the term to mean Rajasthanis, Gujaratis, and even migrants from Uttar Pradesh, the census categories are not entirely reliable. Many claim that the 1961 census estimate of 36,000 is far too low, and estimates between 500,000 and 600,000 are perceived as being more accurate. 13 One estimate from 1994 claimed that Marwaris constituted about 15 percent of Calcutta's total metropolitan population. 14 The ambiguity and difficulty in counting Marwaris gives evidence of how their ethnic label is a rather subjective but nevertheless meaningful operative category. Contemporary state-run anthropological "peoples and cultures" descriptive projects are based in large part on censuses taken during both colonial and independent rule. In these descriptions, and by popular consent, the category "Marwari" includes the following caste groups: Agarwals and Maheshwaris (who are generally considered Hindu), and Oswals (who are generally considered Jain). 15 The names of these three Marwari subcastes commonly derive from existing origin myths: Agarwals are the descendants of Agra Sen; Maheshwaris are the descendants of the Rajput devotees of Shiva; and Oswals are the descendants of Swetambar Jains from Osian. Khandelwals, Porwals, and other Rajasthani trading castes are also often included, but Agarwals, Maheshwaris, and Oswals are considered the primary Marwari groups. Marwaris could be described as a caste conglomeration of Rajasthani Vaishyas, and are indeed sometimes referred to as the Marwari jati. The fact that the term "Marwari" cuts across a Hindu/Jain religious divide is suggestive of how Indian communities have been able to perceive themselves in ways that ran counter to the colonial government's practices, which enumerated people as belonging to separate religious traditions. 16 My assertion about the blurring of boundaries between Hindus and Jains might be seen as being at odds with the growing anthropological interest in Jain communities both in western India and in the diaspora. 17 The two communities of Hindus and Jains, however, are more sociologically integrated than we might suppose, and the drawing of boundaries has changed over time. For example, the 1921 Census commented that three times as many Jains were enumerated as in 1911, and noted that the Jain Swetambari Terapanthi sect assisted with the counting of Jains in the Marwari quarter of Burabazar, taking care to include those "Jains" who may have returned themselves as Hindus in 1911. 18 Whereas at one time Murshidabdi saharwales would have married only inside of Srimal lineages in Calcutta, for at least the last half-century this has not been the case. For the purposes of this study, emphasizing the distinctions between Marwari Hindus and Marwari Jains in Calcutta is not particularly pertinent. This is not, however, to disavow the influence that Jainism has had on Marwari culture,
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such as inculcating values of ahimsa (nonviolence), thrift, asceticism, animal protection, and vegetarianism. It is important to keep in mind that the boundary lines between Hindus and Jains were only partially fixed by colonial knowledge, a fact recognized by the colonial state. There were local pushes for both closure and openness of groups of coreligionists. For instance, families could identify themselves as alternately Jain or Hindu according to personal choices related to marriage, religious participation, and business linkages in changing social and historical circumstances. 19 Yet to some extent these differences are academic. As Laidlow himself notes, "you can be a Jain without ceasing to be, in the broad sense, a Hindu; this is essential ... to how lay Jain religious identity works." 20 In Calcutta, various Marwaris since the 1930s have married within the larger "Marwari" community across distinctions of subcaste and even religion, though this is not the case in Rajasthan. Indeed, there are no Marwaris as such in Rajasthan; they only become Marwaris when they leave. This vagueness about the boundaries of community remains to the present day, perhaps more as a concern internal to "the community" than to outsiders who are perfectly content to loosely classify certain peoples together. More likely, it also stems from the stigma of the term, and not just its vagueness. Many Marwaris today dislike to be identified as Marwaris by outsiders, and indeed many persons contested my own use of the term "Marwari" during my fieldwork. Some Marwari women told me they preferred to avoid using their last name in public so they could not be identified as being part of that community. The very history of inclusions and exclusions that have determined the symbolic and often contentious boundaries of the Marwari community helps us understand the term's fraught use. Moments of Rupture: The Deccan Riots
15
The modern and contemporary twentieth century uses and appropriations of the category "Marwari" have taken shape around certain moments of violence. One of the most important moments of social upheaval for the creation of a national Marwari identity can be traced back to the Deccan Agriculturalist Riots in rural Maharashtra in 1875, when thousands of peasants in a large number of villages in Poona and Ahmadnagar Districts joined in violent protests against Marwari moneylenders. Scholars who have written extensively on the Deccan Riots, ranging from Ravindra Kumar to Ranajit Guha to David Hardiman, have followed the lead of colonial officials in citing usury as the main motivating factor in causing peasant unrest. 21 The riots were symptomatic of the increasing importance of money lending in the countryside and generated both official and nonofficial critiques of both credit rates and institutions. Thus, the Deccan riots became a defining event in the history of the pan-Indian label "Marwari" that helped to cast the figure of the Marwari in the European mold of the Jew. Though there had been agitation against moneylenders in the past, the sheer scale of the Deccan Riots with over 1,000 peasants arrested clearly
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exceeded the extent of any previous insurgency. 22 One reason given for the rioting is that British courts formalized systems of agrarian credit that gave moneylenders additional authority in collecting past debts. 23 The Deccan Riots Report asserted that in every documented case the rioters sought to destroy the written bonds and court decrees that gave written proof of a peasant debtor's economic dependence. Indeed, later on the moneylenders were forced by peasants to hand over court documents that might have served to reduce the amount and number of claims. 24 Historical evidence does not suggest that any great change in the transfer of land ownership was responsible for creating the conditions for the riots. Marwari ownership accounted for only about six to seven per cent of cultivated lands. 25 Marwari reluctance to take over land as a result of defaulted loans may have stemmed from the Marwari moneylenders' inability to coerce local peasants to cultivate the land for them. Instead of claiming land, Marwari moneylenders had found it much more profitable to tighten their controls over the debtor peasants' produce. Neil Charlesworth suggests that the Deccan Riots singled out Marwari moneylenders and not the Brahmin lenders who were much more hungry to acquire land. Rather than control over land ownership, the root of the widespread social distress was the view that Marwari moneylenders were "outsiders." The decline of traditional village elites such as the Brahmin Deshmukhs and Gujarati Patels created a social vacuum in which Marwari moneylenders, as professionals, gained a powerful foothold. The Marwari lender, unlike his local predecessor, did not share community ties of language or local identity and was unsympathetic to the predicaments of Maratha peasants. As Charlesworth points out, the Marwari merchants' status as "strangers" increased the riskiness of their money lending business, because as outsiders they could not have been as aware of the peasants' financial situation and solvency as local agriculturalist lenders. Furthermore, the declining prices of agricultural products were of no help to either side. 26 Marwari merchant money lending in the countryside, as such, broke the chains of Indian feudalism by extending available capital. The prevailing themes of colonial discourse, which emphasized the high rates of interest as the motivating reason to rebel, are but an echo of the history of capitalism in the West and. largely reflect a European understanding of capitalism. 27 By washing their hands of responsibility for the Deccan violence, the colonial state benefited greatly by promoting theories that the rebellions were caused more by the actions of "an other," in this case the Marwari, who could be blamed for economic problems. Even after this point, the social categories of Marwari, Gujarati, and other upcountry traders were fluid and nonexclusive. But the fact that the Deccan peasants targeted Marwaris and not Gujaratis is evidence of an emerging consciousness of difference in which the Marwari community's identity is distinct from that of traders and moneylenders from other regions. The Drain of Bengal
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Miseries seem to follow the footsteps of the Marwarees. Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay, 1819. Cited in Hobson-Jobson. 28
20
The blame placed on the Marwaris as the villains of the Deccan Riots has been followed by many twentieth-century examples of Marwari involvement in other arenas of perceived "excessive" and "evil" capitalism, including widespread gambling and speculation on commodities, the adulteration of religiously valued food commodities such as ghee, and wartime rumors of Marwari merchants' hoarding of food in the time of widespread famine. The constellation of meanings for the term "Marwari" was similar to stereotypes about baniya traders in general. L. C. Jain wrote in the 1920s that the term had acquired "bad associations of timidity and cupidity and is resented by traders and money-lenders." 29 The production of the Marwari as stranger also emerged from everyday practices and humor, such as in the ethnic slurs and jokes made about the miserliness and untrustworthiness of Marwaris and baniyas. To some extent these representations have been internalized. One finds frequent public resistance to and embarrassment about being called a Marwari. These criticisms of Marwaris and their economic activities are in many ways comparable to the reprehension that minority trading groups have historically faced elsewhere. From Weber and Simmel onwards, the social categories of pariahs, strangers, middleman minorities, and economic intermediaries between the elite and the masses have almost become cross-cultural universals in the globalization of capitalism. 30 Simmel wrote that "in the whole history of economic activity the stranger makes his appearance as a trader" because there would be no need for a middleman if the group were able to produce enough for its own needs. 31 Weber wrote specifically about the baniya traders in Bengal, referring to them as the "Jews of India." 32 As Zenner noted, the middleman concept is a fascinating inroad to questions of ethnicity and socioeconomic behavior because it contains the "paradox of the middleman-minority position, namely frequent economic success combined with political impotency and with charges against the minority of having hidden power." 33 Much insight could be gained through cross-cultural comparison; histories of the Jews of Europe and the Chinese in Indonesia might read as similar cautionary tales about moneylenders and traders being "outsiders," although the specific historical politics of "othering" in those cases deserves much fuller treatment than can be given here. Marwaris began arriving in Calcutta in the 1820s. After the construction of the railroad connecting Calcutta to upcountry regions in the 1850s and 1860s, the influx of Hindi-speaking North Indian and Marwari traders became much more pronounced. Both Bengali and later Punjabi Khatri traders began to lose ground to the newcomers. The massive accumulation of wealth by
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upcountry and Marwari merchants in Calcutta's commercial district of Burabazar did not fail to attract both British and local attention. The relatively strong Marwari trading position in Calcutta especially highlighted the downward trends in the economic well-being of Bengali traders. The reasons behind the decline of the Bengali trader in this period are among the most debated points in the economic history of Bengal. One theory is that the large-scale economic depression in the 1830s and 1840s, brought about by a drop in the price of indigo, caused Bengali traders to become bankrupt and declare their insolvency in the courts. This economic collapse undermined the confidence of succeeding generations. 34 Others have argued that the Bengali middle classes preferred the "liberal professions" to industry and trade because the latter occupations did not assure a very immediate source of profits. Other theories claimed that after the Permanent Settlement created a "landlord's paradise" by fixing the revenue tax in perpetuity, it became more profitable for Bengali merchants to invest their wealth in land rather than in commercial enterprise. 35 Racist and exclusionary economic policies also contributed to the development of an economic climate that favored the colonizer. 36 Yet why Marwari trade and industrialization should have blossomed under these same conditions still remains somewhat unclear. Part of the explanation may come from different traditions of landholding and inheritance patterns in Rajasthan and Bengal. Most of northern India followed the Mitakshara legal system, which followed the rule of primogeniture. Bengal, by exception, followed the Dayabhaga system through which property was divided equally among the sons. Baden-Powell noted for Rajputana that "succession is now by primogeniture only; hence there is no division of these estates." 37 In terms of the joint family system, the eldest son of the North Indian/Marwari would inherit and have as his responsibility the maintenance of the brothers, who pooled their income, whereas, among Bengalis, a joint family would own property separately but would be considered "joint" because of sharing of hearth. 38 This rule of inheritance has made adoption a very widespread practice among childless Marwaris in order to continue the lineage. There are many cases of widows' adopting grown sons (usually relatives) who may even already have children of their own. 39 Due to their capital accumulation from pan-North Indian trade, and the ways that families could pool their resources in the Mitakshara system, Marwaris were more solvent than Bengalis. Marwaris also did better than Bengalis because of their stronger informal and formal networks. The strong networks of trading partners and family connections across northern India that resulted from their moving from one place to another enabled Marwaris to be flexible about shifting locations if one particular local economy should sour.
25
In light of the relatively uneven fortunes among Indian trading groups, economic critiques against the British were also applied to internal economic adversaries such as Marwari and upcountry traders. Rhetoric similar to that used by Dadabhai Naoroji, in his famous argument that the British drained
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India of her wealth, was used against Marwari traders who made money in Bengal, but sent it outside of the state to Rajasthan. 40 The Bengali nationalist Prafulla Chandra Ray's autobiography Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist (1932) is a well-known text documenting a modern Bengali ambivalence about the Marwaris. Ray unfavorably compared the more fiscally conservative Marwaris with the urban Bengali gentry. The former, Ray argued, earned a thousand times more than they actually spent; unlike the anglicized Bengal Zemindars, the Marwaris were "mere parasites" who "do not add a single farthing to the country's wealth, but have become the chosen instruments for the draining away of the country's wealththe lifeblood of the peasantsto foreign lands." 41 Despite his stated admiration for the Marwari penchant for hard work and business aptitude, Ray criticized Marwaris for not reinvesting their wealth back into the Bengal economy. Even the Marwari diet, argued Ray, contributed to the economic drain. The Marwaris "survived" on dal, ghee, and wheat flourall items imported from outside Bengal. 42 He wrote: "Whatever they spend finds its way back into their own pockets. Hence the Marwari or the Bhatia or the Punjabi, although they make their money and live in Calcutta, seldom add any wealth to Bengal nor is Bengal in any way materially benefited by their being residents of Bengal. They might as well have been residents of Kamchkatka or Timbuctoo." 43 Accordingly, Ray was neither convinced by nor enamored of Marwari practices of charity. Ray claimed such benevolence was not responsive to local needs for education and medical care. He cited the example of the vice-chancellor of Nagpur University who struggled to raise Rs. 88,000 for the construction of new buildings, when less than one mile away a Marwari had built a temple out of the same expensive Jaipur marble used to construct the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. The cost of the temple, excluding the cost of the attached dharmasala (pilgrim's resthouse), was over Rs. 600,000. 44 The Birlas, Ray contended, gave a paltry Rs. 26,000 to Calcutta University but an incredible Rs. 12,000,000 to start Birla College in their native village of Pilani. 45 Ray's comments on charity are illustrative of the changing perceptions of how Marwaris managed their wealth in public contexts and performed various strategies of giving. Money and Modernity: Managing wealth and charity Eh Marwari / khola kewari / tohre ghar mein / lugga sari (Oh Marwari, open up, there are dhotis and saris stacked in your house!) 46
Ever since the Deccan riots, Marwaris have struggled to find ways to manage
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their social reputation of being "money-minded." During the period that this study covers, c. 18971997, the Marwaris emerged as a community whose national identity is simultaneously admired and contested. They are perceived as an internal trading diaspora extraordinarily successful in making money who nonetheless lag behind other groups in education and other arenas of "cultural advancement," including women's status. This issue is central to my consideration of the public self-fashioning of the Marwaris as political and social subjects. There have been many ways that the Marwaris attempted to manage this reputation, including various types of charity, philanthropy, and social reform. In the past, temple building and other religious good works were particularly favored. Though Marwari traders are regarded as simple, unostentatious, and miserly, they had a reputation for setting aside a certain portion of their profits and spending large sums of money on acts of public charity. 47 As such, wealth and renunciation were often one and the same. Shahid Amin, commenting on the old rhyme quoted at the start of this section, writes, "Marwari wealth and charity both came wrapped in bolts of fine and coarse cloth." 48 The tradition of religious giving became especially important when traders became industrialists, and the various kinds of charitable institutions modernized as well. Schools, hospitals, and technology research became important concerns. While temple building also continued, those traditions were dramatically transformed and modernized. The G. D. Birla industrialist family is well known for modern philanthropy. Their practice of naming the family's philanthropic concerns the Birla temples, Birla hospitals, and Birla institutes for technical education made the name of the lineage into the primary identifying feature of these institutions, thus reflecting the auspiciousness of the lineage and reproducing a sense of family empire in public life.
30
Very few Marwaris, of course, are wealthy enough to sustain such grand projects like the Birlas' public works, which illuminate the prominence of the kul (lineage) in public life. Yet even without public monuments which celebrate the family, most Marwaris found their own means of publicly negotiating issues of gender and other questions of modernity. The biggest change in the form of the community came from the migration of wives and female family members to Calcutta. Although there have been many reasons for the decisions of wives and children to leave their homes in Rajasthan to join their menfolk in distant places, the later migration of other family members, particularly women, was initially enabled by the completion of a railway corridor from Shekhawati to Calcutta in 1916, assuring safe and speedy passage. Starting a few decades after their arrival in the city, campaigns were taken up for the education of Marwari women and their entrance into various arenas of public life. Marwari women's migration and their negotiation of the woman question has been a central part of constructing identity around the kul (lineage). To this day, the migration of
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Marwari families has been marked by the fact that male family members would migrate first, followed later by women and children after the men had become financially secure. When Marwari men began bringing women from their homelands to Calcutta, it was a sign to both the British and local Bengali communities that the Marwaris were in British India to stay. And the pattern of later migration by wives is still in process. Ranu Jain gives the example of meeting an eighty-year-old man who brought his wife to Calcutta from Sardarsahar just 30 years earlier, in the 1950s. 49 The act of claiming one's place through family ties can also be observed in Marwari imitation of certain Rajput warrior and feudal values. The existing origin myths of Marwari subcastes, both Jain and Hindu, trace their ancestry back to Rajput sources. 50 In the princely states collectively called Rajputana from which the Marwaris came, Kshatriya caste Rajputs had partially legitimized their military rule by maintaining a chivalric reputation that relied on the interdependence of caste, clan, land, and lineage. 51 The Rajput ethic privileged feudal honor, heroism, and action, while "intellect and calculations of utility and advantage were disparaged." 52 Though more will be said later about the ways that Marwaris have drawn upon Rajput idioms for their own performance of identity, suffice it to say now that the Rajputana legacy has been a very important influence on Marwari self-fashioning outside Rajasthan. Despite the settlement of Marwari families outside Rajasthan for several generations, to this day Marwaris are continually treated as outsiders, even invaders, and have never really managed to gain an image of being "local" and therefore legitimate. I hope to acknowledge the Marwari contribution to the development of Indian business and industry, yet also bear in mind historian David Hardiman's warning to scholars that the ethnic tag "Marwari" has for over a century now been also associated with greed, ruthlessness and corruption. To ignore such semantic meanings of the term is simply unacceptable historiography. 53 A major goal of this study is to maintain a critical perspective on Marwari culture and history that aligns neither with a nativist hagiography of Marwari capitalism nor with a Eurocentric and culturally blind Marxist or modernist perspective which finds the Marwaris lacking in bourgeois modernity. The tension between these perspectives produces the central challenge in writing about the Marwari community.
Notes: Note 1: Wala (wale in plural) does not always mean resident; it is a very contextual suffix that creates a relationship with the preceding noun. For example, a tea-seller is chai-wala, and a competitive person is a competitionhttp://www.gutenberg-e.org/haa01/print/haa01.html Page 11 of 16
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wala. Back. Note 2: L. S. S. O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteer: Murshidabad (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1914), 57, 173. Back. Note 3: J. H. Little, House of Jagat Seth (Calcutta: Calcutta Historical Society, 1967); Major J. H. Tull Walsh, A History of the Murshidabad District (Bengal) with Biographies of Some of its Noted Families (London: Jarrold, 1902). Back. Note 4: Ranu Jain, Ethnicity in Plural Societies with Special Reference to Jain Oswals in Calcutta (Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, University of Calcutta, 1989). Jain gives many examples of this contestation among saharwales . I use two here. The well-known late Congress Party politician Vijay Singh Nahar commented, "Who says we are Marwaris? We are more Bengali than the Bengalis themselves." He went on to explain that they studied and spoke Bengali, and even the "Hindi" they spoke was a mixture of Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi. Another Murshidabadi man, P. L. Nahata claimed, "All Oswals cannot call themselves Marwaris. They should not even do that. Marwari is a trading community. They are famous for taking interest, for manipulations, for stealing and gambling and for their 'Jewish' tendencies. Oswals are not like that. However, Bengalis perceive the Oswals as Marwaris... We cannot come out of this." Quoted from Jain, Ethnicity in Plural Societies, 135, 237, respectively. Back. Note 5: C. A. Bayly, "Indian Merchants in a Traditional Setting," in Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, eds. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London, 1978), 179. Bayly warns that we should not take caste isolation as a given: "Even within tightly organized family firms some of the most basic relationships of trust were conducted outside the immediate commensal community." Back. Note 6: L. C. Jain, Indigenous Banking (London: Macmillan, 1929), 70-82. Back. Note 7: Ian Catanach, Rural Credit in Western India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Benoy Chaudhari, Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal 1757-1900 (Calcutta: R. K. Maitra, 1964); Ravindra Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). Back. Note 8: Arup De, "Metamorphosis of the Marwari," Probe India (March 1992): 40. Back. Note 9: "Succeeding as Groups," Asiaweek, 7 December 1990. Back. Note 10: Jay Dubashi, "Marwaris at the Fore," Probe India. (December 1996): 74. It is estimated that for 1990-91, the combined sales of Bajaj, Goenka, Modi, and the five Birla brothers was Rs. 15,858 crore (about U.S. $4 billion), and the Tatas' turnover was Rs. 12,132.74 crore (U.S. $3.1 billion). Back. Note 11: Thomas Timberg, The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists (Delhi: Vikas, 1978), 89. Back.
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Note 12: Report on the Census of Bengal. 1901, xlix. Back. Note 13: "Cosmopolitan Calcutta," Hindustan Standard, 2 May 1979. Back. Note 14: Rakhee Pal, "Selling Golden Marwar in Dusty Calcutta," Financial Express, 8 December 1994. Back. Note 15: The Anthropological Survey of India is currently completing a new series of "Peoples of India," with over thirty volumes. K. S. Singh, series general editor, Peoples of India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1994). Back. Note 16: Though religious traditions have a vast historical depth in the Indian subcontinent, the classification of such traditions under the rubric of "Hinduism" is a very recent development. Richard Davis has described the important influence and bias of the colonial census in both enumerating and delimiting different religious communities, which has the effect of making Indian religious history appear as "distinct, self-contained formations." See Richard Davis' "Introduction," in Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald Lopez (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995): 3-54. Back. Note 17: Lawrence A. Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kinds in a Jain Ritual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Marcus Banks, Organizing Jainism in India and England (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992); Michael Carrithers and Caroline Humphrey, eds., The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ranu Jain, Ethnicity in Plural Societies; Padmanabh Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); James Laidlow, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy and Society among the Jains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Back. Note 18: Census of India 1921 vol 6 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1923), 38. Back. Note 19: The Census of 1901 states, "Baniya castes represent the ancient Vaisyas. Chief amongst these are Agarwals (Digambari) and Oswals (Swetambari) though both castes include also many who are Hindus. It may be mentioned here that this religious schism seldom operates as a bar to marriage any more than do differences which are purely sectarian. The Jains themselves do not consider that they are a separate community, and at the census many returned their religion as Hindu. The number of Jains shown in our returns is only 7831 compared with 7270 in 1891, but the true number is probably greater" (158-159). Back. Note 20: Laidlow, Riches and Renunciation, 275. Back. Note 21: Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
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"The object of the rioters was in every case to obtain and destroy the bonds, decrees etc. in their possession... [it] was not so much rebellion against the oppressor as an attempt to accomplish a definite and practical object, namely, the disarming of the enemy by taking his weapons (bonds and accounts)" (Guha, Elementary Aspects, 51). Back. Note 22: Neil Charlesworth, Peasants & Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency 1850-1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 99. Back. Note 23: Ibid., 96. Back. Note 24: Deccan Riots Commission, Report of the Committee on the Riots in Poona and Ahmednagar (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1875); Charlesworth, Peasants & Imperial Rule, 104, 108. Back. Note 25: Charlesworth, Peasants & Imperial Rule, 103. Back. Note 26: Ibid., 95-124. Back. Note 27: David Cheesman describes how European prejudices against Jewish usurers were articulated in India. He writes that the Hindu baniya was described by one European official as "The Eastern Shylock;" the traders were considered extortioners and worse. David Cheesman, " 'The Omnipresent Bania': Rural Moneylenders in Nineteenth-Century Sind," Modern Asian Studies 16:3 (1982), 447. Back. Note 28: Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new edition, ed. William Crooke (1903; reprint, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1968), 561. Back. Note 29: Jain, Indigenous Banking in India, 7 n. 1. Back. Note 30: Max Weber, The Religion of India (New York: Free Press, 1958); Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (1908; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Simmel wrote that the stranger is "the man who comes today and goes tomorrow--the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going" (143-49). Back. Note 31: Simmel, "The Stranger," 144. Back. Note 32: Weber, The Religions of India, 112, cited in Timberg, The Marwaris, 31. Back. Note 33: Walter Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), xii-xiii. Back. Note 34: N. K. Sinha, The Economic History of Bengal 1793-1848, vol. 3, (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1970); Jain, Indigenous Banking, 141. Back.
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Note 35: Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India 1900-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 203. Back. Note 36: Bagchi, Private Investment, 205. Back. Note 37: Baden Henry Baden-Powell, Land Systems of British India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 337. Back. Note 38: For more on the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga legal systems, see Bhupendranath Datta, Hindu Law of Inheritance (Calcutta: Nababharat Publishers, 1957). Back. Note 39: On adoption, see J. D. M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present (Calcutta: A. Mukherjee, 1957). Back. Note 40: B. N. Ganguli, "Dadabhai Naoroji and the Economic Drain" in Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (New Delhi: Tata McGrawHill, 1977): 126-153. Back. Note 41: Prafulla Chandra Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol I (1932; reprint, Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co., 1996), 17. Back. Note 42: Ibid., 90. Back. Note 43: Ibid., 476. Back. Note 44: Ibid., 521-522. Back. Note 45: Ibid., 528-529. Back. Note 46: Quoted in Shahid Amin, "Towns Called Deoria," Seminar 432 (August 1995): 60. Back. Note 47: Jain, Indigenous Banking, 28-29. Back. Note 48: Amin, "Towns Called Deoria," 60. Back. Note 49: Jain, Ethnicity in a Plural Society, 186. Back. Note 50: The Srimal, Porval, and Oswal subdivisions, for instance, have claimed that their acceptance of the Jain faith has been the primary reason for separating from the "bellicose" Rajput. See Sir Athelstane Baines, "Ethnography (Castes and Tribes)," Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologies und Altertumskunde [Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research]. vol. 1, no.5 (Strassburg: Karl J. Trubner, 1912), 33. Back. Note 51: Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph, Essays on Rajputana: Reflections on History, Culture, Administration (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1984), 7. Back.
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Note 52: Ibid., 41. Back. Note 53: David Hardiman, "In Praise of Marwaris: Review of D. K. Taknet's Industrial Entrepreneurship of Shekhawati Marwaris," Economic and Political Weekly, 14 February 1987. Back.
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1. Community and Public Culture

1
Despite the considerable attention paid to the construction of nations, until recently there has been a relative lack of attention given to the constructedness of regions in South Asia. Much historical and anthropological scholarship on India can be characterized by the way that its practitioners have tended to become "regional specialists," producing monographs on one region or another. 1 This has led, in many cases, to an unintended scholarly emphasis on the community of people who share a name with the region: the Rajputs of Rajputana/Rajasthan, the Bengalis of Bengal, the Maharashtrians of Maharashtra, the Biharis of Bihar, and the Tamils of Tamil Nadu. Places like Uttar Pradesh (UP), however, lack an exact community-referent; its inhabitants, for lack of a better qualifying term, are often jokingly called UPwalas.
There have, of course, been some good practical reasons for these regional divisions as practiced in scholarship. Differences between regional languages have indeed posed real difficulties for scholars who have specialized and been highly trained in one regional language. Yet the trend of focusing on a single region has had the effect of eclipsing other objects of study. In particular, I am referring to the numerous internal diasporas that exist all over India: the Gujaratis in Bombay, the Tamils of Calcutta, the Punjabis in Delhi, to name just a few. In order to study the Marwaris, a transregional group whose identity did not preexist in any one place of origin but came to be formed through the processes of migration within India since the seventeenth century, we need to disturb the borderlines of regionalized Indian history. The Marwaris have performed claims on an identity that crosses overand is in fact dependent on crossing overa wide expanse of territory. By engaging with materials in Hindi and Bengali as well as English, I will not only examine how the colonial state may have tried to orchestrate such developments, but will also look at Marwari self-description in Hindi and consider various Bengali responses. Thus this study, I hope, will form part of a new trend of studying India in such a way that relationships between regions come into focus. Performing Community and Public Culture My use of the term "public culture" draws on two different applications of the term in South Asian Studies: first, in reference to the production of available arenas, avenues, and discourses of political action; second, in reference to migration, cosmopolitanism, and global flows. I have been particularly influenced by the work of Sandria Freitag and Douglas Haynes. Freitag examines how local systems of communication opened up new spaces for the articulation of identity under colonial rule. By looking at collective activities in public spaces, including processions, festivals, and riots, Freitag shows how urban groups have renegotiated social relations, and ultimately constructed separate Hindu and Muslim communities. 2 Haynes examines how merchants
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and elites in colonial Surat adopted European idioms of participatory politics in an attempt to forge a modern polity capable of self-rule. In Hayness work, "public culture" refers to the way the Surat elites themselves defined the realm of the public, expressed in the development of a form of hybrid democratic culture. 3
The second use of the term "public culture," most clearly associated with the journal Public Culture,founded by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, is related to but slightly different from the first. 4 For Appadurai and Breckenridge, public culture is a form of cosmopolitanism that has developed through the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and capital, creating postCold War transnational spaces of cultural production. An analysis of these internationalized spaces, Appadurai and Breckenridge contend, reflects the heterogeneous cosmopolitan realities of late twentieth century capitalism more accurately than traditional anthropological models positing either an opposition between popular and high cultures or the identification of various "customs" with specific regions of the world. Much of the work in this area is contemporary, engaging with insights from the field of cultural studies, and tends to focus on the transmission of messages through technologies of popular tourism and travel along with media, television, and film. 5 My own project of understanding the transmission of messages about the public identity of an internal diasporic community in India explores how we might productively extend this frameworkof the production of locality and ethnic identity through migratory flowsback into the past. This approach would seek to untie "cultures" from "regions"and would question, for instance, the idea that Bengal is mostly about Bengali culturewithin the field called "Indian history."
5
Community is constituted by a set of practices, a series of "performances," through which claims are made about collective and inter-subjective identities. 6 These claims can be contradictory, produced through relationships of power, and are open to resistance and contest. Community divisions and identity politics based on the social separation of groups, promoted by both the colonial state and the postcolonial nationalist state, constitute the historical and social backdrop of these performances. Colonial knowledge of ethnographic description and demographic enumeration, such as the census, was frequently taken up by Indian authors as evidence of a particular communitys progress or backwardness vis--vis their "outsiders." 7 These characteristics of community give rise to a kind of "public culture," in which distinctions between the public and private are asserted, shared, blurred, contested, and straddled by performed relations of community.
There are three specific claims about the anthropological idea of community that I would like to establish. The first argument is that community is a relational concept. The Marwaris, to put it simply, needed somebody to be
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Marwari at. Community in itself has no primordial core and is always historically and socially constructed in relation to other such enacted groups. The public identification of a community often comes in the form of an outside labelan ethnic tag used by othersto describe a particular set of social practices that demarcate one group from another. This is an issue of how outsiders address the perceived community. By examining the emergence of Marwari communal identity vis--vis their local counterparts in Calcutta, the Bengalis, and in reference to their Rajput "others" in Rajasthan, we can explore the ways in which cultural difference has been relationally defined among Indian social groups, with a particular focus on the processes whereby the naturally porous boundaries of community are created, maintained, and/or contested. 8
Second, the production of community entails performances of marking the symbolic boundaries of community in order to produce an internal space of community (such as domesticity) in need of reform and refinement. This space does not exist before the reforms; rather, debates and conflict over reforms constitute this space. The community, in their words, represents no consensus. Political structures of colonial governments and economies create the conditions in which communities may come into being in the process of fabricating "public life." Thus, the performance of the internal space of the community is, rather ironically, essentially public.
Third, the processes of creating gender identities are critical to the reformative performances that enact intercommunal boundaries in shared public spaces and constructions of public life. I am especially interested here to see how particular ethnicized audiences become either excluded or included in this process.
In performing a sense of communityand thus making a claim on public culture and political rightsthe Marwaris have relied on family and lineage genealogies to form wider social ties. Focusing on the extendibility of a strong sense of kinship to the formation of wider relationships in the public realm helps illuminate not only how Marwaris have related to others and made sense of their wider social world, but also how Indian concepts of sociability have enabled, and at the same time appropriated, a convergence of Western values of public political life with local senses of identity and difference, albeit under the aegis of both the colonial and postcolonial states.
10
Many public performances of Marwari identity draw on and deploy primordialized symbols of kinship, lineage, and family. Although communities draw on sentiments that are viewed by scholars as primordial, it is not a given that the idioms themselves are necessarily primordial. Nor does the performance of kinship imply that community is necessarily, or even simply, kinship writ large. It is necessary to view these particular kinds of identity
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claims in historical perspective. The performance of community in India has happened within a legacy of British colonialism, which denied self-rule on the pretext of the inability and unpreparedness of Indians to govern themselves. As a result, the possibility of political reform depended very heavily on social reform. The Indian family became a measure of "civilization" and an object of reform, thus bifurcating the public and private realms. As communities such as the Marwaris began deploying signs of kinship in an attempt to gain political recognition, community identity acquired a new visibility under the gaze of the colonial state. 9 Revisiting the "Invention of Tradition" and "Imagined Community" The notions of the invention of tradition and the imagination of community are probably the most widely cited theories today about community formation in the disciplines of anthropology and history. To understand a general term like "community," it would be easy simply to borrow from this literature to assert that the community is something that is either invented, imagined, or a combination of the two. But it is important to trouble the idea of identity, so that we do not think of identity as something that people simply "have" either through invention or imagination. Instead, we must be cognizant of how identities are contingent and emergent in particular types of social practice.
First, the invention of tradition. 10 Some of the basic assumptions of Hobsbawm and Rangers original project warrant both brief recapitulation and examination. Their basic argument is that the so-called traditions of modern societies are actually quite new and were, in fact, invented. Hobsbawm and Ranger make a distinction between custom and invented tradition. Custom, on the one hand, is a genuinely changing set of social practices, and hence flexible enough to survive through the ages. Invented traditions, on the other hand, are defined by the claim that practices that are actually recent have existed throughout the centuries from their origins in the mists of time. Thus, invented traditions create claims of authoritative legitimacy on the part of some power-seeking social group, be it either a community or a state. Hobsbawm and Ranger point out that the essential character of modernity, with its stress on the ever-changing new, precludes a predominance of invented traditions in social life. However, the sphere of public and civic life, which depends for its vitality on such necessary legitimizing fictions, is, according to this theory, replete with invented traditions. This claim about the invention of community in civil society is what makes Hobsbawm and Rangers ideas suggestive for my own inquiry.
The "invention of tradition" theory has the advantage of showing how groups may use the past in attempting to acquire social hegemony and in staking their claims to political power. Yet a considerable weakness in the theory, as Stephen Vlastos contends, is its tendency to fall into a trap of claiming that only modern societies with a sense of history can invent traditions. 11 The
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question of what happens in the case of contemporary societies that are not classically modernthe so-called tribal societies, for instanceremains anomalous in terms of this theory. The distinction between flexible customs and fixed invented traditions reverses the old anthropological opposition between primitive societies as static and modern societies as always being in motion and change. The invention of tradition does not really get around what Johannes Fabian has aptly described as the denial of "coevalness," namely, that while the ethnographers representation appears to be fixed in time, the society goes on changing. 12
The problem of timelessness in the theory of the invention of tradition can perhaps be most clearly seen in the first essay in Hobsbawm and Rangers collection. Writing on the Scottish Highland tradition of kilts and bagpipes, author Hugh Trevor-Roper states that, "even in the Highlands, even in that vestigial form, [the kilt] was relatively new; it was not the original, or the distinguishing badge of Highland society." 13 Trevor-Ropers comment suggests that while anti-English sentiment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created English-hating Scots eager to define themselves by invented traditions of wearing kilts whose patterns represent distinct family lineages, the plaids do not represent the true or essential "badge" of Highlander life. Such an argument, therefore, is limited in the way that it presupposes some unchanging essence to the natives in question. The theory then adds injury to insult by claiming that by coming up with the invented traditions of the plaid kilts, the natives simply got their essence wrong. In this model the historian, it appears, is the only legitimate bearer of truth.
15
Despite its limitations, Hobsbawm and Rangers theory has been especially inspirational in revolutionizing the idea of the constructed nature of traditions, especially those traditions involved in establishing community and national identities. The theory has opened up new approaches to the study of a variety of social institutions. Nationalism is a case in point: if traditions are invented, it follows that the identities of nations that rely on those traditions are invented as well. Hobsbawm and Ranger's argument thus partially inspired the possibilities for a critique of the naturalness of nationalism from a variety of disciplinary angles. Following Hobsbawm and Ranger's lead, scholars such as Benedict Anderson have popularized the idea of the nation as an imagined community. Through the dissemination of print capitalism, which produced an essentially monoglot population (Anderson's well-known argument states), people were able to imagine themselves as part of wider national communities. 14
Andersons important point about the work required of the imagination in helping people form a consciousness of belonging to a group of people all of whom they would never meet is not in question here. After all, even social institutions such as kinship also depend on imagining relatives whom one might never meet. However, Andersons argument points to a very statehttp://www.gutenberg-e.org/haa01/print/haa02.html Page 5 of 18
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centered understanding of a necessarily national community, and does not quite consider the formation of communities that do not have the militaryeconomic-political backing of a bona-fide state. One can challenge Andersons state-centered view of community from at least three additional perspectives. Prasenjit Duara has aptly questioned the widespread historiographical practice of writing about nation as the "subject of History," emphasizing that there has been a reified history of "a self-same, national subject evolving through time." 15 Second, the theoretical reliance on print capitalism as the mobilizing force of national imaginings raises questions about the effectiveness of print in overwhelmingly nonliterate nations such as are found in South Asia. For example, the emergence of Bengali nationalism, culminating in the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, was indeed founded upon a language movement, but one that grew out of an understanding of language politics on the part of nonliterate urban masses and a nonliterate peasantry, and not on print culture per se. Third, there are many other kinds of non-national communities that differ substantially from the referent of Andersons own "imagined community," which is, of course, the community of nation.
As a result of Hobsbawm and Rangers work, and especially inspired by Andersons contributions, social scientists have set out to demonstrate how the nation has been historically constructed, and to illustrate the ways that the "imaginary" of the nation has served to shape productively, and not merely reflect, the imagined community of a national population. Yet recent rethinking of the nation as both a political entity and a unit of study has taken priority over a re-examination of smaller-sized communities in light of postcolonial and globalization theory. As Aletta Norval points out, even Benedict Anderson's otherwise compelling account is limited to communities whose boundaries are formed by the borders of the nation-state. Anderson's theoretical framework remains circumscribed by the imagined community of the nation and does not adequately examine how communities define themselves in relation to others. 16 My study of the Marwari community is an attempt to examine the construction of a smaller social body, without appealing to either "invention" or "imagination" as the primary explanatory device.
Without either invention or imagination in our toolbox anymore, we must seek an alternative way of understanding how communities make identity claims. The rubric I use for these processes is "performance." I am aware that this is already a very loaded term. I do not, for instance, use the term broadly, as Milton Singer does when he defines "cultural performances," such as the "cultural media" of songs, dance, music, verbal texts, dramas and so forth. 17 Instead, I use performance to refer to observable strategic acts and techniques available in the public sphere: the statements, debates, actions, and behaviors that help people make public claims on any number of identity markers. Thus, unlike theories of invention or imagination, my ethnography of Marwari performance does not depend on the development of a sense of
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interiority, and makes space for a wide range of strategic intents, and even ambivalence, which may attend any given performance of identity. Unlike invention or imagination, therefore, this theory of performance makes no claims about what may actually be going on inside peoples heads. Toward a Familial Cosmopolitanism We prefer our community men as partners or helpers in business. Even if they cheat us, there is one consolation that the money will remain within the community. Even today, this type of feeling is persisting. Besides, we have more contacts with our community men, which makes them more familiar to us, thus (there are) more chances of knowing their weak and strong points. Prabhat Jain 18
20
Caste communities, as many historians of Indian communities have shown, are made up of a large number of familial lineages, through which births, adoptions, and marriages form indelible community links. Some well-known examples of scholarship on caste communities include the work of Frank Conlin, Karen Leonard, and Robert Hardgrave. 19 To a large extent these studies are extensions of the Rudolphs innovative claim in 1967 that caste associations enabled Indians to develop a bourgeois democracy through preexisting social structures. 20 Although my work engages similar issues, I am not arguing that the Indian public necessarily came to be based on values of bourgeois individualism. Instead, I am working from a point that both Partha Chatterjee and Veena Das have argued, which is that in colonial India there was no clear distinction between civil society and the state. Civil society was characterized not by individual rights based on competence, but by communities asserting their rightsas communitiesin order to partake of the largesse of the state. 21 This process has the effect of preserving such communities whose boundaries are already established.
The development of the ideas of "caste" and community out of various conglomerations of trading lineages and networks is an outgrowth of the way that colonialism created knowledge about caste. In colonial ethnography, the study of family genealogies was a fundamental part of learning about the social and political structures of India. The early study of lineage and kinship, especially among colonial ethnographers, was actually a handmaiden to the establishment and legitimation of colonial rule. For the British in India, interest in kinship and lineage directly facilitated the colonial government's knowledge of ruling families. This is aptly illustrated in the case of Rajasthan, on which dozens of publications were issued discussing the lineages of royal families, ruling chiefs, and local rulers. 22 In these so-called primitive societies that colonial anthropologists found around the globe, kinship was seen as the fundamental organizing principle of both political and social life. Whereas the colonizing powers had modern institutions like the workplace and the modern state that formed the basic building blocks of social
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structure and civilization, the core of colonized nations supposedly consisted of the bonds of kinship.
In recent decades, studies that emphasize the connections between community, caste, and kinship have gone in separate directions. There has been extensive debate over the institution of caste and its importance in Indian society, from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. 23 There is a coterminous and rich literature on the question of womens roles and the colonial public. 24 Despite the enormous literature produced on the "womens question" in colonial and nationalist thought, and a burgeoning literature on family and kinship, there have been relatively few attempts to acknowledge the historical contingency of kinship as a marker of political identity. 25
The few studies that address kinship and political subjectivity have looked specifically at how kinship both enabled and constrained women in public life. Kamala Visweswaran has addressed how women freedom fighters helped refigure Indian nationalism even though they were "described as political subjects in relationship to their families," and as such their agency arguably accommodated both resistance and consent. 26 Minaults work has discussed the extendibility of kinship as enabling womens political participation and forays into public life, and yet her characterization of Indian women as being either "commodities of exchange" or "individuals" who could never fully act in public life assumes a limited and binary subject position for women, and also assumes that there already was a "pure" bourgeois public life available for the participation of Indian men. 27 Visweswaran takes issue with Minaults point that women "did not themselves act in the public realm, but served as symbols," arguing that this approach confines womens subjectivity to the home and thus effectively silences their public agency. 28
Idioms of gender and kinship are fundamental to the discourse of community and affect the ways that Calcutta Marwaris have both experienced and reproduced public life. One sees this most prominently in frequently articulated public discourses, in nearly every Indian community, over the status of "our women." Specifically, I am interested in the ways that representations of Marwari family life and ideals of domesticity have become reflected in the assertion of identity in the public sphere. Thus, I will be exploring the importance and centrality of the family lineage, known in Hindi as the kul, as it becomes reflected in modern public Marwari institutions. The Marwari promotion of domesticity and conservative domestic values in the public sphere often makes them the target of criticism by other groups, who disagree with the ways in which the Marwaris have traditionally formed their very public self-representations. I argue that their unique orientation to the pastas expressed through relationships of kin and lineagecreates new possibilities in how communities, as unified collective actors, create alternatives to European or bourgeois models of political participation.
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25
As a migratory group, added to daily by new arrivals from Rajasthan, the Calcutta Marwaris represent a flow of persons rather than a fixed and static group. Recent literature on globalization adds to Barths pioneering observation about the continuity of identity despite the comings and goings of concrete individuals. 29 My work draws on recent globalization theory that attempts to see how region and community are both constituted by flows of people. Globalization theory offers distinct advantages in helping anthropologists and historians shift their gaze from fixed groups and regions to look at global flows of people, commodities, and capital. However, there is a tendency in globalization theory to eclipse from view the role of traditionally "primordialized" sites of analysis such as community or kinship in constituting performances of community life.
For instance, Arjun Appadurai has argued that ethnicity does not depend upon "the extension of primordial sentiments to larger and larger units in some sort of unidirectional process, nor does it make the mistake of supposing that larger social units simply draw on the sentiments of family and kinship to give emotional force to large-scale group identities." 30 Though we need to appreciate Appadurai's point that one should no longer think of societies always being constituted by a very localized production of kinship or family sentiment writ large, globalization theory as it stands has little means of accounting for the importance of kinship and family life even within life-worlds of prominent and powerful communities like the Marwaris. The Marwaris, after all, are a group who have been created by globalizing influences of flows of people and capital, and yet for whom the language of kinship plays a major role.
As Partha Chatterjee has recently argued, explanations of community that ignore the "ascribed" ties of human life cannot explain why people have been prepared to make incredible sacrifices or even die for their family, kin, ethnic group, or nation. The interpretive problem lies, according to Chatterjee, in the assumptions of theorists who do not consider all communities to be equally "worthy of approval in modern political life." He further argues that, "in particular, attachments that seem to emphasize the inherited, the primordial, the parochial or the traditional are regarded by most theorists as smacking of conservative and intolerant practices and hence as inimical to the values of modern citizenship." 31 Appadurai, by attempting to move beyond primordialist explanations for community formation, has implicitly accepted the Western critique that ascribed ties are fundamentally conservative and are in fact anti-modern. There is little space for even theorizing metaphors of family, lineage, or kinship in his model. Instead of attempting to recast the role of ascription in understanding the building blocks of group formation, family ties are relegated to primordialism and backwardness, instead of being regarded as productive conduits in identity articulation.
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To argue that narratives of lineage and kinship are creatively deployed as performances of the modern community does not necessarily mean that one must subscribe to the theory of primordialism. Thus, my focus is on the deployment of the language of kinship and not on the internal workings, dynamics, or diagrams of kinship itself. Instead of dropping the idea of kinship altogether, it is more productive to look at how idioms of kinship and lineage, as invoked through public performances of community, become important techniques for the mobilization of community identity in modern Indian politics. The politics of community identity for Marwaris seems to depend on peculiar and fascinating constructions of tradition and lineage that have the effect of making lineage and family the basis of identity claims. Recognizing the ways that emergent communities employ structures of kinship in the process of turning their groups into viable political actors acknowledges the importance of family and kinship without necessarily naturalizing or universalizing them. Even the growth of nationalism in India was articulated through tropes of kinship, adding auspiciousness to Western political forms; the idea of "mother India" is a case in point.
One way of thinking about the problem of community and kinship in light of theories of migration and globalization is to consider these flows of people as a type of "familial cosmopolitanism." In a lecture entitled "Eastern Humanism," Sylvain Levi (the premiere French Indologist of the 1920s and 1930s) asserted that kinship provides the base for an Indian person's orientation to the world:
30
Even if we speak of a man who pretends to keep himself above national, social, religious prejudices, we still denote him as a citizen of the world, cosmopolites, from kosmos, the world, and polites, a citizen. How typical is the difference if you compare the words of Bhartrhari as quoted above: vasudhaiva kutumbakam. For a Hindu, the family-house, kutumbaka, is the primary cell around which the whole world, as great as you may fancy it, centres; kinship is the only real bond you can not get rid of, but the best of men can extend it to the whole world. 32
Despite obvious objections that Levi can be read as essentializing kinship as a permanent and unchanging form of social structure, it would be wrong to dismiss his formulation, because it offers us an important formulation of how humans can orient themselves to the world that contrasts with western political theory. 33
In India, Levi argues, individuals can be cosmopolitan in the sense that they can view the world as part of their own family. This is a different sort of
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orientation to the world from a Western notion of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, in which a subject may be cosmopolitan in the way that he or she acts autonomously and comfortably in international realms. Maintaining the importance of family, quasi-family, and genealogical ties, Levi argues, is actually the bedrock of community. This is not at odds with my essential argument that community is constituted by a series of performances of identity claims in public life, creating connections and linkages, which constitute Indias communal public culture. The idea of performance, after all, focuses our attention on how we strategically orient ourselves to the world. In India, or for that matter anywhere else in the world, cosmopolitanism has never excluded strong family ties, especially in its most public representations, and may in fact actually be dependent on them. Thus, idioms of kinship connections become an important part of many performances of community as public culture. Summing Up: Community and Public Culture I have proposed that the Marwari community was created through trading and capitalist alliances; Marwari trading networks themselves created the very possibility of a public community. New Marwari arrivals in Calcutta depended upon their linkages with others to get started in trade and business, seeking out fellow community members for shelter, food, and guidance. Whether or not these trading circles were necessarily made up of blood relatives, they were performed as such, and maintained high levels of internal secrecy. Whereas a bourgeois public brings together unrelated individuals in an experience in exteriority, Marwari traders relied on credit and networks of trust. For Marwari traders, these powerful and close-knit trading networks extended across Rajasthan, North India, and Bengal. Because they were not only limited to kinship and private relationships, they became general, and thus mirrored the personality of the public. Kinship and marriage did not in themselves generate this "public;" rather, it depended on capitalism and on the Marwaris trading connections.
Thus, there are many important points of intersection between the generation of community through trading and the emergence of the Marwari community as a political actor vis--vis the colonial state. As I have previously noted, there are much longer histories of associations and linkages of each of the many lineages of the Marwari subcastes (Oswal, Agarwal, and Maheswari), which are later appropriated, incorporated, and contested under the multivalent tag of "Marwari." By the turn of the twentieth century, older modes of community linkage continued and were substantially altered by the rise of various Marwari voluntary associations that overlapped with older models. 34 The word "overlap," however, does not mean that the two were not mutually constituted. 35
35
I do not deny the transformative power of voluntary associations in civil society, but I argue that for the Marwaris the public is also a domain of
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trading networks composed of business and kinship connections. There is a big difference between the individualist bourgeois public model and the widely extended kinship model that connects large numbers of people. This means that the public realm itself can be constituted through the performance of familial idioms, or as I put it, a "familial cosmopolitanism." Thus it seems to me that one obvious point of "overlap" between the two publics is found when Marwaris make representations and performances of themselves as kinship or lineage-oriented people.
Neither the bourgeois public nor the familial cosmopolitan public has a static formulation, unaffected by historical contingencies. There have been different and changing networking needs for Marwari traders, especially for the relatively new industrialists, who have been more receptive to breaks with tradition and more eager to promote social reform through voluntary associations. One could argue that this is related to how the commercial nature of trading differs from industrialization. Industrialists require large amounts of capital, a small but trustworthy family to run the operation, and a lineage to build an industrial empire. Industrialists may not depend as much as traders do on the existence of a familial public. Traders, however, need to create linkages over vast expanses of territory and are more invested in maintaining a familial cosmopolitanism than are industrialists, who could sell their products to anyone. Armed with this distinction, I find that casting these linkages among traders as familial cosmopolitanism captures transregional and agentive qualities of community formation that are neither state-centered nor static, and avoids reproducing popular stereotypes of traders as being "clannish" and old-fashioned.
As Marwaris and other baniya trading groups continue to dominate in business, and are an ever-larger presence in various sites of cultural production, it is not surprising that more positive images of baniyas are reflected in popular culture, images that demonstrate the ways in which kinship metaphors are brought into the very modernity of public life. One good recent example of what I call "familial cosmopolitanism" can be found in the wildly popular blockbuster Hindi film, "Ham Apke Hain Kon" ("Who Am I To You?") of 1994, which broke all previous ticket sales records and inspired many repeat viewings. The film marked a turning point in Hindi films from violence- and sex-packed adventure thrillers to family-oriented, good clean fun. It has been described by some critics as being "one long marriage video," incorporating no less than fourteen song-and-dance sequences. The story is about two sisters who fall in love with two brothers. One pair marries but the other relationship is secret. When the older sister dies in childbirth, the younger sister is customarily expected to marry the widower and raise the child. The strategies she uses to avoid marrying the brother of her lover are a reflection of the public negotiations of gender roles within a business family. Some of the valuation of kinship rhetoric is obvious and punchy: the heros car is scrawled with graffiti saying "I Love My Family." This film, perhaps not so coincidentally, was produced by the Marwari director Sooraj Barjatia, who makes films exclusively for his familys production company,
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Rajshri. A note on my terms of analysis for India & the conceits of ethnosociology My use of terms like "community" and "public culture" to describe Indian society may appear to some readers to beg the question of whether or not these terms of analysis derive from within the society itself. To a certain degree, this very question arises from a concern with ethnosociology, itself a product of Eurocentric thinking, which assumes the existence of pristine (and wholly uncolonized) cultures untouched by European influences and forms of political structure. 36 We can avoid the conceit of ethnosociology by recognizing that European forms of political organization were themselves grafted onto Indian society. Rather than questioning whether the set of terms in English is functionally equivalent to some set of translations into Hindi (or vice versa), we should focus on the historical relationships whereby the experience of European political domination has altered the meanings of these sets of terms. "Community" in the Indian context therefore refers to a political form that is constituted by Indian ideas about networks and groups as well as by colonial ideology. The resultant political forms are a mixture of both Western and Indian structures and influences. For that matter, even our "native informants" may use the same English words.
Because of these historical conjunctures, exact translations are impossible. In North Indian languages, there is no one fixed word for "community." Instead there are a smattering of words, such as jati and samaj, which have a broad and flexible range of meanings. These meanings vary widely from context to context. Partha Chatterjee has recently described that jati has had a broad range of meanings in Bengal deployed both inside and outside colonial discourse. Jati has ranged in meaning from "origin" and "birth," to a "class . . .of living species," a clan, a class, or even the more colonial definition of a "human collectivity bound by loyalty to a state or organized around the natural and cultural characteristics of a country or province." 37 Though colonialist discourse sought to determine more clearly the boundaries of collectivities, jati had a much more flexible and relativistic usage. As Chatterjee notes, "One could, obviously and without any contradiction, belong to several jati, not simultaneously but contextually, invoking in each context a collectivity in which membership is not a matter of self-interested individual choice or contractual agreement but an immediate inclusion, originally, as it is by birth." 38
40
Yet the negative aspect of the very flexibility of the term jati is that it could not be used in public life to denote a community that would be "fixed enough" to meet the needs of the political state. While Indian historians wrote genealogical histories of jati groups like the Marwaris, such as Balchand Modi's Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan [The place of the Marwaris in the life of the nation], jati was rarely used in naming official-sounding
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political organizations. 39 A community needed a more transcendent marker of identity, such as samaj [association], which would justify the demand for certain political concessions. Jati could be flexible enough to designate "a people," but I have not seen it deployed as an official name for institutions in colonial civil society.
The second North Indian term for describing community, which came into more widespread use in the early nineteenth century, was the more officialsounding samaj or sammelon. Although samaj was used by Rammohan Roy in the early nineteenth century to designate a sense of membership within his reformed religion, the Brahmo Samaj, the term is used much like the English term "society," and is deployed in descriptions of civil society. Samaj can be defined as "a society, association; a meeting, gathering; society, a particular community; or things pertaining to an event, preparations." The adjectival form of the word samajik has been defined in R. S. McGreggor's Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary as "having to do with society, social; being a member of an audience." 40 The word was later used to describe other formally organized religious groups in North India, such as the Arya Samaj. Sammelon, as in the Marwari Sammelon, is somewhat like the English word "congress," which is used for both a "meeting" and an organization.
Thus, using an English term like "community" to encapsulate the terms of samaj, jati, and sammelon, is not merely a Eurocentric imposition onto (wholly) Indian realities. My very deliberate use of the English word "community" in the following pages seeks to acknowledge the ways that European political terminology has historically influenced the ways that Indians think of their own social and political structure. 41 But I will also try to show how these terms acquire new and unpredictable meanings as their semantic fields stretch to include practices not originally covered by them. The next chapter addresses this problem by examining the interplay of different senses of geographical space.
Notes: Note 1: The "Bengal Studies Conference," the "Rajasthani Studies Group," and the "Maharashtra Group" are well-known entities in South Asian professional circles, thus helping to reify and reinforce the strong sense of regionalism in historical, anthropological, and religious studies of India.Back. Note 2: Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Back.
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Note 3: Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), and "From Avoidance to Confrontation?" in Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, eds. Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991): 239289.Back. Note 4: I am referring to essays entitled "Editors Comments" and "Why Public Culture" by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge in Public Culture (Fall 1988): 5-9. ; See also Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).Back. Note 5: See, for instance, Arvind Rajagopal, "Uses of the Past: The Televisual Broadcast of an Ancient Epic and Its Reception in Indian Society"(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, May 1992).Back. Note 6: The influence of Victor Turners work on cultural performance will be obvious here. See the posthumous collection, Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987). Identity can be defined as "a subject position produced by representations in relation to other representations" (Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 7).Back. Note 7: Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Modernity and Ethnicity in India," in Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, ed. David Bennett (London: Routledge, 1998): 91-110.Back. Note 8: See Frederick Barths introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. F. Barth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969): 938; Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Tavistock, 1985).Back. Note 9: Since I am not making an argument about primordialism, I am not concerned with ethnosociological theories about the biological transfer of substances associated with lineage, kinship, and family ties. The fact that so many prominent Marwari individuals, like nationalist Jamnalal Bajaj, have been adopted, further discredits the transfer of substance argument in the construction of lineage or kul.Back. Note 10: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Back. Note 11: Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).Back. Note 12: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).Back. Note 13: Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland
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Tradition of Scotland," in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 15.Back. Note 14: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).Back. Note 15: Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 4.Back. Note 16: Aletta J. Norval, "Thinking Identities: Against a Theory of Ethnicity," in The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, ed. Edwin N. Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64. Back. Note 17: Milton Singer, ed., Traditional India: Structure and Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959), xiii.Back. Note 18: Quoted in Jain, Ethnicity in Plural Societies, 173.Back. Note 19: Frank Conlin, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 17001935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Karen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Robert Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).Back. Note 20: Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Back. Note 21: Partha Chatterjee, "Modes of Civil Society," Public Culture 3 (Fall 1990); Veena Das, Critical Events (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).Back. Note 22: Chiefs and Leading Families in Rajputana, (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, Rajputana Agency, 1912); The Ruling Princes, Chiefs and
Leading Personages in Rajputana and Ajmer, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1924); Lokanatha Ghosha, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars &c. (Calcutta: J. N. Ghose, 1881).Back. Note 23: For a summary of this debate, see Dirks, The Hollow Crown; Arjun Appadurai, "Is Homo Hierarchicus?" American Ethnologist 13 (1986): 74561.Back. Note 24: One of the major studies is Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).Back. Note 25: Much compelling work on South Asian kinship in recent years has come from feminist ethnography. In these studies, scholars no longer see kinship as a separate domain of analysis, but rather engage with combining
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kinship with other forms of social life. Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Gold, Listen to the Herons Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Rajni Palriwala and Carla Risseeuw, eds., Shifting Circles of Support: Contextualizing Kinship and Gender in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (New Delhi: Alta Mira Press, 1996).Back. Note 26: Kamala Visweswaran, "Family Subjects: An Ethnography of the Womens Question in Indian Nationalism" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990).Back. Note 27: Gail Minault, "The Extended Family as Metaphor and the Expansion of Womens Realm," in The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (South Asia Books, 1981).Back. Note 28: Visweswaran, "Family Subjects," 12. My work builds upon Minault and Visweswarans observations on the connectedness of kinship metaphors and public life, but I do not specifically address how women and men might have differed in their roles as political subjects.Back. Note 29: Barth, "Introduction"; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).Back. Note 30: Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 14. Back. Note 31: Partha Chatterjee, "Community in the East," (Paper presented at the 17th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Seoul, 1721 August 1997), 4. Back.
Note 32: Sylvain Levi, "Eastern Humanism: An Address Delivered in the University of Dacca on 4 February 1922," Dacca University Bulletin 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 910.Back. Note 33: Levis lecture explores how it is possible for a deeply western concept, humanism, to exist in India. Levi interprets western humanism to be an "intellectual catholicity.... the will to do away with local and national creeds and to build up a community which would embrace the whole extent of the world." Ibid.Back. Note 34: The Jalan lineage goddess Rani Sati, for instance, who became a goddess for the modern Marwari community, will be discussed in chapter six.Back. Note 35: I place greater emphasis on how the state actually did affect local structures and networks than does, for example, C. A. Baylys recent discussion of the rise of the Indian "information order" from 17801870. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
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Communication in India 17801870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Bayly presents an empirically rich study of communication and the circulation of knowledge among various linkagestrade, agents, religion, kinship, and marriageand yet maintains a rather artificial separation between local knowledge and state knowledge that ends up denying the transformative effects of colonial rule.Back. Note 36: Daniel makes a good critique of this problem in Fluid Signs.Back. Note 37: Jnanendramohan Das, Bangala bhasar abhidhan, second ed., (1937), quoted in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993): 221. Back. Note 38: Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 222.Back. Note 39: Balchand Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan (Calcutta: Raghunathaprasada Simhaniya, 1940).Back. Note 40: R. S. McGreggor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1007.Back. Note 41: Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) is a good model for this type of research. See also Louis Dumonts essay, "Nationalism and Communalism," Contributions to Indian Sociology (March 1964):30-70.Back.
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Community and Public Culture: Chapter 2
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2. Mapping Community in Rajasthan and Calcutta

1
During my research in Calcutta, I was frequently puzzled when both Marwaris and Bengalis would explain to me that the Marwaris came from Marwar. I would become even more puzzled when people, usually Bengalis, would ask me why I was not doing my research in Rajasthan. The "real Marwaris" are there, they often said. These comments at first exasperated me because I knew that there was no exact Marwari homeland of "Marwar" corresponding to a particular geographic region of that name, at least in the modern sense of "region," which implies currently meaningful political or geographical boundaries. For, despite what their name suggests, Marwaris do not literally come from "Marwar" A multivalent term that (among other things) generally refers to a historically important district in central Rajasthan, "Marwar" is an erstwhile princely state that is now the district of Jodhpur. According to the numerous family histories and other resources I have consulted, however, most Marwari families originally came from the districts of Jhunjhunu and Shekhawati, far to the east of what has been mapped in historical atlases as the (now) territorially bounded region of Marwar. Shekhawati is part of the former Jaipur state, encompassing Jhunjhunu and Sikar in northeast Rajasthan. Thomas Timberg writes that, "the most prominent group of 'Marwaris' in Calcutta are members of the Maheshwari and Aggarwal trading castes from the Shekhawati region, north of Jaipur. Almost all the largest contemporary industrial connections belong to this group: Birla (Pilani near Chirawa), Dalmia (Chirawa), Singhania (Bisau), Jatia (Bisau), Surajmal-Nagarwmal (Ratangarh) and Goenka (Ramdutt RamkissendasDundlod)." 1
In responding to such stern directives that I should be doing my fieldwork in Rajasthan, it became tedious for me to explain time and again that there are no resident "Marwaris" in Rajasthan that can be identified in the way that this business community is identified in Calcutta. I finally just gave up trying to explain myself and would nod in false agreement, assuring people I would soon book my ticket with the nearest travel agent. I could only pretend to understand what they meant. It was only long after my research ended that I realized that, for many Indians, there exists a "subjective region" of Marwar, to borrow Bernard Cohn's term. 2 Cohn's study of the uses of regional identity in India shows that regions have been thought of as embodying coherence, through alliances that are historical, linguistic, cultural, or based on social structure. His argument shows that the criteria that help define a region are subjective qualities that depend on varying individual and group interests and related power differentials. The popular use of "Marwar" is subjective in the way it invokes older meanings of a broad region of linguistic influence as a homeland of Marwaris without directly referring to the much smaller Marwar district (now Jodhpur), which is not
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where most Marwaris actually came from. There seemed to be at least two referents to Marwar: first, as the subjective extent of the older Marwar kingdom (thus synonymous with Rajasthan itself), and second, as an objective place name interchangeable with Jodhpur district, which is a modern administrative unit. 3 The district of Jodhpur was the former capital of the kingdom of Marwar, and the two names remain somewhat interchangeable.
My own imagination of geographical regions and identity formation had been limited by these colonial and nationalist ideas about territory and boundaries, central to both modern forms of geography and cartographic production. I needed to examine what was accomplished by certain practices and performances of naming. By deploying the name "Marwari" for the last century, Marwaris and Bengalis alike have been able to ascribe an identity to a group of people in order to make distinctions between various upcountrymen and so-called non-Bengalis in Calcutta. For reasons that will become apparent, Marwari became that designated name. It did not matter that the term "Marwar" has no exact territorial referent in the modern Indian nation-state. This is contrary to the objectifying logics of colonial, nationalist, and anthropological thought. Locating Marwari, Marwar, and Rajasthan Books on Indian economic or business history as a rule include discussions of the migrant Marwari traders. In such contexts the term "Marwari" has been used quite loosely, and often pejoratively, to describe a Vaishya trading community associated with Rajasthan, Gujarat, or North India generally. The general stereotype of the Marwari businessman is a Hindu or Jain baniya (Vaishya trader or moneylender), carrying nothing but lota (water pot) and kambal (blanket), who has migrated thousands of miles from poor villages in the dry deserts of Rajasthan to cities and towns all over South Asia. The more general term baniya is interchangeable with Marwari, and includes all traders, regardless of regional origin. 4 The majority of Marwari migrant traders settled in colonial trading centers, first in Bombay and later especially in Calcutta and eastern India, where many of them became fabulously rich through business and speculation. 5 During the nineteenth century, these groups were also referred to in Bengal as "upcountrymen." 6 The Calcutta Marwaris are popularly associated with small business, banking, moneylending, and local trade. They have been subjects of jealousy and ridicule by the local majority population of Bengalis. Bengalis have expressed fears of the Marwaris' social clout, as well as contempt toward the so-called "northern Indian" rough and tumble business culture epitomized by Marwari traders.
5
These business and economic histories tend to take "Marwari" as an unproblematic category, without acknowledging the ways in which the
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composition of the Marwari community is a recent historical development, emerging well after the collapse of the Marwar kingdom. Many of the moneylenders and traders in the second half of the eighteenth century, mainly Jains, were said to have come from a place called Marwar. HobsonJobson, for instance, notes that the word "Marwaree" describes "properly a man of the Marwar [Sanskrit maru, 'desert'], or Jodhpur country in Rajputana." 7 But ironically, it is only since the last decades of the nineteenth century that this emergent migrant community of traders has been readily identified by the term "Marwari" in India, despite its occasional uses elsewhere, such as in Central Asia and in the Deccan Riots. Equally puzzling is the way that business and economic histories make confident claims that Marwaris come from the barren deserts of Marwar.
The "brave and enterprising" Marwaris were supposedly named after Marwar, the rugged desert region from which they reputedly came, a name referring to an imaginary geographical origin that enables them to share a common culture despite their dispersion. The place name "Marwar" is usually translated into English as "the region of death," to refer to the harsh desert climate that characterizes this region of Rajasthan. The harshness of the desert homelands of the Marwaris is frequently cited as the primary factor behind Marwari migration and prosperity. D. K. Taknet, historian and biographer of B. M. Birla and manager of his charitable trust, provides a good illustration of the theory of the environmental origins of the Marwari work ethic. Taknet writes: "Nature taught them to follow its rhythm, dust storms and famines inspired them to tolerate pain and suffering. Lack of resources motivated them to work assiduously, hot winds and burning sun strengthened their vigour, and scarcity of water urged them to adopt a frugal way of life. Had they not learnt these lessons from adversity, they would not have turned out to be nationally reputed warriors and top industrialists." 8 The Marwaris, many such historians say, have an almost "genetic destiny" to make money; even in the arid desert, they are able to produce money out of nothing. 9 Though many historians and anthropologists might dispute these purely environmental or genetic causal factors, recognizing the circulation of such "truths" helps to illuminate the continuing presence of Orientalism both in scholarship and among the people we study.
While the subjective region of "Marwar" as an imaginary homeland of the Marwaris can hardly be found on a map, my research indicates that Calcutta Marwaris have actively engaged in mapping their identities, oriented to a sense of Marwar and Rajasthan. Their very name "Marwari," of course, suggests an origin in "Marwar." The historical importance of the Marwar kingdom and its continuing presence as an enduring place name may partially account for the fact that this diasporic and expatriate business group has been called Marwari instead of Shekhawati, the name of the district that most Marwaris have come from. The production of a social identity in this case has also contributed to the rise of an imaginary region:
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Marwar, the mythic place of Marwari origin. The history of the Marwaris aptly illustrates Arjun Appadurai's recent proposition that localitiessuch as the elusive Marwarare themselves produced by the migratory flows of people. 10
What remains to be explained in this chapter, therefore, are the historical and cultural factors that have contributed to the mutual production of both community, the Marwaris, and their more or less imaginary homeland, Marwar. I contend that there was no preexisting "Marwari" community in Rajasthan before the migrations. It was the fact of the traders' departure itselfand their diasporic location outside of Rajasthanthat transforms this migrant community into Marwaris. The example of Marwar and Marwari as a socially constructed region and community is not unique. 11 In taking up the issues of regions and naming, I propose to examine the relationship between mapping and community definition in colonial India in two different ways, which for the convenience of conceptualization, I distinguish as maps and mapping.
By maps, I refer to the conventional definition of maps being objectifying representations of social space, and by mapping I refer to the overlapping networks of orientation through which people make subjective sense of objective spaces. Another term for this is mental mapping. (The fact that maps are also subjective forms, made objective by relations of knowledge and power. is not at issue here.) Both maps and mapping are spatial practices tied to practices of power in naming (and claiming) a sense of territorial affiliation. They both make particular and competing claims on space, albeit using different conceptions of space. The former claims more specifically bounded and bordered lands, whereas the latter may be satisfied with boundaries that are more "fuzzy," to borrow Kaviraj's term. 12 The field of cartography itself has struggled over the question of whether or not mapmaking is a universal cultural practice. Dennis Wood reminds us that mapmaking, as opposed to mapping, is not "a universal expression of individual experience," and that we need to consider practices of mapping along with the actual maps that the practice of mapmaking produces. 13
10
The Marwari process of mapping themselves onto landmarks in a so-called ancestral homeland has been a crucial element in their identity formation. Tracing their ancestry to Marwar, Rajputana, and Rajasthan is itself a form of mapping, in the sense of mapping their identity in relation to other communities in a nation called India. Returning to Rajasthan to celebrate various rites of life passagesuch as marriage, tonsure (first haircut) of boys, building "ancestral" haveli (mansions), pursuing philanthropic ventures, and constructing temples in home villageshas created a
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geographical orientation in Marwari identity that connects the kul(lineage) with Rajasthan. This linkage is rather different from invented tradition. Their way of being Marwari within a history of migration and mobility is one in which a geographical orientation to the past in Rajasthan has become embodied in a performance of what they have thought they owed their ancestors. Maps of Language, Maps of Region: Colonial Ethnography and Rajasthan There is no part of India called 'Marwar,' but there must be some historical evidence of the particular culture of the Marwaris. Historian James Tod says that, in the past, the dry area between the river Sutlej and the sea was called Marwar. But today it is supposed to be between Sindh, Gujarat, Mewar, Ajmer and Jaipur. Other historical evidence is found from the reign of Shershah, when the territory ruled by King Maldev was called Marwar. It was the only kingdom, besides Mewar, that could not be conquered by Shershah. Golden Jubilee history of the All India Marwari Federation 14 European ethnographic mapping of languages and regions produced the two different but related meanings for the term "Marwari"as language and as occupational identitythat were ultimately used interchangeably by colonial officials. Territorial mapping (thus asserting boundaries and creating borders) both in India and Europe was a distinctly European practice, greatly altering notions of nationality and modern statehood. In the case of early modern France, Peter Sahlins has argued that the fixing into boundaries of the frontiers of disputed state jurisdictions "formed part of a constitutive myth of the state." 15 A formidable power against the Mughals (15001700s), Marwar (like all principalities of its time) did not refer to a fixed bounded area. The historical kingdom of Marwar remained until the late 1800s a powerful but somewhat elusive geographical entity spanning a cultural area across nearly all of Rajputana. As Susan Gole and Irfan Habib have demonstrated, Mughal maps of Rajputana did not delineate territorial boundaries in the modern sense. Instead, Mughal maps reflected the names of important places, signifying a sphere of influence, without indicating precise territorial correspondences. 16 It has been observed that the colonial conglomeration of Rajputana depended on Rajput kinship lineages, which constituted political unity, more than on Western notions of territory. 17 In short, Marwar, long a dominant kingdom of Rajasthan, became subjectively interchangeable with the geographical extent of Rajasthan.
Early attempts at making maps of peoples and languages were the outcome
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of the European quest to find India's place in a global framework of ethnology and ethnological groups. In the maps of language (standing in as "maps of peoples") during the early nineteenth century there was a rather literal convergence of ethnography and cartography. 18 While medieval maps, which divided the world's population according to the descendants of Noah's sons Japheth, Shem, and Ham, show an early interest in 'race' and language, later mapping of human geography came in tandem with the development of cartographic techniques necessary to map features of the population. 19 Unlike the divergence of comparative ethnology and philology in the 1870s, as Trautmann has described, 20 the identification of language and region became strong enough to form the basis of the linguistic reorganization of Indian states. 21
15
The early colonial ethnography of Rajasthan helped construct the region as the site of a potent romantic imaginary of princely India and the Rajput rulers who governed there. 22 One of the hallmarks of Rajasthan is the claim that, for the last thousand years, the land has never been directly ruled by foreign conquerors. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, Rajputs managed to defend their rule against the Muslim rulers in Delhi. The princely states of Mewar and Marwar even posed a viable threat to the central power in Delhi itself. This history has given rise to a construct of a "martial Rajput," who draws on ancestral connections in legitimizing his sovereignty as ruler and as warrior. 23 One effect of the European fascination with Rajasthan was a romanticization of historical ruins that imbued such physical landmarks as the remains of forts and palaces with a historic sense of heroism and bravery. Although the focus was ostensibly on Rajput rulers, the romanticization of Rajasthan as a place is important because of the way it is later appropriated by the diasporic Marwaris.
The textualization of memories and oral epic into colonial ethnography served to popularize and canonize the Rajput ethos of Rajasthan during colonial times. Colonel Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (182932) was especially influenced by Rajput tales of heroism, which became enshrined in the text, and had a lasting impact on both British and Indian views of Rajputs and Rajasthan. 24 Tod's text was in turn a tremendous influence on the nineteenth-century literary creations of Bengal. 25 In fact, the term "Rajasthan" to describe a territorially defined region was coined by Col. Tod, and the state of Rajasthan was formed in 1948 out of former princely territories collectively known as "Rajputana." During the colonial period these princely states entered into alliances with the British colonial power but were never part of British India. Interestingly, Tod was not as concerned with delineating territorial boundaries as he was in collecting other types of historical and ethnological information. In addition to his interest in the feudal regimes of the Rajputs, Tod recorded 128 merchant castes with their family members in Rajasthan. The largest of these
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merchant castes were Agarwals, Maheshwaris, Oswals, Khandelwals, and Porwals, providing the organizing framework of the modern Marwari community. 26
Colonel Tod referred specifically to the ambiguity of "Marwar" when he addressed the problems of maps and mapping that arose in his attempt to define the extent of the Rajasthan region. Tod notes that "the limits of Marwar are, however, so very irregular, and present so many salient angles and abutments into other States, that without a trigonometrical process we cannot arrive at a correct estimate of its superficial extent: a nicety not, indeed, required." 27 Although Tod acknowledged the importance of the trigonometric survey that was being concurrently executed in British India as an instrument to produce exactness, he was not convinced that such technique would be appropriate in defining Marwar. In short, this is a refusal of mapmaking. Tod's accounts of his travels and historical research instead produced route descriptions of Rajputanasurely a form of early map, perhaps, but without territorial claims.
Because Tod, like many other Europeans at the time, believed that the feudal regimes he observed in India were actually vestiges of Europe's own past, he took great interest in describing Rajput history. Tod noted: "I have been so hardy as to affirm and endeavor to prove the common origin of the martial tribes of Rajasthan and those of ancient Europe." 28 Tod's Annals and Antiquities emerged in the middle of the Orientalist and Anglicist controversy about the relative merits of Eastern and Western learning. It is in this context that Tod wrote of the prevailing need to write what he called a "national" history of India. His book might be read, as Inden notes, as a pointed response to James Mill's Anglicist History of India, which explores at length the despotism of India's native rulers in order to justify British sovereignty. 29 Tod's study implicitly attacks the theory of Oriental Despotism, one of Mill's fundamental assumptions. Tod, by contrast, was consciously trying to forge ethnological links of sameness between British and Indian. 30 Tod introduced Annals and Antiquities with an argument that his text ultimately challenges: "Much disappointment has been felt in Europe at the sterility of the historic muse of Hindustan. When Sir William Jones first began to explore the vast mines of Sanskrit literature, great hopes were entertained that the history of the world would acquire considerable accessions from this source. It is now generally regarded as an axiom, that India possesses no national history." 31
Unlike Mill, who never went to India, Tod reiterated the importance of his being in India firsthand and of using Hindu and Jain sources that had survived the "Muslim invasion." Tod credited the decade-long work of his Jain research assistant, who he never named, as being invaluable for the creation of a meaningful history. Yet in assessing Tod, we must recognize
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that the Orientalists contributed to justifications for British rule. By writing a colonial text that identified and differentiated between groups of people, Tod enabled the British project of dividing and ruling India. His text fostered a sense of romantic nationalism that was adopted by Rajputs in their own selfrepresentations. This nationalism found its genesis in the Orientalist discourse of human unity which underlay Tod's ethnological models, but this same romantic nationalism itself provided the logic of dividing populations into separate, supposedly governable ethnic groups. 32
20
After the publication of Tod in 182932, there was little written in English on the states of Rajputana until the late 1870s, when other colonial ethnographies were written. 33 This second stage of colonial ethnography in the 1870s was accompanied by a greater interest in land surveys. The triangulation survey of Rajputana was begun in 187677 by R. Todd (the similarity in names is a coincidence), who attempted a detailed survey of the desert areas of Marwar, Shekhawati, and Bikaner States, as well as of Jodhpur city. 34 Some of the surveying team met with staunch resistance from villagers, who physically attacked the surveyors. Though the colonial government claimed that the villagers mistook the surveyors for excise officials, the leaders of the revolt were sentenced to two years' imprisonment and fined the massive sum of Rs. 1000 each. 35 Though we cannot say whether the villagers knew what the surveyors were doing, this incident bore much in common with other forms of violent resistance against colonial mapping. 36 Further surveying of Rajputana was later attempted in 1881 82.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, ethnography focused on language groups that helped to form the coherent cultural region of "Rajasthan." At first, however, Kellogg's Grammar of the Hindi Language (1875) classified dialectical variations in Rajasthan as part of a larger Hindi belt stretching to the east. 37 But it was George Grierson's twelve-volume Linguistic Survey of India (190328) that recognized the uniqueness of Rajasthani as a language distinct from Hindi. This survey marked the first time that the colonial state had made a systematic effort to map languages (in all of their grammatical complexity) within territories of northern India, giving the publication the scientific authority granted by the state. 38 Grierson used the term "Rajasthani" to refer to the language of the place, including its five major dialects. 39
Grierson, to a large extent relying on census data, was well aware of the way that he was actively involved in the creation of "Rajasthani" as a somewhat artificial linguistic construct. Grierson wrote that the term "Rajasthani" literally referred to the language of Rajasthan, the place of the Rajputs. He noted that Rajasthani, "as connoting a language, has been invented for the
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purposes of this Survey, in order to distinguish it from Western Hindi on the one hand, and from Gujarati on the other." 40 To a certain extent, Grierson's mapping of language variation reflected the historical changes that had led to the emergence of distinct languages. Early written forms of Rajasthani and Gujarati are identical (scholars now refer to the language as Old Gujarati). The establishment of the formidable Rathor kingdom in Marwar in the middle of the fifteenth century prompted the use of written languages closer to the spoken vernaculars. After this time, the two language groups diverged. By the end of the sixteenth century, Old Gujarati was effectively replaced in Rajasthan by this so-called "Middle Marwari," which was used for all correspondence, tales, stories, and prose chronicles. Middle Marwari drew mostly on Western Rajasthani rather than Eastern, not exactly corresponding to any of Grierson's dialects. As Smith notes, this Middle Marwari "does not answer to any single geographically definable form of speech, but is rather a compilation of features drawn from several distinct dialect areas." 41 Middle Marwari remained in use until the second half of the nineteenth century, when, in the heyday of nationalist language politics, it was abandoned for Urdu, standard Hindi, and English. 42
Grierson charted roughly twenty different dialects of "Rajasthani" language, of which "Marwari" had the greatest number of speakers. 43 Marwari had the oldest and most cultivated literary tradition, dating back nearly five hundred years, and was spoken across the largest geographical area of Rajasthan, albeit with variations in Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Sirohi, Shekhawati, Kishangarh, Ajmer-Merwara, and also in parts of Punjab and Haryana. Though not all "Marwari" speakers necessarily spoke the same language, Marwar became a distinct language region, home to the modern "Marwari" dialect, even though, according to Grierson's own classification, the boundaries of the subdialects were rather murky. This modern Marwari actually had more in common with Eastern rather than Western Rajasthani. Grierson noted that "standard Marwari varies but little from Jaipuri standard Marwari is spoken in the centre of the Marwar State in Shekhawati of Jaipur, in which we again find Marwari merging into Jaipur." 44 Grierson gave these statistics enumerating the number of Marwari speakers in the area where it was a vernacular: Standard Marwari Eastern Marwari Southern Marwari Western Marwari Northern Marwari TOTAL 1,591,160 1,974,864 477,570 685,649 1,359,146 6,088,389
25
Marwari as a language encompassed a far greater tract than just the princely state of Marwar. "Standard" Marwari refers to the languages spoken in the eastern part of Rajputana (Jaipur), where most Marwaris originated. If
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Grierson relied on the names that Indians themselves supplied for the languages they spoke, then it is not surprising that so many would have claimed to speak "Marwari." This term referred to the very broad spectrum of languages spoken in the vicinity of the great power, Marwar, even though its grammars and lexicons were more influenced by Eastern Rajasthani. Grierson made special reference to the Marwaris as a prominent mercantile community, noting that, "there are few parts of India where some of them may not be found carrying on the banking business of the country." 45 Though Grierson conceded that there were no complete materials from which to enumerate the number of speakers of Marwari away from home, he drew on statistics compiled from the 1891 census, observing that probably many were speakers of other dialects of Rajasthani, including Jaipuri or Malvi, yet enumerated in the general category of Marwari, as follows: Marwari Speakers in Other Provinces Assam 5,475 Bengal 6,591 Berar 36,614 Bombay and 241,094 Feudatories Central Provinces 22,566 Madras and Agencies 1,108 United Provinces & 2,228 Native States Punjab and 130,000 Feudatories TOTAL MARWARI 451,115 SPEAKERS ABROAD MARWARI 6,088,389 SPEAKERS AT HOME TOTAL 6,539,504 The relatively high number of speakers of Marwari in the Central Provinces may be partly due to emigrant Rajasthani people's distinguishing themselves from local Hindi speakers. It is noteworthy that Grierson took the trouble to research the numbers of speakers of Marwari in British India because it hints at the convergence of the two colonial meanings of "Marwari," first as Marwari speakers and second as migrant baniya traders. At one point, Grierson pointed out that the Mahesri and Oswali languages in the Central Provinces were correctly identified as Marwari, both being languages of two Marwari-speaking mercantile castes. Both Bikaneri and Shekhawati, Grierson contended, were also the same as Marwari. He wrote: "They are simply Marwari with an infusion of Jaipuri, which naturally increases as we go eastwards." 46
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From colonial reports on language such as Grierson's, we might be tempted to see the emergence of the term "Marwari" as a nineteenth-century neologism, encompassing the real and imagined demographic changes that resulted from the period of British trade and rule. In Calcutta, after all, the identity "Marwari" came into official usage only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the foundation of Marwari associations and chambers of commerce in civil society. It was at this time that the term "Marwari" became part of common parlance. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial records show frequent conflation between the terms "upcountry" and "Marwari" to describe non-Bengali immigrants. This identity was for the most part assigned (other-ascribed) rather than chosen (selfascribed). The eighteenth-century Oswal Jain migrants and their descendants, who formed the famous banking concern known as "Jagat Seth," did not refer to themselves as Marwaris. It is only in the twentieth century, continuing into the present, that these Murshidabad communities in hindsight have been claimed as, or labeled as, the first wave of "Marwari" migration.
30
Other historical evidence suggests that the use of "Marwari" to mean migrant trader occured much earlier, arising in the seventeenth century in a quite surprising geographical context far away from either Rajasthan or Calcutta. In a study of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economic trade routes that existed between Mughal India, Iran, Turan, and Russia Stephen Dale documents the involvement of Indian merchants in Middle Eastern and Central Asian trade. Using Philip Curtin's idea of a trade diaspora, Dale claims that Indian traders formed their own diaspora through links of alliances and credit networks. Dale writes that most of the Indian traders in Central Asia were Punjabi Khattris, Pushtuns, Afghans, Marwaris, and "Multanis," named after the region of Multan. Many of these so-called Multani Hindus were probably Punjabi Khattris, though many European traders in the area mistakenly called them baniyas. Dale writes that despite this misidentification, there were other Hindu and Jain merchants who "were in fact genuine banias in the Indian sense of the term. These were Marwaris, who were always clearly identified in Russian records by this particular nisba as natives or residents of the Marwar areas of Rajasthan. They are first mentioned in Astrakhan customs and judicial documents of the 1720s and 1730s." 47
As Dale's research indicates, the genealogies of migrant merchant groups go back much further than the period covered in my own study, and are evidence of a much greater heterogeneity than the modern ethnic tag "Marwari" suggests. Marwaris formed a trade diaspora within India, and their preexisting lineage and trade networks gave them the solidarity required to produce an affective community. Examples of these kinds of ties can be seen in Banarasi's 1641 autobiography, Ardhakathanaka (Half-a-Tale). 48 Banarasi was born into the Srimal clan of the Oswal Jains and was the son of a jewelry merchant who traded in precious stones. In the text, all of
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Banarasi's friends, business partners, and even enemies are from the same Oswal Jain community. As Banarasi's translator Mukund Lath writes, "the social world beyond was, in comparison, shadowy, uncertain, even uncanny." 49 When Banarasi traveled to new towns to develop his business, and later in life on a spiritual quest, he sought out other Srimals with whom to make initial contacts. Like most trading groups, whose very economic viability relies on the extendibility of ties across expanses of territory, Jains generally settled separately in order to maximize trade. This does not mean that they necessarily assimilated into the local environment. Lath notes about Banarasi's world that these "geographically separated groups thus continued to live in the same cultural space." 50 What tied them together was a subjective awareness of a shared and clannish sense of being a trading community despite the disjunction of identity and native place. This shared cultural space is one kind of public culture. Colonial Knowledge about Migration To be Marwari in modern-day Calcutta (or any major city or provincial town) is to be an migrant. But in considering how the colonial state created knowledge about the relationship between community and locality in identity formation, we should take care not to celebrate or assume that migration by itself is an act of resistance against the state. After all, it was colonial capitalism that prompted traders from Rajasthan, some of whom already were already trading on Mughal routes, to go to the colonial metropolis. With their identity formed in diasporic trade, Marwaris have been marked as outsiders, even in Rajasthan. Despite their residence in Bengal for several generationsas far back as the seventeenth century for the descendants of the Murshidabadi saharwalisthe Marwaris were viewed as outsiders by both Bengalis and the colonial state. While colonial ethnography arguably "fixed" the locations of many supposedly static groups, this same colonial logic also attempted to essentialize certain trading communities as migrants. Baniyas, wrote one colonial ethnographer, were "not as wedded to their native place as most of the Indian communities," settling in villages where they were "strangers both in caste and language." 51
The 1901 census established five categories of migration, including casual (moving short distances or women marrying out), temporary (journeys for business or pilgrimage), periodic (for labor associated with changing seasons), semipermanent (earning a livelihood in one place but maintaining a connection with old homes), and permanent (settling elsewhere with one's family). According to the census, the Marwari settlement in Bengal fell into the semipermanent category, and was therefore comparable with English settlement in India. Both groups were similar in having left families behind, returning to homelands "at more or less regular intervals, and look[ing] forward to the time when they may again live there permanently." 52 While plenty of scholarly attention has been focused on how communities have
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been tied to regions, much more research remains to be done on how the colonial state created knowledge about migration and migrant groups.
This identification of the Marwari migrant with the British in India is peculiar. On the one hand, Marwari economic activities helped consolidate British economic power. On the other hand, Marwaris were considered backward in social and educational matters, quite unlike the Parsis, who have been described by Luhrman as the quintessential colonial subjects. The Parsis were a group that adopted and identified with the colonizer's Western education, culture, and colonial authority much more than any other Indian community; they represented themselves as rational, progressive, and masculine. 53 Though the Marwaris ultimately became as economically successful as the Parsis and have now even surpassed them, they never fashioned a self-identity that used the British colonizer as a model. Compared with Parsis, Marwaris appear to other Indians to be antimodern; they have been relatively "late" to get English education, and they appear clannish and conservatively old-fashioned. Even though the Parsis had an identity as immigrants from Persia, they were considered cosmopolitan and were never quite seen as outsiders in the same way as the Marwaris. Rather, like the British, Marwaris were portrayed as capitalist and exploitative outsiders, only away from home to make money, and whose notion of home remained elsewhere, if anywhere at all. This sentiment later emerged in nationalist debates over language, when Marwaris did not choose to promote a local dialect (even if, because of their geographical dispersion, they actually shared one) but became major financial supporters of the nationalist Hindi movement. Financing the Hindi Movement
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One of the most important ways that Marwari leaders made claims on being a transregional community was through their promotion of Hindi as a national language beginning in the 1920s. There is irony in the fact that, though their identity as Marwaris derived partly from language enumeration in Rajasthan, Marwaris have historically been such important players in the promotion of Hindi as a national language. Whatever happened to Marwari? We might expect, after all, that Marwaris would want to speak Marwari as a political way of marking symbolic boundaries of community. As Ramaswamy has written, "the proliferation of multiple languages, whether in the family or in the nation, allows for the strategic deployment of linguistic resources to practice 'intimate' politics in one's own tongue that shuts out the unfamiliar, the foreigner." 54 So how do we explain the fact that the language and print culture of Marwari business was overwhelmingly in Hindi and not Marwari? The 1891 census for Calcutta's Ward 7 (the Marwari area of Burabazar) enumerated only nine men and three women who claimed to speak Marwari as their mother tongue. 55 From the beginning of their arrival in Calcutta, Marwaris were involved in promoting Hindi print culture. The oldest Hindi newspaper in India, Udanda Martand, began publication in Calcutta in 1826. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were over twenty Hindi papers
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in India financed by Marwari traders, including Marwari Bapari, Burra Bazar Gazette, Marwari, and Bharat Mitra, that were prominent sources of local news, especially about economic matters in the law courts. 56
There are a couple of ways to make sense of this curiosity. On the one hand, by the late nineteenth century the national language controversy in northern India had become dichotomized into a split between Hindi and Urdu, with little space for other regional languages, although for a long time "Hindi" was not precisely defined. Until the 1930s, the nationalist promotion of Hindi did not specify exactly what "Hindi" referred to. At the 1935 Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (Literature Conference) session at Indore, Gandhi and his supporters pushed for the colloquial and mixed Hindustani, while others supported a more Sankritized dialect. 57 As such, "Hindi" might have not differed so much from what people thought they spoke. In Calcutta, one of the primary markers of being an outsider is to not speak in Bengali, the language of the local bourgeois classes, so in terms of relativity it would not matter if this difference were marked by Marwari or Hindi. However, using Hindi would have been a marker of a claim to a broader transregional and increasingly national political and social identity, in opposition to a more parochial Bengali identity. Social reformer Sitaram Seksaria, who was acclaimed for his pioneering efforts to start Hindi-speaking schools in order to meet the pressing need for the education of Marwari girls, donated the money in 1931 to inaugurate the annual Hindi Sahitya Sammelan's prize, the Sekseriya Puraskar, for women writers. 58 The formation of Hindi library institutions such as the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad in 1974 and Pratibha Agarwal's important work establishing a theater archive that includes Hindi and Bengali productions have helped to establish Hindi as a language suitable for high culture in Calcutta. 59
On the other hand, we need to question the assumption that Marwari migrants in Calcutta all spoke the same language, carried with them by original migrating ancestors from their home villages. I have already described how "Marwaris" actually come from a wide geographical region of northeastern Rajasthan, which does not really overlap with the historical "Marwar" kingdom of the Rathors. The naming of their languages as "Marwari" probably has more to do with the historical importance of the kingdom of Marwar than with linguistic features of the language itself. Since Marwaris were not traditionally scribes in their homelands, there is little reason to believe that many of them would have been fluent in the "high" written literary language of the day; they probably relied instead on their less-standardized spoken vernaculars. In my extensive search for texts written by Marwaris, I did not find any that were written in the Marwari dialect. 60 All of the writings by Marwaris for public consumption have been done in Hindi and, to a lesser extent, in English. Despite Grierson's point that modern Marwari is more influenced by Eastern than Western Rajasthani, it is doubtful that there was a standardized mother tongue
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among those who eventually traveled outside Rajasthan. 61 In the 1891 Calcutta Census, for instance, ward 7 (Burabazar) enumerates 109 Marwaris, 1370 Agarwalas, and 98 Maheswaris, yet with only 12 persons returning "Marwari" as their mother tongue. 62
There are also gender differences in language use dating back to the early part of the century. The 1901Census counted 115 persons in the town and suburbs of Calcutta as Marwari speakers, 39 men and 76 women. 63 Of 6,651 enumerated Maheswaris, Agarwalas, and Oswals in Calcutta, ninetyfive per cent of the 1,941 women were returned as illiterate. Those women who were literate knew Hindi predominantly, with a few knowing Bengali, Oriya, or other languages; none listed English. Of the 4,710 men, two per cent each were literate in English and Bengali, fifty-five per cent knew Hindi, and thirty-nine per cent were illiterate. 64 In my fieldwork I found that Marwari men were far more fluent in Bengali than were Marwari women, particularly those who are housewives. This became especially apparent when I attended a philanthropic ceremony of Mahavir International to commemorate the work done by a Marwari social service society to provide a prosthesis, or "Jaipur foot," to poor accident victims. 65 The Marwari women granting the awards had a great deal of trouble communicating in Bengali with the mostly Bangladeshi recipients, who did not understand Hindi. Some of the women used their limited Bengali (with major lapses into Hindi) to try to get the Bangladeshi prosthesis wearers to promise that they would not eat beef, in an attempt to encourage vegetarianism, albeit with not-sosubtle communal overtones. The Bangladeshis, after all, probably could not afford to eat much meat to begin with, regardless of their religious beliefs. For the predominately Muslim Bangladeshis, eating meat might be a special treat on a festival day; vegetarianism would be a sign of poverty, not auspiciousness.
The Marwari use of Hindi as a primary language in cities where the regional language has been figured as the mother tongue signifies a geographical orientation both to a northern Indian linguistic group as well as to a North Indian nationalist sensibility, which adopted Hindi as the representative language of the nation. Promoting Hindi went hand in hand with promoting a nationalistic awareness. Using Hindi differentiated Marwaris and other upcountrymen from the Bengalis, while also making a statement about nationalist politics. Of course, Hindi speakers in Calcutta are divided along class lines, one group in commerce and business and others who are working class and mostly from Bihar. In modern-day Assam, where a Marwari youth group has made efforts to integrate more into the local community, public conventions have been organized to encourage Marwaris to use the regional language. 66 Locating Marwar in the 1990s
40 http://www.gutenberg-e.org/haa01/print/haa03.html Page 15 of 49
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What do you say about a man who dreams about making money? Or one who takes up a hobby to get away from the arduous task of making money, and makes money out of that as well? Only that, he must be a Marwari. Marwar, 70.
After being told repeatedly that I must go to Rajasthan if I wanted to understand the Calcutta Marwaris, I decided to heed this advice and made a number of short visits there. In the villages and towns of Shekhawati, I became fascinated by the wide variety of Marwari-identified material culture that I came acrosspublic artifacts, including enormous painted houses (discussed in chapter three) and philanthropic ventures, that make purposeful connections between Marwaris and their ancestral homelands. I saw numerous Marwari-funded schools, hospitals, wells, cow sheds, and busts commemorating the homes of migrant businessmen. These sites provided some of my first clues in understanding the geographical relationship and forms of lineage-mapping that the Marwaris practice in Rajasthan.
Traditional Marwari names provide many examples of the relationship between lineage and geographical aspects of identity, as well as connections to trade and occupation. Many prominent Marwari family names, such as Jaipuria, Dalmia, Kanoria and Jhunjhunwala, are the name of the native village combined with the suffix -ia or -wala. Some names follow caste occupations: Kotharis looked after the kothal (treasure), Ruias handled and traded in rui (cotton), and Poddars managed the potedar (Persian for holder [dar] of the treasure [pot]). Other Marwari names are formed from the suffix -ka being added to a nickname: Himmatsingka (courage of a lion), or Loyalka, which derives from English. A few names derive from prominent geographical features in the native place; Tibrewal, for example, comes from tibba, a prominent sand dune in Lakshmangarh. 67
Recent publications seek to reinforce the connection of modern Marwari families to their ancestral homelands in Rajasthan. A glossy and expensively produced English-language picture book, full of large color photographs and artwork, entitled Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (1996) appeared on Calcutta newsstands during the middle of my fieldwork. Published in Bombay, printed at the Emirates Printing Press in Dubai, Marwar can be read as evidence of the production of subjective forms of region through a geographical imagination informed by the migratory flows of people. Since the title, Marwar, suggests a geographic connectedness of the families who identify themselves as Marwari, we might expect to see a map showing where the families originated. From a
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cartographic perspective, it is fascinating but not surprising that this subjective "Marwar" contains not a single map denoting its relative location. The high quality of the production, and correspondingly high cover price, preclude economic considerations as the reason for not including a map.
The text is framed at the beginning and end by articles on Rajasthan, symbolically anchoring a Marwari "modernity of tradition" through a regional imagination of Rajasthan. Marwar begins with an article by Ilan Cooper, a pioneering European authority on the Shekhawati havelis, with the text and photographs printed on yellowish-brown pages colored to look like expensive but old and faded parchment. The article features photographs of Britishinfluenced art, including officers, foreign ships, Christ, and a hot-air balloon. The choice of pictures suggests that even "traditional" haveli art reflected both a sophisticated consciousness and anticipation of modern technological innovation. 68 Marwar ends with several pages devoted to "ethnic chic" fashion and an article entitled "Rajasthan Rainbow," showing colorfully-clad women and children in empty-looking domestic spaces in rural Rajasthan, perhaps reminiscent of the lonely haveli life after Marwari migrant men had left home. Interspersed in the pages of Marwar are a few comic articles about the uncontrollable Marwari penchant for making money, sordid relationships between Marwaris and Bengalis, and a somber look at the restrictions of women's freedom in the "traditional urban Marwari marriage." 69
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The middle sections, making up the bulk of Marwar, include short excerpts and biographical sketches about highly prominent Marwari individuals, including bankers, industrialists, movie directors, advocates, actors, restaurateurs, and artists, showing how well members of the community have fared in business and industry as well as in culture. In the summer of 2000, when I returned to India to do follow-up research for this book, I was interviewed by the journal Marwar about my research, and this interview was published on Marwar's website, albeit with considerable modification by the person who conducted the interview. 70 The rationale for featuring certain families and not others is left unstated, though one assumes that, as with other caste histories, the featured families may have sponsored the publication and its advertisements in order to be included in the book. 71 The articles and interviews of families in Marwar describe the strict upbringing, disciplined work habits, and industrial or business strategies of these Marwari stars, and stress the advantages of joint families in giving a competitive edge in business. The lead article, "Man of Steel," discusses L. N. Mittal, who runs Ispat International from London and is widely considered to be the richest Indian in the world. 72 Also featured is Amit Jatia, nicknamed McJatia, who brought McDonald's to India, promising that Indian franchises would not sell beef, pork, or their by-products. 73 Generally, the featured male industrialists are photographed with wives and children, with quotations about how the daughters are taking various domestic courses and
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preparing to be housewives, or about how the husbands have "allowed" their wives to take a hand in the family business or in family philanthropy. 74 The prominent women featured include those who run boutiques or restaurants, or who patronize art and dance. One exception is Shobhna Bharatiya, daughter of K. K. Birla, who runs her father's newspaper empire, the Delhibased Hindustan Times. She comments that while Birla women may not necessarily work in the office, "we always had aunts looking after and managing schools, hospitals, and auditoriums." 75 In organizing the articles around the various kul-deepak (lights of the lineage), Marwar follows the structure of the more standard caste histories of the Marwaris, by taking each family (kul) as the object of analysis. 76 Mapping Community in Calcutta: Marwaris of the Burabazar Here, a Bengali is like a traveler who has lost his way ... if someone comes here, he will easily assume that it is Rajasthan. Bengali is not the language of communication. If someone does not know Hindi, he will face great difficulty. Ananda Bazar Patrika, 1995 77
While the Marwaris have mapped their identity in Rajasthan, it is Burabazara chaotic, dirty, and urban placethat has long been considered as the traditional locality of Marwaris in Calcutta. This business area in northern Calcutta forms the more immediate context of Marwari mapping among Bengalis. Burabazar has existed in some form since before the arrival of the British over three hundred years ago. The original market, Sutanuti Hat, was the regional center of the yarn and thread trade, and by 1707 the area was already crowded with houses and shops, probably giving it its new name, the Big Bazar. Once affectionately named "Buro" Bazar for "old" Lord Shiva, Burabazar (Big Bazaar) is a cramped section of northern Calcutta, north of Dalhousie Square, bounded by Central Avenue, Brabourne Road, and Harrison Road, covering an area of approximately one square mile. Timberg writes that the first business firms from Shekhawati were already in place in Calcutta by the 1840s, being extensions of firms further west dating from the eighteenth century. 78 The supposed first Marwari baniya in Calcutta, Nathuram Saraf, notes Timberg, reportedly arrived in the 1830s from Mandawa and worked as a guaranteed broker to Kinsell and Ghose. 79 Though Burabazar is cosmopolitan in the sense that traders of all backgrounds have worked and lived here, since the 1870s it has acquired a Marwari identity. 80 The 1911 Calcutta census lists more migrants from Rajputana in
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the neighborhood than from anywhere else in India, and those chiefly from Jaipur (8000) and Bikanir (7000), with the total number having jumped from 15,000 to 21,000 in the preceding ten years. 81 The tiny, dirty streets one sees today, littered with garbage, suggest that the area suffers from poverty, but this is not the case. Though many Marwari families have left Burabazar, moving family residences and sometimes also businesses to more posh localities, it is now estimated that Burabazar houses sixty percent of the total wealth of Calcutta Marwaris. 82
Burabazar has not been a place for production but for transaction. As colonial Calcutta's center of "indigenous banking" and commerce, Burabazar has housed thousands of small gaddi. Gaddi literally means "seat cushion," but is a euphemism for a business firm. 83 Sitting on their gaddis, starting in the 1850s Marwaris and other baniyas conducted crores (tens of millions) of rupees of business as agents and brokers for the European managing agencies, as well as wholesale and retail trade in cloth, thread, utensils, and many other local and international commodities. 84 Marwari baniyas traditionally kept their accounts in large red cloth ledgers, which, along with their gaddi cushions, were changed every year on Diwali, with the blessing of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. 85 The vahi (account books) were kept by a system known as parta, by which daily accountings of cash and credit standings are counted and recorded at the end of every business day. 86 This method of closely monitoring cash flow has been seen as the secret to Marwari success, particularly in speculation, when money changes hands very quickly. 87 During business hours I observed merchants and traders sitting cross-legged on their gaddi with a wooden cashbox, pen, large accounting books, and cellular telephones as their primary equipment. Traditionally, Marwari boys learned arithmetic and accounting and calculated the sums in their heads, without having to use paper. 88 At night, recent arrivals with connections to the baniya or merchant sleep on the gaddi cushion-mats that during the day constitute the traditional office decor. This is a practice that has continued for centuries from the earliest days of migration. One reason that the census enumeration underestimated the Marwari population was that so many of them slept in offices, thus constituting a group of people who may not have been counted in residential areas. 89
In the eyes of the colonizer, the image of dirty, congested
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Burabazar was described as the antithesis of Dalhousie Square, where the wealthy British managing agencies controlling the jute, coal, and tea industries sat side by side on tree-lined streets near the Writer's Building, which is still the seat of the Government of Bengal. Unlike the "white town" of Dalhousie, Burabazar was the territory of local merchants. When the construction of Harrison (now M. G.) Road was finished in the 1890s, Marwaris bought up the land on either side and put shops on the ground and first floors, and residences on floors further up. The strong economic position of Marwari traders in Burabazar helped facilitate a colonial discourse that described Burabazar as the site of contagion and urban filth. Both bustee (slum) and general living quarters in Burabazar were the special target of colonial sanitation inquiries in the late nineteenth century. 90 Clemon and Hossack wrote that the area consisted of "extremely valuable property in an intensely insanitary state" and that the "excessive and reckless overbuilding which has been allowed in the past, the accumulations of filth and rubbish, the overcrowding, the abominable conditions in connection with the dry removal of excrement, the foul and stinking state of innumerable narrow passages, alleys and courts, the shocking condition of certain bustees and kutcha tenementsall thesecombine to make this ward one of the worst areas of its size in any city with which we are acquainted." 91
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These discourses of public health and hygiene are still in widespread circulation, especially among Bengalis. The pervasive images of Marwaris as unsanitary and unhealthy individuals have persisted even though a large number of prominent Marwari families have left Burabazar. Questions of health and sanitation form a sphere for a contemporary cultural and ethnic critique. Evidence of these continuing cultural stereotypes of Marwaris as a generally wealthy but unhealthy population is found in the methodologies of current scientific and medical research. Upper-middle and high economic class Marwaris have been the target population in medical studies of hereditary and environmental factors related to coronary artery disease. They were chosen, the authors of the study claim, because of their lifestyles of high stress associated with trading, low physical activity, and a vegetarian diet consisting of large quantities of hydrogenated and saturated fats and oils, such as ghee. 92
In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Calcutta Corporation commissioned the internationally-known city planner Patrick Geddes to survey the district and submit suggestions for structural changes in the Burabazar neighborhood. Geddes's 1919 report, Barra Bazar Improvement, focused on the problem of congestion in the commercial areas of Burabazar. Citing arguments of economy and sanitation, Geddes recommended
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widening current roads and adding new ones, and creating public playgrounds and gardens. These improvements would provide better access for police and sanitary inspectors and would also increase sunlight and ventilation for mothers and children. Geddes's major planning critique was economic, however, and concerned the need to modernize the chaotic handling of goods by numerous coolies and bullock-cart drivers, which entailed "costly superintendence, endless toils, delays and confusions" and could arguably be replaced by more efficient American methods. Geddes's aim was to modernize the traditional Indian "localisation of business," by which business interests are grouped into different areas. This "old world" arrangement of business bore much in common with the ultra-modern, spacious, and well-lit American produce exchanges, in which commodities could be most efficiently exchanged. 93 In this way, wholesalers of one product would all be located in the same business quarter. Burabazar Architecture and the Revival of Vernacular Design Early colonial observers commented on the distinctive styles of architecture in different Calcutta neighborhoods. James Long wrote, "It is said that everybody who passes three nights here falls in love with Calcutta. But why? He will, during his stay, find in the natural way different communities in different areas who have their own ideas and way of life and have different domestic architecture." 94 The development of Rajasthani vernacular architectural styles by the new landowning Marwaris in Burabazar became a means of appropriating local space. In establishing their new residences, at first Marwaris bought up lands lying next to the roads that had been opened up or widened by the Calcutta Improvement Trust. Along these major commercial streets, they remodeled old buildings and built large, imposing multistoried structures with space for gaddi and residential quarters alike. 95 With the pressures of increasing population, the Marwaris spread deeper and deeper from the main roads into the narrowest lanes, in some places only about seven feet across, taking the places of Bengali traders in both occupation and residence.
These Marwari-built houses in Burabazar were typically crowded, dark, and sparsely furnished, and fostered a unique architectural style in Calcutta that resembled the Shekhawati courtyard houses and thus reflected the community's origins in Rajasthan. These once grand buildings are noteworthy for their prominent arcaded loggias (galleries), separated by columns, overlooking both the street and the inner courtyards. The Rajasthani architectural style, especially the courtyards, mimics the features of the Shekhawati havelis, although I did not observe any wall paintings. Some accommodations were made for the urban environment. In Calcutta, considerations of inclement monsoon weather and the need to maintain domestic privacy in a crowed urban area prompted the use of wooden jhilmil (blinds) and intricate plaster lattice work (jaffrey) on iron
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frames; these features shielded occupants from wind, sun, and unwanted male stares. Ironwork railings, arches, and balconies, originally cast in England and Scotland, were also distinctive features of this Rajasthani architecture style. 96
My research brought me to Burabazar on many occasions, for archival work in public reading rooms and in the headquarters of the All India Marwari Federation, and to visit Marwari women. Traveling from southern Calcutta, where I lived, to Burabazar was a long and exhausting process, entailing a frustrating journey through a seemingly unending traffic jamwhether by taxi or by a rather haphazard combination of minibuses, the subway, and rickshaws. The streets of Burabazar are tiny, crowded, and confusing, so when I first started going there I dared not go without bringing a map. Because detailed maps of even central, touristy Calcutta are hard to come by, I resorted to using my hand-drawn map of major streets that I had copied out of the colonial archival files on Burabazar sanitation. This very personalized but highly necessary use of colonial knowledge struck me at the time as both ironic and embarrassing.
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What I did not expect, however, in my first forays into the rough-andtumble world of Burabazar, was an overwhelming sense of dj vu from having read the colonial reports on sanitation. Just as I had read, in Burabazar I saw rusty pipes sticking out of buildings, leaking foul-smelling liquids into the walkways below. Slippery brown mud, especially after the monsoon, covered the unevenly tuckpointed brick streets, making me lose my footing on many occasions. I learned to wear only dark colors and older clothes on Burabazar days. Inside one of the buildings where I often went for research, a frequently-in-use and foul-smelling men's urinal was prominently perched about five feet inside the entrance, prompting me to make an unusually fast entrance up the three flights of stairs to the office upstairs to get past the stench. The tiny streets and narrow lanes of Burabazar are crowded with traders, handcarts, and bundles of cloth goods lying on the streets. The one time I rode there in a car, we got stuck in one of the small lanes for several hours. Unlike other areas of Calcutta, there are very few women to be seen on the streets. Since I was usually alone, I sometimes received salacious comments from passersby, who addressed me in Hindi, perhaps mistaking me for an Anglo-Indian. Although I did not really fear for my safety, some incidents of random shooting on M. G. Road gave me the impression that there is perhaps more violent crime in Burabazar than in other localities of Calcutta. It is these images of chaos and filth that get associated with the Marwaris of Burabazar, not the spectacular domestic architecture and philanthropy in Rajasthan.
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In the 1990s, the organization CRUTA (Foundation for Conservation and Recreation of Urban Traditional Architecture) attempted to foster architectural conservation among the residents in Burabazar, explicitly using Patrick Geddes's work as their inspirational model. CRUTA and its founding member, a Bengali architect named Debashish Nayak, attracted international attention for their innovative participatory, resident-centered conservation and architectural heritage approach. 97 CRUTA sponsored architectural walking tours of northern Calcutta, including Burabazar. When I went on one such walk with other AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) fellows, the guide showed us how some residents have learned to sweep up their garbage carefully and place clay-potted flowering plants along entrance ways. Was this for the benefit of tourists? The guide also pointed out, rather sullenly, places where wet clothing hung from the ironwork balconies, left to dry in the breeze. The discourse of civic responsibility spoke volumes. 98 Far from recognizing the practicality or innovation of such tiny gestures in the flow of everyday living, especially in such a congested area of the city, the guide took offense at such supposedly antimodern, subaltern spatial appropriations. CRUTA'S language has obviously embraced the logic of colonial and nationalist civic modernity. These are the aspects of Burabazar that have become notorious among Calcutta Bengalis. As many Bengalis note, there are two kinds of Marwaris: the "Burabazar types" and the new industrialists. Leaving Burabazar: Marwaris at Large Gone are the regulated living, thrift, caginess and indigenous book-keeping. Instead you have the club-hopping man-about-town with expensive habits, carefree outlook and computerised accounting system. Arup De on the new Marwaris 99
Starting from the First World War, and especially in the 1940s, some of the wealthier Marwaris began to leave their gaddis and homes in Burabazar for more spacious homes in less densely populated localities. Some of them kept their gaddis in Burabazar, and others relocated their businesses to modern offices and corporate boardrooms. The reasons that Marwaris left Burabazar are many. Some of the social reformers left the neighborhood because they were ostracized for implementing reform. 100 Some informants claimed that at least part of the out-migration from Burabazar came as the result of fierce rioting in localities adjacent to and in Burabazar. Marwari land speculation in southern
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and hitherto unsettled parts of Calcutta in the 1940s was widespread and raised land prices considerably. Until independence, they stayed on the major roads and did not buy residential property located in narrow lanes populated primarily by Bengalis. 102 With the transfer of political power at independence, European companies were bought out, especially by Marwari industrialists, from 1946 into the mid1960s. 103 Along with these changes in industrial control came increased shifting of residential and office locations; many of the palatial mansions owned by Europeans in the posh neighborhoods of Alipur and Ballygunge were bought up by elite Marwaris.
Even though many Marwaris live in what used to be predominantly Bengali locales, the Marwaris are identified with Burabazar. Bengalis sometimes describe such intracity migrations as a type of "invasion" by outsiders coming in to "their" areas. The fear that prices of land and rent will skyrocket when Marwaris come to a neighborhood makes Bengalis nervous. These fears were articulated in a 1997 newspaper article entitled "Land Sharks Demolish Keshab Chandra Sen's House," 104 one of many such newspaper stories that comment on the decline of historical monuments and the lack of resolve on the part of the West Bengal State Government to take action against further decay and destruction. Two Marwari business partners had purchased the land and torn down the decrepit structure that once housed one of Bengal's most prominent nationalist leaders, in order to clear a space for the construction of an office complex with the conspicuously Hindu name of Ganapati Chambers. Most of the house had been demolished by the time some Bengalis obtained a court order to preserve the monument. The story encapsulates many of the themes that I encountered in my research: the declining role of the (Bengali-identified) state in protecting monuments from land developers and from Marwaris who had, admittedly, purchased the land legally, but felt no remorse about razing a piece of the Bengali cultural past.
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The economic disparities between Marwaris and Bengalis are one reason the internal migration of Marwaris within Calcutta has been such a contentious issue for Bengalis. Academic knowledge may play a role here. Mirroring the ways that the colonial state identified certain identities with certain localities, academic descriptions of Calcutta itself often serve to fix locations of community within the city. N. K. Bose's Calcutta: A Social Survey maps the relationships between community and occupation and the placement of voluntary institutions ward by ward, thus creating normative visions, or stereotypes, of where certain people, their work, and their institutions really belong. 105 Naturally, academic descriptions such as Bose's are enabled by colonial ideas of urban space, administration, and urban planning, but in
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themselves they help perpetuate existing attitudes about the ties between community and locality and about the lack of intercommunal integration. Built Interiors and the Performance of Marwari Domesticity During my appointment anthropology, I had ample opportunity to observe the domestic spaces of many Marwari households. For the most part the households were located in Ballygunge, in central Calcutta, and in Alipur, a posh neighborhood of mansions to the west. Upon ringing the bell and eventually being let into the households by suspicious servants, I was routinely made to wait. Since the waiting time always lasted at least fifteen to forty-five minutes (and once I waited for four hours!), my impatience often led me to wonder whether people were really so preoccupied and busy, or whether this was a performance to reiterate the importance of the person with whom I was supposed to meet. 106
When visiting the women of families whom I got to know much better, I did not have to wait at all. I could move a little more freely around the household and was no longer confined to the outermost waiting room. In those cases, I would sit in the bedroom, a space reserved for intimate acquaintances. But in the hottest summer months, even with families I was meeting for the first time, I was often taken into the master bedroom, where the air conditioning was at its best. Generally, however, I was seated in the most public receiving area of the residence. The living rooms of the wealthiest people were vast expanses of extravagantly decorated space, replete with chandeliers, wall-to-wall carpeting or marble, oriental rugs, lavish curtains, and expensive and gaudy furniture, consisting usually of a sofa, chairs, and a coffee table, settings very reminiscent of the opulent mansions often depicted as the stereotypical homes of the wealthy in Hindi films.
Interestingly, none of the mansions outside of Burabazar looked anything like the havelis or even the courtyard buildings of Burabazar. These mansions were built either in colonial styles (if they were old) or in very modern styles, and did not reflect the sensibility of separate quarters as in the haveli. The interiors, however, reinvent a sort of Rajasthani "ethnic chic" through particularly garish styles of furniture and interior decorating. Marwaris are not unique in using domestic furniture and interior design in this way. Recent scholarship on domestic architecture and furnishings has shown how the changing material culture of the home is indicative of the transformations in familial relationships and in the relationship between private and public. Domestic spaces, particularly those intended for visitors, become sites where exhibitions of family coherence and familial orientation to the larger world are very conspicuously on display. 107 This became especially clear in the most public room of the Marwari homes, the formal Western-style living room where visitors like me sit.
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After being seated on a living room couch by a servant, I would wait. This otherwise boring waiting time provided an intimate vantage point from which to take note of the material culture of Marwari households. The largest homes had two different kinds of living rooms, side by side. In many of the houses and mansions, adjacent to the more Western-style living space where I would sit, there would be a more traditional gaddi arrangement for formal entertaining. This space generally consisted of large, ten-by-ten-foot white padded cushions on the floor with pash balish (bolster pillows) thrown about for back support. Some hostesses explained to me that this room was used for dinner parties and entertaining business colleagues. Less affluent, middle-class households did not have the luxury of space for two separate living rooms. Instead, in a modified arrangement the single living room would often blend the heavily stylized ornate furniture on one end with a modified gaddi and cushion arrangement on the other. Unlike most middleclass Bengali households, there was often no reading material to be seen in these rooms. Interestingly enough, the Marwari families who had joined the professionssuch as law, education, or medicineand who lived in Bengali neighborhoods outside of Burabazar had much simpler, plainer, and more inexpensive household furnishings, similar to those I was used to seeing in Bengali homes, and, of course, lots of books.
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I was interested in observing how in Marwari mansions various architectural forms accommodated large joint families with grandparents, parents, unmarried children, and brothers with their wives and children. Space is an important factor. After all, no joint family can continue to expand indefinitely without eventually breaking into separate parts. In the large flats of the upper-middle classes, each married brother would generally have one large bedroom for his wife and children, and they shared a common kitchen. Among the superrich, who live in the mansions of the erstwhile colonizers, an entire wing is devoted to each son and his family. Each wing has its own kitchen for the preparation of tea and snacks, but regular meals were prepared in the main kitchen and taken together. One extreme example is the Mittal family, one of the wealthiest families in India, who take up an entire building. The Mittal Bhavan (house) in Bombay houses 69 family members from three generations (excluding daughters who have married out), all eating from a common kitchen on the eighth floor. The Mittals are currently building Mittal Bhavan II next door, to accommodate the overflow. 108
In addition to marking ethnicized territory through changing
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appropriations of residential space, the development of Marwari public institutions around central Calcutta has been noteworthy as well. The cityscape of Calcutta is now dotted with philanthropic and charitable institutions built by prominent Marwaris over the last sixty years: Hindu and Jain temples, dharamsalas (rest houses), colleges, hospitals, auditoriums, and public drinking-water facilities. The Birlas have built a new and lavish temple, planetarium, museum of industry and technology, an art gallery, and a temple/ sabhaghar (auditorium), along with schools and colleges for girls. Most of these institutions bear the Birla family name. Philanthropy and Mapping the Kul: Industrialists and Temple Building A national chain of the "Birla temples," temples of grandiose scale and design, have become major landmarks and part of the cityscapes of Indian urban life in the late twentieth century. The Birla temples exist in conjunction with other large industrial and philanthropic ventures of the wealthy Birla family, including major institutions of technology, medicine, and education, all of which make attempts (albeit contested) to claim national and international social merit. As Haynes's Rhetoric and Ritual points out, merchants do not establish reputations through business and industry alone but also through religious giving and moral leadership. 109
Birla temples have redefined religion to conform to modern ideals of philanthropy and humanitarianism, combining the worship of a deity with a public institution that contributes to civil society. The architectural forms of the two newest Birla temples incorporate innovative, dual-purpose structures into the temple design that alter temple practices to reflect the concerns of modern public culture in a religious site. One must consider, however, whether the Birla temples are a convincing kind of social performance. Does temple-building on a national scale in fact give legitimacy and merit to the donors and patrons, especially merchants and industrialists with scarred social reputations in other arenas? It might be tempting to make the argument that the Birla temples announce the arrival of capitalism in India, and that industrialist donors have now replaced royalty as temple patrons. My own research, however, reveals that we need to consider carefully issues of public reception in determining whether the builders succeed in gaining legitimacy from public acceptance. While merchant donors build temples with the intent of gaining both social and religious merit, they do not always succeed. A performance, in other words,
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is not always convincing. Merchant temple-building in historical context Temples have arguably been the most prevalent form of charitable institution in Indian history to date. According to Hindu literature and custom, merit is due to the patron of a temple. As is well documented, temples in India were traditionally sponsored by royalty and Hindu kings, regal patrons who had access to the wealth of a country and could afford to build. Temple-building went hand in hand with the construction of state power. Burton Stein argues that premodern temples were in fact so indispensable as symbols of authority that the relationship between human leaders and deities installed in the temple could be characterized as a "shared sovereignty." 110 In this model of rule, both deity and ruler were critical in maintaining a structure of authority.
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Many scholars have pointed out that, at the same time that kings and rulers sought divine legitimation through temple patronage, other prominent individuals, particularly merchants, were also patrons, involved in both constructing new temples and renovating old ones. 111 According to such anthropologists as Arjun Appadurai, making a gift to a temple creates a relationship of reciprocity between the donor and the deity, which in turn makes a performative statement about the authority of the donor to a community of worshippers. 112 The donor provides a forum for a community of worshippers to gain access to gods. In precolonial India, donations for temple building undoubtedly provided a way for merchants to manage and negotiate their relationships with local rulers. Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, however, endowments from state donors decreased and were supplemented or replaced by gifts from prominent local residents and merchants. 113 Hites Sanyal notes that many of the temples built in Bengal during the temple-building boom of 1750 to 1900 were constructed by ordinary and "socially handicapped" people, who were trying to acquire upward caste mobility and social power. 114 Unlike the Birlas, these increasingly powerful individuals did not have a great impact on the technical or architectural aspects of temple building and perhaps did not change the essential cultural meanings of the temple.
By the late nineteenth century, merchants and traders had become increasingly involved in the Congress and other political movements, bringing to this nationalism their interests in Hindu cultural revivalism, building temples, shrines, bathing platforms, and pilgrimage rest houses. The first Birla temple in New
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Delhi, constructed by famed industrialist G. D. Birla during the heyday of the nationalist movement in the 1930s, now displays pictures of G. D. Birla that reflect association with Gandhi and other nationalist figures. Because the temple was no longer directly connected to the divine legitimation of kingship, temple-building had become increasingly secularized. In the second half of the twentieth century, as royalty and kingship have declined almost entirely, merchants have emerged single-handedly as the sole financial benefactors of large temples. In contributing to temple-building, modern merchants have implicitly drawn on idioms of royalty in creating a public representation of themselves and their "good works." As Haynes has pointed out, contributions to temple-building constructs a public identity for merchants that rests on religious values. In turn, the display of these religious values is meant to imply trustworthiness in business. 116 The interdependent relationship between deity and king has given way to a theoretical but contested interdependence between religion and business. Three Birla Temples
The Saraswati temple in Pilani, Rajasthan, was built between 1956 and 1960 by G. D. Birla, twentiethcentury patriarch of the Birla family, and was officially consecrated in 1960. With certain innovations, the temple is a replica, in marble, of the Khandariya Mahadeo temple at Khajuraho. The Saraswati Sharda temple is on the campus of the Birla Institute of
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Technology and Science (BITS). The location of the temple on a college campus thus continues a long tradition of the intermingling of temples and education. Temples have traditionally been the sites of general education, offering lessons in grammar, astrology, and the recitation of sacred texts. 117 In addition, endowments to temples have often provided for the establishment of colleges. A volume published for the Diamond Jubilee of the Birla Education Trust states that the Saraswati temple was built at a cost of 23 lakhs (2.3 million) rupees. Statues of the temple patrons, G. D. and Mahadevi Birla, are placed prominently at the edge of the temple. The Birla Institute authorities claim that this temple may be the first in India to be dedicated to Saraswati, the goddess of education. The temple is meant to give intellectual attainments a spiritual sanction. Faces on the walls of the Saraswati temple in Pilani reflect a variety of ancient and modern thinkers and rulers, including Confucius and John F. Kennedy. The collage of pictures of scientists, saints, and philosophers on the exterior walls suggests a form of Hindu cosmopolitanism, promising to bridge a gap between scientific and technological achievements and Hindu spirituality. The construction of the Lakshmi-Narayan temple at Jaipur was begun by B. M. Birla, brother of G. D. Birla. B. M. Birla was unable to complete the work on the temple during his lifetime, and the work was finished by his foundation. Like the Pilani temple, the Jaipur Birla temple demonstrates how traditions of lineage and kinship are reenergized and reproduced in changing historical and social circumstances. In the placement of two prominent statues of the main donors, Mr. and Mrs. B. M. Birla, the temple draws on older themes of kingship and royal patronage, in this case through a representation of the Birla donors as a modern conjugal couple. The positioning of their images in front of the temple suggests that they are the first devotees of the deity, in the same way that a king would have once been considered to be.
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The architectural style of the temple is modeled on North Indian design, particularly that of Rajput. The garbagriha has a design, and motifs such as rosewood doors, like palaces of classical India. There are eighteen marble pillars surrounding the outer portion of the temple. The pillars are in the sculptural tradition of Rajasthan, with Hindu religious saints and deities as well as a host of non-Hindu figures, including Christ, a Madonna, Zeus, Moses, Socrates, and Confucius. The inclusion of renowned figures of the Western world suggests that the temple stresses the values of tolerance, though through assimilation into the Hindu fold. A printed brochure put out by the B. M. Birla Foundation points out that the temple's "architectural wonders" were in fact constructed by Muslim artisans, apparently thus reinforcing the nationalist theme of unity in diversity and, again, "tolerance" through assimilation. There are two other modern features of the temple. First, the temple brochure also notes that the rather high
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elevation of the Lakshmi and Narayan images inside the temple allows people driving by on the road to pay their respects and pray even if they don't have the time to stop. Having the major deities exposed to the outside is a remarkable contrast to traditional Hindu temples, which house their major deities within the protective garbhagriha of the inner chamber. Second, the temple is claimed to be the first air-conditioned temple in all of Asia.
The Jaipur temple combines space for both religious and cultural uses. According to the brochure, "the temple is constructed on a marble platform of about twenty-nine thousand square feet. The basement will accommodate an air-conditioned museum, library, administrative office and meditation hall." 118 Underneath the Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, and using a separate side entrance, is the B. M. Birla Family Museum. Two large halls display material artifacts relating to the contributions of the Birla family to Indian industry and social welfare. One room displays the traditional and modern clothing of various generations of the Birla family, certificates of appreciation and honorary degrees, and letters from dignitaries and heads of state. The other room is a collection of photographs of the Birla family, documenting their involvement in industry and social welfare projects. Of special note is an exhibit on the production of the first Indian car by the Birla concern Hindustan Motors. The Birla Temple in Calcutta, built by K. K. Birla, a son of G. D. Birla, is the newest addition to the Birla national temple chain. Over thirty years in duration, the Sri Radhakrishna Temple construction was upset by numerous labor disputes, as is common in Calcutta. The temple was consecrated on February 21, 1996. The temple dedication is inscribed in the wall of the temple in Hindi and in English: "The prayer of the entire Birla family is: may this temple spread the message of the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita and other religious scriptures of our saints and holy people; may it lead people along the path of piety and dedication to God; may it inculcate the spirit of adherence to the principles of humanitarianism, compassion towards the poor and the needy, and of amity and goodwill among mankind." This inscription clearly brings a modern humanitarian
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discourse into the public message of the temple. An account of the consecration program in Asian Age (Feb. 22, 1996) reports K. K. Birla's announcement that the Birla Mandir was already listed in some tourist guides published in foreign countries. Mr. Birla's remark suggests how the search for religious and public merit through philanthropic acts has itself become part of the growing mentality of globalization.
Like the bifurcate temple structure in Jaipur, the Calcutta temple includes secular space. Innovatively housed underground beneath the temple structure is a lush theater called the G. D. Birla Sabhaghar, named after the father and patriarch of the three living Birla brothers. Like the family museum in Jaipur, one enters a side door to gain entrance to the theater, suggesting a different mode of experiencing the space. A very large seating area for the audience combined with an extraordinarily plush interior makes the G. D. Birla Sabhaghar the best theater in Calcutta. Combined with the temple upstairs, it is easily the most prominent landmark in Ballygunge. And yet the very luxuriousness of the theater-temple structure has raised questions about Marwari industrialist philanthropic gestures. Even these temples have been seen by Bengalis as part of the Marwaris' business empire.
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Efficacy of Marwari Temple-BuildingSri Sri Siddheswari Limited Most research on temple-building has claimed that donors make temples to acquire religious and social merit. The question of popular response to the templeswhether the donors have actually succeeded in gaining the social reputations they soughthas been relatively neglected.
The Bengali intelligentsia's rejection of Marwari cultural capital in the realm of religious good works is far older than the more recent history of Birla philanthropy in Calcutta, and provides the context in which subsequent Marwari philanthropy is situated. Bengali literature contains some hilarious illustrations of how Marwari charity has been viewed in Bengal, particularly in relation to traditions of merchant temple-building. 119 Set in 1915 (Magh 1326 on the Bengali calendar), Parusharam's "Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited" is a delightful story about a couple of Bengali businessmen, Shyambabu and his brother-in-law Bipin Choudhuri, who are partners in a firm known as "Brahmachari and Brother in Law, General Merchants." 120 (Brahmachari means a holy man who has renounced the material world:;the Bengali word
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for "brother-in-law," sala, is also a common abuse approximating "son of a bitch.") 121 The author, Parashuram, who in real life is the well-known satirist Rajsekhar Bose, presents a humorous parody of what he perceives as the hollowness of modern Bengali and Marwari religiosity:
Shyambabu took a little Ganga water and uttered some mantras and then sprinkled the water in the room. Then he brought out a rubber stamp smeared with vermilion from the drawer of the table and printed the name of Devi Durga for one hundred eight times [an auspicious ritual]. Twelve lines of 'Sri Sri Durga' are marked on the stamp, so he has to imprint it only nine times. Mr. Bipin is the inventor of this labour saving machine. He named it 'The Automatic Sri Durgagraph' and tried to get patent of it.
As the partners sit in the firm's office and discuss the details of a deal, Shyam's Marwari friend, Babu Ganderiram Batparia, arrives. (Batparia means "thief" in Bengali.) They discuss the prospectus for their business venture, Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited, which is a for-profit Hindu temple. Their business plan reads as follows:
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The ordinary people have no idea about the huge income of the famous temples of India. It is known from a report that fifteen thousand devotees go to one temple in Bengal everyday. If one person gives four annas [twenty-five paisa], the yearly income of a temple is about thirteen and a half lakh rupees. Whatever be the cost of maintenance, there is enough money left but ordinary people do not get the profit of it. To get rid of this problem of our country, a joint stock company called "Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited" is founded. With the money of the religious minded shareholders, a big temple with wakeful goddess will be built... Shareholders will get unexpected amounts of dividends and they will be blessed by obtaining virtue, wealth, love and final salvation.
Ganderi, the Marwari, who speaks Hindi slang among his Bengali associates, unveils his plan to speculate on the shares in order to increase their market value. He also suggests that they start a secondary business to sell a product called ghai, which is an impure clarified butter (as opposed to pure ghee) made from the milk of cow, goat, and buffalo. Ganderi assures his associates of his innocence in the "ghai" business, by claiming that since he is only involved in lending money to the business and collecting interest and half the profit, he has no actual contact with the impure substance. In fact, Gunderi had given several thousand lakhs for the construction of dharmasalas (guest houses for religious pilgrims), earning him enough merit to dissolve any trace of sin. After all, it is another man, Kashem Ali, who runs the ghai business in faraway Hatras.
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As the details of the plan are discussedmarketing the goddess and selling shares, and secondary businesses such as guest houses, a village theater, and other kinds of entertainment that will accompany the templea deal is struck for how the directors will split the dividends. Ganderi will invest one lakh (one hundred thousand) rupees and the other directors will invest fifty thousand each. Shyam and Bipin convince a retired Bengali man, Tinkaribabu, to become a co-director in the company in exchange for giving them his pension savings to invest in their business venture. Tinkari also hopes to give employment to one of his less fortunate relatives.
Tinkari: Achha [OK], I think your office will need many people now. I have a relativethe son of my sister-in-law, can't you give him some work? He is jobless and destroying my money. He is not well-educated, spoilt by mixing with bad people. If he gets a job, it would be great. That young man is smart and well-behaved.
Shyam: The son of your sister-in-law? You don't have to say anything else. I shall make him the head priest of the temple. Now at least fifteen applications came for that post, among them five are graduates. But of course, priority goes to your relative.
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At first, Ganderi's prophesy that the shares would increase in value through speculation comes true. The shares of Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited are indeed bought and sold in the market for a high price. One year later, however, at the board meeting of Brahmachari and Brother-in-Law, there is a great financial crisis. Huge sums are owed to the coal seller, the brick merchant, the printer, and many others who had taken on contract work for the temple. While Tinkari demands his investment money back, Shyam insists that the temple could continue to be built. Shyam tricks Tinkari into buying off the rest of Shyam's sixteen hundred shares in the company for eight rupees, which makes Tinkari the director of the company, and therefore responsible for both profit and debt. But Ganderi advises Tinkari that Shyam has in fact bought up all of the shares from the other directors, leaving the company's debt at about ninety thousand rupees, with liquidation imminent after just two days. The story ends with Tinkari alone responsible for the huge debt; Ganderi bids him farewell, sarcastically using the religious greeting, "Ram Ram." The moral of the story: Marwaris trick Bengalis and make off with the money.
The story reveals a great deal about the place of the Marwari merchant trader in the Bengali business landscape and about how Bengali writers have satirized the Bengali-Marwari relationship as a way of resisting the cultural influence of the Marwaris. The way that shares to the temple are bought and
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sold in the story reveals the profit-making potential of religious institutions in Indian public life and questions their true philanthropic value and intent. To a certain extent this reflects colonial-era anxieties about whether charity and philanthropy to religious institutions were indeed genuine or whether they were merely tax shelters for the indigenous elite. The references to the adulteration of ghee into the spurious produce called "ghai" attest to the misery that Marwaris have sometimes inflicted onto local Bengali populations. 122 But Parusharam is not simply making a communalist argument. In his story it is not just Marwaris who are full of unscrupulous business tricks and scams; Bengalis, as evidenced by the characters of Shyam and Tinkari, can be equally greedy in the world of commerce and material gain. Unlike the Marwari character Ganderi, however, the Bengalis are not as clever at making money. Though Shyam and Tinkari escape being responsible for Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited's very troubled finances, they ultimately do not profit as much as Ganderi, who protected himself by selling out to Shyam only after claiming his one lakh profit. Though this account is a fictionalized satire of the modern reception of merchant templebuilding, there are strong continuities with how Bengalis and other Indians today view the construction of temples by industrialists. Popular Responses to Marwari Temple-Building In Calcutta there has been considerable debate among the Bengali middle classes over the ways in which the Birlas have reputedly used the temple and attached theater as a means of investing enormous sums of money that are not subject to taxation. Often, as a way to get people to talk about the Marwaris generally, I asked middle-class Bengalis about their responses to the Birla Temple. Many people pointed out that the temple's auspiciousness is diminished because it bears the name of a businessman. Many people responded that, when entering the temple, they felt overwhelmed by a sense of commercialism, noting the gaudy decor or the brightly colored fluorescent clothing placed on the deities, often in bold yellows or hot pinks. Brochures describing the Birla temples attest to the vast sums of money spent on construction and decoration. The Calcutta temple has a couple of chandeliers that are rumored to be worth several crore, or tens of millions, rupees apiece. The temple is a means, some Bengalis argue, of making black money into white. Even the theater building, with its notoriously high rental charges and high ticket prices, could be another money-making enterprise for the Birla family.
This popular Bengali discourse of corruption derives in part from the colonial policy on temple management. Though the colonial state presumably left aside questions of ritual in an attempt to maintain noninterference in religious affairs, the British did not hesitate to legislate matters of temple management. As Dirks and Appadurai have pointed out, under colonial rule temple management underwent a process of bureaucratic rationalization. 123 In attempting to manage temples, the British colonial state brought the everyday administrative affairs of temples
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into the domain of public life, thereby opening temples up to charges of misuse and corruption. The postcolonial nationalist state's explicit commitment to a discourse of accountability and disclosure despite ample practices to the contrary enables a popular discourse of corruption. 124 At the same time, however, Bengali accusations of financial corruption in regard to the Birla Mandir are arguably an extension of the wider contentious social relationship between the majority Bengali population and the Birla family, who are seen by the Bengali middle classes as part of a larger and disreputable Marwari migrant business community.
The contention over the Calcutta Birla Temple stems in part from the widespread Bengali patronage of the theater, and not necessarily the upper temple portion itself. Bengalis can choose whether or not to visit a Marwari temple, but the widespread use of the G. D. Birla Sabhaghar as a site for cultural production, often of Bengali language shows, reveals both an irony and a tension about the existence of the Birla Temple. An informal survey conducted of middle-class Bengalis showed that while few of them had any plans to visit the Birla temple, they did show interest in attending a cultural event in the G. D. Birla Sabhaghar. Of course, there are plenty of other theaters in Calcutta, including the West Bengal State-sponsored Nandan, but these have fallen into increasing disrepair. The patronage of a temple, housing the most luxurious theater space in Calcutta, suggests the dominance of the business class on a cultural level. With the Marwari-backed G. D. Birla Sabhaghar, as well as the acclaimed Kala Mandir Hall on Theater Road, Bengalis appear to have lost out on "ownership" of cultural production.
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And yet, despite what educated middle- and upper-class Bengalis think, the immense popularity of the Birla Temple as one the city's foremost attractions is undeniable. The lines to get into the temple and deposit one's shoes in the cloakroom are discouragingly long. The couple of times that I visited the temple, I went with girls from wealthy Marwari families who live nearby on Queen's Park. The chauffeur drove us down two blocks in our stocking feet to the front gate so that we could avoid waiting in line and just go right in. As we circled around the deities, I noticed that the area around the temple complex, forming a public space overlooking the street, was typically filled with large groups of people sitting on the cool marble floor, talking with each other and simply enjoying the space. Besides Marwaris and North Indians, it seems, the major visitors to the temple are working-class people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
Merchant temple-building in India is not a new activity, since it has existed for centuries alongside of royal practices of temple patronage as well. Yet in emerging as economic and social leaders, and as such effectively replacing royalty as temple donors, wealthy merchant families such as the Birlas deploy royal idioms of temple-building to claim their own positions of social and economic leadership. Merchants draw on these older royal modes of
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patronage in making claims to traditional "symbols of substance." 125 In doing so, the construction of temples reflects values of royalty and kingship, and thus temples do not merely reflect a bureaucratic reality. The temples combine both South Indian and Rajasthani temple architectural styles to draw upon the traditions of South Indian kings as well as a regional association with Rajasthan.
Yet what is new, in particular with regard to the Birla temples, is how temple architectural structures also reflect modern demands of humanitarianism by providing civic and ostensibly secular spaces inside of religious ones, literally blurring the lines and spaces between what is religious and what is secular. In considering such appropriation of civic spaces into the realm of Hindu worship, one could argue that the space of philanthropic public culture, instead of becoming increasingly secular, has actually become more religious. Last, and most importantly, we should be careful not to assume that merchant sponsorship of temples has necessarily been efficacious in generating social respect and reputation for their business family patrons. The ambivalentand sometimes even hostilelocal responses to Marwari philanthropy, such as regarding Birla temples as profitable ventures, reminds us of the potential problems in assuming that the intent of philanthropy and mapping necessarily generates either a very predictable or very desirable public response. Performances are not always successful.
In the case of temples, it appears that merchants and industrialists replacing kings as the primary patrons of large temples have actually not quite usurped the legitimacy once derived from royal temple-building. The construction of Birla Mandirs across India has undoubtedly changed the nature of religious philanthropy in South Asia by combining civic and religious spaces. And yet these are also temples already associated with the names of founders who have been heavily criticized for their unscrupulous business practices. I have shown an example from Bengali literature that provides evidence of contested readings of merchant religious philanthropy. What I have not examined, and what remains an open question here, is whether or not the temples succeed in gaining the acceptance, and thus hegemonic consent, among the subaltern classes that do frequent their spaces, especially in Calcutta. We should not assume, however, that the intent of gaining social capital through temple-building necessarily produces the same local response across all social classes. More research needs to be done on these subaltern responses. Conclusions The official administrative creation of linguistic provinces in independent India demonstrates how, in official and popular minds alike, cultures and identities were essentially tied to certain places. 126 Thus, Bengali culture was to be found in Bengal, Tamil culture in Madras/Tamil Nadu, Malayalam
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culture in Kerala, and so on. The Marwaris, however, are an interesting case of a community that has never had any clear territorial referent, thus highlighting the inherent limitations of the regionalized way that colonialists and nationalists have often thought about Indian identities. In addition to drawing on the pioneering work of Bernard Cohn, the ideas in this chapter are informed by recent anthropological discussions about the relationship between power, culture, and place. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson contend that anthropologists have formed an "ethnological habit" of naturalizing groups of people as belonging to a particular territory, creating a fixed relationship between territory and culture. 127 Even as increasing anthropological and historical attention is being placed on examining various diasporic, refugee, and migrant groups, however, Gupta and Ferguson warn that scholars should be careful not to make uncritical "spatial and temporal extensions of a prior, natural identity rooted in locality and community." 128 As such, Liisa Malkki theorizes that the invention of homelands by deterritorialized peoples is made through "memories of and claims on places that they can or will no longer corporeally inhabit." 129 An excellent illustration of this kind of trans-regional work is Karen Leonard's monograph on the creation of a biethnic Punjabi-Mexican identity in California, exploring how one diasporic Indian group has made various "ethnic choices" which both complicate and inform their relationship with their homeland. 130
100
The relationship between identity and place for the Marwaris challenges the normative quality of the colonial, nationalist, and anthropological idea that identity formation is conventionally tied to territorial rootedness. My project does not attempt to examine transnational imaginations of community, but examines how such processes get worked out for an internal diaspora in the context of British colonialism. My choice of the word "process" here is a deliberate one, for I wish to argue that the a diasporic Marwari identity and an imaginary homeland of Marwar are not simply objects narrated by state discourse and cartography. As an invented homeland, Marwar is not simply a matter of colonial knowledge (a map), but a place that is practiced, performed, enacted, and brought into being through a series of cultural and material practices (mapping).
This chapter has been an attempt to illustrate the relationship between regions, both objective and subjective, as they reflect the construction of identities of Marwari and Marwar in Rajasthan and Calcutta. Marwari identity is neither a primordial given nor the sole creation of the colonial state. It has arisen in local contexts relating to Indian trading networks in Central Asia, engagements with the colonial mapping of the "Marwari" languages in Rajputana, through tourism and print culture, and through the built environment of Marwari residential neighborhoods in Calcutta. In both Rajasthan and Calcutta, mapping of community onto locality is a technique deployed in both self-ascribed and other-ascribed forms of identity claims.
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By engaging but not exactly aligning with the cartographic knowledge of the colonial state, Marwari practices of naming, mapping, and performing a sense of homeland vis--vis Marwar and Rajasthan stand their ground against modern cartographic maps positing other kinds of geographical truths (namely, telling us that Marwaris are not from Marwar). While still acknowledging the discursive power of maps in creating various regimes of truths, this evidence leads me to question postmodern assertions about the extinction of nonstatist cartographies such as the following:. As Thongchai Winichakul wrote, "Another ultimate loser [to new notions of sovereignty and boundary] was the indigenous knowledge of political space. Modern geography displaced it, and the regime of [European] mapping became hegemonic." 131 Ranajit Guha's point about dominance without hegemony in the colonial reconfiguration of categories is of central importance in this regard.
Notes: Note 1: Timberg, "A Note on the Arrival of Calcutta's Marwaris," Bengal Past and Present 90 (1971): 7584.Back. Note 2: Bernard Cohn, "Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society," in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, 100135.Back. Note 3: A 1929 Hindi literary magazine's special Marwari issue, on the past and present conditions of Marwar, noted that the place that is politically known as Rajputana is geographically and socially known as Marwar. Chand, Marwari Ank (November 1929), 79.Back. Note 4: On the economic role of baniyas, see David Cheesman, "'The Omnipresent Bania': Rural Moneylenders in Nineteenth-Century Sind," Modern Asian Studies 16:3 (1982): 445462; Lakshmi Subramanian, "Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," Modern Asian Studies 21:3 (1987): 473510. Back. Note 5: There is a small but important literature on Marwari migration and business. See Timberg, The Marwaris; Thomas Timberg, "A Note on the Arrival of Calcutta's Marwaris"; Omkar Goswami, "Then Came the Marwaris: Some Aspects of the Changes in the Pattern of Industrial Control in Eastern India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 223 (1995).Back. Note 6: "Upcountrymen" was a term used in northern India. In South India chettiar describes a "caste cluster" of trading groups. David West Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).Back.
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Note 7: Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new edition, ed. William Crooke (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1903), 561.Back. Note 8: D. K. Taknet, "Heroes of a Desert Land," in B. M. Birla: A Great Visionary (New Delhi: Indus, 1996), 2.Back. Note 9: Jug Suraiya, "The Poor Marwari Who Can't Help Making Money," in Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996), 70.Back. Note 10: Appadurai, Modernity at Large.Back. Note 11: Though my example is rooted in the historical and cultural particularities of India, the implications for further research are multiple. The world abounds with examples of constructions of social identity based on subjective forms of geographical information. The so-called "Indians" of North America, let alone the "Americans" for that matter, have a geographically oriented name whose use remains common today. Even though Iberian explorers soon realized that North America was not the promised water-route to Asia, the use of the name "Indian" to describe indigenous peoples continues to this day. Indian groups in San Antonio, for instance, reject the descriptive term "Native American" which they claim robs them of their pride in being "Indian."Back. Note 12: Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Subaltern Studies 7, eds. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992): 139.Back. Note 13: Dennis Wood, "The Fine Line Between Mapping and Mapmaking," Cartographica 30 :4 (Winter 1993): 5060. Back. Note 14: Bhanwarmal Singhi and Nandkishore Jalan, Sammelon ka Sanskipt Itihas [A short history of the All India Marwari Federation (19351985)], Golden Jubilee edition (Calcutta: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon, 1986), 1718.Back. Note 15: Peter Sahlins, "Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century," American Historical Review 95:5 (1990): 142351.Back. Note 16: Susan Gole, Maps of Mughal India: Drawn by Colonel Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Agent for the French Government to the Court of Shuja-ud-daula at Faizabad, in 1770 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988); Irfan Habib, "Cartography of Mughal India," in Medieval India: A Miscellany, vol. 4 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1977).Back. Note 17: Henri Stern, "Power in Traditional India: Territory, Caste and Kinship in Rajasthan," in Realm and Region in Traditional India, ed. Richard G. Fox (Durham: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern
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Asia, 1977): 5278.Back. Note 18: Thomas Trautmann has shown how early maps were an important part of constructing India's place in Biblical chronologies. Both medieval-era Muslim histories and early modern European histories shared the view that Indians were descendants of Hind, the son of Ham, who was a son of Noah. Thomas R. Trautmann, "Finding India's Place: Locational Projects of the Longue Duree," (lecture given at the Regional Worlds Program Globalization Project, Chicago Humanities Institute, 14 March 1996).Back. Note 19: Arthur Robinson, "Maps of People and their Activities," in Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 109153. One minor criticism of Robinson is that he focuses almost exclusively on the available technologies,such as shade and copperplates,that enabled mapping differences among human populations, rather than looking at the ideology that made certain forms of ethnographic mapping productive for the colonial state.Back. Note 20: Thomas Trautmann, The Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).Back. Note 21: The linguistic formation of Indian states started in 1953 with the creation of Andhra Pradesh, where Telegu is spoken. Robert Stern, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 181.Back. Note 22: G. N. Sharma writes that the first time the term "Rajasthan" appears is in a Jodhpur Inscription: "In the pre-British days the entire region neither formed a single political unit of India nor was known by any single common name before the 17th century A.D. The first mention of Rajasthan as a compact land of the princes with territorial divisions, plains, and mountains occurs in the Inscription of V. S. 1765 (1708 A.D.), vv. 6471." (G.N. Sharma, Social Life in Medieval Rajasthan (Agra: Lakshmi Narain Agarwal, 1968), 1 n. 1.) The relevant lines that Sharma refers to are: "desha dharma kshetra saagar sapavitra kshetra tanmadhye meru shikhara saraaj vijaya raajasthaan sannrpanviaasah." I thank Jennifer Joffee, Dept. of Art History, University of Minnesota for providing me with the text of the inscription from the Sardar Museum, MS Collection, Jodhpur. I do, however, disagree with Sharma's interpretation of the inscription. My translation of this inscription would read, "In the pure domain of country, religion, land and sea is Mount Meru and the victorious Rajasthan." This certainly cites Rajasthan as a place-name but does not necessarily connote Rajasthan as a unified and "compact land."Back. Note 23: John Hitchcock, "The Idea of the Martial Rajput," in Traditional India: Structure and Change, ed. Milton Singer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959): 1017.Back. Note 24: Colonel James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829; reprint, New Delhi: Oriental Books, 1994); Derek Lodrick, "Rajasthan as Region," in The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994), 10.Back.
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Note 25: Sukumar Sen, lecture given at Rajasthan Information Centre Calcutta, October 12, 1975, published in Rajasthan: Bangiya Dristi May, ed. Pandit Askychandra Sharma (Calcutta: Kayan Charitable Trust, 1989), 1617.Back. Note 26: Note 27: Note 28: Timberg, The Marwaris, 9. Back. Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 1104.Back. Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, xvi.Back.
Note 29: Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990).Back. Note 30: Peabody contradicts Ronald Inden's assessment that Tod was not strictly Orientalist in his approach to Indian society. Inden's Imagining India does not account for the Orientalist/Anglicist controversy and the subtle varieties of European positions on Indian history, which he lumps together as merely Orientalist. Norbert Peabody, "Tod's Rajasthan and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth Century India," Modern Asian Studies 30:1 (1996): 185220.Back. Note 31: Note 32: Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, vii.Back. Peabody, "Tod's Rajasthan," 204.Back.
Note 33: The Census of India from 1901 onward reported on the princely states in its description of general ethnographic material.Back. Note 34: Charles Black, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 18751890 (London: Secretary of State for India in Council, 1891).Back. Note 35: Black, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 90.Back.
Note 36: See especially Chapter 10 of Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).Back. Note 37: Rev. S. H. Kellogg, A Grammar of the Hindi Language (Allahabad & Calcutta: Am. Pres. Mission Press: 1876).Back. Note 38: For South Indian language classifications, see Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (London: Harrison, 1856).Back. Note 39: Lodrick, "Rajasthan as Region," 1617.Back. Note 40: G. A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Indo-Aryan Family (vol. 9), Central Group, pt. 2, "Specimens of the Rajasthani and Gujarati" (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908), 1.Back.
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Note 41: J. D. Smith, "An Introduction to the Language of the Historical Documents from Rajasthan," Modern Asian Studies 9:4 (1975), 436.Back. Note 42: Ibid., 435.Back.
Note 43: Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India listed five major subgroups and enumerated the speakers of Rajasthani language, including Marwari (6,088,389), Middle-eastern (2,907,200), Northeastern (1,570,099), Malwi (4,350,507), Nimadi (477,777), and others that did not fit into his classification system (907,288). These figures are cited in the Rajasthan State Gazetteer Volume I: Land and People (Jaipur: Government of Rajasthan, 1995), 155. Also see David Magier, Topics in the Grammar of Marwari (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1983).Back. Note 44: Note 45: Note 46: Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 16.Back. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 17.Back. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 18.Back.
Note 47: Stephen Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 16001750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 59.Back. Note 48: He was fifty-five years old when he wrote the book, believing that he had lived for half of his life, and therefore called the work "Half Tale." I consulted a version of Ardhakathanaka that was translated, introduced, and annotated by Mukund Lath. Half Tale: A Study in the interrelationship between Autobiography and History (1641; reprint, Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharati Sansthan, 1981).Back. Note 49: Note 50: Note 51: Note 52: Lath, Introduction to Ardhakathanaka, vi.Back. Ibid., v.Back. Baines, 34.Back. Census of India 1901, 127128.Back.
Note 53: Luhrmann, The Good Parsi. Chapter five will have more to say about this question of "lateness."Back. Note 54: Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil Nadu 18911970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xxi.Back. Note 55: Note 56: Note 57:
Report on the Census of Calcutta 1891 (Calcutta), lxxviii.Back. Modi, Desh ke Itihas Mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 601602. Back. Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of
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Modern Hindi Poetry (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 244 n. 8.Back. Note 58: Ibid., 244.Back.
Note 59: Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad [brochure] (May 1993); on Pratiba Agarwal's work, see her autobiography, Pratiba Agarwal, Dastak Zindagi Ki [Life Is Calling] (Calcutta: Aprastut Prakashan, 1990).Back. Note 60: For an example of Marwari, see John Robson, Selection of Khyals or Marwari Plays (Beawar: Beawar Press, 1866). The text is accompanied by a glossary of Marwari terms not generally found in ordinary Hindi or Urdu dictionaries.Back. Note 61: Note 62: Note 63: Rajasthan State Gazetteer, Volume 1: Land and People, 156.Back. Census of India, Calcutta, 1891.Back. Census of 1901, Calcutta, vol. 7, 48.Back.
Note 64: I compiled these figures from tables in the Census of 1901, Calcutta, Vol 7, 35.Back. Note 65: Laidlow defines Mahavir as the Jain "Great Hero,'"the last Jina (conqueror of desire), and an elder contemporary of the Buddha. Laidlow, Riches and Renunciation, 396. An article about Mahavir International describes its transregional purpose: "The Nagarik Swashya Sangh used to hold a camp in Calcutta every year with its team of doctors and technicians from Jaipur to attend to cases. This was a problem for the handicapped in the eastern region who had to wait for the yearly camp to happen or go all the way to Rajasthan for treatment. And so Mahavir International, Calcutta branch was born: to deal with patients in the city and to make the Jaipur foot available and get it fitted with medical expertise." Paramita Acharjee, "On a Hope, Prayer and Good Hard Work," Statesman (Calcutta), 2 March 1997, 7.Back. Note 66: "Marwari Yuva Manch to Encourage Regional Language," Assam Tribune, 10 March 1989.Back. Note 67: Ilan Cooper, "What's in a Name," Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996), 3743.Back. Note 68: Ilan Cooper, "A Painted History," Marwar, 617.Back.
Note 69: "The Poor Marwari," "Manic about Marwaris," and "Voices in the Dark," Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996).Back. Note 70: This interview can be viewed at www:marwar.com.Back.
Note 71: Rishi Jaimini Kaushik Barua is the Assamese Brahmin author of the multi-volume caste history, Main Apne Marwari Samaj ko Pyar Karta Hun (Calcutta: Jaimini-Prakashan, 1967). The title is literally translated as "I so do
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love my Marwari Society." Barua showed me stacks of the camera-ready copy he had written about some Marwari families who had neglected to pay him for his efforts, so he did not include the material in the published volumes. Maybe he does not really love them that much. Some Marwaris complained to me that Barua is a crook who tries to fleece them.Back. Note 72: "Man of Steel," Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996), 1827.Back. Note 73: "McJatia," Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996): 8490.Back. Note 74: Rajshree Birla, the wife of the late industrial giant Aditya V. Birla, commented about her husband's wishes for their daughter: "He wanted her to go for the arts, learn dancing, singing and cooking. He encouraged her in that. He was not too keen that she go for higher studies. He taught her driving, sometime even taught her cooking . . . as of now she is not interested in business. She is more fond of painting and singing and other things. She wants to be a good housewife." Quoted in Marwar, 154. Rajshree looks after some Birla trusts and charitable activities. Son Kumar Mangalam looks after his father's billion-dollar empire, consisting of over seventy plants making chemical and industrial products, energy, cement, and other commodities. Gita Piramal, Business Maharajas (New Delhi: Viking, 1996), 153.Back. Note 75: "Lady in the News," Marwar: A Chronicle of Marwari History and Achievement (Bombay, Arpan Pub.: 1996), 35.Back. Note 76: The most comprehensive caste history of the Marwaris is Rishi Jaimini Kaushik Barua's eighteen-volume, Mein Apney Marwari Samaj Ko Pyar Karta Hun . Back. Note 77: "Burra Bazar Taake Burra Bazar" [From Bura Bazar to Bura Bazar], Ananda Bazar Patrika , 11 March 1995.Back. Note 78: Bunny Gupta and Jaya Chaliha, "Burra Bazar," in Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 2, ed. Sukanta Shaudhuri (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 113116.Back. Note 79: Timberg, "A Note on the Arrival of Calcutta's Marwaris,"Back.
Note 80: Rev. James Long wrote that by 1872 Burabazar had become a distinctly Marwari area. James Long. Calcutta in the Olden Times (Calcutta: Granthan, 1994); James Long, Calcutta and Its Neighborhood: History of people and Localities from 1690 to 1837 (Calcutta: Indian Publications, 1974).Back. Note 81: L. S. S. O'Malley, Census of India 1911, vol 6. City of Calcutta Report (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1913), 15.Back. Note 82: CRUTA Foundation, Barra Bazar Improvement: A Manual Towards Civic Action (Calcutta: CRUTA Foundation, 1995), 4.Back.
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Note 83: Medha Malik Kudaisya, The Public Career of G. D. Birla: 19111947 (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1992), 15. There is a striking linguistic similarity here to the Spanish colonial asiento (literally, seat) that was a colonial trading monopoly in the new world.Back. Note 84: Prajnananda Banerji, "Growth of Burra Bazar," in Calcutta and Its Hinterland: A Study in Economic History of India 18331900 (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1975), 110111.Back. Note 85: Jain, Indigenous Banking, 90; Omkar Goswamy, "From Traders to Capitalists: Marwaris of Calcutta, 19181950," Statesman (Calcutta), 12 Jan. 1986.Back. Note 86: The parta accounting system was adapted by G.D. Birla to industrial applications, through which the daily expenditure for a big company could be tracked very quickly and efficiently. Piu Chatterjee, Evolution of the Marwari CommunityIts Growing Strength and Relations with Nationalist Politics (192030) (Master's thesis, Calcutta University, 1991), 8183. Back. Note 87: Note 88: Kudaisya, The Public Career of G. D. Birla, 16.Back. Jain, Indigenous Banking, 38.Back.
Note 89: E. A. Gait, Census of India, 1901, vol 6. The Lower Provinces of Bengal and their Feudatories, Pt.1 "The Report" (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1902), 42. Back. Note 90: Report of the Commission to Enquire into Certain Matters Connected with the Sanitation of the Town of Calcutta (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), IOL V/26/840/8.Back. Note 91: Frank G. Clemon and Wm. C. Hossack, Report upon the Sanitary Condition of Ward VII (Burra Bazar) Calcutta (Calcutta: Caledonian Steam Printing Works, 1899).Back. Note 92: For examples of this type of research, see P. P. Majumder, Sujata Nayak, R. N. Das, and S. K. Bhattacharya, "Genetic and Cultural Determinants of High-density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Serum Triglycerides among Marwaris of Calcutta," Indian Journal of Medical Research 103 (February 1996):112119; Partha P. Majumder, Sujata Nayak, S. K. Bhattacharya, K. K. Ghosh, S. Pal, and B. N. Mukherjee, "An Epidemiological Study of Blood Pressure and Lipid Levels Among Marwaris of Calcutta, India," American Journal of Human Biology 6 (1994): 183194.Back. Note 93: Patrick Geddes, Barra Bazar Improvement: A Report to the Corporation of Calcutta (Calcutta: Corporation Press, 1919).Back. Note 94: Note 95:
Long, Calcutta and Its Neighborhood, iii.Back. Meera Guha, "Concentration of Communities in Burra Bazar,
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Calcutta," Man in India 44 (Oct.Dec. 1964), 289.Back. Note 96: CRUTA, Burra Bazar Improvement, 5060.Back.
Note 97: Debashish Nayak, "Getting Cities Back to the People," Indian Architect And Builder (December 1993); "Redesigning History," Economic Times Calcutta, 14 October 1995. Back. Note 98: Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen's Gaze," Economic and Political Weekly (714 March 1992): 541-547.Back. Note 99: Arup De, "Transformation of the Marwari," Mainstream (29 July 1995): 2530.Back. Note 100: Note 101: See chapter five for further discussion of social reform.Back. Interviews; the names of some informants are confidential.Back.
Note 102: Nirmal Kumar Bose, Calcutta: A Social Survey (Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1964), 36. Back. Note 103: Goswamy, "From Traders to Capitalists."Back.
Note 104: "Land Sharks Demolish Keshab Chandra Sen's House," Telegraph (Calcutta), March 1997.Back. Note 105: Bose, Calcutta: A Social Survey.Back.
Note 106: My most unpleasant fieldwork experience was when I once forgot to keep an appointment to meet a Marwari leader of one of the community associations. When I realized my mistake and called to apologize, the man shouted abuse into the telephone and said that he could not believe that I was the kind of person that would behave so badly. He slammed down the receiver in my ear before I could say anything.Back. Note 107: Jordan Sand, "At Home in the Meiji Period: Inventing Japanese Domesticity," in Mirror of Modernity, Stepehen Vlastos, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 191207. Xiaobing Tang, "Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design, Interiority, and Interiorization," Public Culture 10:3 (1998): 530548.Back. Note 108: Gurcharan Das, "Divided We Fall, United We Are Unassailable," Marwar, 7281. Back. Note 109: Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, 38. Back.
Note 110: Burton Stein, introduction to special number on South Indian Temples, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 14 (Jan.Mar. 1977), 7.Back. Note 111:
George Michell, The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning

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and Forms (1977; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 51.Back. Note 112: Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Back. Note 113: Velcheru Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89.Back. Note 114: Hitesranjan Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal (Calcutta: Papyrus Press, 1981), 71.Back. Note 115: C. A. Bayly, "Patrons and Politics in Northern India," Modern Asian Studies 7:3 (1973), 352.Back. Note 116: Douglas Haynes, "From Tribute to Philanthropy: The Politics of Gift Giving in a Western Indian City," Journal of Asian Studies 46 (May 1987): 339360.Back. Note 117: Michell, The Hindu Temple, 58.Back.
Note 118: A Story of Devotion and Service: Hindustan Charity Trust (temple brochure) (c.1995).Back. Note 119: I am indebted to Gautam Bhadra for drawing my attention to the characterizations of Marwari businessmen in Bangla short stories. I am grateful to Mundira Bhandury for her translations of these texts. Back. Note 120: Parusharam (Rajshekhar Basu), "Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited," in Gaddhalika (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar and Sons, 1915): 132.Back. Note 121: This definition of sala comes from Peter Hook, Hindi Structures: Intermediate Level (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, 1986), 7.Back. Note 122: This is discussed in greater detail in chapter four. Back.
Note 123: Dirks, The Hollow Crown; Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule.Back. Note 124: Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," American Ethnologist 22 (May 1995): 375-402.Back. Note 125: I borrow this expression from Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance.Back. Note 126: Selig Harrison, India, The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Back.
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Note 127: Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "'Beyond Culture': Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference" in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, 40.Back. Note 128: Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era," Introduction to Culture, Power, Place, 7.Back. Note 129: Liisa Malkki, "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees," in Culture, Power, Place, 52.Back. Note 130: Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).Back. Note 131: Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 129.Back.
Community as Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997
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3. Merchant Houses as Spectacles of Modernity The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. Guy Dubord 1 The Marwaris today have completely abandoned Shekhawati, leaving their havelis in the care of guardians who live sparely without the means to keep people from pillaging them. Some of the houses are occupied by destitute squatter families, who, for a couple of rupees, eagerly hasten to open the doors for visitors. An association, founded by Ramesh Jangid and Catherine Ripou, attempts to protect the painted towns and plans for a museum project are under consideration. But the rich Marwaris, upon whom it falls to restore these homes, are much too caught up in the rough and tumble of the great Indian metropolises, to come back into the tiny lanes of Shekhawati. Eliane Georges 2
1
This chapter examines the production of visually spectacular ancestral houses by migrant merchants in colonial South Asia between 1860 and 1930, as well as the recent transformation of these now-abandoned homes into new objects of visual consumption. I primarily consider the elaborately painted houses belonging to the migrant Marwari traders of northern India in the Shekhawati region of eastern Rajasthan, and also comment upon the South Indian ornamental houses built by the Chettiar merchants in Madras Presidency, now known as Tamil Nadu. 3 The numerous small towns that make up Shekhawatisuch as Nawalgarh, Fatehpur, Jhunjhunu, Mandawa, and Sikarcontain dozens of spectacularly painted mansions. These palatial Marwari courtyard houses, known as haveli, are characterized by a colorful pastiche of vivid wall paintings covering exterior and interior surfaces. These vibrantly colored painted frescos feature subjects ranging from scenes in the epic Mahabharata to European-manufactured train engines. The paintings juxtapose hybrid images of battle scenes from Hindu epics with pictures of lonely Englishwomen listening to gramophones, and depict steam-engine locomotives alongside portraits of Rajput princesses. A picture known as 'flying Krishna' depicts the charioteer hero of the Mahabharata and his consort Radha flying through the sky in a winged motorcar.
The South Indian mansions I mention here, which bear
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remarkable similarity to the Marwari haveli, were built in the Chettiar homeland, commonly known as Chettinadu. Also organized around a series of courtyards, the outer portions of the Chettiar houses feature painted carvings and gargoyles of British colonial officials and Hindu deities like Lakshmi. Western Christian cherub and Madonna figures placed on the upper rooftops face outward to the local public. Inside, the Chettiar courtyard houses feature luxurious household implements obtained in the Chettiar overseas trade. These include Italian chandeliers and inlaid parquet marble floors in inner and outer verandas, as well as intricate Burmese teak carvings surrounding doors, entryways, and ceilings.
In this chapter I discuss the decorated merchant houses in order to address three general concerns. First, by using interdisciplinary methodology from history and anthropology, I explore why diasporic trading communities, like the Marwaris and the Chettiars, have felt the need to create an identity for themselves architecturally and visually through the development of hybrid forms of vernacular domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of commercial groups in India is a fascinating area of research, although admittedly much less studied than other forms, especially the religious architecture of prominent temples, mosques, and mausoleums like the Taj Mahal, or that of various ruling elites. Significant scholarly attention, for example, has been paid to the architecture of royal palace households, 4 imperial forms of domestic architecture under the Raj, 5 and disciplinary and exclusionary aspects of colonial urban planning. 6 Less notice has been given to the architectural transformation of the dwellings of migrant, intermediary trading groups and middlemen capitalists. Therefore, I wish to introduce an important visual dimension to issues of migrancy, diaspora, deterritorialization, and other aspects of globalization currently being explored by other scholars.
My second concern is to examine how the mansions relate to other proximate architectural forms and become associated with the region as an index of the local neighborly relations of migration and return within which housing style plays a part. The construction of ancestral mansions for ancestors who never lived in themconstitutes a complex set of visual practices. As I will suggest, it represented an attempt to elaborate a devotional bhakti-centered identity of the families in the community through regional ties, yet with an explicit acknowledgement of the hybrid modernity of British rule in India. Notably, the migrant merchants' homes in their new cities of domicile such as Calcutta and Madraswhere they actually lived and amassed their fortunesdid not elaborate the bhakti themes, but drew more directly upon the royal symbols of architecture in their former localities. By locating the Marwari haveli and Chettiar mansions in their local
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social and architectural contexts, I hope to show how the "region," both real and imagined, still has an important place in the transregional histories I examine here.
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Finally, I will argue that these empty mansions are being rapidly appropriated by international tourism, becoming new objects of visual consumptionand thereby transforming spaces of the private into spaces of public access. Visual practices in India have to be understood as part of a global and capitalist modernity, after all, and not just in terms of India's premodern past. Through practices of tourism, spatial geographies of diasporic identity formation are being recreated through a visual orientation to the past. I consider the history of the paintings and decorations and the kinds of visual practices they have enabled by being seen by Indians and foreign tourists. The discussion of "memory-places" in the work of Pierre Nora 7 helps me to illuminate the historical relationship between migrant merchants in an age of colonial capitalism and the production of one type of visual spectacle in India. My concern here is with visual narratives as representative of history, memory, migration, and rootedness, and with how visual objects both underpin and transform such representations of the past, present, and future. The havelis are spectacular in part because they have become sites that evoke memoriesof homelands, of ancestors, and of Rajasthanwhich are visually instantiated by the paintings on the walls.
Though the Marwaris and the Chettiars built and decorated their houses independently of each other, and as far as we know did not collaborate in the design and construction of their houses, a number of remarkable similarities prompts their comparison. The ancestral houses of each community were typically built between the 1860s and 1930s by migrant traders who had left their homelands in search of the riches to be earned through the vast trading networks that attended the development of colonial capitalism. The global cotton crisis of the 1860s, caused by the collapse of the American cotton industry, along with the advent of railroad travel, prompted merchants to migrate eastward as cotton traders and become part of the diasporic trading networks that stretched from Rajasthan to the colonial cities of Calcutta and Bombay. As these traders quickly emerged as the new capitalist class in India, their multiple aspirationslike those of the "new rich" in any capitalist cultureincluded attempting to gain interlocking forms of political, economic, and symbolic power.
In the case of both the Marwaris and the Chettiars, the migrants went "abroad" to make their fortunes. In search of trade and financial success, the Marwaris traveled by foot, camel, and riverboat from their home villages in the Princely States of Rajasthan to small towns and the colonial capitals of Bombay and Calcutta in British India. The Chettiars left their Tamil
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homelands and sailed to Ceylon, Burma, and other places in island and mainland Southeast Asia. After they earned massive wealth through the hard work of buying and selling, and saved by frugal living in their newly adopted domiciles, the emigrant traders and moneylenders sent money (and sometimes even materials) back to their place of origin to construct and decorate elaborately decorated mansions. Visual Spectacles and Indian Capitalism The idea of the merchant house as a visual spectacle needs to be understood historically as part of capitalist modernity in India, and not as a resurgence of feudal display, as it is has been interpreted by some theorists of European modernity. Far from being in decline, as Huizinga would have it, 8 the visual is an essential part of Indian modernity and becomes transformed at critical social junctures. The production of these ancestral houses as a form of visual spectacle can be understood, I argue, as part of a particular moment of historical transformation in colonial India. The construction of such magnificent houses attests to how the newly rich (and increasingly confident) merchant classes sought to visually translate their recent wealth into new forms of social status in their homelands and beyond.
Though Marwari and Chettiar mansions have been considered ostentatious by many generations of both proximate and non-local viewers, they do not simply mimic the architectural styles of the local ruling classes. The architectural style of the haveli shares with Rajput architecture many similar Indo-Islamic elementscusped arches, fluted columns, and courtyard structurebut the range in visual themes of the frescoes exceeds the Rajput styles. On the one hand, the paintings self-consciously appropriate symbols of the modern institutions of European culture, such as the railroad, motorcar, European women, and the uniformed soldier, and visually deploy these images as a means of suggesting the merchants' own new cosmopolitan, modern outlook. These paintings of Europeans on the mansions 'return the gaze' to depict a colonial modernity, often clearly from an Indian point of view, and imbue the images with a striking heteroglossia that no doubt contributes to the current popularity of such images with modern tourists.
10
What is also particularly striking about the merchants' mansions, and a second reason for their spectacular presence, is the way that the houses display these hybrid images associated with foreign rulers, the British, alongside of images of gods and goddesses associated with medieval traditions of bhakti (religious piety). Here the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in the visual form suggests a syncretism of rival aesthetics, through which colonial power only partially mediates a space of authorization. 9 Migrant merchants used a hybrid form of painted
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architecturein itself a form of visual practiceto both announce and renew their identity as pious sons of the soil, but with a cosmopolitan worldview requisite to their aspirations of becoming new major players on a national stage. 10
The paintings in the bhakti style quite self-consciously elaborate religious themes that are outward expressions of (and that make visible) the communities' professed devotional sentiments. This important difference suggests that merchants did not wish directly and aggressively to challenge the authority and status of regional royalty, but that they instead sought to legitimate their rising economic and social status through a visual performance and adaptation of traditional Vaishya religiosity rooted in bhakti devotionalism. This could be seen as an instance of local mimicry, such as described by Bhabha, 11 where signs of aristocracy, albeit "not quite," are appropriated in a transformative practice. By creating ancestral houses for ancestors who never lived in them, migrant merchants sought to acquire symbols of cultural power to correspond with their new economic success in British-controlled foreign lands. In short, by using such visual displays on their spectacular mansions built in their homelands, they attempted to shore up their reputations as sons of the local soil.
Such highly imaginative displays of vernacular architecture and decoration in the built environments of Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, then, speak to the visual dimensions of migrancy and diaspora in the context of colonial capitalism. The development of transregional trading networks among migrant commercial groups such as the Marwaris and the Chettiars developed first through the ascendancy of regional princely states after Mughal decline. 12 These commercial groups began a dramatic, even meteoric rise to success, which coincided with the burgeoning economic and political power of the British, especially after the development of rail transportation in the 1860s. The fact that these migrant merchants felt confident enough to display their amassed wealth through fancy decorations on ancestral houses in their homelands reflects also the changing constellations of patronage structures under colonial rule. The construction of Marwari and Chettiar ancestral houses marks the moment of the ascendancy of the capitalist classes in India and the traders' shift in allegiances from local royalty to the British and their increasingly powerful commercial interests.
The painted houses of both Marwari and Chettiar
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families draw upon the architectural styles of local regional rulers, and yet announce the cosmopolitanism acquired by the commercial communities in their work abroad and subsequent exposure to the European presence in India. By incorporating images of the British and their increasing cultural, economic, and technological hegemony, the paintings signify a tacit accommodation to the British as the new rulers of the region. Through their avowed hybridization of British artifacts and local devotional themes, the houses signify as well an acknowledgement of the British presence in the urban spheres of commerce, politics, and technology. At the same time, as spectacles, the painted houses make visible the rising autonomy of merchant groups and their celebration of bhakti religiosity vis--vis their local royal patrons, whose crowns were becoming increasingly hollow in the face of British colonial domination.
The wider context of practices of religious gifting and the dynamic moral economy of the bazaar is of importance here. For trading groups such as the Marwaris and the Chettiars, the construction of the decorated ancestral houses was enabled by a framework of global capitalism, but it also, importantly, intersected with the traders' concerns for providing philanthropy and charity, especially the establishment of religious and educational institutions. Over at least the last century, the diasporic Marwaris in Calcutta and Bombay and the Chettiars in Madras and Madurai have both maintained ties with their homelands through a number of changing social and cultural links with their ancestral villages, including building the ancestral homes. Hindu and Jain religious traditions promised merit for building projects for public welfare, including temples, schools, step wells, water tanks, and pilgrim's lodges. Marwari merchants in Calcutta and Bombay sent money back to Rajasthan for these activities. The Marwaris also built cow-protection sheds and cenotaph memorials known as chhatris (literally, umbrellas) with pillared domes to commemorate the lives of wealthy merchant families, such as the Goenkas of Nawalgarh.
15
As Peter Nabokov has recently suggested for the Chettiar houses, these forms of vernacular domestic architecture may have "been ways for mediating between the caste's self-image of religious piety and charitability with their financially-winning implication in British colonialism." 13 Chettiar families also set aside earnings for alms and charities, and built resting-places for visiting travellers and pilgrims. In addition, the Chettiars were well known for taking care of cows; they would buy and maintain cows and give the milk to the local Shiva temple. Even though mansion-building ceased in the 1930s, many philanthropic projects, including the establishment of schools and temples, continued to be carried out among Chettiars and Marwaris in their respective homelands.
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The old mansions of the Marwaris and the Chettiars today stand largely deserted and increasingly dilapidated, shadows of their former glory. Here the similarity between the general outlines of the history of the Marwaris and the Chettiars to some extent diverges. Although as a group the Marwaris have maintained their financial success well past independence, their families have tended to largely neglect the houses out of a seeming lack of interest, seeing them as no longer being of value to the family. For many Chettiar families, however, severe financial losses suffered from the nationalist movement and independence of Burma in 1948 forced many to sell off antiques and even the houses themselves. A growing number of thrift and pawn shops in the towns of Chettinadu retail valuable household objects scavenged from the houses, while the decorated houses in the small towns themselves attract visitors who come to view them and perhaps also to hunt for antiques, such as carved doors and home furnishings. The tourism and commodification of merchant houses, therefore, cannot be relinquished to a mere "afterword" in this account. Over time, the mansions and their frescoes -- long-lasting visual spectacleshave been open to re-appropriation by various social actors, and tourist practices of "sight-seeing" represent new ways of viewing old objects. Today the Marwari haveli have become new objects of visual consumption by tourists, increasingly becoming part of the well-established heritage industry of princely Rajasthan.
These paintings and decorations on the nowabandoned mansions, whose owners live in the urban metropolis, are quite different from most other forms of house painting in South Asia, where all sorts of people have frequently painted and decorated the houses they dwell in for self-expression. 14 The mansions were only partially or occasionally occupied by women and children as a temporary measure, until the men had earned enough money to ensure them a safe travel passage and to maintain a permanent residence for the family in the urban locales. Thus here the difference between home and house comes into play. The home, as inhabited space, connects to the lived-in aspects of dwelling and affect associated with Nora's aforementioned idea of memory. The empty house, on the other hand, is disembodied from the lived present; it becomes a space amenable to the rearrangement of familial and cultural myths. It is precisely the very 'emptiness' of these structures that creates the temporal and spatial conditions of possibility for converging interests and visual practices to emerge between Marwari trader families and visiting tourists. The emptiness of the buildings, save for a distant relative or caretaker, is what after all gives them the appearance of being historical, and such houses can more easily become available for tourist consumption.
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To understand what the painted haveli accomplishes as a visual strategy, it is useful to think about Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope to describe a place or site that fuses time and space, such as Sir Walter Scott's use of the castle as a common setting for the production of "antiquarianism" in his Gothic novels. 15 Bakhtin refers to the merger of temporal and spatial structures, such as he finds in narrative genres including the romance and the folktale. 16 The chronotope is arguably related, in Bakhtin's work, to the liminality of the carnivalesque, in the inversion and subsequent reappropriation of patterns and social norms into new and different forms. 17 As a type of visual chronotope, the Marwari haveli could be said in part to index the aristocratic aspirations of a new business class in modern India, albeit tempered by a traditional North Indian Vaishya anxiety about directly appropriating Kshatriya emblems. 18 The ancestral homes speak to Bakhtin's model of the production of an original time and space through chronotopic form. The world of the merchant house is a realm in which the self was disciplined to conform to the new codes of authority in the rising aspirations of migrant merchants. Homeland was defined by the supposed ancestral domicile, even though built and abandoned after the family moved away, and not by holdings of agricultural land. The signifier is the haveli, and the signified is the fusion of time and space, the absent family and their relationship to the absent entity of their ancestral home. The family heritage is embodied and lodged in the house, at once being a multivalent site of private memory and public space.
For though they derive from Rajput mansions, the Marwari haveli go beyond being mere aristocratic 'residences' of ancestral lineages. In fact, they far exceed the spatial and temporal boundaries of the secularized palace or castle described by Bakhtin. As structures meant to be the ancestral homes of the founding fathers of some of India's top business houses, the mansions create new narratives about the migrant businessmen and their families. The potential risks of expressing a rootless cosmopolitanism are tempered by maintaining a strong local identity. The haveli simultaneously bridge the space between the desert and the colonial city where the families' riches were earned, and orient time back into the distant past by positing both family origins and connections deeper into history. Through their emphasis on bhakti, the houses remain part of Vaishya religiosity, and do not directly appropriate, and thereby challenge, Rajput authority. Rather than being living art, as in the cases of house painting mentioned earlier, the empty Marwari haveli are instead a type of historical artifact attesting to the historicity of Marwari claims of being (almost) aristocratic sons of Rajasthan. Painted Themes of the Marwari haveli of Shekhawati, Rajasthan
20
For reasons that will soon become clear, let me say at the onset that we need to complicate the standard ecological rationale for why the Marwaris painted their massive houses. 19 This explanation states that Marwaris wished to bring a little color into their desert lives, to liven up the otherwise drab
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monotone look of the desert sands. It is true that in Rajasthan houses tend to have very few exterior windows and instead depend on ventilation from the open ceilings of inner courtyards, thus leaving large blank surfaces on exterior and interior walls that become amenable to mural paintings. But simply relying on the standard environmental explanation does little, I believe, to clarify or help us to understand the unique cultural and historical milieu in which the haveli were painted or in which they are currently being viewed.
The region of Shekhawati is located in northeastern Rajasthan, between the cities of Jaipur, Delhi, and Bikaner. Although for administrative purposes the area is today divided into the districts of Churu, Jhunjhunu, and Sikar, in everyday speech the region collectively retains the name of Shekhawati, as it has been known for some 500 years. The name is traced to the fifteenthcentury Rajput ruler Rao Shekha, whose descendants established themselves in this region during the slow decline of the Mughal Empire, which ended with Aurengzeb's death in 1707. The Rajputs of Shekhawati encouraged trade in the region by charging lower tariffs than did neighboring regions. As a result, this desert region became a crossroads for trade caravans traveling from Gujarat in the southwest to northern India, as well as to Central Asia and China. Merchant families from all over Rajasthan moved to Shekhawati to establish themselves as trading agents along such routes. 20 These merchant families, who only much later came to be called Marwaris, began to consider Shekhawati their home.
Most of the painted Marwari haveli were built between 1860 and 1900, coinciding with the development of rail transportation and increasing emigration to the colonial cities. Ironically, then, most of the Marwari mansions "at home" in Rajasthan were built during the period of highest out-migration. After all, it was only after the migrants had left and established themselves in business and trade in the colonial metropolis that they would have been able to afford such elaborate housing in their homelands. To understand the cultural and historical reasons why such painted haveli were built, and their recent entry into the tourist imagination, we need to consider how the Marwari ascendance as a business community in India came about in the shadow of the Rajputs, the traditional ruling caste of Rajasthan. The Rajputs were a locally powerful group from whom Marwaris drew some of their inspiration in attempting to gain the cultural legitimacy that they needed to emerge as a new generation with plausible aspirations to economic, social, and sometimes political leadership. Haveli-building was a tradition that migrant Marwari traders picked up in part from the local Shekhawati Rajputs, who had begun building carved and gilded haveli in the 1830s.
Though the Marwaris borrowed a local structural design, as I have noted, the reproduction of Rajput architecture was in no small part due to British
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influence. For some time, the region of Rajasthan had been associated with ruins and heroism, and the figure of the martial Rajput was the embodiment of this much-admired sensibility. As mentioned previously, a key element of local Rajasthani pride is the claim that, for the past millennium, Rajasthan has never been directly subject to foreign conquest. The image of the early Rajput princes of Rajasthan, shaped by the filter of colonial ethnography, became the locus for a potent romanticization of the region. Colonel Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829-32) was particularly influential in popularizing and canonizing this romantic ethos of Rajasthan through the textualization of oral epic and memories into colonial ethnography. One aspect of this European romantic imagination of Rajasthan was a fascination with historical ruins, and the simultaneous development of a romantic sensibility associated with remains of relics, forts and palaces, which associated such landmarks with a heritage of martial gallantry.. As Ramusack notes, the canonization of such tales of Rajput chivalry by Tod and the texts' frequent reprinting helped embellish and preserve such history so that it became part of the social memory of Rajasthan, eventually enabling the memorialization of Rajasthan through tourism. 21
Although the Marwaris did not merely copy Rajput designs, as noted, the building of haveli can be understood as a Marwari strategy of capitalizing on the romantic aura that colonial ethnographers like Tod bestowed upon the Rajputs. The Marwari haveli are usually not decorated with the same degree of silver and gold work as the Rajput haveli on which they were modeled, perhaps out of deference to their ruling patrons. 22 Whereas Rajputs expressed their prowess through forts and gilded haveli, Marwaris could try to translate their newly found wealth into cultural capital with painted haveli, if not actual forts. Marwari haveli are named after the lineage of the family that built them, commemorating the ancestors who originally come from that place. The architecture of the haveli suited the tastes and requirements of trading families. The haveli are often crowded together on narrow, twisted streets, and accentuated by balconies, gargoyles, arches, doorways, and niches. 23
25
The mansions are organized around at least two courtyards, an outer one for business and visitors, and an inner one for the family and for women. Sometimes a third courtyard is used by the servants, who leave the courtyard from separate entrances. Visitors enter through a heavy carved wooden outer door into an inner courtyard, and are ushered into surrounding rooms where business is done while sitting on white cloth-covered cushions. Furniture is minimal. Separate inner courtyards and sets of rooms provide privacy and protection for the women.
The presence of such structures would justify translating the word haveli as a "courtyard house." But there is some disagreement among architectural historians, however, as to the exact etymology of the word haveli. Haveli are
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found across medieval northwestern India, from Gujarat to Rajasthan to even the Mughal city of Shahjahanabad (now Delhi). According to Stephen Blake, the term haveli is derived from Persian, and refers to the large walled mansions and open courtyards of the nobility and the rich. 24 Many of the standard art books on the Shekhawati haveli concur. 25 However, Catherine Asher has observed that the term haveli appears nowhere in the vocabulary of Mughal architecture. According to Asher (personal communication), the term probably originated in early modern Rajasthan to designate a new form of architectural synthesis of Rajput and Mughal domestic styles.
The blending of temple and domestic residence through architectural synthesis was a common tradition among Vaishya groups in western India. In neighboring Gujarat, wooden haveli built to be either residences or temples date back to about 1600. Domestic haveli architecture incorporated the elaborate carved wood style that became commonplace around the 1830s and lasted until about 1900. Occasionally, murals in the Gujarati haveli resemble the designs found on traditional Gujarati embroidery. In contrast, the bhakti styles of the Marwari haveli in Shekhawati are to a large extent patterned after the Krishna-lila scenes of murals such as those in the temple town of Nathdvara, north of Udaipur, a popular pilgrimage site for the wealthy commercial and trading communities of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Tillotson suggests that these mural decorations may also be a popular revival of palace mural art, an alternative to the ornate wooden carvings that characterize the haveli in Jaipur and in Gujarat. 26 In Nathdvara, notably, the word haveli (rather than the more generic mandir) is used to describe the Pushti Marg shrines of Krishna as Shrinathji. The Pushti Marga Vaishnava cult and bhakti sect thought of their deity as a king who was installed in a "palace." 27 Since Shrinath is considered a living god, and not a mere image, his abodethe mansion where he residesis called a haveli. The home of the god follows the plans of royal residences, and its wall paintings consist of a combination of murals and miniature paintings done on cloth, paper, and wood. 28
So far we have considered what the mansions may have meant for the merchants who financed them, but we know surprisingly little about the artists who built them, and what the havelis may have represented for them. The mural painters traditionally came from the kumhar caste of potters, and often worked in multiple capacities as builders, masons, and artists. 29 The patronage of the haveli paintings by emigrant Marwari merchants was important for establishing a new class of itinerant artists who were called upon to paint the walls. Since the demand for artists was too high in the district to be met solely by local artists, there was an immigration of architects, masons, and artists into Shekhawati from surrounding regions. 30 The artists came from a variety of religious backgrounds, and derived inspiration from various schools of Rajput painting, including the Jaipur and Mughal. The paintings approximate the fresco
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techniques that were developed in Italy in the 14th century. 31 In Rajasthan, limewater mixed with pigment was brushed onto wet plaster, which produced a highly durable surface painting with an impressive longevity. The chemicals in the artificial European pigments introduced in the late 19th century, however, reacted with the wet plaster, and the technique was modified for use on dry walls. The artists drew as well on the British-inspired Company School and on the new subjects of European technological modernity. Photography provided a means for urban scenes, including technological marvels and European life, to be depicted in the countryside, where such sights were hitherto unknown. Ironically, however, photography and the cheap reproductions made available by techniques such as chromolithography eventually created competition for the painters. As Marwari patronage itself dried up in the 1930s, these artists were eventually displaced. 32
The types of images on the haveli vary stylistically, ranging from Mughal miniatures to Jaipur mural painting to the Company school with obvious British influence to "calendar-art" images, which reflect the influence of modern print technologies. Marwaris used the blank exterior of the building faade, with upper-story windows, as a canvas for a variety of visual representations. Here I divide the haveli paintings into a few basic types for the purpose of my analysis. The earliest paintings, dating from the 1840s, show remarkable Mughal influence, their designs consisting largely of floral patterns and geometric designs. Hindu themes soon became popular. Most of the scenes on the early Marwari haveli are colorfully painted with intricate scenes from folk tales, daily activities, and the epic Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as images of Mughal customs and Hindu goddesses, gods, and their incarnations. Images of the Hindu god Krishna and his consort Radha are especially common. A comparison with Rajput art is pertinent to my argument. The Marwari pictures of gods and goddesses are more influenced by folk traditions, whereas in Rajput painting there is a stress on more typically Kshatriya warrior themes of rulers, wars, and battles. The Rajputs could deploy images of maharaja kings, whereas the Marwari paintings do not make such claims to warrior authority, and visually perform more of a "virtual" devotional bhakti.
30
The second type of painting I discuss are those associated with European rule. These are often considered the most remarkable paintings on the haveli murals, at least in the eyes of English-language travel writers, and are pictures that comment on the presence of British culture and technology in an Indian context. These images were made possible by European lithographs and photographs, which brought new and previously unseen subjects into the artists' frame of reference.
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Starting in about the 1860s, many new wall painting motifs began to reflect European cultural influences and to define new images of colonial modernity. Using artificial pigments from Germany, local artists known as chiteras (who themselves may have never seen firsthand these technological innovations) created scenes celebrating various material marvels of the Industrial Revolution as introduced by the British in India. Trains symbolized the very essence of modernity, at once implying wealth, status, and, especially after the 1860s, the very means that enabled many Marwaris to travel. The train represents a shift away from the royal titles of feudalism to a market-based capitalist prestige. Horizontal murals of trains became a very frequent motif, such as in a well-known example from the Poddar haveli at Nawalgarh. Other depictions of technological modernity include bicycles, cars, sewing machines, planes, gramophones, and even Orville and Wilbur Wright's first flight. Christian themes also emerged. The Poddar haveli in Nawalgarh features a picture of Jesus adorned with a halo of light.
As with the other examples of visual culture discussed in this volume, the haveli paintings too rest in an inter-ocular sphere constituted by multiple habits of viewing. We have already seen how these murals invoke Mughal painting and Hindu religious art, as well as images of European technological modernity. References to European paintings and photography, my third category of painting, were also part of this visual literacy. After the technique of photography became more widely available in India from the 1840s, artists used portraiture to depict their individual subjects more accurately. 33 However, unlike the Rajputs, who commonly commissioned portraits in the style of Mughal miniatures, paintings of individual owners of the Marwari haveli are less common than portraits of English royalty, including Queen Victoria, George V, and Queen Mary, introduced thanks to the availability of photography. Scenes from the Delhi durbar of 1911 are a common theme in both lithographs and frescoes. Wacziarg and Nath trace this major shift in the content of the frescoes toward European themes to the Great Jeypore Exhibition of 1883, which displayed a combination of European and Indian objects. 34 This exhibition was essentially hybrid, and attempted to showcase local Rajasthani cultural production while bringing it alongside the British world of science and industry in a naturalized juxtaposition. 35
The final class of paintings I will discuss here are pictures of
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women, both local and foreign. Some increased reliance on portraiture was used in popularizing domestic images of seth traders. Scenes depicting the modern couple reflect emerging ideas about bourgeois domesticity, suggesting the importance of companionate marriage. A woman sits with a baby on her lap trying to put on a makeup kumkum on her forehead while looking into a mirror. She is wondering, perhaps, whether she will still be attractive to her husband after having become a mother. Pictures of Englishmen with hats, shoes, and walking sticks were common, as were pictures of European women, often with low-cut necklines, in bathtubs, or in formal portraits as brides and bridesmaids participating in church weddings. One of the most intriguing forms of haveli art, scattered among a number of haveli, depicts private acts of courtship, sexual intercourse, and childbirth. Servants are painted into the background of some of the most erotic images, perhaps implying that there is little that goes on inside the household that is unnoticed by the hired help. In the Shiv Narain Nemani haveli in Churi Ajitgarh, a picture of Queen Victoria turning up her nose and scowling is juxtaposed with a picture of a couple having sexual intercourse. 36 We might find it strange to find explicit images of sexual acts in a spacethe haveliprimarily designed for women. Often these erotic pictures are hidden away behind closed doors in some of the bedrooms, and can literally be viewed only when the door is shut.
Beyond the multiple depictions of both local and foreign women, in general the haveli has been generally considered to be a quintessentially gendered space, a domain for the seclusion of women. As Sarah Tillotson has
documented, since the early 19th century the haveli have long been a source of fascination for European tourists, particularly Victorian women travelers, who wrote vivid accounts of the lives of women living behind the walls of palaces and other mansions. 37 Ostensibly, the haveli were built to house the intergenerational groups of females, children, and elderly members of the household left behind when the men spent much of their time in the colonial cities. The haveli is divided into separate quarters for men and women, preserving practices of gender segregation called parda. As such, the haveli is a marker of gender segregation practiced through creating separate living quarters for men and women. Internal and external courtyards marked degrees of domestic privacy. The haveli thus became a feminized space, akin to the zenana in its associations as the sphere of womanhood. 38
In addition to being a space for the seclusion of women and serving as a marker of the rising status of the merchant family, the haveli were a site of accumulation and thrift. Until the 1930s, Marwari merchants competed with each other to build the biggest and the best haveli, even though these
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mansions were constructed only after one or sometimes all of the family members had left and gone "abroad" to British India for trading and commerce. The practice of sending money back to be expended on paintings made on all available walls, ceilings, and window sills is illustrative of the social importance once placed on haveli as ostensible symbols of hearth and home. The haveli are thereby important geographical markers of the existence of Marwaris living outside Rajasthan. In the oral history that I have done among prominent Marwaris in Calcutta, I found that many people claimed to have a family haveli in Rajasthan. In the past, Marwari families traveled to Rajasthan and to their haveli for important events of the life passage, including naming ceremonies, first tonsure, and marriage, although such trips eventually became less and less frequent. Today, one member of the family might spend a day or two at the haveli to check up on things, but typically many of the family members would have never visited there. Haveli-building ceased around the 1930s for a variety of reasons. One was tied to the permanent migration of Marwari women and children to the colonial cities to join their menfolk, who had prospered and could now afford to house the extended family in the city. But even more importantly, it was at that time that Rajasthan became less central to the Marwari selfperception, and competition with the Rajputs becomes less important. Instead, involvement with the Congress Party and increasing participation in the affairs of the nationalist struggle created a new, national arena for the staging of such concerns. Rajasthan in the Marwari eye no longer remained the primary site of action, identity, and memory. Though philanthropy in the region was revived by a Gandhian imperative for village-level initiatives, building ancestral houses was no longer a pressing concern. The haveli were still used on occasion, such as during World War II, when many families sent their children and women back to Rajasthan to avoid the Calcutta bombing. But at this stage, most Marwari families in Calcutta came to feel that they no longer needed to establish domiciles in Rajasthan.
35
At the same time that Marwaris were building these painted mansions in the desert, resembling the devotional temples there, their places of domicile in Calcutta were remarkably different. The same merchants who commissioned these large houses covered in paintingspaintings that perform a kind of devotional bhaktidid not choose to replicate such images in Calcutta. New arrivals initially lived cheaply in rented rooms and shared community kitchens. Later, they amassed more wealth and brought their families from Rajasthan. In the old quarter of the city, known as Burabazar, Marwaris built towering structures more clearly in the Rajput idiom, using more traditional motifs such as wooden carvings, without the devotional bhakti-like paintings of their residences in Shekhawati. Unlike the spectacles of the painted haveli mansions in Shekhawati, there are no Marwari mansions with painted frescoes in Calcutta. Instead, these houses more confidently and directly quote from the architecture of Rajasthani palaces. Starting in the 1930s, and continuing into the 1950s and beyond, wealthy Marwari families moved out of the Burabazar and bought up the mansions vacated by departing British businessmen and government officials. Once their diasporic identity was secured, with the permanent migration of women and children,
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the practice of directly reiterating their visual connections to the former homeland through building spectacular domestic architecture was suspended. The Lifeworlds of Tamil Chettiar Mansions For at least the last century a number of observers, ranging from colonial administrator and ethnographer Thurston to anthropologist Yuko Nishimura, have commented that the ornate Chettiar mansions were their entry point to gaining interest in and familiarity with the community. The Chettiar houses are typically found in the towns of the region, as opposed to villages or in the countryside. The houses on the main streets are set back from the road, practically fortress-like, with a one-story wall separating the mansion from the passers-by in the streets. The houses are normally two or three stories tall, and have ornate statues, carvings, and gargoyles on the edges of the red tile rooftops and framing the entrance gates. These figures are often hybrid combinations of European faces and figurines along with Hindu images, especially of Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. The interior portions of the Chettiar houses face inward into courtyards, and are lavishly decorated with imported granite and marble pillars, intricately carved Burmese teak, decorative tiles, and crystal chandeliers.
Among the Chettiars there are eleven unrelated Chettiar groups, and the Nagarathar ('town-dwelling') Chettiars built the fanciest houses. Their elaborate mansions in southern Tamil Nadu have been so important to the self-identity of the community that the Nagarattar Chettiars have in fact been referred to as the Nattukottai ('Country-fort') Chettiars (Thurston in fact chose to list the Chettiars under the name 'Nattukottai Chettiar' in his authoritative survey, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India). Thurston, however, did not dwell on extended descriptions of the mansions as later observers did, and attributed the rise of the "commodious houses" simply to the Chettiar social custom of married family members living in separate quarters and cooking separate meals within the same family house. 39
The writer Nilkan Perumal made a visit to Chettinadu in September 1937, and wrote about his impressions of the social and material well-being of the Chettiars as epitomized by the mansions. After a visit to the small town of Arimalam, he stated that the "Chettiar elephantine-houses" were the village's "greatest asset," comparing the castle-like homes to what we imagine were found in towns in antiquity. In a striking comparison to the Marwari haveli, Perumal remarked that "they [the Chettiars] built them just like the Bania [traders] who built up gold-chambers in Sardarnagar (Bikaner) to boast about their cash!" 40 In Devakottai alone, Perumal contended, he found about 300 of these mostly-empty Chettiar
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mansions, whose owners were abroad on banking business, while servants and "stray relatives" occupied some portions of the homes.
What were particularly striking to Perumal were the unabashed displays of wealth in the form of these houses. Perumal estimated that these houses cost about one lakh rupees (100,000) each. He suggested that the Chettiars were vying with one another for such symbols of affluence and were perhaps living beyond their means. He wrote that Chettiars "indulged in this sort of costly mansion to impress upon their fellow Chettiars and the public that their financial success was all too substantial. The personal pride of Chettiars amongst themselves could also be noticed in conducting marriages and birthdays of their children, a lot of money lavishly spent. In the old days, the Chettiars did not invest much money in landed properties, because they believed that the more cash in hand, the better the prospect for returns through lending." 41
40
From the time of Perumal's visit and beyond, the houses began to fall into decline, owing to financial setbacks in the business ventures of the Chettiar merchants. Perumal attested to the relative poverty of many Chettiar families after the nationalization programs in countries like Burma. He was struck by the number of formerly wealthy bankers forced to sell off iron and other housing materials in order to eke out a daily living and return to India. 42 In fact, many Chettiar families have had to sell their elaborately decorated mansions because of financial duress, and the loss of their family houses highlighted the stigma of their community's overall economic decline. In order to understand the rise of the Chettiars and their reasons for building spectacular hybrid houses, I briefly review the major points of their meteoric rise in economic life. Chettiar Wealth and Display The ascendancy of the migrant Chettiars as the leading merchant capitalists of southern India paralleled the rise of the Marwari community to commercial and financial success. The Chettiars began their outward migration even earlier than the Marwaris, in the tenthtwelfth centuries, by following the shipping routes of the Chola traders across the sea. 43 As chandlers who managed the provision of supplies on the Chola ships, the Chettiars began to build transregional networks that facilitated the expansion of trade. The Chola ships sailed from Kaveripoompattinam (Poompuhar) to lands further east, including Java, Sumatra, and Malaya. Salt- and rice-trading, along with trade in precious metals and gemstones, also increased the Chettiars' legendary financial fortunes. The Chettiars established close relationships with the Chola kings, gaining their favor, and were rewarded by the granting of zamindari land rights. While their business establishments dotted the Tamil coast, the Chettiar homeland was in an area of ninety-six villages
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between Pudukkottai and Sivaganga. Near temples founded by members of the community, the Chettiars built homes made of stucco, wood, and tile in a pattern around the temple. Because of these residential patterns, which resembled those in larger towns, the Chettiars were also called by the name 'Nagarathar Chettiar.' meaning town-dwellers.
Because of the salt monopoly claimed by the East India Company in 1805, the Chettiars withdrew from the salt trade. They gradually developed into a regionally powerful community of merchant bankers in parts of the former Pudukottai kingdom and present-day Ramanathapuram and Pasumpon Muthuramalingam districts, the area that since the 18th century has been known as Chettinadu. 44 One of the Chettiars' major activities was to make loans to agricultural producers and to political and military leaders, and they began to expand their intricate networks of hundi (credit exchange) and to prosper. The growth of transregional Chettiar trading networks in colonial times followed the European expansion in South and Southeast Asia. 45 In the early nineteenth century, a few adventuresome Chettiars began to settle in Ceylon. By the 1850s and 1860s, the British had made significant inroads into the commerce of Burma and Malaya and solidified their political domination. The expansion of the British Empire into Southeast Asia created new avenues of trade, commerce, and money lending, and the Chettiars sailed to those regions and began to form business empires there. 46 They financed agriculture and trade, as well as domestic expenses such as weddings. In order to save money and live frugally, the men stayed together in a kittangi (warehouse), with between fifteen and thirty men sharing a single common room. A hired cook prepared the meals. Ultimately, the growing independence of Southeast Asian nations brought about severe nationalization policies and a decline in the price of rice. The Land Purchase Act of 1941 in Burma forced Chettiars to sell their land for a fraction of its worth. As a result of these unfavorable policies, the Chettiars lost most of their massive investments in Burma, Indochina, and Ceylon, and returned home under considerable economic duress.
Like the Marwaris, the Chettiars set aside a part of their earnings and developed a noteworthy tradition of philanthropy and charity that had precedents in religious gifting dating back to pre-colonial times. They built rest houses and water-supply facilities for travelers, and feedinghouses to nourish the poor. As devoted Shaivites, they built new temples, especially for the worship of Murgan, and repaired old ones. These philanthropic activities were not, however, without their share of local politics. As the Chettiars' wealth grew, and their confidence in trying to claim various cultural and religious symbols of authority increased, they invested in gaining patronage and privilege in the authority structures and disputes of local temples. The result was fierce competition between the Chettiars and the dominant Maravar ruling caste for control of temples. 47
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Being at home in Chettinadu: Design of the Chettiar House Although one can reasonably claim that no two houses are alike, the basic design of a Chettinadu merchant house has a series of courtyards surrounded by rooms, with the most public of rooms at the front, followed by increasingly private rooms, with the kitchens at the very back. According to the house owners that I met during my July 2000 visit to Chettinadu, the houses had generally been constructed from back to front. The workers who constructed the houses were typically from the Asari jati community of carpenters. An outer veranda (tinnai) is at the front of most houses. It is intended as a public area and is meant for the use of distant associates and as a place for visiting travelers to sleep at night. A small clay pot storing cool water allows outsiders to use the shelter of the covered veranda as a place to rest; the granite stones absorb very little heat. Sometimes the outer veranda has rooms at either end for accountants or family members to use for conducting business.
45
Passing through a heavy, elaborately carved doorway into the interior portion of the house, one enters an inner courtyard used by family members for household chores and rituals. This major open space around which the house is organized is called the valavu. 48 The four corners of the courtyard represented the directions of the universe, letting the sun be a witness to the ceremonies held within. The open structure lets in good ventilation and light. As a symbol of hospitality, a raised seating area sits at the front end of the open space to be used by family members and their more intimate associates for leisure or business activities. Elaborate drainage along the corners of the slanted roof (koodalvaai) facilitates the collection of rainwater in brass pots on top of granite slabs, which prevent the floor tiles (athangudi) from breaking. Layered red tile that absorbs very little heat is the most common form of roofing.
Surrounding and facing into this first inner courtyard is a ring of small double rooms. Most houses have rooms on both sides but others have rooms on one side only. Each one of these double rooms is called a veedu (literally, house), belonging to each married son and his family. 49 These rooms were used for storage, religious rites, and for sleeping in relative privacy. One of the homeowners mentioned to me that each of these sets of double rooms could even have a different postal address, signifying the separateness of that family's branch. The inner sections of the double rooms on the ground floor are always windowless, for security, with the back wall of the innermost room forming the outermost wall of the house. This secure room is used to house family valuables, including puja deities, and a safe containing jewelry, gold, account books, and cash. The hosts who showed me the innermost rooms displayed a pelai, a trunk or box where the ancestor's clothing is kept and
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worshipped. A kaipetti (handbox), holding accounts, money, and important papers was also kept inside the puja room for protection.
Going even further back from the inner courtyard, one enters the rear-most courtyard, which is used as a space for cooking. This is the antapura, the women's quarters, the innermost precinct of the house. Previously, women used to enter and exit the house through the rear-most door, especially during functions when men were present. Typically, each married son and his wife would operate a separate hearth. This architectural form of dwelling is suggestive of the economic independence of each son as a "nuclear family" or pillu, within a larger joint family structure. The ancestral home was quite literally used as the business headquarters for the family. The initials binding the family members togethera common South Indian naming practicewere given to the house as well. The father, sons, and brothers took turns being away from home, and on their occasional visits home let others look after the business. Often, however, the house was inhabited only by women. The fact that the women could live safely on their own while their menfolk were away was cited to me as evidence of how the Chettiars were able to integrate themselves into the local community. The interpenetration of public and private areas of the house, enabled by the flexible and multifarious uses of inner courtyards, created a relational system of using space for business, religious, and family functions. The courtyards were a semi-public space for the use of travelers and the familial public, yet allowed for privacy and cleanliness. 50
Nowadays, however, the owners of the famed Chettiar houses rarely return, and many of the houses stand empty. Though once upon a time the houses were the focal point for family gatherings, the exodus to urban areas has changed the place of the ancestral house in Chettiar life. A few rooms in the Chettiar house will sometimes be occupied by a distant member of the family, living alone. The owners of some of the houses have rented out the rooms surrounding the outermost courtyard to unrelated families, whose rent contributes to the restoration and upkeep of the mansions. This practice may have started in the first decades of the twentieth century. Interestingly, in keeping with the original design features of the house, the outermost rooms are the ones designated as suitable for occupancy by outsiders. In order to maintain their upkeep, some of the better-preserved mansions have been featured as background sets in Tamil commercial films. "Discoveries" of the Hybrid Houses in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan c.1980-2000 The commodification of the hybrid houses into new objects of visual consumption among local and international tourists is a fascinating development, one that needs to be situated in the context of the
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contemporary types of architecture one finds in India and its diaspora today. Architecture represents a strategy of negotiating a series of modern disjunctures between new wealth and older values, and helps create various configurations of being both "home" and "away." In considering the architectural styles found among members of the urbanized commercial communities in recent times, one might imagine that similar houses could be found that articulate the styles of the "country-forts" and painted mansions. According to David Rudner, there are in fact some elaborate, Chettiar-style houses to be found as far away as Madras, Madurai, and even London. 51 Nowadays, many Chettiar mansions in Chettinadu, however, are being sold as their owners can no longer afford the upkeep.
50
In the town of Karaikudi, antique stores were crowded with furniture, dishes, lanterns, statues, doors, chairs, and other household decorations, all originally part of Chettiar households. When we stopped in at one of the many curio shops in Karaikudi, I was grateful for some time out of the sun, and lingered inside for several minutes. I had no intention of buying anything, but I was curious to see what kinds of objects were there, and we admired and fingered the arresting array of household implements once acquired by Chettiar merchants. It was not until later in the day that my research assistant, Annie, pulled me aside and quietly told me that our host was somewhat distressed about the existence of such shops and what he saw as the exploitation they practice. They harshly reminded him of the hard economic times which had fallen on the erstwhile heroes of Chettinadu, and the quite literal material and cultural losses suffered by the Chettiars.
This loss of ancestral mansions by members of the Chettiar community initially prompted D. Thiagarajan of the Madras Craft Foundation to establish an extremely creative and well-endowed hands-on museum known as Dakshina Chitra, just south of Chennai, for the preservation of domestic architecture in South India. The spacious site is divided into four large areas, superimposed over a map of South India, to display houses from the four South Indian states. Winding paths lead visitors into the preserved houses of potters, weavers, Chettinadu merchants, agriculturists, and Brahmins, as well as to an open-air restaurant selling idli and dosa. Groups of schoolchildren visit Dakshina Chitra on a regular basis, and are taught various arts and crafts by local artisans employed by the museum. There are a large number of well-preserved houses on display, and here I will restrict my discussion to one pertinent example. The reconstruction of a Chettinadu merchant house in Dakshina Chitra provides an excellent example of the evolution of the Chettiar ancestral home. Originally, these were one-story structures, but increased in height to two stories in
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the middle of the nineteenth century. The faade of the house replicates that of a merchant house from around 1850, and the Burmese teak columned veranda and main central courtyard date from 1895, and were taken from parts of a house in the village of Arykuddi. The excellent preservation work at Dakshina Chitra has done much to increase awareness about the architectural heritage of South India.
This recent revival of interest in the domestic architecture of the Chettiars and the Marwaris among museum-goers and tourists suggests, as I have said, a new moment of visual practice involving the merchant houses. I have already discussed the preservation schemes of the Madras Craft Foundation, and I again turn my attention to the Marwari haveli in Rajasthan. The Marwari painted houses are much better known on the tourist circuit than the Chettiar mansions, and here I want to discuss how the broader context of the romanticization of princely Rajasthan serves to incorporate the merchant havelis into a new socio-economic universe of cultural tourism. I explore the types of negotiation that the Marwaris pursue which simultaneously allows their houses to be seen both as "traditional"not unlike the royal homes and palacesyet makes them of special interest in themselves for their picturing of modernity and the hybrid world in which they found themselves.
For at least the last fifty years, distant relatives of the traders and/or poorlypaid caretakers and their families have occupied some haveli, and small numbers of them are increasingly rented out to middle-class families requiring housing in the vicinity. Other haveli are deserted and locked up. Upon payment of baksheesh, caretakers will show the insides of the homes to tourists. Though there is little local interest, it is rare also that diasporic Marwari families living in Calcutta and Bombay themselves ever visit their "homes." The relatively recent presence of European tourists roaming the villages of Shekhawati represents a new public for consumption of the painted Marwari haveli. Visitors wander slowly in the lanes of Shekhawati towns in order to look at and photograph the outer walls of the haveli. Local residents pass them by, puzzled and shaking their heads, and, in a significant Occidentalizing reversal of the gaze, wonder aloud why anyone should be bothered with looking at such houses.
Despite a general lack of local interest, the fact that many of the haveli are now being refurbished for tourists is an important part of the production of social memory, community, and region for the Marwaris. The international notice that the haveli have drawn reproduces the story of Marwari migration, and provides another setting for the reiteration of rags-to-riches narratives common to the newly rich in global capitalism everywhere. This relatively new consumption practice of tourists looking at the haveli taps into wellestablished practices of tourism in western India, centering around the forts and palaces of the Rajput princes, and helps construct narratives about business families as being part of the romance of Rajasthan.
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55
A considerable number of expensive, English-language art books outline and illustrate the unique, brightly-colored frescoes of Marwari dwellings. 52 The books give particular attention to images of technology and modernization. Yet despite its popularity with foreign tourists, who undoubtedly relish these curious depictions of their colonial forebears, this so-called "western-inspired" art has not been seriously addressed by art historians or architectural scholars. G. H. R. Tillotson, for instance, writes, "While the older paintings are among the finest examples of mural art in India, and the first depictions of trains have an amusing navet, the late, westernized paintings are vulgar and incompetent." 53 The "colonial language of vulgarity" 54 is ironically reversed here to make a somewhat nativist distinction between ostensibly fine local art versus styles which are tainted by western influence.
The fact that the haveli and their frescoes have so far been seen as colonially-inspired objects of curiosity, and thus not subject to the kinds of "standards" placed on "high-culture" art, brings to mind Eric Michaels' insights into the commodification of Aboriginal visual culture in late 20th century Australia. Michaels argues that forms of (post) colonial racism produce a global circulation of aboriginal art as a form of kitsch, and thus constitute practices that promote issues of authority. 55 Similarly, because the haveli paintings are often viewed as kitsch by westerners, critics, and travelers alike, the murals re-invoke a colonial discourse when they are called artistically primitive. Instead of making an aesthetic judgment about the artistic value of the painted houses, therefore, I direct my attention to the contingent sets of visual practices which attend various moments of historically-situated forms of display and viewing.
Some of the wealthiest and best-known Marwari families have made conscious attempts to turn their family haveli into public venues. In the Birla family haveli in Pilani, originally built in 1864, one part of the structure is devoted to a Birla family museum, which is formally organized and very clearly addresses a public and tourist audience. 56 The formation of such a museum derives from the imagination of colonial exhibitions, and creates narratives of accomplishments through the display of educational and honorary degrees, photographs of the family with world leaders, as well as various articles of clothing worn on special, public occasions. The Poddar haveli in Nawalgarh in 1966 was made into a secondary school, which is still in operation. In 1992, the family decided to restore the frescoes and open a museum. A promotional brochure for the museum states that almost 10,000 foreign tourists were expected to visit in 1997. 57 The
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Morarka family in Nawalgarh has recently followed suit, employing a caretaker to greet guests, charge admission, and guide visitors around the structure. Many of the haveli are in bad states of repair, either covered up with advertisements, or else simply crumbling into ruin. Though some owners are revamping old haveli, Marwari families are no longer building new ones. Other local forms of commemoration have emerged. Recent examples include shahid minars in Churu, to memorialize soldiers who were killed in Kashmir and in other wars of the late twentieth century.
But there is evidence that other community groups from Shekhawati villages have now adopted this mansion-building custom. Since at least the 1990s, Rajasthani Muslims working in the "petroleum diaspora" of the Persian Gulf have sent money back to their home villages. The construction of modern, ostentatious, and palatial family homes there has become the latest way of indicating transnationally-acquired economic and social status. Though architecturally these houses do not look like Marwari haveli, and have more in common with modern Islamic architecture, there is continuity in the idea and practice of building an ancestral home in the place one no longer inhabits. The practice of building "ancestral" houses has become a cultural pattern of the re-articulation of one's local identity, and the negotiation of the malleable links between the past and the present, as part of the process of engaging in global capitalism. This strategy has become a pattern available to other social groups when they too acquire new wealth elsewhere. Those homes belonging to Gulf-returned owners, because of their newness, are not (yet) tourist sites, although on my various visits to Shekhawati local residents always pointed them out to me as part of the continually changing architectural landscape of the region.
The promotion of haveli tourism capitalizes on the romantic, Orientalist, and princely stereotypes of Rajasthan inspired by colonial ethnographers such as Colonel Tod, who, as I noted earlier, sought to promote Rajasthan as an exotic land of deserts, forts, and ancestral mansions. Rather than take for granted this European romantic investment in Rajasthan since the time of Tod and his contemporaries, I wish to consider the visual practices that have enabled such commonplace (and usually European) forms of viewing. The imagination of Rajasthan as a place of romance has not been obvious and automatic, or, for that matter, arbitrary. It has happened through a number of very deliberate visual moves, dating back to ethnographers like Tod and periodically invoked up to modern times with the Heritage Hotel scheme.
60
As part of an effort to popularize the region among European tourists, Rajput owners of Shekhawati's royal palaces started to convert part of their royal residences into tourist accommodations. All over Rajasthan, particularly near the painted mansions, medieval palaces are being turned into heritage hotels, especially popular among French and Italian tourists, who flock there
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in large numbers, even in the hottest months of July and August. This promotion of tourism capitalizes on romantic and princely images of Rajasthan, with government and private companies offering "princely tours." The European and, increasingly, American interest in finding aristocracy in India (and other places around the globe) may be a resurfacing of early Orientalist ideas, where Europeans (like Tod) believed that the feudal regimes they observed in India were vestiges of their own past. 58
Part of the popularity of these new holiday destinations is the product of deliberate changes in the Indian government's policy on tourism. 59 In 1991, the tourism ministry started the Heritage Hotel scheme. It gives loans and tax breaks to the owners of buildings that are at least fifty years old,such as forts, castles, hunting lodges. and mansionsthat are being developed for tourism. The owners of palaces have become relatively impoverished during the last fifty years of Indian independence, because the Indian state, especially under Indira Gandhi, dramatically increased its expectations of tax revenue from the former princes. In order to hold onto their real estate, many royal families have had to turn part of their homes into tourist hotels. Whereas the royal families are now both owners and operators of palace hotels, their domestic staffs now serve a new set of high-living people expecting royal treatmentWestern tourists.
The State Government of Rajasthan has even attempted to bring schoolchildren into the heritage business, through the combined efforts of the departments of education, tourism, and archaeology. In the fall of 1999, the Tourism Secretary of Rajasthan, Lalit Pawar, announced that each school would adopt one monument of historical significance in its neighborhood, and the dharohar sena, or heritage army, composed of schoolchildren, would look after its upkeep. 60 NGOs and multinationals are also getting into the act. Both the Ford Foundation and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) have done conservation proposals and surveys of the painted heritage in Rajasthan. American Express donated $100,000 in 1997 for the restoration of a fort under its World Monuments Watch program. According to the Tourism Secretary, Mr. Bezbaruah, nearly half of foreign tourists come to India to see heritage sites. 61 Of course, it should come as no surprise that American Express, as one of the world's largest travel and tourism companies, would have a vested interest. Tourism is, after all, big business in India, attracting a couple million foreign tourists each year, and earning over a billion US dollars in foreign exchange. 62
As part of this boom in tourism, the Shekhawati area has figured prominently in the travel sections of several American and European newspapers. 63 It is estimated that about 16,000 foreign tourists visited Shekhawati in 1994. 64 The European tourists I spoke to in Shekhawati in 1996 were interested in
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the haveli because of the art value of the frescoes and murals as High Culture, which they continually compared to various European paintings at home. The idea of the haveli as a profitable marketing concept has traveled abroad, where a number of small businesses are attempting to capitalize on the semantic allure of the word. 65 In London, a mail order company called Haveli sells items "focused on the comforts of homelife." Since the late 1980s, entrepreneurs have created upscale Indian restaurants called Haveli in Atlanta, Houston, Boston, and Ottawa. One restaurant in Singapore boasts a haveli-like interior, with wall paintings and ornate doors and interior screens imported from western India.
Despite its present popularity, the development of tourism in Rajasthan was not predestined. Ramusack has described how the princes of Rajasthan encouraged hunting and nature tourism in the nineteenth century, and then promoted the popularity of aristocratic forms of tourism in the twentieth century. 66 The very fact that we might tend to see the connection between tourism, landscape, and historical mansions and ruins as obvious or natural suggests the dominance of European influence in visual practices in Rajasthan and in South Asia generally. 67 After all, the staging of these haveli as historicaland as expressing the romantic and aristocratic essence of Rajasthanappeals to certain identifiable and historically contingent tourist sensibilities. It is entirely possible that these kinds of associations were first generated in the tourist industries of Europe and the West, and that Indian sensibilities have been trained by that practice. I am therefore attempting to provide an explanation for this "obviousness" of the haveli in terms of the historical practice of the visual and visual objects in Rajasthan. Conclusions
65
An analysis of the visual practices surrounding the production of the Marwari haveli and Chettiar mansions provides a fascinating glimpse into the way in which merchant classes saw themselves as part of a new and hybrid colonial modernity. It shows how images of modernity and Vaishya religiosity were taken up in various local self-representations. The Marwari houses, in particular, could easily be viewed as a case study of the exercise of modernity, as discussed by Freitag. 68 The very deliberate assemblage of public and private in the house form is itself, after all, a modern move. The houses illustrate how merchants negotiated a series of modern disjunctures: being home and away, creating new wealth while maintaining older religious values, depicting the modern, cosmopolitan world in which they found themselves, all while emphasizing the continuity and honor of the family ancestors and lineage in the homeland. To do these things, merchants forged a visual idiom drawing upon a range of painting styles and local domestic architectural models, but made it their own by stressing bhakti devotional imagery.
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The historical context of the production of such houses comes at a specific point in the colonial experience of the merchants. The construction of spectacular merchant houses by business communities can be interpreted as a sign of the confidence the merchants had in the gradual transfer of economic and symbolic power from royal patrons to migrant capitalists who engaged in global capitalism. Each of these architectural practices, while being part of a wider cultural trend, was locally engaged with regional politics. The eventual commodification of the houses into objects of tourist interest further extends the importance of local/global relationships in the production of history and social memory.
As a chronotopic architectural form that extends time and invents history, the Marwari haveli seeks to be part of the romance of the idea of Rajasthan. I have already explored its impact for the development of tourism in the region. But what does the popularization of the haveli mean, if anything, in terms of its potential social capital for Marwaris living in Calcutta? It is true that the romance of Rajasthan as a region was strongly taken up in traditions of vernacular literature in India, especially in Bengal. Yet the prominence and romance of the martial Rajput in the Bengali imagination did not extend to their less well-liked neighbors in Calcutta, the Marwari traders. It does seem, after all, that despite all their acclaimed grandeur, the painted haveli in Rajasthan have made little difference in how the domestic culture of the Marwaris is viewed in urban locales. In Calcutta, Marwaris are (perhaps unfairly) associated with the dingy and crowded neighborhood of Burabazar, the "big market," where the new arrivals from Rajasthan traditionally lived. Partly because of economic jealousy, the living quarters in this area were the special target of colonial sanitation inquiries in the decades around the turn of the century. 69 The pervasive images of Marwaris as unsanitary and unhealthy individuals have persisted despite the fact that a large number of prominent Marwari families have left their Burabazar neighborhood. It is these colonial and later scientific images of chaos and filth that get associated with the Marwaris of Calcutta, and not the romantic imagery of the Rajasthani haveli. The quest for legitimacy that the Chettiars once sought by building ancestral mansions extends to the current reception of the large houses themselves by local dwellers in the vicinity, who find the homes too showy and ostentatious. 70
A process of mapping identity onto landmarks in a so-called ancestral homeland, especially through building ancestral houses, has been a crucial element in the self-fashioning of the public face of migrant traders. Their way of being Marwari and Chettiar within a history of emigration and mobility is one where a geographical orientation to the past became embodied in a visual performance of what they thought they owed their ancestors. Building elaborate mansions in their homelands was an attempt to institute origin through a retrospective move. Whether or not this
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mansion building as performance of locality has generated the desired effects remains an open question. The Marwari haveli are far more popular among international tourists than with local residents, and more than one critic has dismissed the artistic value of the painted mansions. To a large degree, it seems, the fateand indeed the legacyof the Marwari haveli and Chettiar mansions rests with the global tourist trade.
Notes: Note 1: Guy Dubord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1995): 24.Back. Note 2: Eliane Georges Les Petits Palais du Rajasthan (Paris: Editions du Chene, 1996): 44-46.Back. Note 3: This is my translation from Georges, Lennard, Genestar (1996). Antonio Calabria and Despina Stratigakos gave excellent suggestions in improving my translation here. Between 1860 and 1930, the time period when the Marwari and Chettiar mansion were constructed, Rajasthan was a conglomeration of Princely States. Present-day Tamil Nadu was part of the Madras Presidency until 1948, when it became known as Madras. The current political units of Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu were formed in 1948 and 1968, respectively. For details on the territorial terminology on Tamil Nadu, see chapter four in Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue.Back. Note 4: Sarah Tillotson, Indian Mansions: A Social History of the Haveli (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998).Back. Note 6: Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).Back. Note 6: Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, social power and environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Gwendowlyn Wright, "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 19001930," Journal of Modern History 59 (June 1987): 291 316.Back. Note 7: Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).Back. Note 8: J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954).Back. Note 9: See Chris Pinney's forthcoming essay in Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy, (New Delhi:
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Sage, forthcoming 2002). .Back. Note 10: In the twentiety century, the Marwaris emerged as primary financial backers of Gandhi's activities in the anti-colonial freedom struggle.Back. Note 11: Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).Back. Note 12: R. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British 1720-1801 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Back. Note 13: Peter Nabokov, "Research is a Vine by a River," Dak: The Newsletter of the American Institute of Indian Studies 4 (Autumn 2000): 9-14.Back. Note 14: Several examples come to mind. Many housewives daily decorate the floors of the entrance, the kitchen, and prayer areas of their homes, typically first sprinkling the space with water, and then drawing ornamental and auspicious designs called rangoli (in Hindi) or kolam (in Tamil). Warli tribal women in Maharashtra use rice-flour to paint family and community events inside of their huts, depicting weddings, hunts, and wars. These paintings are created primarily during weddings and festivals. See Stephen Huyler Painted Prayers: Women's Art in Village India (New York: Rizzoli, 1994) and Henry Glassie Life and Art in Bangladesh (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1977) for more examples of painting and living space in South Asia.Back. Note 15: Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas. 1992): 84-85; Christopher. Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 183..Back. Note 16: John Bender and David Wellbery, eds. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Back. Note 17: M.H. Hays, ed., Hejduk's Chronotope.(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996): 20 n.3.Back. Note 18: Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Back. Note 19: Ilan Cooper, The Painted Towns of Shekhawati (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1994).Back. Note 20: The emigration of Rajasthani traders and moneylenders to eastern India began as early as the seventeenth century during the Mughal Empire, especially of those Oswal Jains associated with the famous banking concern of Jagat Seth in Bengal. These early networks of traders provided the infrastructure that enabled the foundation of British trade networks concentrated in the port cities of Calcutta and Bombay.Back. Note 21: Barbara Ramusack, "The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace Museums, and Palace on Wheels" in C. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of
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Minnesota Press, 1995): 66-89. . The Hindi translation of a Bengali text, Bangal Mein Rajasthan (Rajasthan in Bengal) is part of a large corpus of literature attesting to the popularity of Tod in local retellings and in the Indian and Bengali imagination of Rajasthan.Back. Note 22: P. Rakesh and K. Lewis, Shekhawati: Rajasthan's Painted Homes (Delhi: Lustre, 1995).Back. Note 23: Gianni Guadalupi, "Painted Cities, frescoes from Shekhawati," FMR: The magazine of Franco Maria Ricci (Dec 98/Jan 99): 107-121. .Back. Note 24: Stephen Blake, Shahjahanabad: the Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Back. Note 25: F. Wacziarg and A. Nath, Rajasthan: The Painted Walls of Shekhawati (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982); Rakesh and Lewis, 1995; Cooper, 1994.Back. Note 26: G.H.R. Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 200-201.Back. Note 27: V.P. Pramar, Haveli: Wooden Houses and Mansions of Gujarat (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1989). .Back. Note 28: A. Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1987), .Back. Note 29: Wacziarg and Nath, 1982Back. Note 30: Cooper, 1994; Wacziarg and Nath, 1982. Back. Note 31: How this process may have travelled from Italywhether by Mughal conquest, foreign missionaries during Mughal rule, or by traders representing the Chola-Nayak dynasties of South Indiaremains uncertain (Wacziarg and Nath, 1982, 25).Back. Note 32: Wacziarg and Nath, 1982. Back. Note 33: Pinney, 1997.Back. Note 34: Wacziarg and Nath, 1982, 31. Back. Note 35: I thank Sandria Freitag for this point.Back. Note 36: Rakesh and Lewis, 1995.Back. Note 37: Sarah Tillotson, 1998. Back. Note 38: Despite the fact that the haveli are rarely inhabited, the continuing Orientalist associations of the haveli with an 'exotic' Eastern lifestyle, emphasizing the seclusion of women, has prompted the recent publication of novels which promise to depict the secrets of family life within the seclusion of
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the painted walls. A number of novels make use of the Rajput haveli as a livedin space, neither preserved but empty nor or in ruins. Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli tells the author's autobiographical story of how as a new bride a sophisticated and educated young woman from Bombayshe finds herself coming to terms with the rigid social expectations that attend everyday life in her husband's family haveli. In Mehta's feminist account, mirroring her own slow acceptance of the customs of her husband's traditional household, the haveli becomes transformed from an object of patriarchal tyranny to a place of tradition, protection, and continuity. Rama Mehta, Inside the Haveli (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977. For reviews see The Independent (London), 29 May 29 1994; Financial Times (London), 13 August 1994.) Suzanne Staples' book, entitled simply Haveli, takes place in desert Pakistan and is a tale aimed at teenage readers. It infuses romanticism, Orientalism, and intrigue into the trials and tribulations of a nineteen-year old 'junior wife' living in the mansion of her powerful husband's family. Both of these novels arguably extend, for a modern, international and tourist public, the Orientalist romanticization of the haveli. Suzanne Staples, Haveli (NY: Random House Children's Publishers, 1995).Back. Note 39: Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press,1909): 258.Back. Note 40: Nilkan Perumal, Chettinad (Coimbatore: Popular Hindusthan, 1955), 26.Back. Note 41: Perumal, Chettinad, 23.Back. Note 42: Ibid., 22-23.Back. Note 43: Environmental rationales are sometimes invoked to explain the Chettiars' success in business. It is claimed by some of the hagiographers of the Chettiars that because the dry and sandy soils of Chettinadu are not conducive to agriculture, the environment encouraged the community to trade instead of farming (Perumal, Chettinad, 17).Back. Note 44: There was no question of the cultural impact of the Chettiars on the region; the local Tamil dialect was known as Chettiar basha and had a special pronunciation.Back. Note 45: S. Chandrasekhar, The Nagarathars of South India (Madras: Macmillan, 1980); R. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Back. Note 46: D.W. Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 5355. The wellknown Indians Overseas Bank found in most major cities in India is a legacy of the Chettiars' success in foreign places.Back. Note 47: Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 370-374.Back. Note 48:
Valavu can have many meanings, including house, household

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premises, and a cluster of "houses" inside a compound with one entry.Back. Note 49: D. Thiagarajan "The Chettinad House" in From Village to Centre: The Structures of DakshinaChitra (Chennai: Madras Craft Foundation, 1999).Back. Note 50: K. N. Chaudhuri notes that the arrangement of rooms around a central space has been a basic design of urban domestic housing in a cultural area ranging from the Middle East to India. Historians such as Chaudhuri have argued that in courtyard houses in the Indo-Islamic architectural tradition, women and children were not confined, although some have noted that custom dictated the use of those houses as public spaces. The courtyard design allows for domestic privacy and interior ventilation, yet also protects the interior from dirt, dust, and noise pollution from unpaved streets K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 199-200.Back. Note 51: Personal communication.Back. Note 52: I. Cooper, Painted Towns of Shekwawati (1994) is one of many examples. Back. Note 53: G.H.R. Tillotson, Tradition of Indian Architecture (New Delhi: Oxford, 1989): 22.Back. Note 54: P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) .Back. Note 55: Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).Back. Note 56: There is some debate about the age of the Birla haveli, since Shivnarain Birla migrated to Pilani in 1858, only giving him six years to amass such wealth. Kudaisya has argued that the Birla haveli has probably had extensive remodeling done on an original structure. The Public Career of G. D. Birla 1911-1947. PhD Diss, Cambridge University, 1992): 26 n.37.Back. Note 57: Poddar's Social Commitmentbrochure, Nawalgarh, n.d.Back. Note 58: Thomas R. Trautmann's The Aryans and British India, contains an excellent discussion of these issues. Back. Note 59: The Daily Telegraph 29 July 1995.Back. Note 60: The Hindu, 28 September 1999.Back. Note 61: Business Line, 19 July 1997.Back. Note 62: Xinhua General Overseas News Service, 24 September 1993.Back. Note 63: C.W. Dugger, "Painted Mansions of Shekhawati," The New York Times, TR 11, 26. November 22, 1998. Back.
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Note 64: South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 25 August 1995, 20.Back. Note 65: I am grateful to Sumathi Ramaswamy for this point.Back. Note 66: Ramusack, 1995. Back. Note 67: Discussions of the heritage industry of Britain are an obvious point of comparison here.Back. Note 68: Sandria Freitag, in Beyond Appearances, ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy. (New Delhi: Sage, forthcoming, 2002).Back. Note 69: See Patrick Geddes (1919) and Report of the Commission to Enquire into Certain Matters Connected with the Sanitation of the Town of Calcutta (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885) IOL V/26/840/8.Back. Note 70: Anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel wrote that the house that he rented during his 1970s fieldwork in Kalappur, built by a rich absentee Malaysian owner, was considered by the local inhabitants to be a showy "status symbol" and as such inauspicious and "highly vulnerable to the evil eye" (Daniel Fluid Signs,: 132133). Elsewhere Daniel discusses the compatibility of the house-person relationship in Tamil culture (105162).Back.
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4. Marwaris and Moral Economies: From Rain to Ghee

1
From 1895 to 1900, the fear that rain gambling might be outlawed caused a minor sensation in Calcutta society. After all, it had become an immensely popular and profitable pastime in local trading circles. Rain gambling was introduced to Calcutta public life by the Marwaris sometime in the nineteenth century, either by the 1820s (as Marwaris claimed) or by the 1870s (as the colonial government claimed). Rain gambling was confined to Cotton Street in the heart of Burabazar in northern Calcutta. Until 1882, bets were placed at small stalls lining the street, which caused considerable congestion, so one leading Marwari opened up the courtyard at Number 67 to the trade. Though two other sites were also opened up for rain gambling, No. 67 remained the most popular location. 1 On one of my trips to Burabazar I walked along Cotton Street and found the original courtyard at No. 67, now somewhat dilapidated, but still intact. As I excitedly looked around the large and empty courtyard, a few passersby came to see what I was doing. I explained to one man that Marwaris had used the space a hundred years ago to register bets on the rainfall, but that it was now illegal. He told me, in a whisper, that rain gambling still goes on in Calcutta, now conducted discreetly over the telephone.
The basics of rain gambling at the turn of the century were as follows. Bets on the rainfall were registered during three periods during the day, from 5 A.M. to 9 A.M or noon; from noon to 9 P.M., and sometimes until midnight. 2 During the rain gambling season, corresponding with the monsoon rains, the courtyard at No. 67 Cotton Street was full of dozens of people all negotiating with the Marwari-financed brokers who handled bets on how much rain would fall during a certain period of time and when. The brokers at each stall yelled out, Khayaga, Khayaga? (literally meaning, "Will you eat?") Puchis men khayaga? ("Will you eat at twenty-five?"). When the customer was satisfied with his bet, he would call out, khaya, khaya ("I have eaten"). The broker only managed the placing of bets, and the Marwari financier was personally responsible for paying them off if the bet were won. The person financially guaranteeing the operation and responsible for paying off the bets, again through the broker, was generally a Marwari trader who operated on a system of credit offered by the broker. 3
During the later years of British colonial rule in India, starting from the late 1890s, new colonial regulations governing money and commodity exchange developed an added moral edge that contributed to a negative public image for gambling, to which Marwaris were compelled to respond politically as a community. Though other social groups also engaged in the same practices, colonial reports singled out the Marwaris as the primary culprits associated with such activities. The debates over regulation of gambling and financial
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and commodity speculation were crucial to the emergence of the Marwari community as a visible actor in colonial public life. The issue of rain gambling, in particular, provided one of the first occasions in which Marwaris gathered as a sort of voluntary association in public life and began to chart out an interstitial, institutional space between the Marwari community and the colonial state.
The antigambling and antiadulteration legislation that the colonial state enacted in the early twentieth century put forward demands that the Marwaris would have never faced in the precolonial days: that both the flow of capital and the inner substance of commodities must be made visible. The visibility requirement was in fact central to new regimes of economic regulation enacted by the colonial state. Significantly, the contests between the government and the Marwaris over legislation concerning gambling, speculation, and commodity adulteration proved to be a rallying point for the emergence of Marwari political solidarity. The debate over rain gambling in particular prompted those Marwaris who engaged in speculative networks to create forums for adopting the language of democratic society and public culture.
5
Despite the immense popularity of gambling and speculation as Marwari pastimes, these activities are seldom acknowledged in Marwari narratives of self-description, such as business, caste, and family histories. People I interviewed spoke generally about the prevalence of speculation but were reluctant to speak about specifics, particularly regarding their own families. Biographical materials on various Marwari families also do not acknowledge, at least openly, that fortunes were built from gambling and speculation. In fact, family history accounts often attempt to boast that the family's wealth did not arise from speculation. Many biographical sketches describe the virtue of the man who avoided speculation. The biographer of merchant Seth Ramniranjan, for instance, wrote: "One most remarkable fact about the business of the family is that neither Seth Ramniranjandasji nor his ancestors ever went into any speculative business. Whatever wealth they earned they earned from unspeculative sound business, untiring zeal and exertion, business foresight, knack and tact." 4 The very mention of the family having engaged only in "sound" business may actually express anxiety about its having been associated with speculation. The practice prompted debates among reformers who argued that speculation was an anti-national menace. Speculation, it was claimed, did not promote any kind of real national economic development, but was pursued out of a selfish interest in money and material gain. 5
The profitability of such transregional activities derived in part from a tradition and infrastructure of speculative practices in Rajasthan, especially in Shekhawati, that was maintained through intricate and sophisticated channels of cross-country communication from Rajasthan to Assam. Timberg
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writes:
Why the Shekhavati migrants showed such aptitude for these markets is not clear. The Shekhavati region had a speculative tradition. As noted by a British visitor in the 1870s their home areas of Shekhavati and Bikaner had vigorous speculative markets... The fact that their fellows were already doing a considerable ready opium business in the Malwa area, made the futures operation a natural extension for Marwaris. It was one also for which they had superior access to commercial intelligence. The sophistication of their banking system and system of accounting also provided the possibility for coordinated speculation. 6
The communication networks between the Marwari speculators relied on both old and new technologies, in which the telegraph played a prominent part. 7 In 1872 the English had set up post offices in eastern Rajasthan, but only Jaipur and Ajmer had telegraph service. Calcutta Marwari merchants wired the current rates for opium to Jaipur. Agents in Jaipur used a system of mirrors to flash the rates from hilltop to hilltop; from the final hill outside of Jhunjhunu a runner would come to the city and inform the merchants of the rates. At night, if information needed to be supplied, gunpowder explosions were deployed along the same route. By 1896 the telegraph had come to Churu and Sikar, and later to Fatehpur and Sardarshahar, 8 and the transregional speculation networks worked very well and very profitably for several decades.
Speculation on the opium, gold, and silver markets was so important, in fact, that Bhimsen Kedia wrote in 1949 that, "speculation and agency system is the chief root of the accumulation of [Marwari] wealth." 9 Sir Sarupchand Hukumchand, for instance, was a noteworthy opium speculator who conducted five million rupees worth of business on the day he opened his Calcutta office in 1915, and by the end of the year he was worth ten million. 10 This transregional economy of speculation and gambling, centered in Calcutta, was done on a national scale and a monthly basis. The Marwari "fathers" of satta (commodity figure gambling) were described by the colonial government as "keen men of business with an intimate knowledge of trade and market fluctuations. They introduced monthly figure gambling on the price of opium and appealed to a clientele of business men: both bookmakers and backers watched the market and laid their money with discrimination." 11 Widespread Marwari speculation on the exchanges helped raise the price of opium, in particular, to levels that were highly profitable to the colonial state.
10
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Concurrent with this speculation that produced profit not only for Marwaris but for other groups of people as well were metropolitan discourses about the immorality of gambling. The colonial state used these critiques to its advantage in outlawing some practices. The presence of plural cultural logics gave these activities an ambiguity that had to be negotiated with regard to the colonial state's efforts to moralize and control. The social life of commodities and business practicesthe changing meanings assigned to gambling, speculation, and commodity flowsalso enabled a politics of colonial difference. 12 This set of negotiations contributed to the rise of "Marwari" as a viable identity tag in public life. Gambling Laws as a Question of Class in European Contexts English law has a long history of legislating against gambling, going back at least as early as 1388, when Richard II commanded his subjects to stop gambling on dice and other games. 13 At the end of the nineteenth century, gambling posed a difficult legal challenge to both the metropolitan and colonial states. Historians of gambling have discussed how, for the British, the practice of gambling threatened the high moral ground associated with hard work, thrift, and self-denial, which was epitomized by writers such as Samuel Smiles in his 1859 treatise, Self Help. 14
The first difficulty the British state faced in regulating gambling was in establishing what aspect of gambling itself was the problem, in addition to decrying the more obvious and despised secondary effects of bankruptcy, delinquency, and overall moral decline. As W. Douglass Mackenzie noted in a short book on the subject in 1896, even the Calcutta Diocesan Conference was reported to have spent an entire day "trying to discover what was wrong about gambling, but did not succeed. They carried a resolution, however, declaring it to be the duty of all to discountenance betting." 15 To address this puzzle, Mackenzie relied on the words of Herbert Spencer, who claimed that the essential immorality of gambling lay in the fact that pleasure is obtained at the cost of pain to another: it is antisocial, with no effort made to further the general good. 16 Gambling was generally perceived as a threat to both state and religion. It was viewed as an activity that depended on the vagaries of chance, and was thereby outside of both rational human action and the workings of Divine Providence.
In response to these moral anxieties, the English state found a fascinating way of managing the problem of gambling, while at the same time making certain gambling practices more visible to the disciplinary gaze of state jurisdiction. The state, in effect, managed to justify allowing upper-class gambling while outlawing working-class gambling. Legislation translated class prejudice into a supposedly objective judgment on the skills of the person in the economic transaction. Sir Earnest Cassel, a private banker to Edward VII, captured this sentiment well by noting that, "When I was
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young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time." 17
The politics of class were paramount in metropolitan logics about gambling, and were a vulnerable point for counter-discourses. "To live is to gamble," wrote Romain in his 1891 treatise on gambling, which labeled government intervention in gambling as a form of "legislative exorcism" whose ultimate effect would be to divide English society into economic classes under the guise of repressing a social evil. 18 Perceptions of gambling depended heavily on who was playing the game. Defining the limits of bourgeois gambling became a necessary step in articulating legally sanctioned notions of class difference.
In England, the process of creating legal distinctions about gambling especially regarding betting on football (ie soccer) became important in the development and spread of gambling as a popular activity among the working classes. 19 Sustaining certain elite practices of gambling in public life depended on their supposedly requiring skill, as opposed to the pure luck of the working-man's folly. Skill, after all, in the case of horse-racing implies a gentlemanly act of intelligence and masculinity. Mackenzie wrote in 1896 that betting on horse races required knowledge of the horses and skill in calculating probabilities. He argued that this represented a "trained ability," akin to that of a carpenter or a novelist, for which a person could legitimately be paid. 20 The recuperation of gambling on horse racing as the preserve of an emergent elite received its moral, legal, and even gendered substantiation because of the skill involved on the part of the gambler. Horse-racing as such was rooted in pre-bourgeois values of masculinity. 21 Thus this interpretation of bourgeois gambling as a skilled performance of masculinity changed horse racing into something honorable, that threatened neither the Protestant work ethic nor the class structure of the emerging social order.
As we shall see, the debate over the morality of gambling in both metropolitan and colonial contexts ranged from arguments for implementing morality through legislation on one side to expressions of the historical universality of gambling on the other. The problem of defining gambling and gambling practices was as contentious in the American colonies as it was in Europe. In eighteenth-century Virginia, to cite a North American colonial example, cockfights were seen as a threat to the solidity of class distinctions, but gradually became more popular among the planters as the landed gentry gained confidence in their social position. 22 Gambling in the British Colonies
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The study of gambling in non-settler colonial societies remains a far less explored area than gambling in European, colonial America, and modern American contexts, such as Las Vegas. 23 Clifford Geertz's groundbreaking essay on the symbolic meanings of cockfighting in Indonesia stands as an excellent example of how gambling play mirrors the structure of social relations. 24 For South Asia, the scholarly literature on the topic of gambling is surprisingly underdeveloped, considering the importance and longevity of gambling as a subcontinental practice dating to ancient times. The imagination of gambling is a vital part of a multiplicity of South Asian lifeworlds. The well-known dice-game scene in the Mahabharata, when Yudhisthira loses his entire fortune and forces the five Pandava brothers and the princess Draupadi into exile, is a case in point. 25
Commenting on gambling practices under colonial rule, John Rogers argues that in Sri Lanka local practices of gambling constituted resistance to the moral imperatives of colonial rule. Gambling, Rogers argues, constituted lower-class attempts to resist the dominant ideology adopted by the state and local elites that intended to reform, improve, and "make respectable" the cultural habits of Sri Lankan people. Rogers notes that gambling was not a form of resistance in itself but became so when the colonial government and Sinhala elite formed a discourse that de-legitimized it as a social practice. 26 Acknowledging the cultural evidence, which shows that the origins of gambling far predate colonial forms of sociality, discipline, and restraint, Rogers indicates that in the Victorian context gambling carried with it peculiar immoral qualities of vice and lack of discipline. Gambling, after all, goes precisely against the moral imperative of "hard work" associated with the Protestant ethic. 27
The other major study of gambling in South Asia is an anthropological monograph by Ellen Oxfeld on the Hakka Chinese community of Calcutta. 28 Calcutta Chinese Hakka gambling, according to Oxfeld, can be interpreted as an important part of social life, associated with weddings, birthdays, and other family gatherings, and generally practiced in sexually segregated settings. Oxfeld contends that the element of risk and chance inherent to all gambling would at first glance seem to go against the Hakka entrepreneur's ideal qualities, which include frugality, hard work, and painstaking planning. 29 Yet, as Oxfeld argues, those Hakka who themselves control gambling operations can actually profit greatly from such ventures, so that gambling itself can be seen as an entrepreneurial venture. 30 Oxfeld's account demonstrates that in some cases gambling can be a highly rationalized form of profit making, and not necessarily contrary to entrepreneurial ethics.
20
For Marwaris, it would be wholly incorrect to say that gambling and

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commodity speculation necessarily constituted resistance to colonial rule, as Rogers' work on Sri Lanka suggests. My evidence shows that the British actually encouraged certain forms of gambling and speculation, often on commodities such as food, opium, and cloth, despite the appearance of an antigambling colonial discourse that was widely propagated in the case of rain gambling. The lack of governmental interference in Marwari opium speculation, for example, makes much more sense when we understand that the British colonial government actually stood to gain substantial tax revenue from this and certain other forms of Indian gambling. English civilization itself was blamed for the arrival of the vice of gambling in India. It was illegal to lose a rupee on cotton gambling, but not illegal for "a person to lose lakhs of rupees every Saturday at the Kidderpore and Barrackpore race-courses and become a beggar!" 31 Many families in Bengal had reputedly been ruined by horse-race gambling, and blame was placed on the governors and viceroys, who set negative examples and encouraged Indian gambling by taking part in it themselves. 32
M. K. Gandhi wrote about the evils of horse race betting in his magazines Harijan and Young India. Gandhi hoped to draw attention to how blind elite Indians were to the negative effects of the practice, and the harm that gambling could inflict upon a young and emergent nation. He argued scathingly that the British stood to profit from the introduction of such vices into Indian public life. 33 Gandhi's colleague Badrul Hassan, who served as the editor of Young India, wrote about how the colonial government's policy on alcohol and opium actually served to increase local consumption. He argued, citing statistical data, that the revenue gained from excise taxes on domestic-bound products (both alcohol and opium) and from the imports of opium into the treaty ports of China formed a significant portion of the profit reaped from colonial rule. 34
The colonial economics of gambling, and in particular the ways that the state served to profit, ultimately overshadowed competing moral narratives calling for its elimination. But the management of those moral discourses was a problem that the British needed to address, especially in the heightened politics of colonial laws of inclusion and exclusion. The Politics of Antigambling Legislation in British India Antigambling legislation in British India initially took effect only in the three major cities of the colonial presidencies (Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras) after 1856. Subsequent pieces of legislation expanded the geographical jurisdiction of the law to outlaw gambling within ten miles of any railway station house in the mofussil (country stations and districts). But the major problem the British faced in such legislation was crafting a legal definition of gambling. Bill No. 2 of 1887, for example, defined a "common gaming house" as a house, room, or any place where "instruments of gambling" such
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as dice or cards were kept and used by the owner or occupier of the room for profit or gain.
This law had a search and seizure clause that empowered the police to enter and search at any time premises suspected of being used for gambling purposes, and to take into custody any person found there, any instruments of gambling, and any money or security used for gambling. As one might expect, the liberties given to the police became a sore point in Indian discussions. Even more contentious than increased police powers was the exception granted to English practices of horse-track betting from antigambling legislation. Following the same logic used in Britain, the final clause of the 1887 act declared that games of "mere skill" were to be exempt from the law, thereby creating a legal loophole for the English pastime of horse race betting to continue without laws threatening its existence. The distinction was not completely about class. Even though working-class and elite Indians alike could also bet on horses, the Turf Club still profited from such authorized bets.
25
In the discussion of colonial antigambling legislation, Marwaris were specifically singled out as culprits requiring special enforcement, because their habits of gambling were so entrenched that they would probably continue even after the bill was passed. As one official noted, "If Marwaris like to go on betting which of two kites will fly the higher, or which of two drops of rain will first fall from the eaves of a house, Government cannot stop them. But ... we ought to have power to put down organised gambling establishments of this kind, which must exercise a most demoralising influence on the people." 35 Little did this official realize that Marwari gambling on the rain was to become a sweeping issue that would have serious ramifications for commodities speculation and that would ultimately incite communal violence between social groups. Rain Gambling in Bombay Marwari practices of "rain gambling" came to the attention of the Bombay Legislative Council several years after the passage of the general AntiGambling Act of 1886, when a group of Bombay Marwari rain gamblers took their case to the High Court. Narottamdas Motiram and Hemraj Khimji were accused of running a shed as a common gaming house. Their large shed, the court claimed, was allegedly subdivided into thirty-one stalls, each of which was used by a subletter to register wagers on the rainfall, and of course to collect a commission on every bet placed. The existence of certain devices recovered during a police search was given as evidence of their guilt. These devices included the so-called "Calcutta mori" rain gauge (mori means "drain"). The term "Calcutta mori" suggests the panNorth Indian character of the practice, and may allude to its site of origin.
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Fortunately for Motiram and Khimji, the court ruled that gambling on the rainfall did not fall under the scope of the 1886 Act. Rain gambling, the defense had argued, operated on the principles of betting (which was legal), not gambling (which was illegal). The precedent used in the case was the 1889 Bombay High Court case of Queen-Empress vs. Narottum Das Matiram, which held that rain gambling was a form of betting and not a form of gambling. In short, the distinction held that gambling required persons to take an active role, whereas betting did not. If it were to be classified as actual illegal "gambling," the so-called rain gambling required a contest and active participation, which could not be proved in persons merely watching the rain fall. Rain gambling was defined as a monsoon event, when bets were placed on the amount of rain that would fall within a three-hour period, a period of time known in Hindi as pahar. In order to calculate the precise amount of rain that had fallen, a tank was fitted with a spout from which the rainwater would overflow once a certain amount had fallen. 36 Rain gambling, the defense argued, was really just a form of betting on a contingent event, without any kind of contest acted out between two persons. The defense argued that it was simply not possible for anyone to take an active role in the event, since rain gambling involved placing a bet, and then just watching and waiting to see if, when, and how much it would rain. Even though laws had already been passed in England that outlawed wagers, bets, and gaming houses, similar laws had not been passed in India. This was partly because traditional Hindu law had permitted such wagers. 37
Because of the precedent established by this court case, existing antigambling law could not include rain gambling in its scope. A new act was then proposed that would specifically target rain gambling in Bombay. Rain gambling, known in Hindi as barsat ka satta, was said to have a demoralizing effect by attracting gamblers from the rural mofussil and other "disorderly" persons, encouraging them to idleness, and inevitably leading to "dissipation ... and the ruin of families." 38 In order to amend the earlier gambling act, the proposed legislation included wagering as an illegal gambling activity. It also outlawed instruments used as a means of gambling, even if they were only watched (as in the case of rain) and not played or tampered with by any of the contenders. Again, the question of skill arose. Unlike horse-race betting, which was protected under law by Act VII of 1867, rain gamblingalong with opium betting (aphin ka satta ) and cotton betting (kapus ka satta)was not perceived by the British to require any skill or other efforts that could justify its equation with betting on horses.
There was an urgency to passing the legislation prohibiting rain gambling before the start of the monsoon in June, when rain gambling flourished. The object of the rain gambling bill, officially called the Bombay Gambling Bill Act I of 1890, was posed in moral terms. The act proclaimed that rain gambling had caused "incalculable harm" and had a "demoralizing effect" on
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the youth of Bombay. 39 However, the legislation cautiously noted that the passage of general legislation would jeopardize the forms of gambling that the British public enjoyed. Determining the moral boundaries between proper and improper gambling was therefore foremost in colonial discussions of antigambling legislation. This was especially tricky in a colonial situation where legal distinctions between native subject and foreign ruler were rife with tension. Clearly, this legislation engaged notions of colonial difference: Why was gambling detrimental for Indians and not British?
30
One of the official reasons for banning rain gambling in Bombay was that the practice had reputedly spread to other communities. It was claimed that, although Marwaris had introduced the game to Calcutta seventy to eighty years before, it had remained internal to the community until the late nineteenth century. 40 The fear that rain gambling networks would now lure non-Marwaris, even poor Europeans, became a sufficient reason to attempt to put it out completely. Debates over the Morality of Rain Gambling in Calcutta Surprisingly enough, despite the passage of anti-rain gambling legislation in Bombay, the original initiative to ban rain gambling in Calcutta came from two angry Marwari businessmen, and not, as we might expect, from either the colonial state or foreign missionary groups. But, as we shall see, it was the moral position of the colonial state vis--vis rain gambling that allowed them to act in this fashion. These two "recent arrivals," identified as Marwaris, were denied permission by other Marwaris to rent space to open a rain gambling shop. As a result of this rejection, the two men started a public agitation against rain gambling. The two recent arrivals contacted newspapers and informed other "public men" of the dangers of rain gambling, eventually submitting to the government a formal memorial outlining the reasons rain gambling was a wicked act and deserved to be banned.
The submission of the memorial elicited considerable commentary from both British and Indian sources. 41 The supposedly vengeful recent arrivals who initiated the campaign against rain gambling were not hailed as heroes, but were instead ridiculed by the English press. The anti-rain gambling bill was cited as a rare piece of legislation that was initiated "not by the restless and interfering European, but by the ease-loving and innovation-hating native of the country. ... Only circumstances of a very extraordinary character ... could have made such ardent reformers in the matter of rain gambling of a class who can not be persuaded to keep their own streets clean." 42 The unsanitary conditions of the Burabazar were held as general evidence of the Marwaris' lack of ability for self-improvement and self-reform. The arguments made against rain gambling in the subsequent Bengal Legislative Council discussion included some devastating cultural critiques of the
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Marwari community. According to the government's logic, if the recent arrivals were so motivated as to bring reform into this aspect of their own community life, then the social and economic problems brought about by gambling must have been very damaging indeed.
As in the previous gambling acts, the new legislation held that the presence of any instruments of gambling constituted proof of rain gambling. The police would therefore be authorized to raid any premises to search for dice, cards, or other implements of gambling, thereby opening up numerous possibilities for police harassment of Marwaris. Some Marwaris complained that the police would scarcely be able to prove that cards found on the business or residential premises of Marwaris were used for gambling and not some other purpose. The provisions of the law, which permitted ruthless enforcement on the part of the colonial police, signaled the beginnings of mistrust and the breakdown of British-Marwari relations, a process that was to gradually intensify up until independence. Community as a Political Actor: Uniting to Defend Rain Gambling The passage of anti-rain gambling legislation in Calcutta did not go unnoticed by Marwari merchants. On the evening of March 25, 1897, a large group of Marwari merchants gathered in what newspapers described as a "monster protest meeting" at the Dalhousie Institute, a well-known Calcutta social club. The purpose of this unusual meeting was to protest the rain gambling bill under consideration by the Bengal Council. The Indian Daily News of March 26, 1897, noted that the overwhelming attendance at the meeting, the massive size of which precluded latecomers from finding a seat, suggested the strength of the "bitter antagonism" found among Marwaris over legislation banning rain gambling. 43 One newspaper account described the Dalhousie Institute as having been "besieged with the Marwaree element from Burra Bazaar." 44
35
The meeting was held in order to organize a protest to the colonial government claiming that the contents of the memorial against rain gambling did not reflect the sentiments of the Marwari community as a whole. The Marwari meeting at the Dalhousie Institute marked an instance of community formation, political participation, and public identity among the Marwaris in Calcutta. But ironically, the community was formed out of a moment of crisis, an act of betrayal against itself. The press mused as to why a memorial against rain gambling would come from within the community, going against a presumed cohesion. Most Marwaris, it was claimed, felt that they were entitled to a form of gambling so culturally specific to them. To explain this paradox, one report claimed that the Marwari merchants who submitted the memorial did so under threat from some badmash (crooks). 45
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The professed goal of this meeting was to provide the government with the views of the managers and heads of important business firms on the subject of rain gambling and its falsely presumed threats to social peace. Leading merchants, shroffs (traditional bankers), bankers, tradesmen, and heads of firms attended the function. The structure of the meeting was quite remarkable in that this occasion marked the first documentable Marwari meeting that conformed to the customary standards of political participation in colonial civil society: the choice of language, the format of speeches, the use of parliamentary procedure. Most unusually, the meeting was conducted in English, a language that would have been quite foreign to most of the members present. Some adjustments were made to accommodate many merchants who did not speak English. Speeches were written for the presiding officers and read out loud by "native gentlemen" who had volunteered for the task. The propositions were translated into Hindi and explained to the entire group before being formally put to the floor.
Babu Hukmee Chand Chowdhury of the Hukmee Chand Sagurmul firm presided over the meeting. An English speech was read out on his behalf, detailing the actions of the two recent arrivals that led up to the Marwari community's gathering in the club that evening. According to Babu Hukmee Chand Chowdhury's speech, the two "recent arrivals" contacted newspapers and informed other "public men" of the dangers of rain gambling, managing to pull together a formal memorial addressed to the government that outlined the reasons rain gambling should be banned immediately. Chowdhury's resolution implored the government to discuss the matter thoroughly and not to pass legislation against rain gambling in a hurried fashion.
The memorial was purportedly introduced into the Bengal Legislative Council at a particularly crucial season, and also when its main opponents were out of government. The retirement and departure of Sir Charles Elliot, combined with the timely absence of the liberal Mr. H. J. S. Cotton in Assam, provided a window of opportunity for the bill to be easily passed at a critical moment before the beginning of the summer recess and, of course, the summer rains. Marwaris appealed to the long history of rain gambling as a way of justifying its legal existence for at least one more rainy season. One pro-rain gambling newspaper report mused that society would hardly be "turned topsy-turvy" if a seventy-five-year-old tradition of rain gambling were allowed to last a few months more. 46 A more leisurely discussion of the issues, argued opponents to the memorial, ostensibly to allow the legislature to exercise its best judgment in the matter, would also mean the passing of the seasons into monsoon rains and the resumption of one more season of intense rain gambling activity.
Babu Sewpersad Garulia of the firm of Sonee Ram Jutmall moved a resolution at the "monster protest meeting" that pointed out the hypocrisy
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of the Council's passage of what was effectively "class" legislation outlawing one community's form of gambling without disturbing gambling in the European community. Garulia contended that the legislation only served to give the police an excuse to harass the Marwaris, while other forms of gambling were actually much more dangerous to society. Garulia asked, " Why then should they have singled out one form of gambling to the exclusion of another? Thousands were ruined every year on account of their indulgences in stocks and share speculations, but who had ever heard that a person was ruined by rain gambling?" 47 The hypocrisy of European exclusionary practices in allowing some forms of gambling and speculation but not others was not lost on the Marwari merchants.
40
At the end of the meeting, a final proposal was moved by Babu Sligoam Lokhani that the Marwari community should no longer speculate on government opium sales. 48 This threat, albeit implying some financial loss for the Marwaris, would indicate to the colonial government the community's strong disapproval of the passage of the anti-rain gambling legislation. A one-day boycott of opium speculation would seem to be a very small sacrifice on the part of the community to protest the abolition of a gambling practice of great enough importance to warrant a large protest meeting. Yet the assumption that even one day's lost opium speculation revenue would create enough pressure that the Bengal Legislative Council might reconsider their position on the ruling shows how much, at least in the eyes of these Marwaris, the colonial government depended on their speculation for revenue.
The protest meeting had little impact on reversing the passage of legislation against rain gambling. In a statement from the Government of Bengal, dated April 16, 1897, the lieutenant governor claimed that the bill had the approval of the "most influential" Marwaris, as well as Indians generally. Lt. A. Mackenzie contended that the legislation did not seek to enforce any sort of "morality" on practitioners of rain gambling. Rather, the reasons for the suppression of rain gambling were a result of the need to preserve law and order, the "public convenience." 49 In fact, one main objection to the passage of the rain gambling act was that it was perceived that only antigambling organizations had been consulted by the colonial government as they gauged public opinion leading up to discussions of the bill. Only one member of the Bengal Legislative Council, Mr. Hill, had a dissenting opinion. He contended that rain gambling in Burabazar did not create a law-andorder problem. Nor were there any clear indications, he contended, that ruin from rain gambling necessarily led to suicidea concern that had been repeatedly cited as a reason to ban native gambling. Despite the official ban on native gambling, the Indian press reported active gambling dens and police tolerance. Interested observers noted the hypocrisy of the failure to enforce antigambling laws. These reports claimed that "rowdyism" would probably stop if the gambling dens were shut down. 50
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Ultimately, the rain gambling act was passed. The lieutenant governor was reputed to have dashed off to a hill station as soon as the bill was signed into law. Though special European constables were stationed in the council chamber, in the event of any Marwari retaliation, such fears were unfounded. 51 Some officials found the legislation too lenient, and protested that the bill was essentially a dead letter in that it did not regulate rain gambling in private residences. Yet in their reports on the practical effects of the act in the years immediately following its passage, government officials declared that the measure was a great success. Reports that grain brokers and other dealers were being ruined by rain gambling were said to have declined. 52 But the legislation had opened up a ripe area of discussion about the ways in which British laws created distinctions between European and Indian subjects. One Law for Europeans and Another Law for Indians? English law has been made by similar play on words. Gambling is illegal because it is indulged in by black men, but betting on horse races is legal because white men participate in it. If a black man kills a sahib with kicks it will be called manslaughter, but if the case be reversed, re. if an Indian is kicked to death by a white man it will be called "a case of rupture of the spleen." 53
The colonial government was not unaware of the apparent hypocrisy of their proposed legislation against native (and, specifically, Marwari) gambling. Since the Ilbert Bill controversy of 188384, when the colonial state proposed to limit the jurisdiction of Indian officials over European subjects, there was an increased sensitivity over laws that distinguished between colonizer and colonized. 54 The lieutenant governor himself pointed out the hypocrisy of prohibiting one form of gambling for one "class" while allowing other forms of gambling practiced by other classes. Many newspaper reports written by both British and Indian alike called for the suppression of rain gambling. The case against rain gambling, though seen as a violation of a popular Marwari pastime, was sometimes justified on various grounds. One report, in assessing the dangers that rain gambling posed to the general population, especially to the middle classes, claimed that "the small losses which such men suffer in rain gambling are of more consequence to them and to the community than the big losses which are sustained by rich people in horse-race gambling. Middle class men who indulge in rain gambling have been known to extort ornaments from their wives and pawn them, or to beat their wives when they refused [to hand over] their ornaments. Poor men, who indulge in this form of gambling, have often turned into thieves. It is only the rich who indulge in . . . [horse track] gambling, but it is chiefly middle class people who indulge in the latter. It is, therefore, very well that Government is going to suppress rain gambling." 55 Assuming that these reports were not all forged or coerced, it is clearly difficult to make the
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argument that the British were uniformly against native gambling and Indians were necessarily eager to preserve it.
45
Some Muslim commentators stated that all forms of gambling, including rain gambling and gambling on the race-track, ought to be banned. It was alleged that the reason the colonial government did not pass a general law against gambling was that colonial officials themselves partook of the practice. 56 Others warned of the dire political consequences that would prevail if Marwari rain gambling were checked and at the same time horsetrack betting remained legal. The Banavasi noted that the Marwaris typically did not hold political meetings, but now even they were making public speeches and threatening remarks against the government. As mentioned, at the protest meeting the Marwaris "resolved to give up opium-betting if the Bill were passed in the teeth of their opposition," threatening financial loss to the government if the threat were carried out. 57 The sudden interest in political issues expressed by the Marwaris over rain gambling signified a shift in British-Marwari relations. Sometimes perceived as economic colonial collaborators, central to maintaining credit networks in the economic expansion of the British, political activity in the name of the Marwari samaj (community) was a significant development in anti-colonialist nationalism. As the report in the Banavasi claimed, preserving rain gambling seemed to be a small price to pay to ensure Marwari loyalty and peace.
The Englishman of March 19, 1897, pointed to the "grandmotherly principle" of the proposed rain gambling legislation. Press reports questioned why the English colonial government should interfere with Indian public life much more than the English government would do at home. After all, rain gambling had been practiced for a long time, and did not appear to disturb the public peace, and was therefore not a crime which would demand interference by the colonial government. Arguments against the passage of anti-rain gambling legislation did not always point out the exclusionary aspects of a law that would penalize Indians yet allow Europeans freedom to practice almost identical gambling practices. Gambling on the rain, or gambling on anything else for that matter, was seen as inherent to the Indian soul. Appeals to an orientalizing logic became important in establishing the need to keep native gambling legal. It was alleged that to interfere with such deep-seated vices would only stir up trouble. Rain gambling was described as "purely oriental, and deeply-rooted in the native mind," and it was argued that, "meddling and puddling with the ways of the Asiatic ... is a great mistake throughout the country, leading to a feeling of rancour and natural distrust against the Europeans." 58 Carefully crafted European images of the essential character of the Indian mind could also be used against the ruling logics of colonial power. The colonial government had acknowledged that, after the suppression of rain gambling in Bombay a few years earlier, a new form of gambling called jota sowda had come into practice. 59 A letter to the editor in the Indian Daily News on March 20, 1897, appealed to the logic that gambling was after all so ingrained in the
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human psyche that any attempt to legislate against it would probably have the opposite effect of "rousing much feeling that had much better be left alone." If a man was going to risk his money by gambling, no legislation could stop him from doing it.
An article in Capital raised the following question: If the Government of Bengal put down gambling on the rain, perceived as a Marwari pastime, what plans did it have to regulate gambling held dear to other communities, particularly the European penchant for gambling at the Calcutta Turf Club? 60 In a further defense of rain gambling, the Calcutta Statesman of March 23, 1897 carried a letter to the editor that contained a passionate appeal for rain betting. The letter claimed that horse racing was much more "demoralising" than rain gambling. In horse racing, after all, there were many more chances to cheat. A horse could be whipped or spurred during the race, or the jockeys could lose weight and become unnaturally thin, both creating an unfair advantage. In rain gambling, some Marwaris claimed, such possibilities of deception and fraud were eliminated. Rain gambling was a legitimate game which resisted any attempts at tampering or manipulation. Unlike horse racing, rain gambling was claimed to be a sport that allowed no possibilities for cheating. What man, after all, could interfere with the weather? A letter in Capital, attesting to the incorruptible nature of the practice, stated: "No man can manipulate the clouds; the whole transaction is above board, and has nothing shady about it, which is more than can be said of horse racing." 61
A memorial dated February 27, 1900, and signed by over six hundred persons, mainly Marwari traders resident in Calcutta, was submitted to the colonial government, requesting them to review the passage of the 1897 rain gambling act. This memorial claimed that the bill was passed in flagrant disregard of the objections of the Marwari community, who had enjoyed the practice for over eighty years, as long as they had been in Calcutta. The argument that they had been in Calcutta for such a long timean attempt to show the persistence of rain gambling as a customshows how the consciousness of community formation was influenced by colonial views that identity and culture, in order to be legitimate, were tied to certain places.
The memorial addressed, point by point, each section of the act, commenting on how the assumptions made by lawmakers simply did not apply to the current situation. Two of the arguments are of primary importance here. The first argument questioned whether rain gambling was actually worse than other forms of gambling, and commodities speculation in particular. The memorial noted the irony of the fact that though many more suicides were ascribable to "failures in commercial speculation" than to rain gambling, even by the most conservative of estimates, no philanthropist of any country had ever recommended that commercial speculation be suppressed. 62 Furthermore, the memorial claimed that the
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passage of the rain gambling act had actually increased the amount of commercial speculation, particularly on silver, thus adopting the colonial argument that, if one form of gambling were suppressed, the urge to gamble would emerge in an even more "dangerous" form. The memorial also employed the European argument regarding skill. Rain gambling required considerable skill in observing the sky, argued the memorial, as opposed to turf betting, wagers on the value of government securities and commercial shares, and other types of forward transaction speculation that depended on blind luck.
50
On one level we might say that Marwari counterarguments to the logic of the rain gambling legislation are completely derivative of the colonial discourse against gambling. The memorial reinforces the idea that the ingredient of "skill" morally justifies rain gambling; it also argues that gambling activities leading to suicide and the moral decay of the family should be suppressed for the good of the public. The memorial points out that jota sowda, gambling on the price of jute, became immensely popular in Bombay after the passage of that city's own anti-rain gambling act in 1893. In hindsight, this of course is precisely what the colonial government would have wanted, namely, to increase commodities speculation so as to increase sale prices, generating more revenue for the government purse. Accumulation of capital was a perennial preoccupation for the British during the nineteenth century as they sought to consolidate markets and trading routes.
Other claims were made concerning the practical usefulness for the government of having persons who were highly skilled in predicting the weather. This knowledge would be important for mariners and other sailors who were often caught in terrible storms. One writer claimed: "Our maritime disasters would be less excessive if the weather was part of the curriculum of study imposed upon ship-masters." 63 The same writer also made a humanitarian appeal, noting that some of the proceeds from rain gambling went to "infirmaries for aged and useless animals." Part of the proceeds of the rain gambling did indeed go into keeping up two infirmaries for aged animals, sparing them from slaughter. 64 Caring for sick and infirm animals, particularly cows, was an important part of Marwari charity and philanthropy. The discourse of humanitarian aid was used as a means of justifying Marwari gambling in the colonial public sphere.
The protection of women was used by the state as a reason to outlaw rain gambling, on account of the damage it could work on Marwari women. The charge was made that Marwari families, ruined by debt, forced the female members of their family into despicable professions. The imagined link between rain gambling and sexual activity added to the urgency to ban the practice. But this turned out to be a relatively easy assumption to counter. As one Marwari merchant asked, ridiculing the overtly gendered logic of the
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colonial legislation, "Were they [the colonial government] also to believe that Hindoo female chastity, after having withstood for countless generations every other method of assault, had suddenly succumbed to the approaches of the wily rain-gambler?" 65
The practice of betting on horse races, the colonial government contended, was a well-regulated form of gambling that only occurred on a very few specific race days. In contrast, rain gambling occurred all day, every day. It was here that the colonial logic about the unsanitary conditions of Burabazar could be used against the state. Supporters of rain gambling argued that Cotton Street was already "such a miserable place in itself" that the presence of a small crowd of rain gamblers would hardly have any effect on the flows of either traffic or commerce. The government, the promoters of rain gambling maintained, was not being forthcoming about the actual practices of betting on horse races. Betting on the horses did not only occur on the day of the race itself. Even months before the actual race, money changed hands in the form of bets on certain horses and their jockeys. Some government legislators were themselves adamant gamblers on the turf, further evidence of the insupportable terms of the colonial legislation. The Trouble with Satta: From Rain gambling to Commodity Figure Gambling While the 1897 rain gambling act did effectively put an end to large-scale rain gambling operations, other forms of gambling arose in the place of rain gambling, possibly operated by the same brokers and dealers who had managed the gambling on rain. By banning rain gambling and attacking opium-figure gambling as well, the government may have counted on the "native instinct" to gamble to encourage former rain-gamblers to take up gambling on the government opium exchange, thereby increasing the government's revenue. The district collector, Major Davies, commenting on a proposed plan to ban rain gambling, wrote that some forty-four shops that organized seasonal rain gambling were used throughout the entire year for gambling in opium. According to Davies, the proposal was apparently aimed at "the suppression not of a form of gambling, but of a mild form of betting on the average price of the monthly opium sales in Calcutta. Those sales are only held once a month, so the evil cannot be very great." 66 Since rain gambling was seasonal, according to the monsoon, the shops had ample time for manipulating bets placed on the monthly government sales of opium. The state effort to ban rain gambling had more to do with the state's attempt to prohibit private gambling on the monthly price of opium, possibly to encourage speculation on the public opium exchange. The colonial government gained in at least two ways from opium gambling and commodities gambling. First of all, there were substantial price increases because of commodities speculation. Second, to a lesser extent, the government profited on the fees charged for the myriad of telegraphs sent wildly across northern India in preparation for the final commodities sale.
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Starting around 1900, bets were placed on opium figures on a daily basis. This daily gambling broadened the range of appeal of opium gambling to a wider spectrum of classes, because daily gamblingusually on the final digit of the sale pricedid not require a sophisticated knowledge of the opium market and of opium prices. This type of gambling was known as tezimandi (literally, "rise-fall"), because the gambling did not depend on the opium's actually changing hands through buying and selling or on delivery and receipt of the goods (pakka mal). Opium merchants, unlike the speculative Marwaris, would themselves speculate on pakka mal, and were primarily concerned with getting a good selling price. The opening up of the gambling market led people of the poorest classes to bet as little as one rupee on the hope of earning between five and ten rupees on the one they had played. This daily satta was said by the government to "attract the idle riff-raff of the town, the labourer, the servant, and the mill-hand." 67 The state may have feared the social problem of idleness if this "riff-raff" were to begin skipping work in order to gamble. Though the government cited numerous Hindu and Muslim texts that held gambling to be a terrible vice, even those most committed to outlawing gambling in India did not want to stop the betting by baniyas or English sahibs. These elite trading groups, unlike the casual laborer, could afford to lose their money. 68
Despite the passage of legal regulations against rain gambling, the specter of gambling on the opium figures still troubled social reformers. In Rewari, opium gambling was said to bring ruin on some of the people who practiced it. 69 Yet again the question rose, How could opium gambling be attacked as immoral if betting on horse racing still continued? As one observer reported, "I am unable to see that there is any difference between book-makers giving odds against a particular number being the winning number at a sale of opium and between them giving odds against a particular horse being the winner of a race. But it has never been suggested, I believe, that racing book-makers should be prosecuted." 70
In the debate over opium-figure gambling in the United Provinces, similar degrees of ambiguity existed about whether and how opium gambling should be made illegal. The main argument for doing so was the prevalence of the practice, particularly in the way that the lower classes and women had been pulled into its sway. The poor people, it was said, were developing unfavorable habits of idleness and corruption through associating with bad characters and missing work. The gambling agents reportedly even sent small boys out to the women's zenana quarters to collect wagers from the secluded pardanashin ladies, and therefore brought the evils of gambling into the respectable Indian home. These women were said to steal money from the male members of the household in order to place their bets. 71 There was also considerable government discussion around the fact that opium, grain, and silver gambling were all connected practices, and any bill
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to outlaw one of them might include the other two. Even rain gambling might be written into the act.
So, we might well ask, was the legislation against rain gambling really about rain gambling? Many of the commentaries published in the press protested the Bengal Legislative Council's decision to ban rain gambling and claimed that the real issue at stake was betting and gambling on opium. Opium betting, it was argued, was actually a much more dangerous form of gambling, but one that directly benefited the colonial state. According to one editorial, the government ought to regulate tejimundi (opium betting), which involved betting thousands of rupees, and as such was a greater threat to the prosperity of many families. The government feared a strike by opium gamblers, which could cause the government significant financial losses. The writer noted that, "while the rain gambling Marwari will be at the absolute mercy of the police under the proposed Act, his opium gambling brother will be allowed to do a worse thing, and snap his finger at the authorities." 72
Gambling on the price of opium was a geographically dispersed venture, which reflected the pan-Indian nature of gambling networks and local communications. Whereas the centers of opium-figure gambling were said to be located in Agra, Delhi, Jaipur, and Saharanpur, one colonial report noted that, "there is every reason to believe that a syndicate of opium merchants in Calcutta control and finance the whole business." 73 At every regional center where opium figure gambling was found, commission agents working with dealers laid down stakes and accepted them, and sent each other telegrams to keep each other abreast of the latest developments in price. On the actual sale day, especially, the telegrams would "fly to and fro in brisk and unremitting succession." 74
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Why were opium speculation and opium-figure gambling so important to the British? The potential health hazards to Marwaris as opium gamblers could not be proven, although the colonial state tried to collect evidence in this regard. By contrast, opium consumption was perceived as highly detrimental to Bengali health. 75 As late as 1924 Dr. Sudhindra Bose criticized the colonial government for issuing statements about the physical and morally beneficial aspects of opium. Bose quoted the Inchcape report, which listed opium as a critical source of government revenue. 76 There is considerable evidence that by legislating against one particular form of gamblingrain gamblingthe government could partially divert potentially critical public attention from the opium trade.
Speculation on opium markets was even older than rain gambling. Existing alongside it, the opium numbers game was played out of the very same
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shops. Shutting down rain gambling was a way of pushing people to speculate on the official opium exchange, and not informally, as in rain gambling shops, where the state could not gain any profit. For more than any other form of commodities gambling, the most profitable treasure of the colonial government had for several decades been opium. The official importance of opium speculation dates back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Governor General Auckland wrote that he was "very much embarrassed with our opium transactions. ... The opium market is very much in the hands of native merchants many of them men of capital many of them desperate gamblers and nearly all habitually speculating beyond their means of doing so with safety." 77 Speculators, Auckland explained, bid higher and higher on the market price of opium, not wanting to be ruined by a reduction in price. Yet even after the end of price bidding, when it was time for payment and delivery, thousands of chests of opium lay untouched in the godown (storage). Another crop of opium would come into the warehouses in the coming year and would undoubtedly lower the sale price. The best measure that Auckland could take was to legislate for the immediate resale of opium if the transactions were not concluded in a timely fashion. There was a fine line, it appeared, between commercial speculation and gambling. Auckland wrote, "If one customer hesitated to fulfill his engagement another was at hand to take his place, the payment which was not made today could scarcely fail to be assured for tomorrow, and what is now pronounced to be vast and unmeasured gambling secured to be but the common enterprise and competition of commercial speculation." 78 This sentiment made opium speculation into a more respectable economic activity, at least among the British.
The debate over rain gambling brought attention to opium wagering in 1911, when a draft bill to ban wagering on opium prices was discussed among government officials. But there was a great deal of uncertainty at the time about how long the opium trade with China would continue. E. M. Cook, home department undersecretary to the government of India, wrote that it would "hardly be worth while, in view of the present uncertain state of the opium trade in India, to undertake legislation to prohibit wagering on the price of opium." 79 The opium trade with China was too profitable, too important, and too volatile to take major risks. However, there were occasional reports about arrests of Marwari merchants for placing bets on opium, such as a case in which bail was refused to Biswanath Kshetri and Biseswar Lal Agarwala, Marwari merchants. 80 The surprise expressed by the colonial government over why the two Marwari merchants were not given a chance to post bail is indicative of the laxity that prevailed with opium-figure gambling, even after punitive legislation was passed.
The problem of Marwari gambling on opium became pan-Indian. In May 1925, the government of Bengal sent inquiries to the United Provinces and Punjab governments to find out whether or not opium gambling was widespread in other states, and what means the government had found, if
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any, to put a stop to it. 81 The Central Provinces amended the Public Gaming Act in 1926 to include gambling on the digits of a number indicating the price of cotton, opium, and other commodities, as well as on "the occurrence or non-occurrence of rain," with any instruments of such gambling found constituting proof of illegal activity. 82 These laws unsurprisingly created a distinction between gambling and "mere betting without gaming," ostensibly in order to make a distinction between native gambling and elite gambling on the racetrack. Whereas the government argued that Indians found satta to be a terrible problem, horse-race betting was regarded as "an expensive hobby of a small class that can well afford the cost and can be trusted to protect their own interests." 83 The difference, it appeared, was that one could only place a bet at the turf club on a limited number of days, and that admission to the club was made exclusive by a prohibitively expensive entrance fee. In the case of satta, any class of person could gain access to the shop, and there would be "no limit to the number of days" on which bets could be made.
Opium-figure gambling existed alongside cotton-figure gambling. Shops along Chitpur Road in Burabazar took bets on cotton figures from gamblers on any particular figure, from 0 to 9, and the shop laid various odds on each figure. The winning number was the average of the five daily quotations on cotton future and demand sales from America and England, obtained by Reuter. 84 The instruments used in cotton figure gambling included a tin board showing the day's cotton figures, either from a newspaper or a telegram, a board showing the name of the firm, a ticket showing the winning number, a board giving the odds of bets on particular numbers, and a box of moneyexactly the same items used by bookmakers at the races, which were not made illegal by any law in India. 85
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Numbers gambling became tremendously popular. By 1911, when opium figure gambling was under discussion, the cotton figure numbers game had also become a concern for some members of the colonial government, who fretted that the gambling had "nothing in the world to do with cotton" and was mere betting on a number. 86 Cotton gambling became the latest scourge of colonial gambling policy by 1912. The colonial government charged that since a minuscule amount of money, even down to one anna, could be bet, cotton figure gambling was accessible to the poor and "even" to women and children, who would no doubt come to ruin from this "deception." Many colonial officials worried about passing legislation focused on a single object of betting, as was the rain gambling act, which ultimately had a limited effect on containing gambling as a whole. Some felt that a general form of legislation should be devised (making an exception for horse racing, of course) that would outlaw all forms of wagering. Others wrote that the government ought to legislate against all forms of betting that were injurious to the public welfare and public morality.
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By 1925, the export of opium had greatly diminished, and the speculative market in opium figures had come to a halt because there was no longer enough fluctuation in the price for bookmakers to profit from taking bets on the daily market price. As a substitute for the price of opium, the bookmakers took bets on the average of several prices of cotton in the American market. These included the futures markets for New York in March and in May, the New Orleans futures markets for March and May, and for the "spot cotton" price. 87 The Politics of Cloth and Cloth Speculation in Colonial India Marwari speculation, hoarding, and commodity adulteration caused a great deal of unrest in colonial Bengal, particularly among Bengali Muslims. The riots that came partially as a response to such gambling were critical arenas in which issues of class, religion, and regional origin came to a breaking point. Even before speculation on cloth became a divisive issue between Marwaris and the Bengali Muslim and Bengali Hindu communities, Marwari trade in foreign cloth became a turning point in British-Marwari relations, inspiring anti-colonial, nationalist sentiment in Marwari public life. After the 1905 plan for the partition of Bengal was announced, there was a widespread boycott of Manchester-made cloth. As a group deeply involved in the cloth trade, Marwaris stood to suffer significant financial losses from this boycott. The Bengalee reported that the "keen commercial instinct" of Marwari traders in Manchester piece goods motivated the colonial government to rescind their policy. 88 The Marwari Chamber of Commerce sent the Manchester Chamber of Commerce a telegram that appealed to the government to prevent the partition of Bengal. Sales of Manchester goods had practically ceased in Calcutta because of the numerous Bengali public meetings calling for a boycott of British goods. This was a great cause of concern for Marwari merchants, who feared that they would not make their big yearly sales before the pujas. 89 The colonial government's reply was not sympathetic. It suggested that Bengalis should stop agitating against the partition and drop the boycott. 90 Yet the issue over cloth was far from dead. An editorial in the Forward on September 12, 1924, argued that the boycott of foreign cloth was the "Marwari Community's duty." The "domiciled" Marwari cloth agents, the writer charged, were "the local agents of foreign exploiters," because they continued to take orders for and trade in foreign Manchester cloth.
The blame for the December 1917 "cloth riots" in Burabazar was placed on the rapidly rising prices of dhotis (men's garments) and saris (women's garments). The rise in cloth prices was attributed to a type of speculation known as "cornering." 91 The following month, January 1918, Marwari shops in Burabazar were looted for both cloth and salt, another commodity that was hoarded and speculated upon. The Imperial Legislative Council raised the question of high cloth prices in February 1918, to determine whether
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the increase in cloth prices was related to "unavoidable economic causes" or whether speculation or cornering had had a significant effect. Although cornering was blamed, the government did not take any immediate action to stop the speculation, which in turn raised the price of cloth. Newspaper reports claimed that dhotis were still being imported from England, and the cloth mills in Bombay were still producing large quantities of cloth, so that there was no reason that the price of cloth should be four to five times its normal price. If there was no shortage of dhotis and cotton cloth, where were the high prices coming from? A letter in the Nayak claimed that there were sufficient dhotis stocked for one year's use, eliminating shortage as the source of high prices. The writer claimed that Marwaris were the ones behind the "mischief," because the government had neglected to appoint a cloth controller to assure a steady supply of the commodity in the bazaar. 92 By controlling (and restricting) the flow of cloth from the godown (storage facilities) to the shops, Marwaris were seen to have created an artificial scarcity.
Thus, in addition to cotton-figure gambling, which had the effect of raising the cost of both cotton and cloth, cloth hoarding contributed to this perception of widespread public deception. The increase in the price of cloth placed enormous hardships on the working classes, perhaps even more than increases in the price of food. A March 1918 newspaper editorial commenting on the suffering caused in the population by the lack of affordable cloth claimed, "One can pass his days, as is usually the case in this country, in a state of semi-starvation, but not with scanty clothing that has been forced on many by the rigors of the prices of dhotis and saris." 93 The high price of cloth, which affected the price of essential garments like dhotis and saris, had a devastating effect on Calcutta and most of Bengal. Reports of persons committing suicide out of shame over their nudity were not infrequent.
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The cloth issue became embroiled in the question of the British War Loan Fund. Several Marwaris wrote about their contributions to the war loan fund as evidence of their loyalty as subjects of the British Raj. But others charged that Marwari investment of huge amounts of money for the war loan would only encourage them to raise the price of cloth and dhotis in order to recoup their losses. 94 The reputed three crores (30 million) rupees donated to the war fund needed to be made up for, and there were rumors in the press that the government had actually ordered the Marwari cloth merchants to raise the price of cloth in order to raise money for the fund. 95
When cloth prices stayed high after World War I, some claimed that the Marwaris were withholding their stocks of cloth from the shops after any possible wartime scarcity would have ceased. 96 The government was blamed for not taking measures to control the spiraling inflation of the price
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of cloth. Calls were made for increased production of Indian homespun cloth and a ban on foreign-spun cloth. It was alleged that there was plenty of cloth in the city, and the high prices were attributed to Marwari speculation. 97 During the government inventory of the stocks of cloth, it was alleged that the government had been duped and had failed to record the accurate numbers. 98 The Marwari Association voted to suspend the purchase of cloth for three months in the autumn of 1918, an action that was seen by others as proof that the community held large enough stocks of cloth to last for the three-month hiatus. 99
After the 191718 "cloth riots," a war of words raged between the AngloIndian newspapers and the pro-Marwari Hindi press. Marwaris needed to defend their loyalty to the Raj, and yet a crisis of leadership seemingly prevented them from asserting their identity as honorable businessmen and political subjects. 100 A pro-Marwari editorial in the Bharat Mitra charged that, "Marwari capital ... has helped the establishment of the European merchant offices in Calcutta. If the Marwaris hold away from the European traders, all these offices and banks will come to a dead stop and the Europeans will feel that sad consequence of it. All these insults, which are being heaped up on the Marwaris, are due to their want of self-respect and to their habit of cringing at the feet of others. The entire trade of Calcutta is in their hands. If they now boldly withdraw from it, the whole business will come to a dead stop. But in the Marwari community, there is no leader and everyone is for himself. There are many self-seekers in it who are mad for Government honors. Will the Marwari community continue to suffer like this and not wake up?" 101
The perception that the colonial gambling laws only served to sanction government raids on native establishments continued well into the 1920s. In the spring of 1920, the police raided the Marwari market in Burabazar on suspicion of "cotton gambling." Tarachand Ghanshiamdass and his munim (accountant) Jai Narain Poddar were charged with running gambling operations in their courtyards, and police broke into their shops, entered their cash-rooms, and seized many of the merchants' books and papers, documents useful to the colonial state in tax assessment. Ironically, the government had not yet passed any measure outlawing the practice, and could do nothing to convict the traders. This police action was viewed as an uncalled-for assault on a community that had always been faithful to the power of colonial rule and continued to give subscriptions to the war loan fund. The contributions to the fund were portrayed as proof of the honesty of Marwari traders, honesty that supposedly could not have been mustered by those who were gamblers. One editorial, expressing anger that the police would violate the private shops of loyal subjects, charged: "If our brethren are frequently arrested by the police in this manner and are considered gamblers, then it is better to give up residing in British territory and to return to the Native States." 102 The threat of migration served as a
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reminder of the importance of Marwari capital and trade in Eastern India. What would happen to colonial capitalism if they were to leave and pull out their sources of credit and agency systems? Rumors spread of a proposed Marwari protest meeting against the police actions.
In April 1919, communal rioting forcibly shut the shops in Burabazar, yet the Marwaris did not join in a protest meeting against the strike. A letter in the Bangali noted that even though the Marwari Association and the Marwari Chamber of Commerce "have taken up a penitent attitude," they still did not protest against shop closings in Burabazar. 103 By May 1919, Marwari capitalists were being accused of buying up stocks of rice and speculating on the price. This practice was perceived to be even more immoral than hoarding cloth. While a limited amount of speculation in cloth might be more or less tolerable, some felt that the government was bound to act to stop practices of speculation in food, perceived as a more immediately necessary commodity. 104 This created a potential emergency situation for Bengalis. Yet the British state continued to benefit.
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Profit was found in the speculation of other commodities as well. Income tax returns for 1918 showed a large increase in the amount of income tax revenue derived from the large profits that Marwari cloth merchants had made on cloth. 105 In addition to cloth, the price of mustard oil had also increased significantly. Marwari speculation on rice in the outer districts of Bengal was another common complaint. Reports of the looting of shops for rice were frequent around Bengal. One newspaper report charged that Marwari speculation was to blame for inflating rice prices and leading desperate people to loot and riot for food. The advent of the puja season, normally a time of increased consumption, would only make the situation more desperate and dangerous. 106 The stocks of rice were significantly lower than in previous years, raising suspicion that such stocks were being hoarded for higher profit. And as the annual Durga Puja festival approached, there was added concern that the Marwaris might not lower their cloth prices to enable the Bengalis to purchase new clothes. In August 1921, the sharp rise in the price of wheat was blamed on "wheat gambling" rumored to be practiced rampantly in the lanes of Burabazar. Marwari merchants, who purchased vast sums of wheat, up to 10,000 tons each, were blamed for deliberately forcing up the price of this household necessity with no regard for the hardship that this would inflict on the working classes. 107
Occasionally, the British colonial government took steps to thwart these potentially explosive situations. Sometimes the government interfered in matters of food speculation by forcing Marwaris to leave the countryside mofussil, much to the relief of local villagers. One report warmly thanked the district magistrate for expelling "certain Marwaris" from the town of Krishnagar on account of rice speculation, yet
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warned that it "also exhorts the Marwaris not thus to ruin the Bengalis on whom they depend for their livelihood. Unless they desist even now, the consequences will not be good." 108 The complaint against the Marwaris in this case came, in large part, from their portrayal as outsiders who had come to Bengal to exploit the local population. It seems that local forms of exploitation, perpetuated by people perceived as local residents, were somehow not as terrible as those forms of trickery exercised by groups not native to the region. This is part and parcel of the detrimental social constructs that Bengalis have made of Marwaris.
Because Marwaris were starting to settle permanently in Bengal with their families during this period, their presence had an even more oppressive and burdensome effect on the price of land. Marwaris had begun investing their profits by buying land at elevated prices. It was alleged that Marwari capitalists were buying up zamindari (estates) from landowners who had suffered great debts. This was the last straw for Bengalis, who felt that such land grabbing violated the sanctity of the Permanent Settlement, which held that the money made in Bengal ought to be kept within its boundaries. The Nayak commented that, "legislation is necessary for excluding all Marwaris and other people from outside Bengal, from holding landed property in Bengal, except for strictly residential purposes." 109
The various forms of Marwari unscrupulousness in commodity speculation and hoarding were met with violent resistance on the part of the local Bengali Hindu and Muslim populations. In addition to the anti-Marwari riots of 1910, both 1918 and 1926 saw similar disturbances. 110 Unlike the 1910 riots, however, in which only people who were identified as "Marwaris" were looted and beaten, the 1918 riots targeted other Hindus who, like Marwaris, were also attacked and killed. According to the Nayak, "the Moslems at first were out against the Marwaris and the police, but now they seem to be angry with all up-country Hindus... Some Moslems anticipated this outbreak which has a political rather than religious tinge about itthey are the outcome of racial hatred and indignation." 111 Reports in the local press were quick to emphasize that these riots differed from those in the past because they were the result of political and economic causes, and not religious ones. 112 These riots were thus ironically seen as a form of political progress by which politics, instead of religion, formed the basis of public action in India. The Dainik Basumati argued: "A new spirit, a new strength, a new aspiration, apparently has come to animate Moslems. Riots, due to political causes, which are common in Europe, are unknown in India." 113 The newspapers described many reasons for the riots, including protests relating to the internment of Muslims, the "cloth question," and Muslim rights for representation under the Reform Scheme.
The rioters generally did not target Bengalis.

The riots appeared to

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114
single out Marwaris as their targets for two reasons. The first was the rapid and uncontrolled rise in cloth prices. The Marwaris were accused of deliberately raising the price of cloth. The Dainik Basumati of September 12, 1918, claimed: "We find that Musalmans have a great grudge against Marwaris... The high prices of dhotis for which the Marwari dealer is responsible and which are preventing Musalmans from buying new cloths on the occasion of the Bakr-Id festival." 115 The Nayak reported that poor Hindus and Muslims were driven to rioting because they were being denied the pleasure of buying new clothes for their sons and daughters on the festival days, while the cloth dealers were becoming increasingly wealthy. 116 By this point, social relations between Marwaris and Bengali Muslims were at a particularly low ebb. Marwaris were being accused of buying out bustees (slum lands) for real estate development, thus rendering landless the hapless residents. They were also accused of refusing to hire Muslim tradesmen and coachmen. 117 Another reason for the riots was the alleged adulteration of ghee with "stuff obnoxious both to Hindus and Moslems," namely, beef and pork fat. 118
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Finally, wartime hoarding brought about a serious silver shortage. Even the purchase of silver ornaments was seen as a threat to this nationalist resource, as it would encourage the practice of melting silver coins into molten metal. Then the government would be forced to purchase silver at inflated prices in foreign countries. 119 The early years of World War I saw an unprecedented surge in the hoarding of silver coins. Marwaris profited from the war by taking large amounts of gold with them when some fled Calcutta during the war bombing and returned to their homes in Rajasthan. 120 The press reported that silver rupees were virtually unobtainable from banks, and that the market rate for a silver rupee was now seventeen annas, instead of the usual sixteen. 121 The Nayak charged that police seizure of molten gold from Marwaris in Burabazar had caused a panic, with rumors flying that the government would soon stop converting notes into silver due to the scarcity of precious metals, as had happened in Allahabad, Lucknow, and Bombay. 122
By pursuing certain types of antigambling legislation, the colonial government itself promoted harmful speculation, particularly in government-controlled commodities such as opium and Manchester cloth. These speculative activities, combined with other communal tensions arising from Marwari involvement with activities such as cow protection and joining with the Arya Samaj in playing music before mosques, were part of the impetus for violent riots between Marwaris and Muslims in 1910, 1918, 1926 and 1946. 123 The Marwaris were not very successful in negotiating creative public solutions to the hoarding and speculation crisis. Today, local people are aware that money that went into Marwari charity and
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philanthropy, including temple building, sometimes came from crisisinducing activities that were potentially harmful to local populations. Because of this kind of popular memory, middle-class Bengali populations are not at all placated that Marwaris are now really giving something back to the community. Marwari voluntary associations developed techniques to manage public moral discourses about their sometimes unscrupulous involvement in the economy. As will be seen, the Marwari management of the "moral economy" of ghee adulteration through a unique collusion of religion and civil society was multifaceted in its understanding of colonial capitalism. The Politics of Ghee Adulteration and its Public Resolutions in Calcutta In August 1917, an unusual public scandal developed in response to rumors and evidence that Marwari merchants had adulterated ghee (clarified butter). The question of ghee adulteration had arisen beforein 1885, when a dozen or so people were punished for selling very poor quality ghee, and again in 1907. 124 The modes in which the 1917 scandal was publicly reconciled signify complex cultural understandings about the public and moral management of market commodities. As one travel writer quipped, adulterated ghee "in this land means something between a criminal act and a cultural disaster." 125 I am specifically interested in how the Marwari Association negotiated two different and incommensurable understandings of capitalism in their attempts to find a public solution to the ghee adulteration crisis. An analysis of the event and the two ways that the Marwaris attempted to solve itfirst through chemical testing of ghee, assessment of fines, and appeals to government, and second, by orchestrating a spectacular public display of Brahmin priestsI will demonstrate the coexistence of multiple cultural understandings of the colonial capitalist process.
The problem of commodity adulteration was not unique to ghee, but ghee is not perceived as being an ordinary commodity. Far from being a culturally neutral substance, it is a culturally marked commodity having very particular cultural and religious associations for Hindus. Ghee is an excellent example of the process by which some products move in and out of the "commodity" category. 126 Watts' Dictionary of the Economic Products of India asserts that ghee is "universally employed for domestic cooking ... and forms an important article of trade." 127 Watts notes that while the cow is the most desirable source of milk used to produce ghee, milks from buffalo, sheep, and goats are also employed because they are cheaper and more fatty than the more delicate cow's milk. In fact, Watts points out that the chief adulterants in ghee are vegetable oils, animal fats (especially mutton), and starches. 128 Clearly, the adulteration of ghee was not new; rather, what was new was the manner in which the adulteration of ghee could be judged and made into public knowledge, necessitating new forms of crisis
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resolution.
The treatment of ghee in colonial housekeeping manuals and cookbooks draws upon orientalist discourses to give it special attention as a pure food commodity essential to Indian cuisine. The renowned dictionary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words, Hobson-Jobson, quotes colonial historian James Mill as saying, "the great luxury of the Hindu is butter, prepared in a manner peculiar to himself, and called by him ghee." Hobson-Jobson defines ghee as: "Boiled butter: the universal medium of cookery throughout India; supplying the place occupied by oil in Southern Europe, and more... The word is Hindi ghi, Sanskrit ghrita." 129 Since ancient times ghee has been described in textual accounts as being a commodity of enormous cultural prestige. It is said that in ancient days, Aryans only used ghee for frying, whereas the general population used vegetable oils. 130 Ghee was exported to Rome to be used by the wealthy classes in cooking and making sacrifices. 131
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In the field of anthropology, much has been written about the qualities and cultural rankings of food and food transactions in South Asia. Khare has defined cooking as cultural steps taken to produce edible foods. The central theme of Hindu cooking, says Khare, is to produce a culturally meaningful parity between food and its eater. 132 Within the ethnosociological system of food classification in India (which admittedly suffers from a serious lack of historical contextualization that will not be elaborated upon here), ghee is among the highest-ranked inclusive foods. The use of ghee, as opposed to oil, constitutes a superior ritual act. Ghee is considered to be a fully cooked food, and its presence confers ritual purity on a dish. 133 Used as a topping, such as being drizzled over kitcheri, a casserole of rice and lentils, ghee turns exclusive food into auspicious food. When used as a medium of cooking, fire does not alter the cultural value of ghee. Because ghee comes from the cow, ritually the most sacred animal, it is claimed to have great curative properties. 134
Khare notes that, "Ghee, as indicated, is a restrictive concept, differentiated from tel (oils), although both are cooking fats. The former ranks higher than the latter. However, under modernization, appearance rather than substance has come to determine what is ghee and what is not, because, for example, hydrogenated oils, which only look like ghee, have come to mean ghee for the orthodox." 135 Khare warns us against imposing a modern and scientific concept onto practices of production and consumption that at least partially predate modern ideologies. Clearly there were factors other than purity that made the adulteration of ghee into a cultural crisis for Bengali Hindus in 1917.
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It is necessary to take a step outside of the ethnosociological folk taxonomies of foods in Hindu thought to consider how historical factors came into play in creating the ghee crisis. Jennifer Alexander points out that the market is itself a cultural construct, in the same way that kinship and religion have been conceived. The advantage of her approach is that it allows us to see the market as "a structured flow of information, showing how traders make their living by acquiring information and concealing it from others." 136 In the case of the ghee scandal of 1917, changes in the methods of producing knowledge about commoditiesin this case, through the application of scientific chemical analysis of gheechanged the way that people thought about the commodity and also the way they perceived their economic and social relationships with Marwari traders.
But knowledge and information played a second significant role in signifying the dangers of adulterated ghee. Rumors of the adulteration of ghee went hand in hand with the circulation of other colonial discourses on both the physical decline of the Bengali people (labeled as "race" or "nation" in contemporary terms) and images of the effeminate Bengali. John Roselli's work on the colonial theory of Bengali effeteness demonstrates how the Bengali elite "made the stereotype its own." 137 As Mrinilini Sinha has recently argued, the simultaneous production of discourses of "manly Englishmen" and "effeminate Bengalis" became a crucial element in the gender politics of justifying British colonial rule in India. 138 This mutual cross-cultural construction of Bengali manhood became even more pronounced as Bengalis lost ground to Marwari traders and middlemen in the economic sphere. Orientalist constructions entered into colonial discourse on the subject as well. Lord Zetland, for instance, wrote in his memoirs that the controversy centered "around rumours that Calcutta had become a market for the production and sale of adulterated ghee (clarified butter) which as a product of the sacred animal, the cow, and the normal adjunct of the cooking, played a paramount part not only in the diet, but also in the religious practices of all orthodox Hindus. Here then was a shocking scandal touching the religious life of millions, dragged into the open light of day." 139
It is in this historical and cultural context that rumors of Marwari adulteration of ghee produced such an uproarious turmoil. It was feared that the adulteration of food by the Marwaris could potentially threaten the very survival of the Bengali people. One sensationalist report stated that, "unless the practice of adulteration is put a stop to at an early date, the Bengali race will become extinct." 140 The decline of the Bengali race became a common narrative in the press, reflecting two separate but equally distressing concerns. First, Marwaris and other "up-country" Hindus were perceived as replacing the Bengalis in trading and shopkeeping; the production of sweets was now perceived to lie in Marwari hands. Even the more menial
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occupations of washermen and artisans were being "taken over" by outsiders, prompting resentful feelings about migration and job displacement. 141 The second concern related not only to the escalating price of essential articles of food, but also to widely circulating rumors of these foods having been intentionally adulterated. The Adulteration of Ghee
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The Calcutta Corporation had a law that adulteration was allowed only if it did not destroy the food value of the item. According to this law, it was the duty of the seller to inform his customer that there may be additives present, but this was rarely done.In 1886 the government of Bengal first passed legislation preventing the sale of some types of adulterated ghee in Calcutta. But by the year 1890, health officials felt that the enforcement of this legislation had become so lax that it was ineffectual in preventing adulteration. Dr. Simpson, who served as the city of Calcutta's health officer in 1890, expressed his concern that the government was not adequately prosecuting cases of contamination. In his opinion, the sale of adulterated food products ought to be banned in Calcutta. According to Simpson, the word "ghee" by itself had implications of being pure. The government, however, at the time contended that this was not the true purpose and intent of the original legislation and claimed that a mixture known by the name of the predominant substance did not necessarily imply purity. 142
C. J. Lyall, home department officiating secretary to the government of India, pointed out that the 1886 legislation actually differentiated between two kinds of adulteration. First, there was adulteration that made the food unwholesome and hence could actually destroy the food. Second, there was adulteration that did not make food unwholesome and would be allowable as long as the purchaser understood that the product was not pure. As Lyall pointed out, some buyers would be happy to purchase ghee that was adulterated but not harmful to health, and "it would be unjust to give the Inspector power to destroy the vendor's entire stock because he had represented it to be pure." 143 The only way that a vendor could be prosecuted under the 1886 law, therefore, would be if a customer had asked for pure ghee and been given something spurious in its place.
Despite the flexibility in the law, Lyall quoted the following statistics as proof that the average amounts of the fines had actually gone up, even though the total amount decreased: 144
Year
# of Prosecutions
Total amount of Fines Average fine in in Rs. Rs.

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1887 1888 1889
49 53 38
1,044 1171 907
21.3 22.1 23.87
The increase in average fines was taken as proof of the efficacy of the law. Up to this point, the colonial state did not feel that there was any reason to legislate further on the matter. This was, however, about to change. Marwari adulteration of Ghee in 1917 The Marwari Association was itself concerned about ghee adulteration and, according to the biography of Ramdev Chokhany (a founding member of the Marwari Association), between 1912 and 1917 the association petitioned the Bengal government and municipal officers to punish those sellers who adulterated food articles, but the government did not respond. The Marwari Association contended that the adulteration of ghee with animal fat, a cheaper substance, was not only against the Hindu religion but was also unhealthy. By the middle of July 1917, complaints over the adulteration of ghee had reached a fever pitch. The Marwari Association convened a meeting in Calcutta on July 22 to examine the charges of adulteration that were being leveled against Marwari merchants. The merchants denied any wrongdoing, but at a meeting of the association a few days later it was decided to test samples of ghee. The founders of the Marwari Association, Ranglal Podder, Ramdev Chokhany, and others, conducted a surprise inspection in which they collected two or three tins of ghee from the storage godowns (crawlspace) of every ghee businessman. After sending those dozens of tins to an outside laboratory for chemical testing, the result was that nearly every single tin contained animal fat mixed with the ghee. Out of sixty-seven samples of ghee analyzed by Smith Stanistreet & Co., only seven were found to be pure ghee. The amount of ghee in the samples varied considerably. One sample contained no ghee at all, and was found to be entirely composed of animal fat. The adulterated ghee was being sold at Rs. 4052 per maund, compared to its wholesale price of Rs. 1422. 145 Even though the Marwari Association declared it would fine the merchants for the offense of adulteration, this action did not satisfy religious elite. 146 The news of this adulteration had created an storm of outrage, especially among North Indians, Rajasthanis, and Brahmins. Thousands of Brahmins gathered on the banks of the Ganges River, locally called the Hughli, and began fasting to death in order to punish the businessmen who had adulterated ghee. Responsibility for the death of a Brahmin was regarded as a curse. Lord Zetland wrote:
95
At this point the Brahmins, as befitted the priestly caste, stepped

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in and summoned learned priests from Benaras to advise them on the action to be taken. The priests came and deliberated for two days before pronouncing judgment on those who had been defiled by the use of the adulterated article. They must repair to the banks of the holy river and there purify themselves by performing the ceremony known as Homun [sic], consisting of the burning of ghee and various spices, while they repeated mantras from prescribed volumes of the holy books, the ceremony to extend over four or five days during which a rigid fast must be observed.
According to Zetland, over three thousand Brahmins gathered on the banks of the Hughli River. More and more Brahmins joined in, and by August 19 there were between four and five thousand people undergoing purification on the chance that they had consumed adulterated ghee. 147
On the morning of August 19, the Marwari Association again met to discuss punishment for the offenders. How the ensuing investigation should be conducted became a problem, according to Chokhany, because enmity had spread throughout the society, and the early nineteenth century Bari Panchayat (early caste guild) had practically been destroyed. The Marwari Association organized a panchayat (council) of one hundred people, with representatives from villages and from Calcutta. The proceedings of the panchayat were held in the Shri Vishudhanarda Saraswati Marwari Vidyalaya school. The panchayat agreed that: harm should not come to religion, conduct, or custom; innocent people should not be punished; the punishment should be tolerable by society, and; whatever punishment agreed upon should be meted out to all of the accused. The panchayat examined every businessman and found that nearly all of them had mixed animal fat with ghee. 148
100
The Marwari merchants accused of adulterating the ghee were punished by the panchayat. The panchayat heavily fined the businessmen, and boycotted the ones that refused to pay for periods ranging from one year to life. In all, Rs. 75,000 were collected, and the money was used to purchase pasture land at the pilgrimage site of Vrindawan (Brindaban, Krishna's birthplace), where pure ghee could be produced. After the news of the punishment reached the Brahmins on the river banks, they decided to conclude their ceremonies and rituals by the following morning. 149 Zetland wrote: "These various decisions were communicated to the Brahmins on the river banks, who declared themselves satisfied and brought their ceremonies to a close."
It is highly likely that the Marwari Association itself staged the public spectacle of bringing protesting Brahmins to the river. None of the sources that I consulted, including Modi, Chokhany, or Zetland, offered details about
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who had orchestrated, and indeed paid, the upcountry Brahmins to produce such a public spectacle. The numerous links between Marwaris and Brahmins in other social contexts leads me to suggest that the Marwaris themselves were the ones to stage this event as a public solution to the ghee crisis. Internal politics and rivalries between various Marwari groups helped the Marwari Panchayat prove its worth when they showed that they could solve the dispute.. The staging of this performance of starvation and ablution was a way of negotiating with the public, the colonial state, and other rival Marwari organizations in a competition for social legitimacy. 150 The strong business, social, and religious connections between Marwaris in Bengal and in the "upcountry" of northern India enabled them to bring in Benaras Brahmins as religious experts who could officiate over the religious aspects of the ghee adulteration. This kind of socio-religious solution to the problem went hand in hand with the levying of fines and social boycotts (ostracism or excommunication), combining various modes of dealing with the public. 151
The adulteration of food products, known in Bangla as bhejal, arguably took on a new cultural status under the British. 152 The use of modern scientific methods to demonstrate the inner substance of the ghee created new cultural problems. The scientific tests, in short, made visible the intrinsic qualities of ghee and exposed any adulterants, and as such introduced a new type of knowledge about the relative purity or impurity of commodities. Laws regulating the purity of commodity substances could then institutionalize the new knowledge documenting contamination of commodities.
The Marwari resolution to the ghee crisis depended upon European and scientific understandings of chemical composition, yet combined them with local religious ideas about ghee adulteration that only culturally empowered religious specialists (the Brahmins), and not the colonial state, could address. The reputation of Marwari baniyas as corrupt and untrustworthy businessmen, combined with the scientific proof of their adulteration, had to be publicly addressed. This did not mean, however, that the public river display necessarily satisfied a disgruntled and religiously sensitive public. The colonial state decided to change their previously laissez-faire approach to commodity adulteration. Legislation and Its Role in Making Adulteration Visible Zetland wrote that the displays on the river were merely "socio-religious eddies" that would eventually die down. Legislation, he noted, was necessary in handling this crisis, and an emergency bill to amend the Calcutta Municipal Act was quickly brought before the Council. 153 The adulteration of ghee was recognized as a problem outside of Calcutta as well, so at the end of August the Marwari Association held a joint meeting with the British India Association, the Bengal Land Holders Association, the Bengal Mahajan
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(moneylender) Assembly, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, and the Rajput Association, calling for government legislation banning the adulteration of ghee. 154 The Bengal Legislative Council held a session to discuss the "alleged adulteration of ghee" on September 4, 1917. The Honorable Babu Surendra Nath Ray queried the Council on the problems associated with the adulteration of ghee. He pointed to such concerns as ghee's being adulterated with animal fat and groundnut oil, thereby desecrating the ghee for use in Hindu religious ceremonies, and to the Council's failure to follow the recommendations of the Calcutta Corporation in passing an act that would prevent the adulteration of food. In his response, the Honorable Mr. Donald contended that only 114 out of 457 samples of ghee tested in 191617 were found to be adulterated. 155 On July 3, 1919, the Bengal Food Adulteration Bill was passed. This Bill was meant as a supplement to the Calcutta Municipal Act of 1917, which forbade the adulteration of edibles. In its "statement of objects and reasons" the Bengal Legislative Department explained the purpose of the bill: "The adulteration of food, particularly of articles of common consumption, such as milk, ghee, mustard-oil, etc., is extremely prevalent, and the existing law has entirely failed to check the evil. The present Bill has been framed for the purpose of remedying the defects in the law, which make this practice possible, and of ensuring the purity of the staple articles of food which are most liable to adulteration." 156
105
In addition to inflating prices and adulterating ghee, Marwari merchants were accused of adulterating mustard oil and selling a spurious substance known as "paka oil," or ripe oil. Marwari merchants had reputedly brought on the mustard oil crisis by cornering the market on mustard seeds. 157 An article in the Moslem Hitashi noted: "A selfish and wicked class like the Marwaris is to be found in no other place of the world. It is they who are at the bottom of all these high prices and they are also responsible for adulterating mustard oil. Cannot the authorities put them down? Or do they mean to support their nefarious deeds? In that case Hindus and Mussalmans should combine and devise means to drive them out of the country." 158 Again we read the threat of expulsion of the evil outsider. Reports came in from outlying areas about the adulteration of all kinds of foodstuffs. The Marwaris were accused of adulterating flour with the fruit of babul plants as far south as Kharagapur. 159
The foods most at risk for adulteration, as named by the bill, included milk, butter, ghee, wheat flour, and mustard oil, though the bill made provision for any other articles of food that the local government might deem pertinent. The Bengal Food Adulteration Bill approached the problem of adulterated food in two ways. First, it prohibited the manufacture and sale of any food that was mixed with another substance if the mixing altered its quality, substance, or nature. The adulteration of ghee would have been prevented by a stipulation in the bill that ghee must contain only those
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substances "which are derived exclusively from the milk of cows or of buffaloes." 160 Second, the bill forbade the addition of any substance to a product that would serve to increase the bulk weight or measure of any product. This was particularly a concern with wheat flour. Merchants were accused of mixing substances such as pebbles or sand with the wheat, increasing its weight and apparent bulk to insure a more profitable sale. The bill went so far as to state that no materials that could be used for adulteration were to be allowed at the site of manufacture. The stipulated penalty for manufacturing or selling either adulterated food or food that was not of the "prescribed quality" was a fine of two hundred rupees for the first offense and one thousand rupees for any further offense. 161
Through the month of May 1918, there were reports that adulterated ghee was still being sold in the market and that the government was doing nothing to stop it. 162 One paper reported cynically: "Considering that the ghee being sold now is not purer than before, while it is dearer, it looks as if the whole Marwari agitation against adulterated ghee last year was a got-up affair, a mere trick to raise prices ... our youths should try to get control of the trade, ousting the Marwari, who has no objection to selling adulterated ghee if there is a demand for it, though he himself would not buy it." 163 Perhaps comparable to the adulterants in the ghee itself, the Marwari was perceived as bhejal, a noxious adulterant in the state of Bengal.
In the early months of 1920, after the passage of the bill, the price of ghee rose, partly as a result of the export policies of Marwari merchants. 164 Newspaper reports as late as 1924 spread rumors of an artificial foreign ghee being sold on the Calcutta markets, adulterated with pig and cow fat. 165 Under the provisions of the 1919 Bengal Food Adulteration Act, there was no way to protect consumers from the use of adulterated ghee in sweets. It was alleged that Marwari merchants were able to get around the technicalities of the antiadulteration law and to sell substandard grades and qualities of ghee that would pass the frequent but random inspections. Long after 1919, scientists struggled to find laboratory techniques for a quick and accurate method to detect the adulteration of ghee. They developed tests based on the solubility of ghee in mixtures of acetic ether at various temperatures, in which the more fatty acids of animal fat would be insoluble and thus easy to detect. 166
In the years immediately following Partition, the potential adulteration of ghee was seen as a veritable threat to the longevity and strength of the Indian nation. As Dr. Santosh Kumar Mukherji noted in his appeal, CowKeeping: For Building a Healthy Nation: "To preserve the newly won freedom and prepare ourselves for the fullest attainment of our nationhood we require able-bodied healthy young men who can defend their motherland
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and work for her reconstruction." 167 Dr. Mukherji noted that the practice of adulterating bazar milk was very common, and several "clever persons" had found a way of circumventing the Food Act, which stipulated that milk must be the "normal clean secretion obtained by milking of the healthy cow." Because the Municipality did not enforce this rule and only ensured that the milk fat levels were up to the legal standards, Mukherji asserted, milk was sometimes adulterated and diluted up to the legal standard of "fat" violating the provisions of the law. Consumers were still faced with ghee adulteration and relatively high prices for pure ghee. According to Dr. Mukherji's report, the high price of gheeat Rs. 4 to Rs. 8 per seermade the purchase of "real" ghee prohibitively expensive. Occasionally, ghee would be made from the milk of buffalo, yet passed off and sold as the "real" ghee made from cow's milk. Alternatively, a substance called Vanaspati, prepared from groundnut or cottonseed oil, was advertised as "vegetable ghee."
110
In September 1950, an All India Anti-Vanaspati Sammelan was held in Nasik. Sri Purushothamdas Tandon, who presided over the conference, urged people not to buy Vanaspati. In the process of manufacturing Vanaspati, a catalytic agent was used that could potentially react dangerously with impurities in the oil and cause the product to become rancid. In a government experiment, rats were fed a diet of Vanaspati, rice, and protein, and it was found that after three generations of such a diet the entire population of rats had gone blind. Yet the government did not seem to take much interest in placing a ban on Vanaspati. It was reported that the health minister of Bombay, Dr. Gilder, claimed that the rats had gone blind simply from feeding them the typicaland inadequateBengali diet, and that it had nothing to do with the Vanaspati. Dr. Gilder's claim was ridiculed by Dr. Mukherji, who contended that if this explanation were true, the entire population of Bengal, having eaten rice for centuries, would have certainly gone blind as well. 168 It seemed to Bengalis that the Marwaris' commodity adulteration actually threatened the very survival of the Bengali people. Conclusions There are many other areas of Marwari economic history that I have not considered in this chapter. More research needs to be done on how Marwari firms developed vis--vis speculative practices, and what role such practices may have played in both nationalist and Hindu-Muslim communal politics. We also need to ask how conceptions of gambling and commodity adulteration changed from the Mughal to the colonial period, so that the logics of British colonialism are not seen as being inscribed onto a blank page of static Indian "culture." Yet within the time frame considered here, it suffices to say that activities of speculation and gambling, as made visible under the gaze of the colonial state, were crucial to the formation of public Marwari community identity, which could itself operate as a political force in Indian public culture. Rather than destroying community, colonial capitalism actually created Marwaris as a political unit.
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Marwaris' defense of gambling as essential to their character was a performance to establish an interiority that could then be mobilized in the demand for political rights. The public "monster protest meeting" demonstrates the way that Marwaris, connected to each other through gambling networks and speculation alliances, created a space in which they could represent their community interests to the state.
This is not to say that the process of identity formation has been without social costs. In making unscrupulous economic activity visible, the state reinforced the social image of the Marwaris as outsiders and dubious businessmen. This reputation contributed to rioting over speculative activities such as hoarding of cloth and food. Because the massive accumulation of local wealth through speculation was a clear threat to British economic domination, it altered the way that the state treated Marwaris as political subjects. Marwaris, after all, had much closer commercial alliances with the Europeans than did the Bengalis, who stereotypically sought government help in securing employment postings. 169 Though the British relied on local sources of credit to finance their empire, they did not want such groups to profit from numbers games on commodity figures and rain gambling. Because the colonial state was unable to regulate and thereby unable to tax the proceeds made from Marwari rain gambling, it had little to gain from allowing it to continue.
Ironically, despite competing metropolitan discourses of moral conscience, the colonial state promoted certain practices of speculation, especially on opium, that served the economic interests of the British. Far from constituting "resistance" to the operations of the colonial government, gambling on certain commodities markets, and on opium in particular, actually played into the hands of the most deliberate colonial economic policy. As has been extensively documented, the opium trade with China was part of the most profitable as well as one of the most morally criticized aspects of British trade in colonial Asia. 170 Though immensely profitable for the British colonial government, the opium trade was characterized by high degrees of uncertainty. Whether the trade would remain in placeand how profitable the trade would ultimately be each yeardepended on a large number of political factors in China that were often well beyond the control of the British. The speculative activities of betting and gambling on the price of opium could be at least covertly encouraged, providing one way for the British to help control the unpredictable opium market, especially in the face of often inhospitable relations with China.
115
Concerns about Marwari practices of hoarding, speculating, adulterating, and creating artificial scarcity of essential commodities continue to the present. In the 1990s, Assam has witnessed an anti-Marwari movement on the part of ULFA, the United Liberation Front of Assam, who have extorted money
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and even killed the president of the Kamrup Chamber of Commerce, which has sparked an exodus of Marwaris from the area. 171 After anti-Marwari agitation in Orissa in the early 1980s, many Marwari families from Orissa, Assam, and Bihar migrated to Raipur in the Chhattisgarh region of eastern Madhya Pradesh. These migrants were aided by Marwari families who had been living there for generations, although locals complained about rising costs of housing due to the Marwari influx. 172 And during the early months of 1999, a national crisis over the shortage and soaring costs of onions and other vegetables prompted much protest and an all-India strike, along with rumors that the Congress Party had relied upon its traditional Marwari stronghold to cause a crisis to weaken the ruling BJP.
Notes: Note 1: The address 67 Cotton Street is mentioned in West Bengal State Archives. Judicial Proceedings, March 1897. No 31-42 (A).Back. Note 2: Introduction into the Bengal Legislative Council of a Bill for the suppression of rain gambling in Bengal. WBSA. Judicial Proceedings, March 1897. No. 31-42 (A). Back. Note 3: "Rain gambling in Calcutta: A Visit to the Gamblers," The Statesman (Calcutta), 2 October 1896.Back. Note 4: Jnanendra Nath Kumar, The Genealogical History of India, Part IV (Calcutta: Ahi Bhusan Ghosh, 1934-45), 64.Back. Note 5: Shri Ramdev Chokhany, Radhakrishna Nevtiya, ed. (Calcutta: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelan, 1950): 174-175. Chokhany wrote that instead of indulging in speculation, businessmen needed to train in modern commercial banking and exchange. A word on what speculation refers to is pertinent here. In commodities speculation, there is no actual transfer of goods. These types of transactions, known as "forward" and "futures" trading, have been worldwide phenomena. Unlike bargaining in the market, in which a price is fixed for a commodity at hand, forward trading is a potentially unlimited circulation of capital based on the mere play of figures, without any movement at all of the commodity. Futures trading refers to the same process on a stock exchange. Forward contracts are as old as exchange itself, and have nothing to do with exchange on a formalized share market. They work in two ways. The first method is hedging, by which the buyer pays in advance for the commodity so that when the actual future sale is held, he or she is not affected by variation in the price. The second method is using forwards for the purpose of speculation. In this case, the seller of a forward contract predicts that the price of the commodity will be below the futures price (at the settlement day). If this happens, the seller gains by buying the asset and then selling it to the buyer of the futures contract at a higher price (the futures price). If the futures price is
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above the market price, the buyer of the futures contract could pay an agreed price (the futures price) for the commodity, and sell it at the higher market price, thus making a profit. Options differ only slightly from futures in that they do not make the sale compulsory. They simply give the buyer the right to sell or buy.Back. Note 6: Timberg, The Marwaris, 165; Kudaisya, The Public Career of G. D. Birla, 37, 46; Modi, Desh ke Itihas Mein Marwari Jati ka Sthan, 628-629. Back. Note 7: Interestingly, many family histories, though outwardly denying any explicit connection with gambling, acknowledge that the men's first experience learning a bit of English came when they began sending telegrams.Back. Note 8: Rakesh and Lewis, Shekhawati: Rajasthan's Painted Homes, 42-43.Back. Note 9: Bhimsen Kedia, Bharat Mein Marwari Samaj (Calcutta: National Publications, 1947): 252.Back. Note 10: Timberg, The Marwaris, 39.Back. Note 11: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925.Back. Note 12: Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction," The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) has been one point of departure here.Back. Note 13: Reuven Brenner, Gambling and Speculation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Back. Note 14: Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 2.Back. Note 15: W. Douglass Mackenzie, The Ethics of Gambling (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1896), 7.Back. Note 16: Ibid., 8-12.Back. Note 17: Quoted in Brenner, Gambling and Speculation, 90.Back. Note 18: James Harold Romain, Gambling: Or Fortuna, her Temple and Shrine, The True Philosophy and Ethics of Gambling (Chicago: The Craig Press, 1891), 23. Back. Note 19: Ross McKibbin, "Working Class Gambling in Britain 1880-1939," Past and Present, No. 82, 1979: 147-178. Back. Note 20: Mackenzie, The Ethics of Gambling, 21. Back. Note 21: I thank David J. Libby for this point. Back.
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Note 22: Brenner, Gambling and Speculation, 61.Back. Note 23: See for instance Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 17401790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Back. Note 24: Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973): 412-454.Back. Note 25: Don Handelman and David Shulman, eds., God Inside Out: Siva's Game of Dice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Back. Note 26: John D. Rogers, "Cultural and Social Resistance: Gambling in Colonial Sri Lanka" in Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, ed. Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 179. Back. Note 27: Rogers himself admits that his short case study cannot take a comprehensive look at gambling in Sri Lanka because it narrowly restricts its focus and ignores elite forms of gambling. An attempt to overcome this omission, I believe, would tend to contradict Roger's argument that even modern forms of gambling have generally constituted resistance to the state.Back. Note 28: Ellen Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Back. Note 29: Ibid., 99. Back. Note 30: Ibid., 109.Back. Note 31: RNNB Bande Mataram, 20 August 1923.Back. Note 32: RNNB. Bande Mataram, 8 December 1923.Back. Note 33: See M. K. Gandhi, Drink, Drugs & Gambling (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1952).Back. Note 34: Badrul Hassan, The Drink and Drug Evil of India (Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1922), 103.Back. Note 35: Extract from the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor of Bombay, assembled for the purpose of making Laws and Regulations under the provisions of the "The Indian Councils Act, 1861," 16 July 1887. NAI. Home Judicial. January 1888. Proceedings 43-46.Back. Note 36: WBSA. Poll/Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925.Back. Note 37: Queen-Empress v. Narattamdas' Moriram and Another. Indian Law Reports. Bombay Series, Appellate Criminal, Vol XIII. (Bombay: Government Book Depot, 1889) IOL V/22/165. Even though the Marwaris included both
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Hindus and Jains, the law reports mentioned "Hindu law" and did not indicate that "Jain" law would come to bear on these discussions.Back. Note 38: Bill to amend the Prevention of Gambling Act (Bombay IV of 1887). NAI. Home Judicial. October 1889. Proceedings 170-178.Back. Note 39: Ibid.Back. Note 40: WBSA. Home Judicial. March 1897. No 31-42 (A). Back. Note 41: In the archival records of the West Bengal State Government, there exist hundreds of pages of discussion of the question of rain gambling and its effects.Back. Note 42: The Englishman22March 1897. Back. Note 43: Indian Daily News, 26 March 1897. Quoted in WBSA. Judicial Dept. Judicial Branch. B Proceedings, April 1900. No. 1-2. File No. J 2G/1. "Subject: Memorial for the Repeal of the Rain Gambling Act."Back. Note 44: "Rain Gambling in Calcutta: A Marwaree Meeting" The Statesman. (Calcutta) 26 March 1897. RNNB. The press's spatial ascription of Marwari identity as the "element" from Burabazar is an example of the localization of identity and the way in which communities are bounded and located by outside forces, as noted in chapter two.Back. Note 45: CRNPB. Bharat Mitra 25 February 1897.Back. Note 46: "How they Manufacture Law,"Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), 24 March 1897; Back. Note 47: "Rain Gambling in Calcutta: A Marwaree Meeting," The Statesman (Calcutta), 26 March 1897. Back. Note 48: Ibid.Back. Note 49: NAI. Home Judicial. May 1897. Proceedings 297-308B. Back. Note 50: Note 51: RNNB. Hitavadi (Calcutta), 23 April 1920. Back. RNNB. Dainik O Samachar Chandrika, 8 April 1897.Back.
Note 52: "It appears that since the passing of Act III of 1897 systematic rain gambling which was formerly carried on in Calcutta at houses maintained for the purpose has completely disappeared." Question of amending Act III of 1867 so as to include within its provisions the suppression of rain gambling and opium-gambling. NAI. Home Judicial. 1901. February 1-2A. Back. Note 53: RNNB. Hindustan (Calcutta), 21 February 1922.Back. Note 54: Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and
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the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 33-68. Back. Note 55: RNNB. Sulabh Dainik 26 March 1897.Back. Note 56: RNNB. Mihir-O-Sudhakar13 March 1897.Back.
Note 57: RNNB. Bangavasi 3 April 1897; Dainik-O-Samachar Chandrika 23 March 1897.Back. Note 58: Letter to editor, signed by "Abandoned Cows, Hacks, and Poor Doggies," Indian Daily News (Author: City?), 20 March 1897. Back. Note 59: Jota Sowda referred to a form of gambling that later came into prominence in the second decade of the twentieth century that involved placing bets on outstanding sowdas (transactions) of the prices of jute. Statement of Baboo Bungshi Dhur, The Statesman (Calcutta), 26 March 1897.Back. Note 60: Capital (Calcutta), 24 March 1897Back. Note 61: Reported in Letter to editor, Indian Daily News (Calcutta), 20 March 1897.Back. Note 62: Memorial Addressed to the Honourable Sir John Woodburn, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. Government of Bengal. Judicial Dept., Judicial Branch. B Proceedings, April 1900, No. 1-2. Section Number 4.Back. Note 63: The Statesman (Calcutta), 23 March 1897. Back. Note 64: Ibid.Back. Note 65: Baboo Sheonath Chowdry, The Statesman (Calcutta), 26 March 1897.Back. Note 66: Home Judicial. February, 1901. A Proceedings 1-2.Back. Note 67: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925. Back. Note 68: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925. Back. Note 69: Ibid. Hafiz Anwar, Additional District Judge, Rewari.Back. Note 70: W.F. Wells, CS, Judge, Agra, in No. 128 of Criminal Appeal Sessions Court, 18 June 1898. In NAI. Home Judicial 1901. Feb. 1-2 A.Back. Note 71: Draft Bill to Prohibit Wagering on the Price of Opium in The United Provinces. NAI. Home Judicial. June 1911. No. 43.Back. Note 72: "Morality by Legislation," Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), 25 March 1897. Back.
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Note 73: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925.Back. Note 74: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925.Back. Note 75: There is ample evidence in the 1893 report of the Royal Commission on Opium that Marwaris were avid consumers of the narcotic. A representative of the Marwari community, Rai Sheo Bur Bogla Bahadur, reported to the Commission that many Marwari men took up the habit of opium eating in their 40s. Two physicians, Dr. Kailas Chunder Bose and Dr. Hiralal Ghosh, testified that Marwaris were noted for opium eating but that it did not negatively affect their health, intelligence or longevity as much as it affected Bengalis. They commented that this opium habit did "not deteriorate the intellect of the habitual consumers; on the contrary it acts as a stimulant to their brains. The Marwaris, who are noted for opium eating, are the most intelligent class of merchants in India," and actually lived longer than Bengalis. Minutes and Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Opium between 18th November and 29th December 1893; with Appendices, Vol. II. (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1894). Evidence of Dr. Kailas Chunder Bose, 28 November 1893; Dr. Hiralal Ghose. 28 November 1893.Back. Note 76: RNNB. Modern Review (Calcutta), August 1924.Back. Note 77: Auckland to J.C. Melville, 6 August 1837. Auckland Private Letterbook, Vol. III, No. II. British Museum, Additional Manuscripts 37691. Back. Note 78: Minute by Governor General Auckland. "Opium Question" July 29, 1837. Auckland Minute Books,Vol II. British Museum, Additional Manuscripts 37, 710.Back. Note 79: Draft Bill to prohibit the practice of wagering on the price of opium in the United Provinces. Home Judicial. A. October 1911. No. 165Back. Note 80: WBSA. Police. Aug. 1925. P 2P-38. Proc. 65-67. Back. Note 81: WBSA. Police. May 1925. P 2P-38. Proc. 389-392.Back.
Note 82: The Public Gambling (CP Amendment) Bill. Extracts from the CP Legislative Council. NAI. Home Police. File 24/16/1926. Back. Note 83: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925.Back. Note 84: Letter from C. J. Stevenson-Moore, CVO Chief Secretary, to Government of Bengal, Political Department, to Secretary of the Government of India, Home Dept. "Proposed legislation for the suppression of "Cotton Gambling" in Bengal." Home Police A. April 1912. 116-118. (Author: please clarify citation)Back. Note 85: Bengal Cotton Gambling Ordinance, 1912. NAI. Home/Home. July 1913. Pro NO 25. Back.
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Note 86: Home Police. April 1912. 116-8 (A)., 1-8.Back. Note 87: WBSA. Poll. Police. Gambling on Opium Figures. P 4G/2. 1925. Back. Note 88: Bengalee (Calcutta), 6 September 1905.Back. Note 89: Ibid.Back. Note 90: Ibid.Back. Note 91: RNNB. Bengalee (Calcutta), 15 December 1917.Back. Note 92: RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 21 May 1918. Back. Note 93: RNNB. Bengalee (Calcutta), 1 March 1918.Back. Note 94: RNNB. Barisal Hitashi (Bansal), 27 May 1918.Back. Note 95: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 19 June 1918.Back. Note 96: RNNB. Jyoti (Chittagong), 2 January 1919, and Bangali (Calcutta) Jan. 9, 1919.Back. Note 97: RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 22 August 1918.Back. Note 98: RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 4 September 1918.Back. Note 99: RNNB. Bangavasi (Calcutta), 23 November 1918.Back. Note 100: See chapter five for a fuller discussion of the leadership crisis.Back. Note 101: RNNB. Dainik Bharat Mitra 17 April 1919.Back. Note 102: RNNB. Samyavadi (Calcutta), 7 May 1920.Back. Note 103: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 19 April 1919.Back.
Note 104: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 14 May 1919.Back. Note 105: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 23 August 1919.Back. Note 106: RNNB. Nayak 10 September 1919.Back. Note 107: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 17 August 1921; 23 August 1921.Back. Note 108: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 30 August 1919.Back. Note 109: RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 2 September 1919.Back. Note 110:
RNNB. Mohammadi 13 September 1918.Back.

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Note 111:
RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 11 September 1918.Back.
Note 112: Ibid. Some, however, felt that the riots were an echo of the Shahabad cow-killing riots of the previous year. These so-called "korbani" (sacrifice) riots had reputedly spread from the United Provinces and Bihar into Calcutta. Back. Note 113: Note 114: Note 115: Note 116: Note 117: Note 118: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 11 September 1918.Back. RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 11 September 1918.Back. RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 12 September 1918.Back. RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 16 September 1918.Back. RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 12 September 1918.Back. RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 11 September 1918.Back.
Note 119: General Department. Misc. Branch. File No. 3W/12. B October 1918. No. 66-68.Back. Note 120: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta),8 July 1918.Back. Note 121: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 7 May 1918.Back. Note 122: RNNB. Nayak (Calcutta), 30 May 1918.Back. Note 123: The 1918 riots were partly explained in the colonial archives by the Marwaris evicting Muslims from property purchased from the Calcutta Improvement Trust. (Home Poll. Nov. 1918. 164-201A: 5) On the 1926 riots, see Representation of the Marwari Association on communal question arising out of the Calcutta riots. (Home Poll. Dept. Poll. Branch. 1926. File No. 220 Sl 1-2) The Honorary Secretary of the Marwari Association wrote that Muslims were solely responsible for the riots, and desecrated many Jain and Hindu temples. The petition asked the government to give Marwaris licenses for firearms so they could remain in the Burabazar area adjoining Muslim neighborhoods. Also see Home Poll. 11/VII/1926 and Home Political 1926 F 205:8-14 for more on the Marwari Associations comments on the riots.Back. Note 124: Modi, Desh ke Itihas Mein Marwari Jati ka Sthan, 694.Back. Note 125: Geoffrey Moorhouse. Calcutta: The City Revealed (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 171.Back. Note 126: Arjun Appadurai. "Introduction," Social Life of Things, Back. Note 127: George Watts, "Ghee," in Dictionary of the Economic Products of
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India (Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1972): 491498.Back. Note 128: Ibid., 494.Back. Note 129: Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 370.Back. Note 130: K. T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 37.Back. Note 131: Ibid., 47.Back. Note 132: R. S. Khare, Culture and Reality: Essays on the Hindu System of Managing Foods (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1976), 12. According to Khare, Hindus don't have a Levi-Straussian opposition between the raw and the cooked. This ethnosociology of food concerns both the relative ranking of individuals and groups who handle certain foods, as well as the intrinsic qualities of foods in relation to other foods (19). There is no one moral order for handling and distributing food within society, because food transactions are conducted in relation to individuals. Instead, multiple hierarchical situations exist. A good example of this would be the case of prasad food for the deity, which could not be on the same transacting level as for humans. The basic binary opposition is between kacca and pakka. Kacca refers to unprepared food in an immature physical state (such as raw rice or lentils), and is considered to be kin exclusive food. Untouchables can bring kacca to Brahmins without any problem. Pakka, on the other hand, refers to fully cooked and "inclusive" food.Back. Note 133: Achaya, Indian Food, 65.Back. Note 134: Ibid., 84.Back. Note 135: Khare, Culture and Reality, 21 n. 8.Back. Note 136: Jennifer Alexander, Trade, Traders, and Trading in Rural Java (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1-2.Back. Note 137: John Roselli, "The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal," Past and Present. 86 (Feb. 1980): 121148.Back. Note 138: Sinha writes, "In this colonial ordering of masculinity, the politically self-conscious Indian intellectuals occupied a unique place: they represented an 'unnatural' or 'perverted' form of masculinity. Hence this group of Indians, the most typical representatives of which at the time were middle-class Bengali Hindus, became the quintessential referents for that odious category designated as 'effeminate babus.'" Colonial Masculinity, 2. Back. Note 139: Lord Zetland, 'Essayez' The Memoirs of Lawrence, Second Marquess of Zetland (London: John Murray, 1956), 80-81.Back. Note 140: RNNB. Hitavadi (Calcutta), 19 September 1919.Back.
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Note 141: RNNB. Bangali (Calcutta), 12 September 1919.Back. Note 142: WBSA. Municipal/Municipal. Dec. 1890. M 20A/5. No 9-10, 321.Back. Note 143: WBSA. Municipal/Municipal. Sept. 1890. File M (20-A)/5 5) Back. Note 144: WBSA. Municipal/Municipal. Sept. 1890. File M (20-A)/5 5.Back. Note 145: A maund is a weight measurement, deriving from a unit of measure in the ancient world, and under colonialism was also used by the British. A maund can be divided into 40 seers, which in the early 20th century eventually became standardized into 82 pounds.Back. Note 146: September 8, 1917, Zetland Papers, 77-80, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library.Back. Note 147: Ibid.Back. Note 148: Modi, Desh ke Itihas Mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 695-697.Back. Note 149: Zetland Papers, 77-80.Back. Note 150: Shri Gangaprasad Bhotika, "Marwari Samajkay Andolan aur Basantlal" [Basatlal and Movements of Marwari community] in Basantlal Murarka Smrtigranth, 82- 84.Back. Note 151: More research remains to be done on the complicated nexus of relationships between Marwari businessmen and the Brahmin priestly community in this scandal and in other contexts, such as the Rani Sati temple discussed in chapter six.Back. Note 152: Bhejal is defined as "to mix with bad ingredients, not pure, artificial, or to mix with inferior things."Back. Note 153: Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings. 4 September 1917. Q and As., 672-3. IOL. V/9/1201.Back. Note 154: The preceding two paragraphs draw from Shri Ramdev Chokhany., 108-126.Back. Note 155: Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings, 4 September 1917, 672-3.Back. Note 156: The Bengal Food Adulteration Bill, 1919. NAI. Legislative Department, August 1919, No. 11-13. Quoted from "Statement of Objects and Reasons," 33. Back. Note 157: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 23 August 1919.Back.
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Note 158: RNNB. Moslem Hitashi (Calcutta), 26 August 1919.Back. Note 159: RNNB. Midnapore Hitashi, 1 September 1919.Back. Note 160: The Bengal Food Adulteration Bill, 1919. NAI. Legislative Department, August 1919, No. 11-13. Chapter II. General Provisions - Clause 6, 11. Back. Note 161: The Bengal Food Adulteration Bill, 1919, 11.Back. Note 162: RNNB. Hitavadi (Calcutta), 31 May 1918.Back. Note 163: RNNB. Darsak (Calcutta), 30 August 1919.Back. Note 164: RNNB. Dainik Basumati (Calcutta), 26 February 1920.Back.
Note 165: RNNB. Vishwamitra (Calcutta), 5 September 1924.Back. Note 166: Phanibhusan Sanyal, Adulteration of Butter and Ghee, With Animal Fat and Vegetable Ghee, and Its Detection (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1929), 143155.Back. Note 167: Dr. Santosh Kumar Mukherji, ed., Bulletin of Krisi Gopalan Silpa Sikshalay. Special Number: Dairy and Cowkeeping (Calcutta: Krisi Gopalan Silpa Sikshalay, 1954), 1. Back. Note 168: Ibid., 5-6.Back. Note 169: "Morality by Legislation," Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), 25 March 1897. Back. Note 170: Binaya Chauduri, Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal (Calcutta: R K Maitra, 1964)Back. Note 171: "Ulfa forces exodus of Marwaris," Telegraph (Calcutta), 25 January 1990.Back. Note 172: "Marwaris flock to Raipur," Asian Age, 23 January 1996.Back.
Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta, c. 1897-1997
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5. Social Reform and the Women's Question in Marwari Public Life

1
The question of social reform for the Marwari community, and especially for Marwari women, has always been entangled in the web of the group's negative associations, dating back to the early nineteenth century. This has been especially so in Bengal, home to India's supposedly most emancipated women, the Bengali bhadramahila.
One Marwari woman, for instance, told me that while growing up she would often tell people only her first name because she did not want them to "know." Sarite did very well in her graduation examinations at an elite convent school in the late 1970s, and the school posted the exam results on television. She said that Bengali parents were so amazed that a Marwari girl had done so well, they rang up the school to find out whether it could actually be true! In another instance, when I was doing research in the library at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, I ran into Prabha, a Harvard student I had once met at a party. I went up to her to greet her. Without thinking, I told her I had a bad memory and asked if she could please remind me of her last name. She flushed red and told me her surname in a whisper, then suggested that we meet at noon to go out for lunch. Later, at a nearby South Indian restaurant over a lunch of vegetarian dosa pancakes, Prabha confessed to me that she had felt mortified when I asked for her surname at the Centre. Though she said she would not hold it against me, the last thing she had either wanted or expected was to have to be identified as a Marwari in this elite space of Calcutta's intellectual world.
This pair of vignettes suggests the Marwaris' public struggles in both developing pride and negotiating a new space for Marwari women in Bengal. I would like to explore the historical conditions that make stories like these commonplace. To do this, I give a genealogy of the way that Marwaris came into the problem of "social reform" and ultimately began to resolve the woman question.
Marwari intellectuals' debates over widow remarriage, women's seclusion, female education, and dowry did not arise until the second quarter of the twentieth century, about eighty to one hundred years after Bengalis wrestled with very similar issues. Indeed, many Marwaris themselves regard Marwari womenor even their own community as a wholeas simply "backward" and "conservative" compared to their proximate and pioneering Bengali neighbors. The classic story of nineteenth-century social reform of conditions for Bengali bhadralok women, from the Bengali social reformer
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Rammohan Roy onwards, is often read as a well-rehearsed script for women's modernity all over India. Thus, one might view Marwari debates in Bengal and their subsequent resolutions as working themselves out simply along lines established by Bengalis. Timberg, for example, makes the following assumption: "The story of Marwari social reform may seem familiar to those who have read much Indian social history. With the details and names changed, it was modeled, consciously to a considerable extent, on the experience of social reform characterizing almost every Indian community as it enters a modern consciousness." 1 This chapter is an attempt to grapple with these and related historiographical problems, which I abbreviate as "being late" and "being the same."
First, the appearance of coming late to reform is actually a problem in the formation of a public and collective Marwari identity under colonialism. Christopher Bayly and B. R. Grover, among others, have shown how various collective organizations existed among North Indian trading groups during the eighteenth century. 2 But as I have been arguing throughout, the early twentieth century was the first time that Marwaris represented themselves as Marwaris in etching out a political identity in the colonial public sphere. To put it another way, the label "Marwari" had to be attached to a community participating in modern public life before it could take itself as an object of reform. In fact, the apparent "lateness" of the women's question among the Marwaris gives credence to my claim that the modern Marwari identity is actually relatively new. One could argue that, because the Marwaris were only formed as a modern community from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, with the women arriving in Calcutta during the 1910s1930s, their not confronting the women's question until the 1940s hardly makes them "late."
5
Second, once Marwaris formed themselves as a political community through discussions held in the voluntary associations of civil society, the Bengali paradigm still did not "naturally" hold sway. In the most general sense, of course, social reform for all communities in colonial India is similar in that it constituted a public performance of modernity crucial to the community's changing public role as a new aspirant to a share of political power on a national stage. In these performances, the status of women has been central to whether a community could be judged as "modern." While Marwaris may have raised sets of issues similar to those raised by Bengalis, the specific resolutions they negotiatedin the same city but in quite a different historical and social contexthave enacted and produced a set of very different public meanings. These differences are partly due to the economic disparity between the two communities, and also to decisions about whether or not women's income would be considered advantageous overall to the family. 3
There were also differences of degree in the acceptance or dismissal of

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certain reforms for women. The most vehemently disputed set of social reform issues for Marwaris, interestingly enough, have been those that affect the exchange of women and wealth through marriage alliances. Initially, great contestation and social ostracism arose when two people married from different subcastes. Later legal attempts to prevent the marriages of young girls, particularly the 1926 Sharda act, were considered disastrous by conservatives, who fought them tooth and nail. Around this same time, multiple generations of families were ostracized in cases of widow remarriage or marriage outside the subcastes of Agarwal, Oswal, and Maheshwari.
Dowry, which has grown to astronomical proportions throughout this century, is perhaps the most disputable practice. Wealth worth several thousands of dollars is exchanged among traders through dowry. Among industrialist families, the amount goes into the millions. In the event of such exchanges, divorce is extremely rare, although it has now become a more public issue among some industrialist families, including the Birlas. Marriage is perhaps the single most important form of social linkage in business dealings, on which rests the future fortunes of trading lineages, business empires, and corporate consolidations of multimillion-dollar industries. Naturally, many other communities, even the less economically well-off Bengalis, are also interested in money, status, and power, but the financial stakes are nowhere near as great.
In fact, it was the nationalist movement, particularly the influence of Gandhi and the Hindu conservative Madan Mohan Malaviya, that inspired Marwari leaders to take up questions of reform and status, particularly for women. In addition to being played out in relation to the Bengali experience, Marwari social reform was drawn into the national political currents of that period. The resurgence of twentieth century Hinduism, inspired in part by the practice of enumeration in electoral politics, was an undeniable influence. This was not restricted to conservatives. The cultural identity of Marwaris among both conservatives and reformers alike has been closely tied to communal issues in North Indian politics. Specific influences and ideas once associated with Jainism have been appropriated and characterized as "Hindu" in the broader public sphere, and such distinctions have not persisted. Conservatives and reformists both lay claim to a broader Hindu identity, especially in relation to the 1947 Partition. Even very recent social reform literature reflects this logic. One contemporary reformer, connecting marriage reforms to demographic competition between communities, writes: "The result of the fact that Hindu widows cannot remarry is that the number of Hindus is gradually decreasing in comparison to other communities. From a political point of view, this inequality can be dangerous, as is clear from the tragic incidents before and after the partition of this country." 4 Caste and Civil Society in Colonial India
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As Veena Das has theorized, in India communities themselves became political actors seeking representational space in a larger public arena. 5 According to this model, communities in the colonial culture of India formed entities that made claims on the state, using a model of reform from within the community. In India we generally see a politics of identity, based on a community affiliation, as the norm for political action. Excepting the unique case of the Bengali bhadralok, there has been little interest in legislating for everyone. Though these communities engage in the continuing deployment of colonial ethnological knowledge about the peoples and cultures of India, we shall see that their appropriations of colonial discourse may be for very different ends than those that the state intended.
10
The history of Marwari social reform is unlike that of the nineteenth-century Bengali bhadralok, who made appeals to the colonial state for the legislative implementation of universalizing modes of social reform. Of course, both communities lived under the same conditions and terms of colonial law, which affected certain social customs and set certain minimum legal standards against which offenders could risk criminal prosecution. It is important to understand why law, in fact, was the major sphere in which the nineteenth-century bhadralok reformers worked out their project of social reform. For the Marwaris, the question of making new laws to promote changes in the treatment of women never arose. This was only partly because major laws, prompted by the work of Bengalis and other social reformers in India, were already in place. Marwari social reform was played out in a somewhat different set of social spaces. Almost a century after the Bengalis, Marwari leaders situated themselves in a caste-based arena for social change in which they appealed to the politics of group identity.
Nicholas Dirks has argued that colonialism created forms of civil society in India by reinventing new kinds of "traditional" institutions, caste in particular. Dirks contends that caste became "the most critical site for the textualization of social identity, for the specification of public and private domains, and the legitimating conceits of social freedom and societal control." 6 Dirks' insight can aptly be applied to the Marwari debates about social reform in order to show how the Marwari caste community is actually produced through and within the sphere of these disputations and debates. Community comes into being through the mutual engagement of people with opposing opinions. It is this very engagement, not indifference, which produces the caste community as a part of civil society. The complexity of the Marwari debates shows that there are many different and overlapping constituencies to whom the issues are addressed, ranging from national interests in the case of indentured labor to more internal questions about the age of consent for Marwari boys and girls. Although the Marwari subcastes, such as Agarwal and Maheshwari, had their own organizations, they had many questions in common. Scholarly Approaches to Bengali Social Reform under Colonial
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Capitalism The topic of colonial "social reform" has in recent years been a source of frequent discussion and debate in the field of Indian cultural history. Much of the scholarly discussion has focused on the changing role of Indian women as a primary site for social transformation, often with unintended negative consequences for the so-called beneficiaries of this social action. 7 This literature has pointed out how "social reform" often imposed the norms of one community (usually the Brahmins) on communities for whom they did not traditionally apply. This process happened through the deployment of law, which uses a universalizing model to regulate social customs that were perhaps once restricted or limited to the practices of a small number of groups only. 8
So why did the bhadralok use law instead of advocating reform within their community through social boycott and other local disciplinary techniques? In his study of the Bengali social reformer Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Asok Sen has argued that the negative effects of economic imperialismincluding deindustrialization, agricultural economic stagnation, economic drain, and the alienation of land ownership from cultivationthwarted the development of a middle class of intellectuals who could effectively lead the way to social transformation. Bengal, Sen argues, never had a civil society in the European sense of the term, in which the fulfillment of an economic function would advance social progress ("social production" in Sen's terms). 9 Since the Bengali middle classes were alienated from the means of production, middle-class leadership was characterized by a lack of hegemony. As a result, Bengali intellectuals exerted only a very weak influence at best; the middle classes could not be persuaded by Vidyasagar to pursue and achieve a program of social reforms. Vidyasagar had to rely on British support and legislative changes in civil law, which would create a legal space to perform enlightened practices (such as widow remarriage). 10 Sen writes:
The Bengal economy had fulfilled none of those conditions of capitalist development whereby the doctrines of possessive individualism and market relations obtained their significance as progressive social philosophy in British history. For a middle class with no positive role in social production, the theories of Locke, Bentham and Mill acted more as sources of confusion about the nature of the state and society under colonial rule the complex of colonial law and order accounted for a perpetual rift of private property from adequate commitments to social production. Growing in this context, the middle class had neither the position, nor the strength to mediate effectively between polity and production. There lay the travesty of imported ideas of individual rights and rationality. 11
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15
While few would disagree with Sen's argument that colonialism created a modernity that might look incomplete when measured by certain European standards, his argument runs the risk of becoming reductionist in its creation of a base-superstructure framework that ultimately rests on economic principles. It is important to consider how social reform among Marwaris took a very different shape than among their Bengali predecessors, even under ostensibly the same overarching economic environment.
The Marwaris, unlike the Bengali bhadralok of the nineteenth century, did not resort to the sphere of law as a way to propagate social change. Instead, they acted as a caste community in creating public life, with goals of doing charity, philanthropy, and social reform for themselves and by themselves, without relying on a state-supported, universalizing legal framework. Though resident in Calcutta, the Marwaris drew their inspiration for reform from Gandhi and his program of nationalist uplift. There is very little, if any, reference to the famed Bengali reformers in Marwari self-representations of social reform. The Marwari approach to reformaligning themselves more with a nationalist orientation, without acknowledging the accomplishments of their Bengali forebearswas itself seen as a type of parochialism within Bengal. As we shall see, when promoting reform for themselves, the Marwaris did not attempt to appeal to the state or try to mobilize governmental power in pursuit of their own social goals. For the Marwaris, there was no explicit model of universal citizenship that they deployed in the service of social change and social improvement. Early Calcutta Institutions of Marwari Public Life From the 1830s onwards, there were considerable waves of migrants from Shekhawati and Bikaner who flocked to Barabazar. These early migrants traveled to Calcutta on riverboats that belonged to Marwari firms with branches on the eastern end of the Ganges. 12 New arrivals stayed in basa (charitable kitchens), which provided them with free room and board, although these filled no ostensible political function. 13 As noted earlier, new arrivals slept on the gaddi of more established businessmen who were helping out their fellow caste members from home. The growth and development of these informal organizations initially helped Marwari migrants in setting up and running their trading businesses in Calcutta.
The first public organization for Rajasthani upcountrymen in Calcutta, the Bari Panchayat, brought together traders by late 1828 to discuss business matters and some social concerns. There was a very close connection between business organizations and community organizations. The panchayat was run under auspices of the firm of Sojiram Hardayal, its founder, and arbitrated commercial disputes, particularly those concerning bills of credit ( hundi). After the Sojiram
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Hardayal firm closed in 1860, the panchayat was rebuilt in 1861 by the firm Tarachandra Ghanshyamdas. 14 The governing board of the panchayat was Agarwal, and the disputes seem to have pertained to the Agarwals. 15 In 1887, Adodhyaprasad Chowdhary, a "Marwari" Agarwal, had married a deshwali Agarwal girl, upsetting the symbolic boundaries of acceptable marriages, which ultimately caused a split in the organization. 16
Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a shift in the structure of public organizations from caste panchayat associations to modern voluntary associations. One very early such organization was the Calcutta Pinjrapole Society, established in 1885 for the protection of cows. The Calcutta Pinjrapole was the very first social organization of the Calcutta Marwaris. 17 The Calcutta Pinjrapole was established by Ramchandra Goenka, Swaraj Jhunjhunwala, Jugal Kishore Ruyia, Bhadridas Mukim, and Raja Shirbaksh Raiji Bagla; its members also included a number of Rajasthani and upcountry Hindu and Jain merchants. 18 Bhuder Mull Rooiya and Chatur Bauj Rooiya, sons of Suram Mull Rooiya, donated part of their building and profits, and wrote in their legal deed that they "consider kindness to and relief of suffering of cattle to be acts of great importance and high merit." 19 The goals of the Pinjrapole were to provide good milk, nourish milk cows, and protect aged and dry cows from slaughter.
20
The Pinjrapole was at the forefront of a large variety of cow protection societies that sprang up across the whole of India. As a result, Marwaris were closely associated with cow protection when minorities objected to it. Among the various groups involved in cow protection in Calcutta, the Marwaris were singled out by the Muslim press as being "inclined to settle all the [cow protection] problems themselves without taking any account of Moslems. we believe Marwaris, if they could, would forthwith forcibly stop cow-killing by legislation under deterrent penalties." 20 This is a good case of a community using of law to fight other communities, not for regulating affairs seen as "their own." Representative Voluntary Associations The socially conservative Marwari Association was started in 1898 in Calcutta "for the gradual betterment of the moral and material well-being of the community." The first meeting was held on December 8, 1898, at the home of Babu Rung Lal Poddar. The association extended membership to Marwaris, Agarwals, Maheshwaris, Oswals, and trading Brahmins. Acknowledging the blessings the goddess Lakshmi showers on trade (her "favorite temple"), the ninety association members passed resolutions to promote social, economic, and educational improvement for their community. The association was concerned that the community was falling behind in education, particularly in English. Their many philanthropic
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activities were also discussed, including the Vishudhhananda Saraswati Vidyalaya boys school teaching Sanskrit and English, the Burra Bazar library in 1900, and contributions to both famine relief funds and the Calcutta Pinjrapolefinancing the cow-protection society with over 100,000 rupees per year. 21
The Marwari Association also called for government intervention in the improvement of law and order in policing thefts and break-ins, as well as in attending to municipal problems of railways, traffic, roadwork, water supply, and sanitation infrastructure. Other matters had to do with what we might classify as "identity politics," that is, asking the state for special privileges on the basis of caste and Hindu religion. These issues included refreshment rooms for Hindus on the Eastern Indian Railroad and at the High Court, objections to the storage of animal hides in the godowns with other items, objections to missionaries preaching at the Hindu bathing ghats, requests for Hindi-language rail timetables, and the need for platform passes for men "to pilot the timid and shy Hindu ladies of the higher classes" through the crowded railway station. In response to the Marwari Association's letters, especially regarding matters of sanitation, the lieutenant governor agreed, but also took the opportunity to chastise: it was "not reasonable that a community of great wealth and so great intelligence and shrewdness should live amidst surroundings of a dangerously unsanitary character." 22
The age of consent for marriage, a subject of legislation during the 1920s, was of great concern to members of the conservative Marwari Association. The association claimed that the 1922 bill was against the tenets of the Hindu religion, and that reform on these matters should come from within society and not from law. Initially, it was argued that passage of the bill would cause more women to be effectively widowed:
The effect of the measure will be that even a husband will be liable to the punishment of transportation for life or 10 years rigorous imprisonment on a charge of rape for having intercourse with his wife if she happens to be under 14 years of age. Punishing the husband on such a charge would mean condemning the wife also to lifelong misery. To her all prospects of happiness in life would be gone for ever. It is not likely that the husband after serving out his sentence would be able to live happily or would like to live again with the wife who was the cause of his imprisonment, and as Hindu girls are not married more than once, the wife will practically have to lead the life of a widow. 23
25
Later on, arguments were made that "to introduce a late system of marriage" would disrupt the joint family because the Hindu bride needs to
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"identify herself thoroughly with the family and under the loving care and guidance of the other female members of the family she learns to consider the house and the family as her very own." If she married and joined the family later, the association worried, she would insist on breaking off from the joint family. 24
The Marwari Association arose precisely at a point when the community was rife with disagreement and dissension over a variety of economic and social issues. At the same time, these organizations were necessary links to the government. The Association became the forum for getting government titles as well as providing a meeting place for government officials and capitalists. As a result of dissension, there arose many breakaway and alternative organizations espousing different viewpoints that often worked at odds with the Marwari Association. Because of economic disagreements, the piece goods wing of the Marwari Association became the Marwari Chamber of Commerce in 1900. Membership was supposedly open to all, though the overwhelming majority of its members were Marwari baniyas. The Chamber handled 1,198 arbitration cases during its first year, and handled eighty per cent of the Calcutta import trade of piece goods. 25
A large number of voluntary organizations sprang up after the turn of the century. The Marwari Association had taken a particularly conservative view on women's issues, arguing against widow remarriage, for example, which prompted much internal dissent. In opposition to the Marwari Association, there also arose a movement among youth workers of the community, who established a Vaishya Sabha in Calcutta, which later merged with the Arya Samaj. The Vaishya Sabha, intended to be more inclusive than other groups, was formed by Ramkumar Goenka in 1902 and, like the Marwari Association, attended to various municipal and social issues. 26 These included posting guards beginning at 3 o'clock in the morning to protect women going out to the toilet, setting up a store to sell reasonably priced funeral cremation supplies, and speaking out about dowry and the marriage of young girls to elderly men. 27
Up to this point, although women's concerns (such as in their travels on the railway) arose in these organizations, the women's questionof how Marwari women should become modernwas not yet on the agenda. There is evidence, however, of some individual attempts by Calcutta businessmen to provide for destitute women's welfare in Rajasthan. Ramchandra Goenka established a Vidhowa Sahayak Samiti (widow helper association) in 1899, and donated proceeds from rents from a building on Harrison Road and a cash sum of Rs. 15,000. This institution also helped orphan children below the age of fifteen. From the report of 1904 we learn that in that year, "146 widows of 21 villages of Rajputs got help from this fund." 28
Page 9 of 61
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Indentured Emigration & Beginnings of Marwari Political Action The Marwari Sahayak Samiti was formed in 1913 as a result of the politicization of the issue of Indian emigrant indentured labor. Gandhi's return from South Africa in 1896 and publication of the miseries of the coolie system helped make indenture part of the nationalist agenda. Ramdev Chokhany is claimed to have first petitioned the protector of immigrants, Dr. Banks, about the coolie system in 1913 and to have helped found the Samiti when he received no satisfactory response. 29 Largely inspired by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a right-wing Hindu conservative, several prominent Marwari businessmen became involved in the politics of the indentured labor system, which had been established by the British after the end of the British slave trade of Africans in 1834. Malaviya was a politician who championed the Hindu cause and traveled and lectured promoting communal sentiment and physical fitness to fight the Muslims. 30 The anti-indentureship movement in India was originally restricted to the English-speaking political elite, but changed greatly because of the Marwari involvement. 31
30
The anti-indenture issue is most likely the earliest example of Calcutta Marwaris' making a concerted effort in civil society for the benefit of others and of their assuming that they had a larger role to play in the "Indian" issues of the times. The community was first attracted to the problem when one of "their" women was forcibly recruited, but the indentured workers generally came from outside the Marwari community. 32 The Marwari Sahayak Samiti was highly instrumental in helping the newly indentured coolies gain release from unfair contracts by swearing that they were unwilling to travel overseas, giving them access to free legal assistance, and paying for return journeys to their home villages. 33 The colonial government, however, claimed that the Marwari Sahayak Samiti was not directly involved with the struggle against indentured emigration. 34 Initially, the colonial government actually paid more attention to the Marwari Association, which was perhaps more recognizable as the Marwaris' official representative body. 35
The Marwari Association corresponded with the colonial government in an attempt to persuade the British of the importance of banning indentured emigration. The Association claimed that indentureship was tantamount to slavery and should be abolished. 36 In 1919, Honorary Secretary Ram Dev Chokhany sent a copy of a resolution passed by the Marwari Association to the colonial government's summer headquarters at Simla. The resolution read as follows:
The Marwari Association beg to call the attention of the

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Government of India to the fact that a very large number of Indian emigrants, who have earned their return passage to India under the indenture contract, are being kept beyond the time of their contracts in the colonies of Fiji, Trinidad, Jamaica, British Guiana and Dutch Guiana; and, although the war was ended and the seas made safe for travel in November 1918, no steps at all have been taken by these colonies to fulfil their repatriation engagement; that accounts of great hardship have been brought to the notice of members of the Marwari Association and that individual attempts to obtain fulfilment of the contract have failed.
37
The Marwari Association Committee claimed that the recruiters put pressure on the recruited coolies to claim to the magistrate that they had chosen to emigrate under their own free will, when in actuality the circumstances of work were not laid out in a manner that was comprehensible to the recruited villagers. 38 Letters in the colonial archive containing translated selections of the reports of released indentured workers offer evidence of the coercion used in labor recruitment. These letters produced an outcry when originally published in the Hindi language daily Bharat Mitra from October 28 to November 5, 1913. The Bharat Mitra newspaper accounts tell the stories of fourteen persons, illegally recruited as indentured workers, who were rescued by the Marwaris and given justice.
The stories began with a newspaper boy who, in his task of selling the English papers in the docked steamer ships, had encountered Lakshmi, a woman from the Hiralal Motilal family who told him to give word to "the Marwari gentlemen of Burrabazar" to seek their help in arranging for their release. Lakshmi was traveling to Ajmere (Rajasthan) from Agra with her young daughter and was approached by an arkati (recruiter) when the person meeting her at the station did not arrive. 39 The arkati put them up and gave them food and lodging for a week while attending to other business. Lakshmi was then tricked into agreeing to go to a place called Jamaica, which the arkati told her was very near Calcutta. He purportedly kept her jewelry with him for safekeeping but disappeared once he got her and some other recruited men and women into the coolie depot in Calcutta. As she was instructed, she told a sahib that she was going to Jamaica of her own free will, after which she was to board the ship. In her deposition, Lakshmi claimed:
35
After this the Arkati went away and when I looked about for him and could not find him anywhere, I began to weep. Subsequently I came to know from the coolies in the depot that the man was an Arkati and that having made me over to the cooly recruiting company, he had left with his remuneration. My grief then knew no bounds. After a few days I thought that if I could
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send word to the Marwaries of Calcutta, they would surely rescue me. So I sent word through that newspaper seller and you came and got me released. 40
The secretary of the Marwari Sahayak Samiti, Babu Onkarmull Shroff, made arrangements to pay for the woman's release. It turned out that Lakshmi had devised the Marwari name of "Hiralal Motilal" as a guise to send out a message to any Marwari who would help. Upon meeting the women in the coolie depot, the Marwari Sahayak Samiti realized that a very large number of people detained in the coolie depot were there against their will. In all of the cases they examined, trusting villagers were told that Jamaica was very near to Calcutta. The Marwaris took special note of instances in which the recruitment policy went against Hindu custom. In the depositions given to the colonial government are several examples of Brahmins forced to eat with low caste men, and women were reported to be single when in actuality they were married to husbands back in the villages. In all the cases of persons who were rescued, they had appealed to the Marwari community for help and were given food and shelter in one of the community dharmasalas (guest houses). 41
Why would the Marwaris take such a strong interest in the problem of indentured emigration? Karen Ray has argued that self-interested economic motives most likely played an important part. She wrote that Marwaris had accepted the theory that emigration had so decreased the numbers of laborers that the price of labor had become greatly inflated. Because they were so dependent on the jute trade, through which many fortunes were later made through the "sandbag war" of the First World War, the Marwari merchants, dealers, and brokers would be greatly disadvantaged by a decreasing labor supply. 42 Indeed, the Marwari Association Committee expressed their concern over the lack of any "surplus population now among the labouring classes." They believed that a labor shortage would have a highly detrimental effect on the industrial development of the country. This angle signified the way that Marwaris began to see themselves as civic and business leaders.
There is no doubt that such economic considerations did play some role in the decision of wealthy Marwari industrialists to become personally involved in the indentured emigration question. Other arguments were based on a notion that Indian culture was under threat. The Marwari Sahayak Samiti decried the destruction of Hindu caste laws by working conditions that did not respect the sensitivities of Indian caste society. Mixing arguments about "living wage" and caste, social, and religious customs, the Samiti wrote:
They are allotted to the different estates and become subject to

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the colonial labour laws which, although framed to protect the labourers, have, it is no exaggeration to say, been in practice unparalleled in their severity. The result is that they suffer the penalties prescribed by the laws and cannot earn even a living wage and at the end of the indenture period, many find themselves in an absolutely penniless condition and in debt. It is not only in this respect that the indentured Indian people suffer in those foreign lands. Their social and religious customs are held in utter contempt. All distinction of caste, creed or even sex is ignored in housing them. Their marriages solemnised in accordance with their religious doctrines are not recognised as valid and even the dead bodies of Hindu labourers have to be buried in the absence of any arrangement for cremation. Thus they are reduced to a state of abject servility and all manhood and sense of self respect are crushed out of them the great discrepancy in the proportion of men and women has naturally led to the prevalence of immorality and irregular unions between men and women of different castes, with the result that a race of baseborn Indians with a shameful heritage and of lax morals have sprung up in colonies. 48
40
As conservative Hindus, these Marwaris argued that many aspects of the indentured emigration system were antithetical to the values of the Hindu religious system. The problems of crossing the black waters of the ocean, breaking caste by eating with caste inferiors, and forcing marriages among men and women of mismatched castes violated many of the most important, politicized, and public tenets of Hinduism. I do not mean to imply that these questions of caste were merely a pretext for the purely economic considerations of Marwari business interests. The two concerns may, in fact, have worked in tandem. Thus, the Marwaris learned to put a communal spin on their social agenda. The rhetoric of Hindu community identity was deployed in the service of effecting legislative reforms. The Marwari argument that the politics of indentureship violated custom (ostensibly an area off-limits to British power) proved to be a useful tactic in getting the government to regulate, and eventually stop, forced labor migration. When the British colonial government clamped down on several freedom-fighting organizations that operated under the name of Samiti, the "Marwari Relief Society" was born as the successor to the Marwari Sahayak Samiti. Taking shape after 1914, the Marwari Relief Society grew into a thriving medical and social service institution serving hundreds of patients each day.
The involvement of the Marwaris in the anti-indentureship campaign demonstrates that the Marwari community was involved in "village-oriented political activity" long before Gandhi had popularized such activities. The anti-indentureship campaign, therefore, became a useful link between the Calcutta Marwaris and Gandhi. In fact, Gandhi was invited to Calcutta by the Marwaris to discuss the indentureship question soon after his arrival in
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India, thus beginning his involvement with anti-indentureship campaigns in the Congress session held in December 1916. Nevertheless, Pandit Mohan Malaviya was probably a stronger force in the shaping of Marwari politics than was Gandhi. In the context of widespread anti-colonial agitation, the national politicization of the indentureship issue was not lost upon the British.
The initial mobilization and protest against Indian indentured emigrant labor practices was critical to forging ties between Marwari community leaders and nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Malaviya. The indentureship movement allowed Marwari leaders to participate in the disciplinary politics of social reform on a national basis with respect to relatively powerless laborers without placing their own community image at risk or exposing their own social habits to external criticism. Ray's suggestion that Marwari involvement in the anti-indentureship issue could even be explained by their own worries as capitalists about the labor supply may, however, be too extreme in its assessment. In any case, the movement was one of the first occasions that Marwaris acted as "Marwaris" in the arena of social and political reform. Further, it was the indentureship movement that formed a common set of concerns between some Marwari intellectual leaders and M. K. Gandhi. With Gandhi's encouragement, these leaders were the ones to raise the Marwari women's question. Gandhi's Shadows: Marwari Reformists and the Nationalist Movement Many Marwari industrialist-nationalists worked very closely with the Congress Party and greatly influenced Gandhi in forming an anti-colonial nationalism. The Marwaris' relatively new interest in politics arguably arose in part from the large trading and speculative profits made during World War I, particularly by prominent businessmen like G. D. Birla, who encouraged diversification of Marwari investment. Beginning in the 1920s, Marwari firms bought up shares of European companies in jute and coal, and by the 1930s and 1940s they began establishing new presences in industries such as paper and sugar production. The massive accumulation of capital through speculation created the conditions for some top Marwari families to make the transition from traders to industrialists. As industrialists, they increased their visibility on both the national and international stages. The kinds of commercial linkages that Marwari industrialists needed in order to produce a product and sellto any willing customerwere distinctly different from and probably less extensive than the needs of traders, who required very wide social networks to keep their systems of hundi (credit) and trading businesses solvent.
From the 1920s onward, Marwari businessmen and industrialists incorporated various Hindu causes into nationalist political agendas, including animal protection, vegetarianism, local cloth distribution, and the improvement of the status and education of Indian women. This
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engagement and interest in Hindu revivalism was quite pervasive, and cut across divisions between reformers and conservatives within Marwari society. (Even the reformers, as we shall see, brought a Hindu consciousness to bear on their appropriations of colonial discourse about the community's relative social backwardness.) These nationalist programs relied on and drew inspiration from a growing modern religious imagination of Hinduism, which ultimately developed a communalist edge in its stance toward non-Hindus.
45
Hindi and English-language biographies of such prominent individuals as Gandhi's right-hand man G. D. Birla, P. D. Himmatsinka, Ishwar Das Jalan, Bhagirath Kanoria, Jamnalal Bajaj, B. M. Singhi, and Sitaram Seksaria are excellent sources on Marwari involvement in nationalist politics. By the 1920s, these men and their wives had become unwavering followers of Gandhi, joining the civil disobedience movement, wearing and promoting homespun cloth known as khadi, promoting youth development and military training (especially after the 1918 riots), and aiding in the relief of famine, floods, and earthquakes (such as in Bihar in 1934). Many of these men had careers in politics as members of the Indian National Congress Party. P. D. Himmatsinka, a solicitor, was a member of the Constituent Assembly from 1948 to 1952, the Rajya Sabha from 1956 to 1962, and the Lok Sabha from 1962 to 1971, representing the Sontal Parganas in Bihar. 49 Jamnalal Bajaj was a top Congress leader from 1924 to 1942, serving as the treasurer of the All India Congress Committee, and was one of the foremost Marwari politicians in western India. Originally from Rajasthan, Bajaj settled in Wardha, which is near Nagpur (then in the Central Provinces). Jamnalal Bajaj donated both land and money to Gandhi, who set up his ashram at Wardha. Of this group of people, G. D. Birla was by far the most prominent figure in aligning Marwari economic concerns with the politics of the Indian nationalist movement. Medha Malik Kudaisya has argued that Birla's alliance with Gandhi, even more than Nehru's, helped foster a vision of independent India based on nonviolence, support of khadi, and the promotion of Indian industry. 50 Gandhi first met Birla when he came to Calcutta in 1916 and was a guest at the Marwari school Vishudhdanand Saraswati Vidyalaya. 51
It was Gandhi who inspired Marwari leaders such as Birla and Bajaj to raise the women's question for the Marwari community. Gandhi held a very large meeting for Marwari women on January 25, 1921, to raise both funds and consciousness among his baniya supporters. He asked them to give up the luxuries they were accustomed to and to wear homespun khadi. 52 He opened a shawl and asked the women to spontaneously give what they loved most, their money and jewels. One newspaper reported that, "at this stage there was a shower of gifts which literally filled up the chaddar." 53 As important as the Birla-Gandhi alliance was in the shaping of Indian nationalism, I will not discuss Birla further, and instead direct interested readers to the abundance of published literature that outlines his national and industrial accomplishments. 54
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Although he has received less national attention than Birla, Sitaram Seksariya is gaining recognition as having been one of the foremost reformist Marwari leaders, active in the nationalist freedom movement and as a social reformer, especially in the promotion of women's education. As discussed in chapter two, he also contributed financial help to the national language movement to popularize Hindi. He was born into a Marwari Agarwal family in 1891 in Nawalgarh, Rajasthan. Sitaram's father died in 1903 of plague (Author: what kind? Bubonic plague?)in Burabazar. Even as a teenager, Sitaram was reportedly already engaging in projects of social uplift. At the age of seventeen, Sitaram opened a library in Nawalgarh. 55 After the death of his parents, he spent twenty years earning money in business. In 1921, at age thirty, he separated from the family business in Calcutta and became a "sleeping partner" in the Ramrith Sitaram firm. Until, 1928 he was engaged in business and the stock market, then reportedly left business altogether at the age of thirty-six. 56 He then joined the national freedom movement and was arrested and jailed five times between 1930 and 1942.
Along with Bhagirath Kanoria, Sitaram was a pioneering figure in female education; together they established the Marwari Balika Vidyalaya (girls' school) in 1920. The Marwari Balika Vidyalaya (MBV), which taught both Sanskrit and English, had a Bengali woman as the headmistress. This was, for the time, a radical decision. The Marwari parents regarded Bengali women as "modern," and were afraid that if their daughters came into contact with them, they would lose their morality. 57 Sitaram's son Ashok told me in an interview that in the early days his father walked door to door, recruiting students from conservative families who were afraid to send their daughters out of the house. Women's education was controversial, and Sitaram had to beg parents to send their daughters to school.
In addition to his work on the MBV, Sitaram opposed the "adoption custom," and in the 1920s he and some other "youth" published a letter in newspaper against adoption. 58 Sitaram left Burabazar in the early 1930s, when he was ostracized because of his support of widow remarriage. It was not until the post-independence period that Sitaram Seksaria made the transition from social ostracism to widespread respect. After leaving Burabazar, he first built a house in Tollygunge, and then in 1958 purchased the house on Lord Sinha Road where his son and extended family still live. Seksariya felt that the MBV was located in an unhealthy environment, and he wanted to build a school in a healthy environment with playgrounds and a big hall. He collected donations from former students of the MBV who were then the wives of famous industrialists. The girls' school Shri Shikshayatan, just adjacent to his Lord Sinha Road mansion, was founded in 1954. Later additions to the school included a swimming pool, hostel, and college.
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59
50
Sitaram Seksaria's wife, who died in 1965, was an illiterate woman involved in social reform and the movement against parda, and went to jail in the civil disobedience movement. A few of the wives and married daughters of Marwari freedom fighters took part in public protests, and their stories are proudly described in the history of contributions Marwaris made to the nationalist movement. Janaki Devi Bajaj described herself as an "illiterate innocent" whose personality slowly developed under her husband's and Gandhi's influence. Engaged at age four, married in 1902 at age eight to then twelve-year-old Jamnalal, Janaki Devi's initial years were spend in parda. She studied Marathi with a tutor but did not enjoy it and gave it up. Later, she was taught by a Parsi teacher to learn words from the newspaper, which she said greatly broadened her perspective on the world. 60 Under the influence of Gandhi, Jamnalal told Janaki Devi to give up her ornaments and wear homespun khadi cloth, and join him in burning foreign cloth on the occasion of Holi in 1923. 61 She participated in civil disobedience movements and was jailed. 62 After Bajaj died in 1942, she presided over the Goseva Sangh, the cow-protection society associated with Wardha. 63
Less is known about other Marwari women freedom fighters; unlike Janaki Devi, none of them wrote autobiographies. Indumati Goenka (19141971), the daughter of Padamraj Jain (1882-1946) and daughter-in-law of freedom fighter Kedarnath Goenka, was the first woman in Bengal to be imprisoned in connection with the freedom movement. Her marriage to Keshavdev in 1929 at age sixteen was characterized as "ideal" by the Vishwamitra newspaper of Calcutta because it reportedly broke with customs of parda, dowry, jewelry, and ostentation. She was a student at Bethune College and studied in the Bengali medium, which was unheard of for Marwaris at the time. She promoted khadi, participated in the Nari Satyagraha Samiti (a Congress women's movement), picketed foreign shops, and burned foreign cloth. She supported women's education and was an activist against parda and dowry and for widow remarriage. 64 Indumati was arrested and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for being listed as the secretary of the Rashtriya Mahila Samiti on a pamphlet that called for the resignation of the police. Burabazar shops closed for a day to protest her arrest. A corporation meeting noted her imprisonment, but they knew nothing about her: Was she a citizen of the city or an outsider? To honor her, the girls in Bethune College did not attend their classes. 65 Among other activists, Shrimati Puspawati Kotecha was the first woman in Oswal society who took part in the civil disobedience movement, and Srimati Champadevi Bharuka also took an active role in the national movement and went to jail in 1932. 66 Subcaste Organizations: Marwari Agarwals and Marwari
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Maheshwaris As I have noted earlier, public identity for Marwaris as "Marwaris" was never singular. They also sometimes identified themselves publicly by their subcastesMaheswari, Agarwal or Agarwala, and Oswaland formed voluntary associations, with subcaste names, that fostered social change, especially in the area of education. Why these organizations did not take up the "Marwari" banner is an interesting question. Since Sanatani conservatives overwhelmingly dominated the Marwari Association, perhaps their appropriation of the term "Marwari" led the reformist leaders to stress other kinds of linkages and alliances. To a certain extent the subdivisions were symbolic. The leaders of the subcaste organizations all worked very closely together, so the discussions that went on in such organizations influenced each other. With rare exceptions, until the 1930s there was very little intermarriage between the subcastes, and those exceptional cases prompted major community discussion and dissent.
Jamnalal Bajaj was an important influence in promoting social reform among the Marwaris in Maharashtra, and was one of the few major national Marwari leaders to be located outside of Calcutta. Working alongside his friend Srikrishna Jajoo (who engaged in parallel activities among the Maheshwaris), Jamnalal Bajaj concentrated on enabling change and reform through education, and established a hotel for Marwari boys at Wardha in 1910. His attempts to raise funds and gain support from Marwari businessmen for a Marwari College in Bombay were initially met with great resistance. 67 In 1912 the All India Agarwal Mahasabha was founded by Bajaj and others, against the Marwari Association's wishes, partly in order to promote the remarriage of widows, although there was a great deal of controversy about this within the group. 68
In 1918, Jamnalal Bajaj attempted to end the struggle between the conservative Sanatanis and the reformers, but the Sanatanis were not receptive. Bajaj established the Marwari Agarwal Mahasabha at Wardha, Maharashtra. 69 His major concerns were to counter the trends toward extravagant living among Marwaris (which sent many families into debt) and rising unemployment among Marwari youth, as well as to raise the age of marriage to prevent child widowhood and to promote intercaste marriage among Marwaris in order to widen parents' choices of prospective brides and grooms. Bajaj also used the forum to propagate Gandhian programs for homespun khadi cloth and to eradicate untouchability, which irritated other Maheswaris and for which he risked "excommunication." Under Gandhi's tutelage, he opened his grandfather's Lakshminarayan temple to untouchables. 70 At an Agarwal Mahasabha conference in Delhi in 1926, Jamnalal spoke out against the veil, and Janaki Devi and her sister-in-law removed their gangut (veils) as he spoke. In her autobiography, Janaki Devi commented that it was very "bold work" for women of the time to remove
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their veils, because wearing the veil was a sign of status, culture, and decency. 71 It was Janaki Devi Bajaj, on the insistence of Gandhi, who later went to Calcutta to urge women there also to remove their veils. 72
55
Sitaram Seksariya, an Agarwal, described his involvement with Bajaj in the Marwari Agarwala movement for social reform. I have paraphrased his description:
We had some success in streamlining the marriage rituals into a one-day affair, and got rid of the 4 A.M. ritual breakfast on the day of the wedding. At this time (1920) there were great disputes in the Marwari Agarwal Assembly in Bombay. The reformers proposed a rule that the age of a boy and girl, respectively, should not be less than sixteen and twelve. The proposal was not passed until Jamnalal suggested an amendment that the boy should be at least sixteen, but a girl can be married before she is twelve. Over a dozen of the members, all from Calcutta, resolved that they would not participate in the marriages of boys and girls below sixteen and twelve, and attempts were made to create an atmosphere against child marriage. In Calcutta, black flags were hoisted by these protesters to demonstrate where a child marriage was being performed, then the Sharda act passed with opposition from the orthodox. The debates over widow marriage were even more vehement. At first, one could not even speak of widow remarriage, so proposals were discussed that men over forty should not be allowed to marry virgins. The group sent scouts to marriage places, who would try to take the girl away from the wedding place in order to forcibly stop the marriage. 73
Significantly, the issue of widow remarriage was resolved, more or less, by voting on resolutions at the meeting. Majority ruled. However, there were also occasions, such as the Agarwala widow-remarriage scandal described below, when caste mechanisms like "excommunication" or techniques of social boycott and ostracism were also at play in the very same circumstances. The use of these techniques gives evidence of Marwaris' participation in two kinds of public culture, and controverts Milton Singer's argument about the compartmentalization of modernity and tradition in different realms. 74 Here is what happened.
The marriage of Agarwal child-widow Janaki Devi with Babu Nagarmal Lahila of Jharia was held in Calcutta, creating much internal tumult between reformist and Sanatani leaders. The conservative Agarwals who were against the marriage spread rumors that it was held with the help of Congress. The Sanatanis "raised great hue and cry," but the marriage was performed
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without any difficulty, albeit under police protection. The question of widow-marriage came up again in the Agarwala Mahasabha, but the proposal to permit it could not be passed. 75 The Sanatanis started a new conservative society, the Akhil Bharatvarsiya Agarwal Mahapanchayat, which was formed to protest the marriage. This panchayat expelled and cast out the twelve members (including Seksaria) who had helped to orchestrate the widow's remarriage. 76 The ramifications were not merely symbolic; this social ostracism reportedly prompted Seksariya to leave his residence and move out of Burabazar. 77
Although Maheshwari leaders were active in institution-building in Calcutta, they had their own disputes over social changes. 78 Up to 1934, the Maheshwari Sabha would not permit widow remarriage. 79 An intercaste marriage dispute arose regarding the Birla family in 192425, when Rameshwardas Birla married Kumari Sharada Devi of the Jhawar family. Enemies of the Birlas, still upset that the Birlas had canceled another one of their family marriages a few years back, claimed that this girl was Kolvar, not Maheshwari. The agitation lasted for more than twelve years. Factions were formed, and some people ostracized the Birlas. 80 Partly as a result of turmoil, the Maheshwari Vidyalaya School was founded with Birla money. This episode suggests how Marwari charity could not only be used to lay claims on social power generally but could also arise from internal tensions and competition within the group.
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Though debates over marriage were probably the most hotly argued aspects of Marwari social reform, there were a large number of other issues as well. As in other Hindu groups, there were debates about the inauspiciousness of traveling abroad, a practice banned by custom and religious texts. The first Marwari foreign journey took place in 1886, when Indrachandraji Dudhoria and Indrachandraji Nahata went abroad. When they returned in 1889, there was a violent agitation in Oswal society. Modi notes that the social ostracism resulting from crossing the "black waters" lasted past 1923, when the children of Indrachand Dudhoria were accepted by Oswal society but children of Nahata were not. Later, these practices became commonplace. B.M. Birla, for instance, went abroad with his wife. 81 Disjunction and Discord: Discursive Production of Caste Communities The rise of internal debates over issues of social reform in association meetings prompted the publication of a number of tracts that expressed a variety of positions along the conservative/reformist spectrum. Although we cannot be certain about how many people might have read or been influenced by such literature, such texts do indicate the kinds of intellectual concerns that were raised among Marwaris. Tulasyana wrote a ten-page
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pamphlet decrying the administration of the Marwari Agrawal Mahasabha. According to the pamphlet, he wrote that the self-made reformers had formed a group of autocrats consisting of some prominent people and were deceiving the society. He claimed that Jamnalal Bajaj, who started the Mahasabha, was untrustworthy because of his role in establishing a hostel for untouchables at Wardha, where they could study and not be treated as untouchables. The work of the reformers was antireligious, it proposed, in that it went against the principles of "Sanatan Dharm," attempting to alter the time-honored traditions associated with the ban on widow-remarriage, the marriage engagement system, and holding women's meetings, such as in Fatehpur, where the idea was even promoted that the rights of women were no less than the rights of men. Besides, he argued, even these reformers did not practice the reforms that they preached, especially in arranging marriages for their children below the suggested age requirement of sixteen for boys. He gave the example of one Marwari Agarwal man who vomited in the middle of the meeting pandal when he discovered that two cobblers were serving water to the visitors. He asked, Can the views of reform-loving gentlemen of Calcutta be applicable to All India social reforms? No, he wrote, not at all. Finally, he claimed that the administration of the Marwari Agrawal Mahasabha did not provide public detailed accounts of the expenditures of the charity, which thus functioned in a corrupt manner. 82
Tulasyana's argument pulled together a number of claims that addressed a variety of publics. On the one hand, he raised questions about the financial accountability of the organization, focusing on questions of bureaucracy, corruption, and disclosure. On the other hand, his critique focused on how the reformers themselves privately upheld the tenets of the Sanatan Dharm religion by arranging child marriages and vomiting in response to known intercaste pollution, even though they were publicly trying to destroy timehonored customs like the ban on widow remarriage and mixing with untouchables.
Another such tract is Bhimsen Kedia's 1947 Bharat Mein Marwari Samaj, which outlined the major positions of the conservative Marwari Sanatanis. Kedia defined Marwaris as a group of people who follow Sanatan Dharm, believe in nonviolence, wear homespun khadi, are pure vegetarian, love the poor, establish institutions in different parts of India, and know the ins and outs of business. 83 He described at length various social customs involving marriage, childbearing and pregnancy rituals, and engagements, defending these practices as part of family traditions "in which repetition of the deeds of ancestors are done." 84 Kedia used contemporary discussions on health to defend Marwari women's practice of sexually explicit joking in gatherings with pregnant women. Even if the talk is bawdy, he argued, it at least keeps the pregnant woman happy, which is good for health. 85 His only significant critiques in the book concerned: 1) the lack of educational training given to Marwari youth, which led to widespread illiteracy (he pointed out that there
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were no registered accountants in the community); 2) wasteful expenditure on marriage, Brahmins, superstitions, giving bribes, and ornaments and clothing for women; and 3) the irresponsible management of Marwari public institutions. 86
As I noted earlier, distinct communities did not exist before these debates. And one can see how differentiated communities were; issues such as marriage were better discussed along caste lines, while the "community" that intervened on a national issue such as indenture was called "Marwari" without any subcaste qualifiers. An All-India Marwari organization would emerge in the 1930s to handle various social issues, especially those relating to marriage. Before getting into that, however, I would like to take up Nicholas Dirks' argument about the textualization of caste disputes, and consider why such salacious (and often mud-slinging) discursive claims were used both to construct and criticize a prototypical Marwari identity. There are a large number of such tracts, but I will limit my discussion in order to go deeper into the types of language and narrative strategies that were deployed. Chand Magazine's Marwari Number
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In November 1929, a special issue of the Hindi literary magazine Chand featured articles on the present condition of the Marwari community. 87 This anonymous issue, probably edited by social critic Rajagopal Mohatta, 88 caused a major uproar among urban Marwari leaders, reformist and conservative alike. The unsigned articles, plays, poems, and short stories constituted an overwhelming condemnation of Marwari culture in places ranging from Rajasthan to Calcutta. This issue of Chand is an excellent example of the ferocity of debate within the Sanatani/reformist battles attempting to show the need for reform within the Marwari community.
According to this issue of Chand, Marwari backwardness was rooted in the "feudal culture" of Rajasthan, which was sorely lacking in hospitals, village sanitation systems, medicine, and educational facilities. There was only one state school in Rajasthan to provide female education, and as a result only a handful of women could read and write. For men, one primary school might serve dozens of villages, resulting in three per cent literacy, with two per cent limited to signing their own names. 89 The fault for these conditions, it was argued, lay in the despotism of the rulers, who were reluctant to open schools and provide education that might challenge their authority. 90 Because of the lack of such basic facilities, this critique continued, the people of Rajasthan were subject to superstition, ignorance, and blind faith in religion: "If there is a famine or an unknown disease from which people die, they curse their bad luck and go for quack medicines from the temples." 91 As in other parts of India, the same article contended, child-marriage and marriage outside the mel (appropriate marriage circle) was rampant in
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Rajasthan, especially among the Vaishya trading castes. Out of 4,659,493 women in Rajasthan, 2,129,155 were married, and among those who had been married, 883,259 womena full forty-one per centwere widowed, with the number of child widows alone being well over 100,000. These nefarious practices of child marriage and even polygamy had led to the "fall of Rajasthan." 92
An interesting feature of Chand's critique is the use of colonial statistics and other kinds of knowledge to justify conclusions about the social condition of Marwari women that the original data probably did not warrant. The women, Chand decried, were bribed with luxury to forget about their problems; the girls were married off at young ages to wealthy older men irrespective of the men's age or physical condition, and kept happy by gifts of jewelry, good food, and clothing. 93 By blindly following custom, this critique said, Marwaris did not hesitate to marry a girl of seven or eight years to a man between fifty and sixty, and even considered this to be a religious act. 94 Chand argued that wealthy Marwari women were unlike the wives of artisans and peasants, who stayed healthy and cheerful by participating in agricultural cultivation and tending buffalo and cows. Census data were cited to show that the number of Jains was diminishing. The wives of Jains reportedly fasted quite frequently to the point of weakness, threatening the very vitality of the community.
Chand also prefigured the role of modern literature in reforming familial practices and producing new kinds of sentiment. For example, a story called "Osar" (meaning "heifer") connected the two concerns of child marriage and the economic burden of funeral feasts. This story tells of a sick man who dies, leaving his wife, widowed daughter-in-law and child, and an unmarried daughter, aged ten. The people of the village come regularly to the house, urging the widow that she should arrange for the ritual funeral feast, because otherwise it would be difficult for them to get her daughter married. The widow refuses on account of lack of money. Some time later a marriage broker comes to the house with a marriage proposal from an old man who agrees to arrange the funeral feast if he can marry the daughter. The widow is reluctant, unwilling to sacrifice her young daughter to a life of almost certain widowhood. But when the broker argues that the family will face social ostracism if she does not agree, the widow is pressured into assent. The funeral feast is held, followed by the wedding of the daughter. After two years, when the girl is twelve, her husband dies and the daughter returns to the village as a widow. Again the villagers pressure the family to hold a funeral feast and come to enjoy their food, never inquiring about the girl's welfare as a widow. 95 Overall, "Osar" is about wastefulness, wasting lives and wasting money; discussions of the virtues of saving and avoiding ostentatious displays or "show" were a major theme of social reform.
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Though charity is in their blood, argued the Chand article "Qualities of Marwaris," Marwari benevolence is never systematic. It cites many examples: Marwaris wanted to do good acts for animals, but the Pinjrapole cowsheds established for such purposes did not maintain the cows very well; 96 Marwaris would informally establish funds to help widows, but would never agree to get them married; 97 and since the money that they gave to charity was made through usury from poor peasants, the donated money could ultimately not be particularly beneficial to the very people who were impoverished to begin with. 98
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The most vicious parts of this issue of Chand made blatant claims about the sexual practices of the community (both men and women) that were guaranteed to shock and disgust its readers. The descriptions were meant to stoke the fires of sexual jealousy, fantasy, and possessiveness in its male readers in order to urge them to consider reform. The Marwaris, Chand contemptuously noted, were particularly prone to sexually lewd behavior. The Marwari men were said to especially prefer the prostitutes of Jodhpur, renowned for their music and dance, who were available to travel with them to places like Calcutta and Bombay. 99 These Calcutta men, argued Chand, left for their offices early in the day, and did not return home at midday, but had their lunch on their gaddi. Left to themselves, Calcutta Marwari women followed routines of early morning bathing in the river, followed by visits several hours long to temples, returning home for lunch and perhaps out to temples again in the afternoon. Chand stated, "The young wives wait for the return of their husbands and also expect some satisfaction from them. But when the husbands do not return the women use the servants for physical satisfaction. The women say that they are sickthey call the servants for massaging and slowly they engage the servants to satisfy them. Even in the name of going to visit a temple after going for a river-bath they engage in this type of adulterous activity." 100
A temple house called Govind Bhavan was cited as an example of this type of behavior. Its chief priest, Hiralal Goenka, was reportedly infamous for dressing up like the amorous god Krishna and satisfying the lusts of his women visitors, especially widows. When Hiralal became ill, it became known that many women were visiting him, and many women were discovered to be using Hiralal's photo in their lockets instead of Lord Srinath, leading to scandal and a public expos in the newspaper Hindu Panch, which published Hiralal's photograph. 101 Chand also claimed Marwari women were known for singing festive songs using abusive language "without parallel in any other Indian state." 102
Chand ended its discussion by complimenting and naming some of the Marwari reformers in Calcutta as providing the engine of social reform for
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the national community. Chand contended that the community in Calcutta was divided, with one group opposing any type of reform. The other group (the younger generation) sought reforms in every sphere, from politics, to religion, to social life. They sought literacy, widow remarriage, the removal of parda, and national independence, and some were even willing to marry widows themselves. These leaders, according to Chand, sought to reform not only Marwari society but Hindu society as a whole. Their ideas included independence for women and abolition of the caste system. Some men were actively involved in such activities, while others primarily donated money for the purpose. 103
The response to this issue of Chand by most Marwaris was one of extreme outrage. Most copies were burned. Banarsidas Caturvedi, the editor of the Calcutta Hindi monthly Vishal Bharat, proposed a motion condemning Chand at the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. Ghanshyam Das Birla pushed Gandhi to write about the issue, and a defamation case was raised in the court. Ramnaresh Tripathi wrote a piece called "An Answer to Chand's Marwari Ank [volume]," in which he protested the negative portrayal of Marwari literature, songs, and culture. 104 Though it is true that Marwari women sang obscene songs at weddings, so, said Tripathi, did women in Uttar Pradesh. In fact, Tripathi claimed that no other community had improved as much as the Marwaris, both in economic entrepreneurship and in education. He wrote that both this issue of Chand and Ragagopal Mohatta's tract Abalaon ka Insaf [Against the Idea of the Weaker Sex] derived from G.W.M. Reynolds' novel Mysteries of the Court of London and were just as useless in improving Marwari society as Reynolds' book had been for the English. Tripathi contended that the only reason that the editor of Chand dared to publish this issue was that Marwari society was not strong enough to defend itself. 105 Synchronicity: The Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon After the scandalous publication of Chand, and amid the war of words by various Marwari factions, there was a perception by Marwari Sanatanis and reformers alike that Marwaris needed to work out their ideological differences and be more united against such ferocious outside attacks, especially in the light of new political changes brought about by the Government of India Act of 1935. The reconciliatory Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon (also called the All India Marwari Federation or AIMF) was established under the presidency of Ramdev Chowkany in 1935. The Sammelon brought together geographically-scattered Marwaris, defined as "such persons who represent the way of life, language and culture of Rajasthan, Haryana, Malwa and the adjoining areas and who or their ancestors have settled in part of India or any foreign country." The stated goals of the AIMF were to promote economic and social development, arbitrate disputes, and provide for social uplift. 106
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A considerable amount of discussion contributing to the growth of the AIMF involved the Government of India Act of 1935, a plan to consolidate the provinces of British India and the Princely States, had provisions that some Indian subjects would be considered federal and some provincial. 107 The act had created fear that the Marwaris, spread out all over India but belonging by origin to some of the Princely States, might lose their rights of citizenship. They appealed to the Working Committee of the All India Congress Committee that the Marwaris should have the rights of citizenship, whatever their place of residence. On this issue, there was also concern expressed that the rulers of the independent states should give citizenship rights to their people. 108
The official history of the AIMF organization divides into four periods. The first period, from 1935 to 1946, was spent trying to reconcile the various factions in the group. Issues that related specifically to the condition of women were kept out of the discussions during this period. 109 Instead, the AIMF worked on issues related to government regulations in commerce, politics, education, and health. We might note here that government constituted the "outside" to the community; women belonged to an imagined inner space. But both this "outside" and "inside" were matters of performance. At the second conference held in 1938, speakers such as Padampat Singhania expressed their hope that the organization could sooner or later "tackle and solve the social problems," such as village reforms and family planning. 110 At the third session, proposals were passed to promote education in the traditional Marwari system of accounting, to encourage all families to house and nourish a cow for general cow protection, and to eradicate the famine in Sikar District of Shekhawati by addressing the crises of grain, kerosene, and sugar. 111
One of the major concerns of the Marwari organizations in this period was confronting the negative deployment of the term "Marwari" in certain contexts. Some debate in the AIMF around 193738 was given to the definition of "Marwari," which originally appeared in Molesworth's MarathiEnglish Dictionary in 1857. The dictionary defined Marwari in three ways: first, as relating to Marwar, "a country lying to the north of Gujarath"; second, a native of that country "applied esp. to men who employ themselves as corn handlers and grocers"; and, third, (as mentioned earlier in the preface), "applied allusively to a cunning and knavish fellow." 112 Contesting negative definitions of "Marwari" in this and other dictionaries of Indian languages became an important activity for Marwari voluntary associations when increasing nationalist consciousness gave rise to discourses of both "pride" and "improvement" of the community's wellbeing. 113 The role of the AIMF in policing negative uses of the word "Marwari" has in fact continued to the present. 114
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The second phase of the AIMF extended from about 1947 to 1961, and at this stage the AIMF began to address social issues. The AIMF passed proposals to include both men and women as advisors, promote literature that addresses women's issues, and involve women in projects of social development and awareness. The AIMF meetings were used as forums in which women could remove their veils for the first time. This shedding of the veil at AIMF meetings signified that their liberation was in the hands of the organization. Proposals were passed to bar any member whose female family members were required to veil. 115 At a session of the AIMF in 1948, Sushila Singhi announced a proposal for an anti-veiling " Parda Nivaran Satyagraha" with the provision that no one should be allowed to become an AIMF member if the women in the family lived in parda. 116
The endeavors of Sushila Singhi, one the of the foremost women activists in the Calcutta Marwari community, were inspired by Janaki Devi Bajaj, who worked with Gandhi in Wardha. Sushila, who passed away in 1999, was herself a widow who remarried. She was born in Lucknow, and her first marriage was at the age of fourteen. The following year, when Sushila was fifteen, her husband died of typhoid. He was eighteen. After that, Sushila studied in the Marwari Balika Vidyalaya, and Sitaram Seksaria arranged her marriage with B. M. Singhi. In describing to me her gratitude and debt to Sitaram, Mrs. Singhi said that he had literally "saved her life" by helping her to remarry after she became a widow. According to what Sushila told me in our interview, from the 1920s through the 1940s, North Indian and Marwari women were very bound by parda. She said that, besides being required to veil outside the house and in front of male or older family members, the behavior norms in this system meant that a married woman was not allowed to go out, to stand in front of her father-in-law, to talk to her mother-in-law directly, to talk to her husband in front of her mother-in-law, and was not supposed to talk too much in general. At her second wedding, in 1946, which raised eyebrows just for being a widow-remarriage, Sushila also did not follow parda and wore no veil. In a public lecture addressed to a Bihar Marwari women's meeting in 1983, Sushila Singhi described her experiences in the 1940s anti- parda movement. She told her audience: In April 1949 I came to Bihar in the midst of your mothers and mothers-in-law and on their request I accepted the presidentship of the Purdah Virodhi Saytagraha Conference (against veil). Mahatma Gandhi had brought women out of homes and asked them to accompany him. I remember the days when I myself had determined to join the anti- parda movement after unveiling my face in one such meeting. While thinking of parda I am reminded of the days when I used to visit small towns and villages of different districts of Assam, Bihar, and Orissa for the anti- parda movement with the late Basant Lal Muraka, late Sitaram
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Seksariya, Shrimati Ramam Murarka, and Shri Singhiji. In the movement started by the conference, through the "social reform" committee, in between the years 1948 and 1957, efforts had been made to unveil the women and inspire them to speak in the meetings. During that period I toured a lot in Bihar, and brought many social struggles. The villagers did not accept us and would not even offer us a drink of water. Today we don't find parda, but even today aged people of some villages or small places want to retain parda or veil as a symbol of shyness, and compel newly married daughters-in-law to cover their faces. Though a new generation is ostensibly against it, they mesmerizingly cover their faces a little in the name of parda. The dolls of yesterday, decorated with jewels and clothes, are considered incapable by men of doing many jobs. Despite education and fashion this situation has not changed, because she has been made helpless in the name of housewife and mistress of the house. 117
Parda, as Sushila presented it, is not an issue internal to kinship or to the home. One's performance of it happens outside, in the arena of nationalism. Parda is thus an example of how a practice relating to domesticity and malefemale relations is performed as a theme of public life. This public performance of the "internal" life of the community is different from the Marwaris' negotiation with the government on gambling, for example. It was also affected by discussions among European women about the dangers of parda for a woman's health and the well-being of the family. 118
Compared to other issues, such as dowry, the eradication of parda was a highly successful campaign among the Marwaris. Yet even though women's education has arguably increased, many people feel that Marwari women's lives have not necessarily changed for the better. Sushila Singhi once publicly claimed: "I am sad to say there is no change in the values of life. When the girls meet each other, the topic of their conversations is nothing else but jewelry, fashion, fashionable shops, etc. Their ambition in life has become lust for very costly clothes, new means of luxury, and to go to clubs where they drink and play cards with their husband and his friends. It is often seen that the husband who comes home late fools his wife by giving her clothes and jewelry." 119 Her modern aim, reflecting the influence of Victorian principles, was for women to have a more contemplative, intellectual life and a companionate marriage.
The third and fourth periods of the Sammelon, from 1962 to 1973 and from 1974 to the present, continued many of the same social reform projects from earlier days. At the AIMF's session in 1973 in Ranchi, Bihar, proposals were passed to promote education by improving the standard of education and reducing expenditures, and to raise literacy among women, as well as political awareness. There was further discussion about removing parda,
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especially in small villages and other "backward areas." The dowry system needed to be stopped, the group argued, so boys and girls were encouraged to take a public vow that they would not take or give dowry in marriage. The AIMF expressed awareness that Marwaris were blamed for corruption, bribing, and adulteration in the countryside. Proposals were passed in the twelfth session in Bihar to stop wasting money on extravagant weddings, and to start a system of collective marriages to avoid wasting money. Special meetings were organized for women, with programs and discussions about the promotion of Rajasthani culture, literature, and art. 120 From November 9, 1975 to December 12, 1975, there were Samaj Sudhar Days, including the passage of fourteen proposals to simplify marriage ceremonies, to offer food relief in Assam, to give financial help in the marriage of poor girls, and to tackle the new problem of men who desert their wives after only a few months of marriage. 121 Concerns about dowry, veiling, libraries, cow protection, disaster relief, medical care, and education remain on the AIMF's agenda today. Housewives and Citizens: Educating Marwari Women
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Negotiations over women's education have been an important part of the resolution of the women's question in Marwari public life. Ramdev Chokhany, the first president of the All India Marwari Federation, wrote that:
The development of any caste depends on women, but the condition of Marwari women today is horrible. Marwari women don't know how to maintain family and they are not fit for giving birth to a perfect or healthy child. By spending all day gossiping and eating, they are prone to all kinds of disease. Lack of education is one of the major causes for this condition, so it is the duty of men to provide facilities for women to learn and then they will be able to maintain their families perfectly. 122
Chokhany's statement indicates that, in debating the issue of female education, Marwaris have participated in a larger national discussion about the survivability of a people amid degenerate native customs. Women offered the key to the future, and much of the impetus for reform came in the field of education. 123
The Marwari promotion of female education has focused primarily on domestic skills and home science. Domestic science was once seen, even in the West, as a very innovative form of female education and a creative way of bringing girls and women into education. But by the 1950s, when the Marwari women begin to seek education beyond high school and to need education facilities for modern subjects like English, the study of domesticity was already seen as backward and retrograde, especially when
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compared to the courses of study available to their Bengali counterparts. From the earliest days of Bengali female education in the Bethune School in 1850, Bengali girls read out of English textbooks. By the 1930s, Bengali women were earning master's degrees in every conceivable subject, not just in home science.
Because there has been little need among the upper-middle-class and wealthy factions of the community for women to earn an income, home science has been the perfect subject for reproducing the family household. Marwaris have lacked an economic incentive to impart professional or vocational education to women. Further, Marwaris have had the kind of money it takes to set up private schools in general, and they have started several institutions for domestic education, particularly in Calcutta. The politics of women's education among the Marwaris of Calcutta have thus been inflected by the language of class and status. Indeed, domestic education and home science students have come to be perceived as "Marwari."
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The stress on domestic education suited the housewifely lifestyle of Marwari women, for whom there was no real impetus to seek gainful employment. A 1961 speech given by Shrimati Heda at an AIMF meeting stressed the importance of domestic subjects for girls. She noted: "arts and cultural education have a unique place in the life of girls. The useful teaching of music, handicraft and interior decoration brings about a new grace and dignity in their domestic life. So, every girl should get such educationlater she may voluntarily go in for any professional and higher education. Her education in arts, culture and religion will keep her aloof from the evils of modern materialism. Home and school should complete such education. A thoughtful and enlightened housewife can make a pleasant home and a proud society. If each house is happy and prosperous, the society is also prosperous and developed" [my emphasis]. 124 Heda left the question of professional and higher education to a woman's own choices; later she may voluntarily make such choices, but there was no reason to create the expectation of advanced education for all girls.
Even Marwari boys, after all, faced similar forms of resistance to their obtaining higher education, as in the case of Jamnalal Bajaj's efforts to start a Marwari College in Bombay, discussed earlier in this chapter . In Calcutta today, many of the colleges offering business degrees at bachelor's and master's levels have special, early-morning programs so that young men can attend classes and then spend the rest of the day in the office and at work. This represents a major change from how Marwari boys were prepared for business careers in the early days of the twentieth century, when boys received little formal education. Now many Marwaris come to the United States for business school. It is rare, however, for Marwari men to be educated beyond the M.B.A. level. Since there is the expectation that
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women should not be more educated than men, women are generally discouraged from doing Ph.D.'s, especially before they are married.
By contributing extensively to the promotion of domestic science courses, Marwaris have found an interesting solution to the women's question in education. Women can be educated, it seems, not for future employment, which would stigmatize the family, but rather in subjects that will actually help maintain the family, and not threaten it. There are home science degree courses in institutions such as the Rani Birla College of Home Science, which in 1997 was discussing plans to extend its curriculum to combine domestic education and business subjects. In addition to formal degree-granting institutions, there are also many informal classes given in Calcutta in domestic subjects. Saroj Kaushik, a Sindhi woman and graduate of Lady Irwin College in New Delhi, operated one such course. In the 1970s and 1980s, she ran Saraswati Niketan Finishing School for Girls with a sixmonths certificate or one-year diploma course in the following subjects: visual poise, personality development, international cooking, slimnastics and fitness, interior decoration, home management, Western dance, beauty care, dressmaking, and handicrafts. 125 Although there were students from many communities in the courses, according to Kaushik most of the students were Marwari. These subjects helped women become appropriate wives for top industrialists, capable of entertaining their business friends and keeping up an intelligent conversation.
A movement to provide English-language education for Marwari girls came in the 1950s. The first such Marwari girls' school was Modern High. Both Modern High School for Girls and Rani Birla Girls' College were started by Hindustan Charity Trust of Braj Mohan and Shrimati Rukmani Devi Birla. Modern High School for Girls was established on Jan 3, 1952, "in fulfillment of Mrs. Birla's vision of the need for a girls' school where a balanced education, combining the best aspects of Indian and western cultures, could be imparted through the medium of English." 126 The school eventually moved to the central area of Ballygunge and was placed on land adjacent to one of the Birla Calcutta residential complexes, consisting of several mansions that house members of the extended family. An indoor ice-skating rink at Modern High was opened in 1968, but it has since been converted into a large theater for school performances. Modern High School teaches all subjects, including sciences, home science, art, needlework, and geography, and is one of the most popular girls' schools in Calcutta, 127 competing with the convent schools for students from upperclass families. In a recent school magazine, the task of the school was described as "to continue educating girls to fit gracefully into society; as enlightened and responsible women." 128
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Other such schools include G.D. Birla Girls' School, Mahadevi Birla Shishu Vihar, and Ashok Hall Girls' Higher Secondary School, which are part of the Ashok Hall group, looked after by Manjrushee Khaitan, the daughter of Basant Kumar and Sarala Birla. The Birla family now owns a great many of the private schools in Calcutta, including South Point, which is the largest high school in the world. Not surprisingly, middle-class Bengali parents who send their children there point to the unbelievably high enrollment, rising tuition fees, and the morning, afternoon, and early evening three-shift student ("factory") scheduling as evidence of how so-called Birla "philanthropy" in education is at heart just a money-making scheme. Women's Clubs and Organizations There are a number of women's institutionsostensibly open to all but which mainly serve adult Marwari womenthat are basically social clubs that exist to create linkages among women from similar economic backgrounds. In Burabazar, there is the Mahila Parishad, which runs a Montessori school and various social activities. 129 The Ladies Study Group (LSG) was founded in the late 1960s and is a club for women of family of members of the Indian Chamber of Commerce. The women come from some of the wealthiest families. By 1974, they had donated over 700,000 rupees ($20,000) to relief work. 130 I was invited to attend an LSG meeting held at the Indian Chamber of Commerce in 1996. There were about forty women there. The day's program was a debate held between invited speakers about a bill being considered in Parliament at the time on whether women should get a day off every week from doing housework. The highly educated and articulate Bengali panelists debated the matter in a lively fashion, followed by a rather halting discussion with the Marwari and North Indian women in the audience. Afterwards, there was a reception with lovely North Indian vegetarian snacks of tea, coffee, fried puris, and alu dam (seasoned potato). To my surprise, most of the women fled immediately after the debate ended, but a few stayed, so I chatted with one or two. The official LSG forum, after all, is a completely English-speaking event. One wealthy, elderly Marwari woman told me that she did not like going to LSG meetings because she was uncomfortable being in an English-speaking environment. 131 After the LSG meeting I got a ride back to Ballygunge with the Bengali speakers on the panel, a rich and sophisticated Marwari housewife, and a Murshidabad saharwali woman, who seemed especially shy and had a lot of trouble speaking in English. The Marwari woman who owned the car got off at her house first, then had the driver drop the rest of us. After the Murshidabadi woman got out of the car, the two Bengali women started talking about the two others right away, saying "Oh, how they are really coming out now," and "Yes, they do ask such intelligent questions." Though the Bengali women were happy to participate in the debate, and no doubt earned a little bit of money for their efforts, their condescending attitude spoke volumes to me about how Bengalis view the progress of their Marwari sisters.
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In addition to the LSG, the Jyotirmai Club was founded in 1962, described as "the culmination of the aspirations of a few socially aware housewives who desired to improve their social environment." An undated printed "Members List" for Jyotirmai listed about 500 couples, all of whom have Marwari or North Indian surnames. 132 In an interview I did with Mrs. Manjula Tantia, one of Jyotirmai's founding members, she described how the club was formed among housewives during business hours when their husbands were away at work. 133 One of their primary activities is charity. During the war with China in 1962, Jyotirmai donated 6,740 grams of gold and Rs. 50,000, which were given to the chief minister of West Bengal to aid the war. In 1965, blankets were provided for flood victims in Bihar and Kashmir, and wells were dug for drought victims in Rajasthan. One of their primary goals has been to work toward uplifting the underprivileged through organizing medical services, charitable homeopathic dispensaries, immunization, and camps to fit limbs with prostheses. Jyotirmai also emphasizes the "personality development" of its members through literature, cooking lessons (with chefs from five-star hotels), drama, music, dance, poetry sammelons, and "Happy Hour" courses to teach religion and culture to children between six and thirteen years old. 134 The Shilpam Sevika Scheme provides courses in masala grinding, knitting, embroidery, cold storage and gift-wrapping, to train lower-class girls to be housekeepers and nannies. A club brochure claims that, "the demand for girls trained under this scheme has been very heartening indeed." 135
Not all Marwari women, however, are housewives. Some work, but in very particular kinds of professions. The prominent Marwari women who are involved in running charitable concerns illustrate the distinction, made not only by Marwaris, but by most Indians, between business ( vyasay) and service ( chakri). This is the difference between working for oneself versus working for others. One way that Marwari women avoid service is by being in business, either working in the family business or else running their own boutique, shop, restaurant, or factory. One female professor, who confessed she was very embarrassed to speak to me "as a richy-rich Marwari," told me a story about how she had confronted the stigma of women's work. As a teenager she was desperate to be independent and have her own money and, after badgering her parents endlessly, began tutoring school children. After a few weeks, however, her aunt told her that there were many rumors circulating about her father's business firm. The family couldn't be doing very well, people were saying, otherwise why would he send his daughter out to work? Work was not just about her, she had realized, but a reflection on the entire family. She stopped her tutoring, but eventually went on to marry outside the Marwari community and has formed a very different sort of life from the one she grew up in. The Spectacle of Neelam Jain's Death The focus so far on the historical development of Marwari institutions and
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organizations might suggest that the impetus for social reform has developed primarily within the public sphere. In recent times, however, Marwari management of their social and public identity, particularly in relation to women, has been brought into dramatic crisis by events occurring within the public sphere.
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On September 4, 1980, the dead body of a young upper-middle-class Marwari woman named Neelam Jain, better known by her nickname "Pinky," was found lying on the sidewalk of Calcutta's fashionable Camac Street. Many reasons were given for Pinky's death, ranging from suicide to rumors of threats to expose smuggling operations by the family. We will never really know exactly what set off the events that led to her falling several stories and ending her life with a fatal crash onto the cement of the street below. Her in-laws, initially charged with the crime, have since been exonerated.
Whatever the true reason for Neelam Jain's death, the event was picked up in the press and became part of a wider genre of women's deaths commonly known as "dowry death." Neelam Jain was not the first Marwari woman to die a so-called dowry death, nor was she the first woman in Bengal whose death became an object of considerable public concern and debate. 136 But since the 1908 death of Snehalata, a poor Brahmin girl who killed herself rather than see her father become impoverished on account of her dowry, no other dowry death in Bengal has attracted as much attention as Neelam Jain's. 137 In fact, a series of sensationalist articles called Jananta ki Adalut ("The People's Court") in popular Hindi tabloids drew many parallels between the deaths of Neelam Jain and Snehalata. 138
The tabloid press reported in great detail how Neelam had often fought with her mother-in-law and had desperately wanted to leave the house. On the fateful day of her death, she was allegedly dragged from her flat up the seldom-used stairway leading to the terrace on the twelfth floor, from which she fell. A few days after the episode, Neelam's mother-in-law, Mrs. Jain, and her two sons were put in jail after being arrested by the Calcutta police. A large amount of silver was recovered from the Jains' flat, stashed away in a secret compartment in the frame of a bed. Even today, nearly twenty years later, there remain rumors that the Jain family had been deeply involved in smuggling. Perhaps an unwilling witness, Neelam Jain may have proved herself to be a dangerous liability because she could not keep the family secret.
Much was made in the Hindi newspapers about the irony that such torture and violent death could happen in a family of Jains, who are traditionally described as pacifists. The person who received the most blame for the
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death, interestingly enough, was not Neelam Jain's husband, but rather his mother. 139 Stories abounded about the horrible way that Neelam Jain's mother-in-law treated her, forcing her to do very menial chores. When her body was discovered on the sidewalk, she was wearing the cheapest kind of cotton sari, which only a maidservant would wear, and there were strange marks on her body. It was rumored that on the night of her death Neelam Jain had received multiple electric shocks. The discussion of Neelam Jain's funeral became as much a spectacle as her death itself. Newspaper reports chided the husband's father for trying to bribe Brahmins to come to the shraddha (funeral) ceremony and take dakshina (literally, "south," here referring to the fee that a Brahmin would charge for performing a certain ritual). This discourse about the instigation of Brahmins is not unlike, to a certain extent, what happened in the 1917 scandal over ghee.
The subsequent debate, which raged on for weeks in the sensationalist tabloid newspapers, focused on the dubious origins and circumstances of a letter Neelam Jain wrote to her husband. The last letter that Neelam wrote to her husband, which became known as her "suicide" letter, was published in Chapte Chapte, a local Hindi newspaper. Here is my translation:
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Dearest "Little" [the nickname of her husband, as youngest son of the family],
Whatever I spoke yesterdaywhether you believe it or notplease remember that I was asked to say it by my sister-in-law. Let bygones be bygones. Now I promise I shall never lie in my life. You ought to get married again. If mother is happy because of it then I am also happy. It is for my happiness that I am asking you to remarry. But you make sure that she does not undergo what I have undergone. Lastly, all I say is you should be happy always. In mother's happiness lies my happiness. I could bear no more and hence I'm committing suicide. One is bound by destiny.
Neelam
The public discourse about Pinky's death reflects a strong public interest in determining the source of the letter. Was this letter really written by Neelam Jain? And of her own will? Whether this "suicide" letter was real, fake, or coerced, whether it was written "purely" of free will or under tremendous pressure, we shall never know. Yet even when the court's
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expert determined that the letter was genuine (in the sense that it had been written by Neelam's own hand), this fact did not quell the widespread disapproval accorded to the Jain family in light of the deadly events. 140
In the aftermath of Neelam Jain's death, the newspapers reported with a tone of some surprise that there were public gatherings of large numbers of textile merchants. Normally these merchants would probably not oppose the dowry system, and furthermore they did not have a strong history of activism in general. But social boycott, a traditional form of punishment (discussed earlier in the context of widow remarriage), was used as a way to bring public condemnation upon the Jain family. The newspapers printed a list of sari and cloth shops owned by the Jain family, with the dictum that no one should purchase from them. Social ostracism in this case took the form of economic boycott. Yet rumors abounded that the shop managers had put everything on sale in the shops in order to combat the boycott, with the result that many consumers forgot any sense of social justice and rushed into the shops hunting for bargains.
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The most striking aspect of the public debate over Neelam Jain's death was the way that Neelam Jain's name became synonymous with the problem of dowry death in Marwari society. Many editorials claimed that there were a thousand more Neelam Jains in the community who faced similar fates if there were no interference. Neelam Jain's death, although it was not the first dowry death among Marwari Jains, brought to light the problem of the exorbitant dowries and ostentatious marriages that had become common and infamousamong Marwaris.
Women's groups all over Calcutta and Bengal began discussing the problem of dowry death and how it might be combated. These meetings called for action to be taken against dowry, at both the legislative and the community level. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, in particular, was seen as ineffectual and in need of revision. Two community organizations, the Marwari Association and the Haryana Association, held marches in which over two hundred persons participated in a procession against the dowry system that had purportedly led to Neelam's death. 141 Fifty prospective bridegrooms at a meeting organized by the West Bengal Provincial Marwari Federation took oaths, along with their parents, that they would not accept any dowry. 142
The early 1980s saw the convening of numerous discussions about the dowry problem among women's and intracommunity groups. Community leaders came out with public statements condemning the practice of dowry and the ostentation displayed at marriage ceremonies. They acknowledged that the problem of the torture of daughters-in-law for additional dowry was
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on the rise, such as in the infamous case of Neelam Jain, and that the community needed to take action. Calls were made for people to boycott marriages that would be celebrated with an excess of pomp and show. Leaders such as Mr. Nand Kishore Jalan cited the cases of widow remarriage and anti- parda social reform movements as evidence of the community's ability for self-reform. 143 At the same time, the national feminist magazine Manushi called for a boycott of dowry marriages. 144
As the work of many scholars on other regions and times in India testifies, the critique of dowry is not new. At a general level, the social critique of dowry stems from a cultural conception of marriage that has changed from material or economic to spiritual and companionate. The change may be attributed to colonial culture, in which regulations over the expense of marriage date back to the nineteenth century, when the colonial government itself took a keen interest in the Rajput marriage customs described by Colonel Tod. Proposals included placing caps on expenditure and prohibiting child marriages. 145 To the colonial idea of frugality, ideas of romantic love and companionate marriage were added over time. Dowry has been an object of reformist critique since the early-twentieth century death of Snehalata.
In recent years, dowry has become more identified with public identity, and more attention has been placed on baniya trading communities such as Marwaris and Jains and their practices of staging ostentatious and elaborate weddings. Even a cursory look at the invitations to Marwari weddings suggests a tight relationship between capitalism and kinship. Unlike Bengali invitations, which normally list only the home phone number, invitations to Marwari weddings commonly list the businesses associated with both the bride and groom's families.
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Public spokespersons for Marwari social organizations assert that the controversial social practice of expensive marriages associated with the Marwari community is directly responsible for the one hundred dowry deaths that have occurred among the Marwaris in West Bengal alone. Marwaris are said by their own community leaders to have more cases of dowry death than any other community. Rajesh Khaitan notes, "The ostentation of the Marwari community is the reason for the high rate of dowry deaths in the fold." 146 Social reformers who criticize the high expectations that Marwari families have for dowry (demands which often include a minimum of Rs. 50,000, cars, gold jewelry, and even apartments) have taken several steps within the community to prevent the escalation of dowry. Newspaper reports tell of community boycotts against families who torture their daughters-inlaw for money. 147 In September 1986, fifty couples participated in a dowryless mass engagement ceremony organized by the All India Marwari
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Federation held in a dharmasala in north Calcutta. 148 Making Hindu Marriage Public: Marwari Community Marriages in Bengal Ever since the highly publicized 1981 "dowry death" of the young Marwari bride Neelam Jain, Marwari community organizations have taken it upon themselves to find ways of combating the negative publicity their community has earned from their enormous dowries and the disturbingly frequent cases of "dowry death" within their fold. Since 1981, dowryless mass marriages have occurred in a variety of Marwari community organizations in Calcutta, in addition to the All India Marwari Federation. 149 These marriages have attracted wide local publicity and have brought considerable public recognition to the organizers. The cultural capital arising from such an event arguably accrues to the organizers of the event much more than to the couples who take their wedding vows in this manner. I participated in the planning of one such "community marriage," which was a major project of the women's wing of the Akhil Bharatiya Marwari Sammelan. I will refer to the women's group as "Sammelan," the name that the women generally used to describe themselves. Under the auspices of the All India Marwari Federation's women's association, an introduction gathering for prospective brides and grooms was held on September 68, 1996. This parichaya sammelan, or "acquaintanceship gathering," was held to facilitate the introduction of marriageable Marwari boys and girls from all over South Asia. To a certain degree, the public format echoed the way that wealthy Marwari families now sometimes meet in public spaces (such as the lobbies of five-star hotels) to negotiate marriages, which has the event of neutralizing the power dynamics of the event by circumventing the more traditional (and perhaps more stressful) home visits. Those lucky enough to find a match would eventually be married in a mass wedding ceremony held in the first fortnight of the following December. This samuhik vivah, or "collective mass marriage," takes as its core assumption that brides and grooms who choose to participate in the community marriage vow not to give or accept any dowry. Furthermore, the drastic reduction of ceremonial expenses (which for these couples would be borne by the organization) is an additional sign that this is an effort to attend to the common critique that Marwaris spend too much money on ostentatious weddings and other public displays of wealth.
The Mahila Samiti, the women's wing that organized the event, was made up of an energetic team of over two dozen Marwari women. The meetings were held on Saturday afternoons inside the heavily air-conditioned Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. The group gathered many times to discuss and plan a community marriage, by which suitable Marwari boys and girls would be matched in a communal introduction and engagement function, to be followed later by a community wedding. The women in the group
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came mainly from upper-middle class Marwari households. While the majority of the women in the group could be described as housewives, a handful of them pursued careers in business and a few in teaching. Being part of a Marwari women's community group gave them an appropriate social forum in which to socialize and contribute to worthy causes.
When I first attended the Sammelan meetings, I initially hoped to be a mere "observer," sitting on the sidelines without becoming too involved. The meetings were very lively affairs, and bordering, for me, on the chaotic. We sat around a large oval conference table, with participants reaching for the table microphones to voice their opinions. The meetings were conducted in a mixture of Hindi dialects, languages that I could reasonably understand one-on-one, but which I found bewildering when twenty-plus women all spoke at the same time, sometimes into the microphones, competing with one another to voice their opinions. At the first meeting a sign-up sheet was passed around the room, listing the various committees that needed volunteers. When it came to me, I tried to pass it ahead, only to have it returned. "We need more people either in fund-raising or in the reception committee," the President said to me sternly and in English, "and you also need to submit your membership dues." I could not pretend that I did not understand. Silently cursing the anthropological tradition of participant observation, a technique that now threatened to turn me into a cardcarrying Marwari social reformer, I put my name down to work for the reception committee and wrote out a check.
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From the first meeting onward, a couple of men sat on the sidelines, as unobtrusive observers of the Marwari women's public space. These men, I later learned, were the leading officers of the All India Marwari Sammelan. Though the meetings were ostensibly led by the president of the women's wing, and though the marriage was officially organized by the women's wing, it quickly became clear that the male officers had their own agenda for how the function should be organized. The men became more and more vocal in articulating their plans and concerns. It seemed that they knew exactly how they wanted to do things and that their role was actually to organize the function while eliciting the women members' consent. There were many aspects of the discussed plans that needed to be accomplished to make the community marriage a success. Carefully-worded advertisements needed to be posted in Hindi dailies all over India in order to attract the attention of Marwari parents who wished their sons and daughters to participate in the event. The prospective brides and grooms were recruited through these advertisements in the Hindi press and also through relatives, office contacts, work, and other networks. We had discussions ranging from decorations, food, and catering to heady issues of legal responsibility and financial liability in case of any possible marriage troubles. For instance, the fine print of the engagement contract stated that the Marwari Sammelan would not be held responsible for any death resulting from participation in the AIMF community marriage. Though this statement was undoubtedly necessary to protect the organization from any
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legal responsibility, that it was even thought of is evidence of a lingering doubt in the organization about the success of a dowryless marriage. The statement suggests that dowry may, in fact, be essential to a secure married life.
Notably, not a single woman in the group suggested that her son or daughter also participate in this community marriage. Though it was never made explicit, it was clear that this mass marriage was aimed at the lower and lower-middle classes. Though the organizers could eventually claim valuable cultural capital and social credit for dowryless marriages, the politics of class privilege were clear. This was clearly a case of elite women deploying less-privileged people in the service of social reform and selfimprovement. The wealthy Mahila Samiti volunteers arranged these community marriages for lower and lower-middle-class Marwaris, not for themselves. This familiar pattern of paternalism in social reform, practiced by the social elite in "reforming" the lives of their less fortunate brethren through public performances of community ritual, is an old trope in the history of charity, philanthropy, and social reform in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. The system of individually arranged marriages, accompanied by large and often undisclosed amounts of dowry in the form of money and gifts, is still very much the norm. In fact, it is families like those of the Mahila Samiti who themselves put on the lavish weddings that poorer people struggle to emulate. Some of them were tremendously worried about providing for their own daughters' dowries. 150 As I became more involved in the group, I heard rumors among the women that there had been a dowry death in the family of one of the leading Samiti volunteers, but this volunteer was not ostracized, at least not publicly.
The Sammelan wanted to create a new kind of public wedding. Weddings in India, and especially for the Marwaris, are usually a very expensive business. Calcutta's five-star hotels, such as the Taj Bengal or the Oberoi Grand, where elite Marwaris hold introductory meetings to discuss potential matches, are also the sites where the wealthy hold their weddings. At these elaborate, all-day events, thousands of guests, dressed to the nines, mill in and out from the ceremony to the buffet table. (I found that weddings were an excellent way to speak to people informally and sometimes make contacts for my appointment anthropology.) Obviously, not all Marwaris have their weddings at the Taj. Middle-class people rent spaces in privatelyowned marriage halls, with catered food and lively entertainment shows of dancing and singing performed by relatives of the bride. Rich people in India often use illegally-earned "black money" to pay for their weddings, while middle-class people are much more likely to go into debt. The Sammelan explicitly sought to create an alternative to this "show."
The introduction ceremony was held at the Vidya Mandir auditorium attached to Hindi High School, a boys' school in central Calcutta. Our
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reception committee set up booths and greeted the hundreds of potential brides, grooms, and their extended families, registered them, and collected their Rs. 250 fees. Some young men from a Marwari youth organization were also there to help us with the work. I had to concentrate to understand the variety of regional accents of Marwaris arriving from all over the subcontinent, and I worked very hard for several hours trying to quickly hunt down registration materials and nametags. 151 Although a considerable number of the participants had been willing to travel all the way to Calcutta to take the chance, at least half registered late on the opening day, possibility suggesting the marginality of the event as a realistic pathway to marriage.
A catalogue was distributed to each of the families with a photograph and brief description of all the preregistered participants. Descriptions of the potential brides and grooms listed the candidate's name, age, birth date, gotra (clan), father's occupation, height, subcaste, educational qualifications, and father's name and address. 152 Photocopies of information for the ones who registered at the door were quickly made and distributed. In all, over 200 young men and about 150 young women ended up participating in the event. In her opening address, Alka Bangur, president of the Samiti, explained that the young women were spared from having to appear before numerous suitors and their fathers were spared the expenses of entertaining the boy's family, who were themselves searching for a prospective bride. Mrs. Bangur was later quoted in the press as saying: "Here, the girls chose from among over 200 men." 153
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At the introduction ceremonies, the potential brides and grooms each walked across the stage and introduced themselves, repeating some of the information given in the catalogue. I was quite struck by the class disparity between the participants and the women organizing the function. None of the participants looked very rich. A small number of the potential brides and grooms were afflicted with various physical disabilities, such as muteness, deafness, blindness, and limps. Some of the men were divorced or widowed. While the self-introductions were going on, families in the audience watched the people on the stage and at the same time flipped through their catalogues to read the descriptions, making comments to each other and marking the names of those who might make potentially compatible spouses. After the parade of potential spouses, actual negotiations took place during the program breaks, when families mingled and chatted with each other, often going off by themselves for more private conversations. The conversations were not between the boy and the girl but between families. The tone of the conversations I (over)heard was remarkably blunt, especially in discussing income and family business.
During the introduction weekend, only a couple of matches

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were made, but the stage was set for several more couples to become engaged in the months that followed. By the time that the mass wedding rolled around in December 1996, ten couples ranging in age from eighteen to thirtyfive years had made their pledges to not accept dowry and to be married at the event. Each couple paid the sum of Rs. 1000 ($30) to participate in the wedding. 154 Each couple was allowed to invite about a dozen close relatives who stayed in local Marwari dharmasala (guest houses). The rest of the expensesfor priests, flowers, food, and a handful of presentswere provided by the organization. There were other marriages arranged at the introduction ceremony between couples who chose to marry privately and not have their ceremony with the other couples. According to Asha Maheshwari, secretary of the Mahila Samiti, these couples preferred to marry separately because of "certain family obligations." 155 Rituals of Mass Marriage The overall concept of the mass wedding ceremony defied tradition in many ways. First of all, it involved a shift in social authority from a familial public to the more anonymous public of a caste association in civil society. But within the framework of the larger structure, many of the so-called traditional rites and rituals were maintained. Wrapping red turbans on the heads of the grooms before the ceremony started was an important part of re-creating community tradition within this unusual framework. Scenes of the traditional wedding rituals were played out on a long raised platform, divided up into one stall for each couple, their families, and a priest to do the rituals for each couple. The first stall had a Bengali man notably wearing the topor, which is considered to be the traditional Bengali wedding hat. This Bengali couple, who had connections to one of the Marwari women on the committee, had decided to marry at the Marwari function in order to avoid the high cost of wedding expenses. The inclusion of the Bengali couple within an ostensibly Marwari gathering was initially somewhat surprising to me. The symbolic boundaries of community drawn by their participation suggest that Marwari social reform is more fractured than we might think, and perhaps relies more on class than on community definitions. Though some couples, like these Bengalis, were from Calcutta, other brides and grooms came from such faraway places such as Nepal, Bihar, Darjeeling, Siliguri, and Cuttack.
Each stall was decorated with hundreds of strands of flowers, creating a picture-perfect wedding setting. Within each couple's separate platform, which demarcated boundaries of individualized ceremony, the observing families took an important role. The parents of each couple, as well as some siblings or other close relatives, sat closely around the couple in order to watch the proceedings. The worship rituals did not differ greatly from those
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performed in the usual sort of individual-couple ceremonies. Since the couples had promised not to exchange any dowry, the organization provided gifts, including some clothing as well as pressure cookers, water filters, and suitcases. 156 One can only speculate about how the participating brides and grooms felt about this "collectivity" made up of themselves and other couples. The sense of community, manufactured here by the simultaneous marriage ceremonies, arose only in the public articulation of the event, especially as represented by the press. Although mass wedding ceremonies reflect a shift in the construction of social authority from the family to the social organization, even with this shift in social settings, the family's presence played an important role, creating a familial space that broke up the space of the collective mass.
The creation of separate stalls for the couples and their families demonstrates how the space of the mass wedding could be individualized, and was indeed planned to be so. a href="../images/haa06m.html" target= "new"> One of the couples very creatively, it seemed to me, deemphasized the "mass" aspect of the event. For them, having the immediate family around was not enough, so they hired a film crew to make a videotape of the event. Their decision to record their wedding raises interesting questions about how the couples themselves gain cultural capital from participating in this kind of mass wedding. < There are certainly other ways of getting around the high costs of marriage. After all, many couples choose to have a civil ceremony and are married by a representative of the state. But getting married in a mass ceremony, organized under the auspices of a caste organization, grants couples a certain degree of respectability (and, of course, gives them a good story to tell their friends and children in the future). But by cutting out other couples, this couple can create the space of their own public, for later representation.
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The presence of a video camera and video crew to film the wedding rituals of one particular couple suggests that the mass wedding was simply not complete for them without that quintessential object of modern representational techniques: the video camera. The imaginary of the video could create a much more romantic narrative of the wedding. By editing out the "mass" aspects, the video could even represent the event as one couple's "private" wedding. Whereas the publicity photographs published by the press stress the authority of the organization, and show all the couples together, the video captures a more individualized narrativea traditional wedding story created out of the mass event. By videotaping, the couple
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may have been able to recoup some of the cultural capital that they lost by not providing a lavish wedding of their own to display their prosperity, wealth, auspiciousness, and generosity. After all, the videotaping of weddings, which has become commonplace worldwide, represents another way that the practices and customs of the elite have established higher standards for what counts as a respectable wedding ritual.
Though ten couples had registered for the mass wedding, only nine couples ended up getting married in the public ceremony. One man stood in front of his place on the platform waiting angrily for the arrival of the girl he had pledged to marry. Unfortunately for him, the bride and her family never turned up. The same thing almost happened to one of the brides. As the ceremonies of other couples began both to the right and the left of her, the bride-to-be sat and cried loudly on the edge of the platform, crumpled up in painful sobs at the thought of being stood up at her wedding. The idea that the family had broken the marriage alliance was devastating to her and her family's honor. This did not seem to be something that could merely be blamed on the organization. Luckily for the bride, her wedding story had a different ending. Halfway through the ceremonies taking place for the other couples, her groom and his parents came rushing into the ceremony, full of excuses that their train had reached Howrah station extremely late.
Let us return to the question of the form that these weddings took and the sites of individuality that were negotiated within the space of the group. Mass marriages are unlike the modern story of love marriage, which is sometimes portrayed as another attempt to beat the cost of dowry and lavish wedding ceremonies. Mass marriages are mediated by the structures of civil society and a numbers mentality that are products of global modernity but that obscure questions of individual choice. Love marriage, as the Sammelan women themselves said, is not seen as a suitable solution to the problem of dowry. Instead, the Mahila Samiti depend on gaining consent to a radical shift in social authority from the family to the voluntary association in civil society. The disciplinary and authoritative gaze is shifted to the community, as represented by the community organization. The mass marriage, however, had a relatively small overall impact for poor Marwaris; only nine marriages were formed from 350 participants. Perhaps the organization's quest for cultural capital, acquired in part through newspaper representations of the event, was the ultimate goal. The fact that public representations of the event depended on emphasizing Marwari women's charity in public life also reflects a desire to counter stereotypes of Marwari women's confinement in the home. Social organizations are probably the most visible kinds of social commentary and "social reform" that exist in the historical and ethnographic archive. And yet, these "public" social organizations represent only a small fraction of what
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and how Marwari women think, reflect, and act upon their own "social condition." Literature and the work of sentiments Literature may also serve as an ethnographic source, offering evidence of and insight into ways that women have made small changes in gendered relationships and family space. Even though literature certainly engages in aestheticizing experience, it has the advantage of highlighting, and even exaggerating, sentiment as a key component of the narrative. As such, literature can make sentiments the object of analysis for the anthropologist and historian. 157 Literature documents the productive work of sentiments, while out of necessity magnifying them, and thus makes them visible to the reader. The sentiments expressed in literature are not necessarily invented ones, for their effectiveness comes from their quality of being shared by author and reader. The intersubjective hermeneutic between author and reader is what makes such sentiments documentable.
Let us turn to two short stories published in Alka Saraogi's 1996 collection entitled Kahani ke Talash Mein (In Search of a Story.) 158 The first story, entitled Lal Mitti ka Sardak (The Red Dirt Road), discusses a woman's experience taking a short trip away from her husband and children, when she accompanies a female friend to a Bengali resort in Santiniketan. Vandana, the protagonist, lies restlessly in bed early one morning, unable to sleep because of the nervous thoughts circulating in her head. She contemplates the guilt she feels over temporarily leaving her family to go off with a friend. Conversations she had with her son before departing for the station replay themselves in her mind:
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"Mommy, did Grandmother ever leave you like this, the way that you are leaving me?" Surprised at this unexpected question, she fell silent. Suresh, her husband, quipped, "Your Mom is modern, pal!" Was there some irritation behind the way that Suresh was joking around? "No Bittu. No one can become modern by putting on airs. And see, when you grow up, then you will do a lot of things which I have never done. In this way everything keeps changing all the time. I am not like Grandma, and in the same way you are not like me." Vandana said this in a confident tone without any expression on her face. 159
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In this poignant vignette, Saraogi demonstrates the way different generations of a single family can encounter modernity. Vandana's son points to the standards of the past in expressing his emotions, asking whether his grandmother had ever done this to her. Vandana's husband, however, tries to make a joke out of her modernity that will placate the son but perhaps add to the guilt that Vandana is meant to be feeling. Against these familial claims on her, Vandana must find a way to negotiate the guilt that her son and husband place on her for leaving them, if only for a couple of days. In her clever response about "everything changing all the time," Vandana points out the way that the reproduction of gender roles never remains constant. Instead, the definition of appropriate behavior for kinship roles is always mediated via generations, within a seemingly personal experience of modernity.
The emotional pain that results from resisting tradition stays with Vandana throughout her adult years. A A second second excerpt, also a flashback, portrays Vandana's teenage days and documents the family's management of the socalled pollution associated with women's menstruation. Vandana Vandana is sitting with her mother, sister, grandmother, and father in the living room, relaxing and talking. Vandana's mother whispers to her:
"Look, for two days don't sit on the bed and don't touch anything. Spread out the mat and sit on it, and at night take out the blue silk sheet and sleep on it. You understand, don't you, just as your older sister does, huh?" Mom whispered in her ear very responsibly. Vandana thought about the secret of the mat and the blue sheet many times, but without knowing everything she could not reach any decision. When she asked her older sister about it, she became very irritated. As soon as their mother went away, Vandana climbed into the lap of her sister and went to sleep on the bed.
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[Vandana said,] "I will not sit on the mat, nor will I sleep on this sheet, and when I touch you, you will become polluted yourself. Now what will you do?" Grandma sat quietly and ran her fingers through Vandana's hair. [Her father said to the grandmother.] "Mother, what is this, aren't you going to explain it to her? What are you doing? She is touching everything." Vandana became very startled at hearing her father's words. Does he want things to be like this? Grandmother ignored her son's rebuke. "Now, she is only a girl, slowly she will begin to understand, son." Months and months passed like this. But in spite of the displeasure of her mother and father, she stood firmly on her decision, with the support of her grandmother.
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In the end her older sister also protested, "What is this? Different rules for her and different rules for me." At first Vandana's protest was successful, then it became clear that her weaker position had intelligence as its only weapon, and this was a very unstable base. Vandana eventually became so insulted that she lost her stubbornness and afterwards she just always went along with her father's will.
One could well read this account as Vandana's expression of feminist resistance to her father's patriarchal insistence on the secret of the mat and the blue sheet. Climbing onto her sister's lap, sleeping on the bed, announcing out loud that she will intentionally touch things and pollute others during her menstrual period are part of Vandana's tactics to press change on her family. More surprising are the story's intergenerational alliances. The sister takes her time in coming to Vandana's defense and does not adopt strategies of resistance herself. Mother and father represent the patriarchal status quo. The grandmother is the one to support and defend Vandana, interestingly enough, rather than championing tradition in the threatening face of modernity. Admittedly, the grandmother's alliance with modernity may not be permanent, and she does not claim that Vandana will always be this way: "Slowly she will understand, son."
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The intergenerational component of "The Red Dirt Road" suggests new ways to think about the relationship between the forging of Indian feminisms and the construction of the past. Although the nuclear family has been characterized as modern and fundamentally progressive, the feminism articulated in the story does not form a revolutionary break with the past. Instead, Saraogi's story highlights how sentiment itself links past and present in the form of solidarity between the grandmother and granddaughter. This alliance with the past, rather than a struggle against it, creates an affective relationship to the past that is expressed through practices of affect, with the grandmother "running her fingers through her hair." The figure of the grandmother represents the bonds of kinship inherent in constructing an emotive present in relationship to a lived past.
The second story, Ek Vrat Ka Katha (The Tale of a Fast) portrays a woman's practice of ritual fasting, known in Hindi as vrat (literally, "vow"). This particular fasting day is called Bachwaras, a day when Hindu women fast for the well-being of their sons. Amita, the main character, recognizes the importance that her mother-in-law places on keeping the fasts, so she follows the rituals just to keep her mother-in-law happy. But Amita's habit of feeling hungry as soon as she gets up always causes her trouble on the days of fasting, and she sometimes forgets about the fast and mistakenly has something to eat. Her mother-in-law tries to quell her habit of eating right when she gets up. The mother-in-law tells Amita that it is the duty of women not to eat before men, and that she should eat only after all of the male members of the household have eaten. Amita has hardened herself to such unspoken disapproval from the very beginning and never waits for her
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husband to eat before her. She cannot imagine living life the way that her mother and mother-in-law have: incapable, she feels, of raising any objections. How could they tolerate so much? On this Bachwaras day, Amita fights with her brother-in-law, with whom she generally shares a close joking relationship, about not making him a hot breakfast when all of the women are fasting and can only eat cold roti (chapatis). Amita jokingly tells him that he should just have the cold roti, and he becomes very upset and protests. After Amita angrily snaps that he should grow up if he can't take a joke, the brother-in-law storms off without eating breakfast. I now quote from the final paragraph of the story:
Amita looked over to her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law for support. She thought that her mother-in-law would scold him for getting so angry about such a small matter, but who knew how many untold complaints were written on her expressionless face. She thought that her mother-in-law was reliving some old event in her mind. The sister-in-law put her head down and kept on eating. In Amita's loneliness her heart felt as dry and heavy as the flour in the rotis.
Saraogi emphasizes the loneliness that results from Amita's resistance to the codes of womanly behavior that her mother-in-law and sister-in-law promote. The sister-in-law, after all, is jealous of the close joking relationship that Amita shares with her husband. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law do not join her in a sisterly alliance against patriarchal norms. Instead, Amita's behavior at least temporarily alienates her from everyone else in the family. For Amita, the experience of modernity becomes a prison sentence of emotional isolation.
150
Saraogi depicts the production of sentiment in conjunction with an engagement with both feminist values and history. Rather than attempting to promote specific changes in women's lifestyles, the author attempts to articulate the emotional turmoil of women who seek to make subtle but significant changes in the practices of their domestic lives. 160 By portraying practices of feminist "social reform" within the intimate site of the household, Saraogi sensitively captures the nuances of emotional distance and deep resentment that go along with such challenges to patriarchal familial authority. While examining the predicament of changing values in modern conjugal relationships, Saraogi's stories question the relevance of male viewpoints in reflecting women's experience. They also raise questions about the predicament of modern feminism for women living in kinship networks and family life. The stories do not just sentimentalize family relationships; they document a complex set of intergenerational and gendered relationships, and suggest that the practice of everyday feminism can maintain a positive relationship with the past and can draw upon it for
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strength. In this sense, tradition is not so separate from modernity. The grandmother, for instance, may be old, but she is not irrelevant to the formation of the new. Intergenerational linkages, through lineage and the kul, are not simply the "weight of tradition," they are actually the basis of women's support and continued action.
The critique of patriarchy in Saraogi's writing focuses on her characters' feelings of pain and disappointment. For Saraogi, social reform, or change, does not necessarily require revolutionary heroes who valiantly smash tradition in the march to the modern. She employs more subtle tropesof compromise, hurting, accommodation, and resistanceto suggest how social arenas such as the family are changed. This aspect of Saraogi's work may not be unique, but it is the reason that it is so important. Saraogi's fiction also serves as a measure of the evolution of the Marwaris' engagement with questions of social reform since the vehement debates over the condition of Marwari society, particularly for women, that marked the beginning of the 20th century.
When reading about these disputes in hindsight, we tend to think of these fights and debates as dividing the community, in the Marwari case between reformists and Sanatanis. Rather, I argue that these debates themselves created the community. Agreeing to disagree was at the heart of the issue; reformers and Sanatanis alike agreed there should be a debate about the status of various cultural customs. Furthermore, these debates did not just create one community among Marwaris. Many publics and public constituencies were created. The existence of various kinds of groups, such as the Marwari Agarwal associations and Maheshwari Marwari organizations, suggests that there are different constituencies involved who negotiated change among sub-castes. In the case of the Marwari Sahayak Samiti work on indenture, a national body was invoked. Alka Saraogi's contemporary fiction also circulates in the realm of the pan-North Indian Hindi public sphere.
The final chapter of this book is a theoretically-informed case study of an ongoing dispute between some Calcutta Marwaris and the Indian state over the question of whether or not sati worship should be legal. This chapter is an attempt to synthesize many of the themes that I have has covered so far: negative stereotypes of the Marwaris as backward, mapping community in Rajasthan, the uses of history in constructing the past, temples and money-making, and appropriate gender roles for Marwari women.
Notes:
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Note 1: Timberg, The Marwaris, 73. Back. Note 2: C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); B. R. Grover, "An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of North India during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Money and the Market in India 11001700, ed. Sanjay Subramanium (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).Back. Note 3: Satyajit Ray's film Mahanagar is a good example of the intergenerational negotiations made in a struggling Bengali family when a woman decides to take a job outside the home.Back. Note 4: Dinanath Sidhantalankar, "Vidhwa Vivah. Samajik Santulan ki gahri aawashwakta," Samaj Vikas, 45:6. (Aug.Sept., 1996), 35.Back. Note 5: Veena Das, especially in her Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), has been a pioneering thinker in this area.Back. Note 6: Nicholas B. Dirks, "The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India," Identity, Consciousness and the Past, ed. H. L. Seneviratne (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135.Back. Note 7: Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849 1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); J. Krisnamurthi, ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and State, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).Back. Note 8: Lucy Carroll, "Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856," in Krisnamurthi, ed., Women in Colonial India, 126.Back. Note 9: Asok Sen, Iswarachandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi, 1975), 148. Back. Note 10: Ibid., 56. Back. Note 11: Ibid., 155156.Back. Note 12: C. R. Bhandari, Oswal Jati ka Itihas (Chanpura,1934), 277283, cited in Timberg, The Marwaris, 52.Back. Note 13: Timberg, The Marwaris, 4.Back. Note 14: Balchand Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 59091. Back. Note 15: Ibid., 594.Back.
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Note 16: Ibid., 596.Back. Note 17: Pinjrapole is a nineteenth-century neologism. Pinjra means "caged" and pole means "courtyard."Back. Note 18: Calcutta ka Sanstayan: Akh Jhalak [A Glance at Calcutta's Institutions] (Calcutta: Nawalgarh Hitashi, 1974), 2325.Back. Note 19: Calcutta Pinjrapole institutional papers. Copy under 6912, search no. 6906, Book 1, Vol. 53, pp. 254256, no. 2105 for 1921.Back. Note 20: RNNB. Mohammadi (Calcutta), 11 February 1921.Back. Note 21: Report of the Marwari Association: 18991903 (Calcutta: Wilkins Press, 1903), 110.Back. Note 22: Report of the Marwari Association: 1899-1903, 100.Back. Note 23: Govt of Bengal, Judicial Dept. Judicial Branch. File No. 1-A-18. Proceedings 24-33, Aug 1922. Bill further to amend the Indian Penal Code (Age of Consent). No. 29. Dated Calcutta 26 June 1922. From Rai Sir Hariram Goenka Bahadur To The Assistant Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department. Back. Note 24: Govt. of Bengal. Judicial/Judicial June 1928. Progs 110-33A. The Hindu Child Marriage Bill by Rai Sahib Harbilas Sarda. No. 125. From Babu Ramdhan Dass Jhajoria, Hon Sec to M Assoc. To: Secretary to the GOB, Judicial Dept.Back. Note 25: Bharat Chamber of Commerce. Golden Jubilee Souvenir (Calcutta: Alliance Press, 1950), 6. In 1950, after independence, it was renamed the Bharat Chamber of Commerce. Nowadays it appears to be defunct; I did not find any materials relating to the organization before 1947, when a concerted attempt was made to boost the organization through a new series of publications(Journal of the Marwari Association, 1947).Back. Note 26: Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 617619.Back. Note 27: Timberg, The Marwaris, 72.Back. Note 28: Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 649.Back. Note 29: Shri Ramdev Chokhany, 8489.Back. Note 30: "Note on the Activities of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya," NAI. Home Poll. 187/1926: 9.Back. Note 31: Karen Ray, "Marwari Politicization to Counter Village Victimization: The Anti-Indenture Struggle," Shodhak, 17: 8 (1988). . Back. Note 32: Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour
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Abroad, 18301920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).Back. Note 33: Karen Ray, "Marwari Politicization," 89.Back. Note 34: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigration). December 1915. Proceeding 52. Letter from the Hon'ble Mr. James Donald, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Financial Department, to The Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Commerce and Industry. Back. Note 35: Besides the Marwari Sahayak Samiti and the Marwari Association, another society involved in the struggle against indentureship was the "Indentured Cooly Protection Society or Anti-Indentured Emigration League," which had its main office at 160 Harrison Road in the heart of Burabazar. This organization distributed leaflets in the rural areas where workers were being recruited and organized lectures stating the evils of emigration.Back. Note 36: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigration). April 1916. Proceedings 30-33B. From the Honorary Secretary, Marwari Association, Calcutta, to The Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Delhi. February 7, 1916. Back. Note 37: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigration). August 1919. Proceedings 1-3. Letter from the Honorary Secretary, Marwari Association, Calcutta to The Private Secretary to His Excellency the Viceroy, Simla. Dated July 31st, 1919.Back. Note 38: It is interesting to consider that Marwaris participate in the discussion of "free will" when it comes to the question of plantation labor, but not in questions of domestic life, or at least not to the same extent.Back. Note 39: The coolie recruiters were known by the Bengali word arkati. The same word was used for recruiters of all types: recruiters of workers for tea garden estates and for the army. Originally the word arkati referred to the man employed on a boat whose job it was to constantly determine the depth of the rivers and inlets, so that the boat would never become marooned in any one spot. Kati referred to the stick that was used in measuring, and ar referred to the effect of refraction of the stick under the surface of the water, so that arkati literally meant "bent stick." This "bent stick" pointed the way that the boat should travel, or in the case of labor recruitment, pointed the way that the workers should migrate. I am grateful to Dipesh Chakrabarty for this information.Back. Note 40: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigration). August 1919. Proceedings 1-3.Back. Note 41: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigation). April 1916. Proceedings 3033B.Back. Note 42: Karen Ray, "Marwari Politicization," 88.Back. Note 43: NAI. Commerce & Industry (Emigration). April 1916. Proceedings
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30-33B.Back. Note 44: Karen Ray, "Marwari Politicization," 95.Back. Note 45: Medha Malik Kudaisya, "The Public Career of G.D. Birla 19111947" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1992).Back. Note 46: Goswamy, "Collaboration and Conflict,"Back. Note 47: Stanley Kochanek, Business and Politics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).Back. Note 48: G. D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir (Bombay: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1968); Ramesh Bhardwaj, ed., Sitaram Seksaria Jamanshatabdi Granth, (New Delhi: Gandhi Hindustan Sahitya Sabha, 1993); Ramesh Bhardwaj, ed., Sitaram Seksaria Wadmay, (New Delhi: Gandhi Hindustan Sahitya Sabha, 1993); Nandkisore Jalan, ed., Ishwardas Jalan Abhinandan Granth, (Calcutta: Abhinandan Samiti, 1977).Back. Note 49: Himmatsinka Abhinandan Granth, 5571.Back. Note 50: Kudaisya, The Public Career.Back. Note 51: Kudaisya, The Public Career, 39.Back. Note 52: Radhakrishna Nevtiya and Jugalkishore Jaithliya, eds. Shri PrabhuDayal Himmatsinka Abhinandan Granth, (Calcutta: Shri PrabhuDayal Himmatsinka Abhinandan Samiti, 1984), 6471.Back. Note 53: Pushpa Joshi, Gandhi on Women (New Delhi: Centre for Women's Development Studies, 1988), 63. Speech reprinted from the Amrita Bazar Patrika of 28 January 1921; and CWMG Vol XIX, 274-275. (Author: what is CWMG?)Back. Note 54: See, for instance, G. D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma.Back. Note 55: Pannadevi Poddar, "Mere Pita" [My Father], Sitaram Seksariya Janmashtabdi Granth, (New Delhi: Gandhi Hindustani Sahitya Sabha, 1993), 1121.Back. Note 56: This type of ideal life-narrative, of earning money for the first decades of adult life and then devoting oneself to charity and social causes in middle and old age, has been much valorized among trading communities for several centuries. In the "Half-Tale" autobiography discussed in earlier chapters, a similar life narrative is presented and valorized for Banarasi. In cases such as Sitaram Seksariya's, however, the fact that he was able to purchase extremely expensive parcels of land and an elaborate mansion once owned by Scottish industrialists suggests that he was not as much of a renouncer as his biographers claim. Even if he was not actively involved in the day-to-day operations of family business and industry, he would at least have held part ownership in such ventures. This explanation is not meant to diminish
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Seksariya's achievements, but instead to point out how one member of a business family could become a Gandhite nationalist and at the same time benefit from colonial capitalism. Gandhi, of course, certainly benefited from the enormous financial contributions that Birla and other super-rich Marwaris made to the Congress Party.Back. Note 57: Sitaram Seksariya Abhinandan Granth, preface.Back. Note 58: Sitaram Seksariya Abhinandan Granth, 2139.Back. Note 59: The Voice of Shri Shikshayatan College (Calcutta: Shri Shikshayatan College, 1978).Back. Note 60: Janaki Devi Bajaj, Meri Jivan Yatra [My Life Journey] (1956; reprint, New Delhi: Martand Upadhaya, 1965), 349.Back. Note 61: Ibid., 5557, 6769.Back. Note 62: Ibid., 106128.Back. Note 63: Papers of the Goseva Sangh 194250. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Back. Note 64: Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 713; Ashok Goenka, "Smt. Indumati Goenka: A Brief Life Sketch," in Kedar Nath Goenka Centenary Volume, ed. Vinod Tagra (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, n. d. (1992?)), 243 247.Back. Note 65: Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 28 June 1930, 2423.Back. Note 66: Bhimsen Kedia, Bharat main Marwari Samaj (Calcutta: National Publications, 1947), 277.Back. Note 67: B. R. Nanda, In Gandhi's Footsteps: The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1921.Back. Note 68: PrabhuDayal Himmatsingka Abinandan Granth, 35, 5761Back. Note 69: Shri Gangaprasad Bhotika, "Marwari Samajkay Andolan aur Basantlal" [Basatlal and Movements of Marwari community], Basantlal Murarka Smrtigranth, 82- 83.Back. Note 70: Nanda, In Gandhi's Footsteps, 145147, 201.Back. Note 71: Bajaj, Meri Jivan Yatra, 5859.Back. Note 72: Letter from Gandhi to Janaki Devi Bajaj, in Bajaj, Meri Jivan Yatra, 60.Back. Note 73: Samaj Vikas 45 (AugSept. 1996), 911.Back.
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Note 74: Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York: Praeger, 1972). Singer wrote that there was a physical separation of two spheres of tradition and modernity in which people would have different "norms of behavior and belief" (320).Back. Note 75: Shri Gangaprasad Bhotika, "Basantlal," 8284.Back. Note 76: Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 639-643.Back. Note 77: 996 Interview with Ashok Seksariya. Back. Note 78: Among the institutions founded in Burabazar were the Maheshwari Sabha (established in 1914), a library (1915), a Maheswari Vidyalaya (1916), a Seva Samiti (1921), a gymnasium (1922), a music room (1927), a social club (1935), a girls' balika vidyalaya school (1940), an adult vidyalaya (1945), and a Women's Mahila Samiti (1963).Back. Note 79: Calcutta ka Stanstan: Ack Jhalak [A Glance at Calcutta's Institutions], 3941.Back. Note 80: Basant Kumar Birla, A Rare Legacy: Memoirs of B. K. Birla (Bombay: Image, 1994), 291294.Back. Note 81: Modi, Desh ke Itihas mein Marwari Jati ka Stan, 686.Back. Note 82: Vasantlal Tulasyana, Maravari-Agrawala-Mahasabha ka kacca cittha [Critique of the Administration of Marwari Agrawal Mahasabha], (Bombay(?): n.d., n.p. [1929?]).Back. Note 83: Kedia, Bharat may marwari samaj, 23. Back. Note 84: Ibid., 140152.Back. Note 85: Ibid., 140152.Back. Note 86: Ibid., 256257, 298304, 231232.Back. Note 87: Karine Schomer writes that Chand [The Moon] began publication in 1922 as a women's magazine, combining entertainment, a little sensationalism, and a moderately nationalist stance that could pass government censorship. Schomer comments that the Marwari number was an example of sensationalism and "contained a considerable amount of muckraking that was more titillating than socially useful." Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Varma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 181182, 182 n 82.Back. Note 88: Personal communication with Rishi Jaimini Kaushik Barua.Back. Note 89: "Kuch Janne yogy bate," Chand (1929), 115116.Back. Note 90: The annual report of the Jodhpur court for 192324 was quoted in decrying these rulers, who "being themselves mostly uneducated could
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unfortunately display little enthusiasm over the education of the ryots. Indeed some of them had a lurking suspicion that the education will make the ryots think more of their rights than their obligations." Ibid., 117.Back. Note 91: Ibid., 115.Back. Note 92: Ibid., 120.Back. Note 93: "Marwari Streeon," Chand,169172.Back. Note 94: "Marwardion ke Gunavaguna," Chand, 59.Back. Note 95: "Osar," Chand (1929?), 6570.Back. Note 96: Ibid., 5859.Back. Note 97: Ibid., 59.Back. Note 98: Ibid., 60.Back. Note 99: "Marwari Steeon" Chand (1929), 177178.Back. Note 100: "Calcutta ka Samajik Jiwan," Chand (1929), 155156.Back. Note 101: Ibid., 157158.Back. Note 102: "Manoranjan," Chand (1929), 1734.Back. Note 103: "Kalkatta ka Sudharak Marwari Samaj," Chand (1929),188192.Back. Note 104: Kedia's Bharat Mein Marwari Samaj, discussed in the previous section, was no doubt in part a response to the charges raised in Chand.Back. Note 105: I am indebted to Francesca Orsini for providing me with the information that I present in this paragraph. Ramnaresh Tripathi's booklet, Marware ke manohar git: (Hindi Mandir, Prayag, Jul-Aug 1930), 51, (Subtitle "Chand ke Marwari ank ka uttar") is in SOAS Library, ref. S. XII. Hindi 49041. Back. Note 106: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon, Memorandum and Rules and Regulations, n.p., 1961.Back. Note 107: Peter Heehs, India's Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 123.Back. Note 108: Shri Bhanwarmal Singhi, Sammelan ka Sanskipt Itihas (Calcutta: Akhil Bharatwarhiya Marwari Sammelan, 1986), 30.Back. Note 109: Some members were not happy with this decision and broke off to form a Marwari workers federation that promoted social reform in Orissa until
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rejoining the AIMF in 1946.Back. Note 110: AIMF History, 2530.Back. Note 111: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon, June-Dec. 1943 (Calcutta: Bajranglal Lath, 1946), 711.Back. Note 112: J. T. Molesworth, Molesworth's Marathi-English Dictionary (1857; corrected fourth reprint, Bombay: Bombay Educational Society Press, 1991): 648.Back. Note 113: B. M. Singhi, Marwari Samaj: Chunauti aur Chinti (1965; reprint Calcutta: Shushila Singhi, 1985), 107-120.Back. Note 114: In 1991, septuagenarian Orissa chief minister Biju Patnaik created waves of protest, Burabazar shop closings, and a one-day boycott of the Calcutta Stock Exchange in response to his "dangerous and irresponsible" threat to Marwaris that they would have to leave Orissa with the jug and blanket with which they came to conduct business. Patnaik pointed to the way that Marwaris were targeted in the recent riots in Bhadrak as evidence of them "playing the politics of religion," by worshipping Ram while adulterating commodities like rice and sugar. By issuing this statement just before an election, Patnaik probably hoped to win the votes of non-Marwari people back to the Janata Dal party from those who might have cast their ballots with the Marwari-identified BJP. The public reactions in Calcutta expressed shock and disgust at the communallydirected remark. Dr. Kusum Khemani, secretary of the Bharatiya Bhaisha Parishad, said Patnaik's statement was completely unfounded, asking how anyone could "say anything against a community which is so involved in charitable work?" Khemani pointed to the examples of eleven hospitals plus numerous schools and colleges, open to all, that were run by the community. "Widespread protest over Biju remark on Marwaris," Telegraph, (Calcutta) 13 May 1991; "BJP decries Biju Patnaik's utterances," Times of India (Delhi), 15 May 1991; "CSE brokers boycott trading," Telegraph (Calcutta), 15 May 1991; "Biju's remark halts CSE trading," Statesman (Calcutta), 15 May 1991; "Burrabazar Bandh," Statesman, 15 May 1991; "Anti-Marwari Remarks: Biju backed by state party chief" Times of India (Delhi), 16 May 1991; "Biju flayed for comment on Marwaris," BPO 17 May 1991; "Advani ridicules Biju's threat to Marwaris," Telegraph, May 17, 1991; "Storm in a Teacup," The Sun Times, 17 May 1991; "CM's threat to Marwaris part of a clever design," The Sun Times, 17 May 1991; "BJP-Cong-Marwari nexus new Janata Dal plank," Telegraph, 17 May 1991; Payal Singh, "Going Berserk? Biju Patnaik's unsavoury ultimatum to Marwaris has stirred a hornet's nest," Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 May 1991.Back. Note 115: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelon, second session, 1948.Back. Note 116: AIMF Papers, 197476. All India Marwari Federation. Back. Note 117: Sushila Singhi, "Akhil Bharatiya Marwari Mahila Sammelon, Udghatan Satra" [text of Inaugural Session Address by Shrimati Sushila Singhi
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under the auspices of the All India Marwari Sammelon] (Patna: 23 December 1983).Back. Note 118: One example of this kind of text is Kathleen Olga Vaughan, The Purdah System and its effect on motherhood: osteomalacia caused by absence of light in India (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1928).Back. Note 119: Sushila Singhi, "Akhil Bharatiya Marwari Mahila Sammelon, Udghatan Satra."Back. Note 120: Report of AIMF, 197476:Back. Note 121: AIMF Papers 1974-76, 1923. All India Marwari Federation.Back. Note 122: Shree Ramdev Chokhany, 152154.Back. Note 123: I have noted earlier in this chapter the work of Sitaram Seksariya and his contributions to the Marwari Balika Vidyalaya and some of the other schools in the Burabazar, which created spaces for Marwari girls to receive basic primary education. Marwari reformers also established a large number of girls' schools in Rajasthan, including the Rajasthan Balika Vidyalaya in Vanasthali village, which began offering instruction in home science, art and culture, music, and sewing in 1919. Kedia, Bharat Mein Marwari Samaj, 241; Rshi Jaimini Kaushik 'Barua,' Surajmal Jalan 286-299.Back. Note 124: Shrimati Gyan Kumari Heda [inaugural lecture], Akhil Bharatvarshya Marwari Sammelon Silver Jubilee Conference, (Calcutta: December 12-25, 1961), 4.Back. Note 125: Private papers of Saraswati Niketan. Calcutta. Back. Note 126: A Story of Devotion and Service: Hindustan Charity Trust, [undated brochure].Back. Note 127: Modern High School for Girls: 40th Anniversary 19521992. (Calcutta: nd).Back. Note 128: School Magazine of Modern High School for Girls: 19921995.Back. Note 129: Papers of the Mahila Parishad, Calcutta.Back. Note 130: Calcutta Ka Stansayn, Ack Jhalak, 151.Back. Note 131: The inability, or refusal to speak English should not necessarily be confused with class. This woman's family's industry in cement and chemicals does approximately $50 million of business each year.Back. Note 132: Jyotirmai Club, Members List, (n.d.) Back. Note 133: As I noted in the introduction, the fact that men are away at work all day creates a space for women's agency: to meet friends, to shop, and even
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to talk to anthropologists while the men are away. Despite the appearance of an overwhelming patriarchy in these families, wealthy Marwari women did not articulate to me that they felt oppressed. Many say they are generally very content not to have to work. One Bengali woman from a business family, now married into a Marwari family, told me that she enjoyed her life as a "Marwari by marriage," spending her days being driven around by a chauffeur and shopping. When I spoke to her about the Marwari and Bengali relationship, she retorted that most Bengali women were probably jealous.Back. Note 134: "A Word about Jyotirmai Club: A Ray of Light for a Better Life," (undated brochure, 1990?).Back. Note 135: Ibid.Back. Note 136: Another dowry death reported in the press was that of Gita Jaiswal, age 22. See the articles about Jaiswal in the Bengali newspaper Sattayug (Calcutta) on 16 September 1981; "Marwaris Call War on Dowry" in the Telegraph (Calcutta), 25 September 1996; Aajkal 9 June 1981. Back. Note 137: Animesh C. Ray Choudhury, "Bride Pricerooted in the Soil?" Business Standard, 22 February 1981.Back. Note 138: I am grateful to S. Singhi for generously sharing with me her copies of these unarchived articles, used in her own journalism work.Back. Note 139: Even the husband's father was said to have been henpecked and beaten by his wife. In response to a photo of the mother-in-law drinking milk, one reader commented that he was reminded of the expression, "Don't feed milk to a snake." If one continues to feed the snake, presumably it will bite and kill you one day.Back. Note 140: In the case of the news coverage of Neelam Jain's death, public discussions of her death actually bear a striking similarity to debates over women's agency in the case of sati.Back. Note 141: Indian Express (Calcutta), 20 September 1980.Back. Note 142: Statesman (Calcutta), 10 October 1980.Back. Note 143: Telegraph (Calcutta), 17 February 1984.Back. Note 144: Manushi,nos. 78, 1981.Back. Note 145: Home Public. August 1888. Proceedings 2330.Back. Note 146: Shyamal Sarkar, "Marwari Brides Pay Price for Wealth," Statesman (Calcutta), 14 February 1997.Back. Note 147: "Marwaris Call War on Dowry," Telegraph (Calcutta), 25 September 1996.Back.
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Note 148: Telegraph (Calcutta), 19 September 1986.Back. Note 149: Ranjit Kumar Guru, "A Meet in Rourkela to Marry Minds and Hearts," Asian Age, 30 December 1995.Back. Note 150: When I visited women from the Samiti in their homes, talk would often turn a discussion of their own children. One woman brought me home and noticed my eye traveling to a stack of fresh pillows and linens wrapped in plastic on the top of the wardrobe. "Those are for my daughter's dowry," she said, "we have already started saving. For middle-class families like ours, any decent boy's family would ask for at least 20 lakhs ($50,000)." Her daughter was eight years old.Back. Note 151: To my surprise, none of the participants ever expressed surprise at seeing me work in the booth. I was wearing a Mahila Samiti badge pinned onto my sari. They probably all assumed that I had married into a Marwari family, and no one questioned me about my identity.Back. Note 152: This catalogue was produced as one issue of Samaj Vikas, 1996.Back. Note 153: "Mass Wedding: 9 Knots Tied," Asian Age, 8 December 1996.Back. Note 154: I might add that if you do the math here, the fees from both the introduction ceremony and the wedding add up to the whopping sum of approximately Rs. 97,500, which is about the equivalent of US $3,200. Was this actually a money-generating event?Back. Note 155: "Mass Wedding: 9 Knots Tied."Back. Note 156: The giving of dowry gifts in this manner is reminiscent of other historical contexts, such as Christian missionaries providing dowries for the girls who studied in their schools.Back. Note 157: Kirin Narayan, "How Native is a Native Anthropologist?" American Anthropologist 95 (3) 1993. p 671-686.Back. Note 158: Saraogi, one of the interesting Calcutta Marwari women writers I got to know, is a brilliant writer in Hindi literature. Unfortunately, I could not incorporate material from her recent historical novel about one Marwari family's migration from Rajasthan to Calcutta, a Hindi novel with the title, Kolkatta, via Bypass. There are a couple of other well-known Marwari writers. Prabha Khaitan has written a large number of Hindi novels about Marwari family life (see bibliography) and several books on philosophy, including a Hindi translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex. In contrast with Saraogi, Khaitan's novels are meant to shock; her topics and themes include runaways, love affairs with married men, sibling incest, alcoholism, and other family scandals. Saraogi commented on the perceived ambiguity of her role as a writer combined with her responsibilities of being a mother in a joint family: "People say Ch-Ch, it is good you are busy in something therefore you don't get bored." ("Aatmalochan key
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abhav may lambe samay tak rachnakar chal nahi pata." [A writer cannot exist for a long time without self criticism. An Interview with Alka Saraogi] Jansatta Sabrang [Sunday magazine supplement], 24 September 1995, 1617.)Back. Note 159: The translations from the Hindi originals are my own, done in consultation with the author.Back. Note 160: I am not arguing that Saraogi's work has had a prescriptive effect on the lives of Marwari, North Indian and Bengali women. I am primarily interested in the way the relationship of Marwari women to the past is revealed in the stories as the main characters' sentiments toward older family members. Thus, I put aside questions of readership and the overall social impact that Saraogi's stories might have on a larger reading public.Back.
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6. Sati Worship and Marwari Public Identity in India

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The legal debate in India over the worship and glorification of sati (widow burning, previously spelled "suttee") stands unresolved at present. After several years of controversy, the practice of worshipping sati was made illegal in 1987 after the death of a young Rajput woman named Roop Kanwar. At that time the Indian government revised the colonial legislation banning widow immolation to include sati glorification, and thereby outlawed ceremonies, processions, or functions that eulogize any historical person who has committed sati. The law furthermore prohibited fundraising or the creation of trusts to preserve the memory of such persons. 1 This legal debate over sati worship provides a context for examining the cultural politics of how Calcutta Marwaris have been among the most vehement defenders of sati worship in the last several decades. Many Marwaris maintain that the worship of sati has nothing to do with actual widow sacrifice, and assert that sati worship is an essential part of their religion, tradition, and cultural identity. The Marwari temples for the glorification of their "Rani Sati" lineage goddess are among the wealthiest temples in India, adding class and ethnic components to the ethical controversy. Indian feminists and social reformers contend that sati worship goes against women's democratic rights, because worshipping sati as a cultural value, they argue, leads to widow murder. The final legal decision is still pending in the Indian Supreme Court.
How can a practice such as sati, long declared illegal by the former colonial government and denounced by feminists and social reformers, be a culturally valued ingredient in the way that some Marwaris construct their identity and traditions? To understand, we must first distinguish between sati (actual widow sacrifice) and satipuja (the worship of sati). Even though no Marwari I met advocates sati in the modern age, many (if not most) of them want to preserve their traditions of satipuja. 2 An analysis of Marwari belief and practices of satipuja provides a means of understanding how a community both practices kinship and defines its public boundaries. The question of law is always already present here. Competing questions of democracy, secularism, tolerance, and the rights of communities to worship freely are central to how Marwaris themselves have understood the satipuja issue.
A special issue of the Hindi literary journal Dharmayug was devoted to a discussion of satipuja in 1981, shortly after the controversy created by the 1980 procession of Marwari women in Delhi. Mrs. Dinesh Nandini Dalmiya, an accomplished novelist and poet, expressed her views as follows:
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Through education and legal action, the gut feeling for sati practices and other customs related to sati can be stopped to a great extent. But in spite of this, there will be one or two cases of sati and people will keep on worshipping at sati mandirs. Glorification of village culture is the norm in the country. There has never been a ban on glorification nor can there be any. Along with temple construction comes the question of our citizenship with religious rights and freedom and how can you stop that? 3
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Others refer to family and tradition and defend their practices of satipuja in terms of the language of community rights. Kalavti Goenka said, "Rani Sati is our lineage goddess. For 400 years she has been worshipped by our family. The puja occurs twice a year, on two auspicious days. In our family, weddings, tonsure, naming ceremonies and other occasions would not be complete without her blessing." 4 Her husband, Natawarlal Goenka added, "there is no question of any encouragement given to the practice of sati by building a temple. Jhunjhunu's Rani Sati was a brave and sacrificing woman who inspires us. If worshipping her is found to increase incidents of sati, then they could also start banning the epic Ramlila's scenes in which the sati is shown. This is a question of our faith. Steps taken against the Rani Sati temple will be considered by us to be a step against our citizen's rights and our freedom of religious belief." 5
In the twentieth century, the lineage goddess Rani Sati has become an important symbol of religious duty and community identity for the Marwaris. The Jalan family, to which the legendary Rani Sati originally belonged, is one of the many lineages that constitute the Agarwal subcaste of the modern Marwari community. Rani Sati was the first in a succession of thirteen sati in the Jalan family. The precise date of her death remains unclear, though years as widely divergent as 1295 and 1595 are the two most frequently cited dates. In 1996, Rani Sati temples all over India celebrated the 400th anniversary of Rani Sati on Rani Sati's "birthday" of December 4th. 6 (This date may suggest an oppositional stance to the illegality of sati, because December 4th is the same date the colonial government banned sati in 1829.) To celebrate Rani Sati's four hundredth anniversary, the Rani Sati Sarva Sangh temple board organized a large yagna (a public fair organized around a vedic sacrificial ritual), ostensibly for the Goddess Durga, at the site of the main Rani Sati mandir (temple) in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan. Before the yagna took place, one member of the Calcutta-based board of temple trustees told me in an interview that he anticipated over one hundred thousand persons would attend the celebrations, with twenty-five thousand alone expected to come from Calcutta.
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Rani Sati's 400th anniversary celebration did not fail to attract the attention of Indian feminists. The Mahila Atyachar Virodhi Jan Andolan (People's Movement Against the Oppression of Women), a volunteer organization and feminist activist group, filed a writ petition with the Jaipur High Court claiming that the yagna fair glorified widow immolation and was against the dignity and democratic rights of Indian women. Their legal counsel in the Jaipur Court argued that the organization of such a grand event within the premises of the Rani Sati temple constituted the glorification of someone who had committed sati. 7 The High Court responded by dismissing the petition, on the grounds that the yagna was offered for the Goddess Durga. However, the High Court ordered the temple authorities not to glorify sati, and ordered that the yagna had to be held far away from the main Rani Sati image. 8
The yagna was thus held in a makeshift three-story tent two hundred feet away from the Rani Sati image installed in the garbhagriha (the main temple hall). The High Court furthermore banned the offering of the kalash (a cup of water symbolizing fertility), the chunari (wedding veil), and the chhappan bhog (a 56-course meal offered to the goddess), rituals that were all seen as constituting part of the legally-disputed practice of satipuja. The following excerpt from a contemporary newspaper account tells of the changes that the temple authorities had to make to comply with the order from the High Court:
Following the order, the elaborate lighting arrangements have not been put to use. Said to have been brought all the way from Calcutta, where the Rani Satiji Mandir Trust has its head office, the use of light fittings, in the form of towering gateways, images of Subhash Chandra Bose and so on, were not permitted by the district administration after the first day. 9
10
It is notable that the Jhunjhunu villagers had almost nothing to do with the temple board or the organization of the 400th anniversary celebrations. This was not merely a "local" event. Even the lighting and decorations were brought from very far away. Rather than encapsulating the sentiments of the local Jhunjhunu community, the Rani Sati anniversary festival instead served as a focal point for a diasporic group, the Marwaris, to celebrate the ties of a geographically dispersed imagined community and its remembered traditions. The original plan for elaborate lighting would have commemorated the birth centenary of Subhash Chandra Bose, a Bengali nationalist famed for his military heroism in the fight against colonialism. Had it ultimately been allowed, Subhash Chandra Bose's image would have created a connection with Bengal and would have also added a feeling of militant nationalism to the ostensibly religious festivities. This sense of militant nationalism was important in two respects. First, the image of Subhash Chandra Bose was a reflection of the nationwide celebration of Bose's birth centenary, thus emphasizing the national character of the sati festival. Secondly, the
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inclusion of an image of a militant nationalist by Marwaris echoed the tropes of militant Hindu nationalism that are frequently used by the traditionally "warrior" Rajputs in defending their own practices of sati.
Temple authorities defended their religious rituals to the press, contending that the worship had nothing to do with perpetuating actual sati. Mahavir Prasad Sharma, the manager of the Rani Sati temple, was quoted in a popular magazine as follows:
I am really amazed by this media over-reaction. None of these girls or any others who might have come here for the yagna is expected to burn themselves on their husbands' pyres. The idea is to give them a pativrata (devout wife) for role model. To inculcate values that will make them good mothers and wives. And you hysterical feminists won't even allow us to do that. 10
Sharma's defensive statement reveals the tension between women in the Marwari community and the predicaments of modern feminism as practiced in India. As the most economically powerful community in all of India, the Marwaris deployment of sati as a valorized symbol of women's roles presents a challenge to feminist denunciations of sati as emblematic of the forms of violence perpetuated against Indian women. Rani Sati, I will argue, has symbolized a community deployment of certain themes of domesticity by which particular sets of gendered social norms and domestic practices become associated with the public performance of a community identity.
The geographical location of the Marwaris major Rani Sati temple in Rajasthan is a critical element of the story. The propagation of the worship of a Rajasthani sati goddess reproduces a strong sense of territorial linkage between a migrant group and its imaginary homeland. The question of "tradition" is paramount to this analysis. While acknowledging that Marwari practices of satipuja could conceivably be contextualized as a type of "invented tradition," 11 my research indicates rather that the relationship between satipuja and Marwari identity is not simply an example of "invention." Though Marwaris themselves stress the continuity of their traditions from a distant past in order to justify satipuja as a cultural and community practice, it is not important to my study to make a scholarly judgment about whether or not the Marwari worship of Rani Sati is in fact continuous over the last several centuries. I want to recapture the affective and political aspects articulated in experience, without making a judgment about whether or not a particular custom is actually "handed down."
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I seek an approach to the study of sati worship that will achieve ethnographically grounded understandings of sati without abandoning a feminist critique and that also acknowledges the extent to which sati is a debated issue within the community itself. Locating Sati in Colonial and Post-Colonial Contexts In the early nineteenth century, the widespread prevalence of Hindu widow sacrifice posed one of the most difficult challenges for the British colonial government. While missionaries and various colonial officials vehemently campaigned against the practice, the colonial state delayed the passage of legislation until December 4, 1829, for fear of unrest and rebellion among its Indian subjects. The legislation that was eventually passed included punishment for women who tried to commit sati, as well as punishment for those persons who were found guilty of aiding a woman to become a sati. Reformist Indian leaders, headed by Raja Rammohan Roy, joined the fight against sati, beginning a social reform movement and the "Bengal Renaissance." The colonial state's preoccupation with sati has been richly discussed in terms of colonial discourse theory and the "invention of tradition" under colonial rule, 12 problems in academic representations of womens agency and consent, 13 and the phenomenology of pain. 14
Despite the 1829 legislation, occasional cases of sati have occurred up to the present day. The most infamous case was in 1987, when an eighteen yearold Rajput widow named Roop Kanwar burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre in the village of Deorala, Rajasthan. To those villagers honoring her death, Roop Kanwar was known as a sati, a woman transformed into a goddess by having committed a Hindu ritual of widow immolation. Twelve days after the immolation took place, Deorala villagers persisted in glorifying Roop Kanwar's sati by conducting the ceremony of the chunari mahotsav (mahotsav is literally a "great festival") in which women offer their chunari (wedding veils) on the site of the sati, in order to obtain the blessings of the sati goddess. The public outcry that arose from the aftermath of Roop's death prompted the Indian state to revise the 1829 colonial legislation governing sati by toughening the laws on abetment to include a specific prohibition on sati glorification. 15
The religious justification for Roop Kanwar's death served as a warning to many liberal Indians of the erosion of democratic rights for women under resurgent Hindu revivalism, making both sati and satipuja into a matter of urgent public debate. As might be expected, the proliferation of academic literature produced in the wake of Roop Kanwar's death overwhelmingly condemned the act of sati. Unlike the nuanced scholarship on sati in the colonial period, which examines the complex interplay between the community of believers, Indian social reformers, and the legal discourse of the colonial state, much of the literature about the cultural politics of Roop Kanwar's sati has tended to frame the issue in terms of a rather stark trope
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of the cultural backwardness of those glorifying sati. Journalists and academics alike have tended to describe both Roop Kanwar's death and other cases of widow murder in the 1980s with expressions such as "turning back the clock." 16 In this rendering, the actions of Roop Kanwar and the Deorala villagers were often depicted and, it was claimed, could only be understood as belonging to a barbaric, bygone age enjoying new life under right-wing Hindu fundamentalism.
There are, of course, some notable exceptions to the "backwardness" trope in narrative renderings of Roop Kanwar's death, particularly the work of Ashis Nandy and Veena Das. Nandy has argued that the "progressive" response to Roop Kanwar's death had more to do with the threat of the "nonmodern" in Indian public life and the attempt of some to gain political power by virtue of a presumed "superior knowledge and morality" through which representation of unpopular viewpoints is suppressed. Nandy contends that middle-class feminism cannot speak for all Indian women, especially for those who valorize sati, and cannot explain why or how the figure of the sati comes to be valorized. These feminist authors, Nandy writes, continue a colonial tradition of delegitimizing minority cultures in the name of progress and democracy. 17 Das notes that this debate over sati partially concerns the rights of communities to construct their own histories. Das writes,
20
The second question relating to the glorification of sati as well as preventing the veneration of sati matas raises the entire issue of whether a community has the right to construct its past in the mythic or the historic mode, in accordance with its own traditions, or alternatively whether the state may exercise complete monopoly over the past. on the one hand we have a hegemonic exercise of power by the state, which acts as the only giver of values and this is affirmed when even its most vocal critics turn for help to the state; and on the other hand we witness constructions of past time in such a way that all new events are sought to be understood as mechanical analogies of a limited stock of past events, a process which often leads to hegemonic control being established over the individual by the community. This is especially so when the community draws its energy from the symbol of a divine sacrificial victim, as in the case of sati. 18
Das contends that critiques against the culture of sati, which grant power to the state as a value-giving institution, may no doubt serve a very immediate and very important political purpose. At the same time, she is aware that communities may exert a heavy hand in establishing their own hegemony.
Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangaris work on the involvement of the Marwari
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community in the production of the culture of sati raises several points that are important for my study. Vaid and Sangaris approach to the question of sati involves the argument that a lethal combination of ideologies, beliefs, and institutions (such as sati temples), along with material gain, serve to undergird the moral and religious conceptions that help turn widow immolation into sati. They write,
The history of Rani Sati temple indicates that the participation of Marwaris in a nationalist construction of sati with its accompanying patriarchal values and Hindu chauvinism, began quite early but acquired a substantial shape in this region only after Independence. The commemoration of Narayani Devi, hitherto worshipped as a kuldevi or family goddess within the privacy of Agarwal homes, was converted into public worship sustained by massive amounts of money. No longer a family deity of the Jalans, Rani Sati [the deified Narayani Devi] is now worshipped by many castes. Years of propaganda in the form of cultural programmes, commemorative and eulogistic meetings have paid dividends. 19
Vaid and Sangaris account has the advantage of connecting satipuja to a wider political context, and shows how the different ideological interests of the priestly Brahmins, Rajputs, and baniyas (trading castes, including Marwaris) coalesce into a patriarchy that promotes a culture of sati. One way to respond to Marwari mythologies about the goddess of sati is, as Vaid and Sangari have done, to see these stories as mere rationalizations of sati in the modern age, and to call for an immediate ban of Marwari worship of Rani Sati. Yet by focusing on aspects of propaganda, money, and material advantage in explaining Marwari involvement, Vaid and Sangaris analysis also demonstrates the methodological challenges that feminist and materialist epistemologies face in describing the experiences of women who are not feminists.
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Through this analytical lens, Marwari practices of satipuja can only be read as backward, repugnant, and disempowering to Marwari women. Belief in the worship of sati is relegated to a willful and deliberate patriarchalism inherent within a resurgent Hindu fundamentalism. It is true that Marwaris have begun to shift their political support away from the Congress Party, and have become more active in right-wing Hindu politics in the last few decades. 20 Yet simply explaining away satipuja as a type of fundamentalism does little to illuminate the complexity and tenacity of the practice. Even a sophisticated and deliberately political reading such as Vaid and Sangaris analysis is unhelpful in suggesting how we might derive ethnographic insights into the lives of those with whom we, as analysts, may disagree. We need to ask whether the political stakes in representing sati veneration as a social pathology (admittedly a strategy to fight for gender justice in a context
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of right-wing Hindu patriarchy and oppression) may tend to distort the complexity of satipuja and present a serious problem in anthropological interpretation.
Even if the colonial and post-colonial states have not always been wrong in stopping cruel practices found in Indian society, a fundamental problem still remains unaddressed by Vaid and Sangaris approach: they cannot account for why Marwari women might desire to worship sati. Instead of concluding that Marwari women are either lying or living under false consciousness, I believe that the problem lies in the inadequacy of interpretive ethnography that informs works such as Vaid and Sangaris. My ethnographic research reveals complex connections between Marwari identity politics and satipuja that make it difficult to decide whether the worship of Rani Sati necessarily leads to actual incidents of sati. Instead, I focus on how sati has become both a valorized and a contested idea in the way that the Marwaris in Calcutta perform, create, and produce their community identity and their traditions.
Recent work in anthropology and religion is helpful here in recapturing sati as an object of anthropological analysis. Paul Courtright's writing on sati, sacrifice, and marriage shows how two centuries of colonial and secular rule have "undermined sati as an uncomplicated act of religious heroism, removed it from its religious context altogether as far as the legal system is concerned, and relegated it to the category of the criminal. [Yet] the underlying religious values that sati embodied have not disappeared in contemporary India and have adapted themselves to changing circumstances." 21 By positioning himself in this way, Courtright's approach does not in itself justify the act of sati, but instead acknowledges the continuation of values associated with sati that have in some form persisted despite the rapidly changing political context. Courtright thus opens up the possibilities for an analysis of the religious values associated with sati, even though actual sati has been socially and legally delegitimized. It reminds us that even criminal activity contains cultural meaning in addition to, and sometimes distinct from, the law and order questions of the state.
Part of the problem may lie in the co-existence of a multiplicity of meanings of sati in the field of religious studies. As John Hawley has described, in English the word sati refers to an action (i.e. to commit sati). Yet in India, the term sati has traditionally referred not to the deed but to the woman herself (from the Sanskrit feminine form of sat: good or true), who is rendered as a goddess for her super-human bravery and strength. The sati in the Indian case is never therefore a widow; she becomes a "good woman" because she is faithful to her husband and does not suffer the fate of becoming a widow. The sati, notes Hawley, is thought of as a satimata, a sati goddess mother who is believed to be a historical individual and whose life is mythologized as a paradigm of wifely virtue. 22 Other authors concur. Julia Leslie concludes that some women believe that the sati
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is an ideal conclusion in the ideology of pativrata in which the sati gives blessings to both husband and wife. 23
Lindsey Harlan's compelling work on popular religious practices among Rajput women helps contextualize the Marwaris worship of Rani Sati as combining two Rajput traditions, those of the kuldevi (lineage goddess) and the satimata (deification of an immolated wife). Harlan argues that whereas for the Rajputs the kuldevi gives protection to both inner and outer realms of Rajput experience (the home and the battlefield), and tends to be worshipped publicly, the satimata relates solely to the inner world of women and is worshipped at home. 24 The Marwaris, I will argue, combine into one figure a kuldevi who is also a sati: a goddess who provides a public representation of protection to the community as symbolized by the virtues of an inner domesticity. I do use the term "representation"quite deliberately here, to suggest that the ideal, symbolized by Rani Sati, embodies a exemplar of Marwari domesticity meant for public demonstration and not necessarily a literal model that Marwari women blindly follow.
30
Comparing the activist scholarship of academics like Vaid and Sangari (who emphasize the ways that satipuja constitutes a criminal act but do not take its cultural meanings very seriously) with the work of scholars like Courtright and Harlan (who choose not to contextualize contemporary practices of satipuja within a changing set of social relations that have banned and delegitimized sati) discloses the tensions that attend contemporary studies of sati. I have already pointed to the problem of insufficient ethnography in Vaid and Sangaris approach. Courtright and Harlan embody a more relativist position that leaves aside the question of a wider, contested cultural context. Their work has the danger of representing unchanging portrayals of religious practice and meaning, without accounting for the shifting and now-hostile political and social environments in which satipuja is practiced. Harlan, for example, writes, "I leave to others the task of addressing the political, economic, and social implications of sati immolations and assessing the extent to which such immolations were voluntary." 25 Even while conceding that she finds sati "horrifying," Harlan's relativism makes her approach ahistorical. The very fact that women worship sati in a legal, intellectual, and social climate that overwhelmingly condemns this practice is, after all, of central importance. As Asad has aptly pointed out, it is problematic to insist "on the primacy of meaning without regard to the processes by which meanings are constructed." 26
The changing set of religious values surrounding sati thus needs to be paired with the changing role of women in twentieth century India, especially vis-vis the development of modern ideas of public and private. Much has been written about the production of the new woman in colonial India and her ambiguous relationship to home and nation. Yet very few studies on women
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and nationalism actually demonstrate how the performance of religious rituals becomes part of the way that women helped define boundaries between auspiciousness and inauspicousness, and the home and the world, to formulate a new sense of self related to public ideas of family and community. Mary Hancocks work is a notable exception, and shows how women's religious practices are instrumental in helping them create a modern imagination of domesticity. Her research reveals how women who engage in bhakti (personalized devotional worship) both accommodate and resist ideological forms found in elite religious practices. 27 Following Hancock's example, I explore how cultural forms are both appropriated and resisted by Marwari womens practices of satipuja. The tension between Marwari womens discourse and Indian feminism is of particular interest. While I do not disagree with Sangari and Vaids argument that satipuja is patriarchal and part of a wider burgeoning right-wing Hindu movement, I seek to examine how Marwari womens practices of satipuja may purposefully entail opposition to the values of feminism, liberalism, and secularism.
The fact that a prominent sati-worshipping community does not advocate actual sati for its women is a crucial point in my analysis. The question whether some sati are authentic and some sati are not is not at issue here. All sati is murder. The issue here is sati worship. The challenge, then, is to find an alternative approach to satipuja that neither cedes a practical commitment to the cause of social justice and human rights, nor simplifies a complicated issue that raises many difficult questions about the role of gender in the making of "community" and "tradition" in India today. One of my goals is to show why and how the worship of sati functions as a public performance of a domestic theme as the marker of a communal identity. As many anthropologists and historians have pointed out, the experience of colonialism created an unstable civil society, within which definitions of the public sphere depended heavily on the reorganization and reform of what was characterized as the supposedly "backward" native domestic sphere. 28 Since European powers had a deliberate policy of deferring the possibility of selfrule for their colonial subjects, who were deemed "unprepared," anti-colonial nationalisms embraced ideologies of indigenous domesticity as a way of making public statements about their civilizational attainments and their desire for nationhood while simultaneously creating a space of difference from the household culture of the colonizer.
Domesticity thus refers to much more than the usual portrayal of South Asian womens subordination, from ancient textual representations of womens roles from the sage Manu onward. Domesticity accounts for the changing political meanings attached to the Indian home (and womens place in relation to it) by virtue of the cultural impact of bourgeois ideology in the colonial world. So-called rites and rituals related to the home, associated with particular caste and tribal communities, can no longer be naively perceived as being located outside the world of politics and self-representation in civil society. Symbolic representations of the domestic realm, created by both
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colonizer and colonized, have thereby been narrations of a much wider public ideology, namely, a testament to supposedly inner ideologies that define the civil and political potential of a community at large. This ideology has been especially important for Marwaris, a "pariah capitalist" internal diaspora community defined by migration and trade. Marwari Migration, Domesticity, and the Sati Goddess The Managing Committee of Rani Sati Mandir was formed in Jhunjhunu for the first time in 1912, and the Rani Sati Fair started the same year. Originally, the shrines to the sati were simple memorial mounds built on small quadrangular platforms (chabutras). In the early twentieth century, however, the temple at Jhunjhunu expanded greatly when Agarwal Jalan (a Marwari subcaste) devotees decided to build a larger temple. Construction of the present-day structure began in 1917. The temple was completed in 1936, when Seth Shiv Chand Rai Jhunjhunuwala donated 40,000 rupees to finish the seven-story main gate. 29 In recent decades about one hundred thousand people have attended the fair each year, until it was temporarily banned in 1987. It was later revived. There is an interesting relationship between the development of the Rani Sati temple in Jhunjhunu and migration patterns of the Marwari community out of Rajasthan. Though it must be pointed out that Marwaris are not the only caste community who honor sati, 30 family chronologies and oral histories show that the cult of Rani Sati developed at about the same time that women began to migrate away from Rajasthan and permanently settle in other parts of India with their husbands.
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Besides the temple at Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, one finds hundreds of temples for the worship of Rani Sati across India today, with about twenty-five in Calcutta alone. (Temples to Rani Sati can also be found in international locations like Hong Kong and New York.) One of the oldest temples to Rani Sati, besides the Jhunjhunu temple, is the Rani Sati Temple in Kankurgachi, just outside of Calcutta, which dates back to 1837, just eight years after sati was banned in Bengal by the colonial government. This poses an interesting question: Why did this migrant community choose to glorify the sati of a woman of their own lineage and caste, instead of choosing any one of the thousands of sati that had happened locally in Calcutta and that were not worshipped by the Bengalis? To answer this question, we must be cognizant of the connections between the worship of a Rajasthani sati and the development of a migrant communitys identity and its traditions. Even a sati can have an ethnic and pan-Indian identity. Traditionally, after all, Rani Sati was the lineage goddess only for the Jalan kul (lineage), and only later became adopted by the wider emergent Marwari community.
The Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, headed by a
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Marwari temple board registered in and administered from Calcutta, is said to be India's second wealthiest temple trust. Earnings from this temple, which come from the handsome donations of visitors and devotees, are just below that of Tirupati Balaji Temple in South India. Though one would not want to reduce Hindu temples to their material aspects, it cannot be denied that temples are big business in India, especially popular ones like the Rani Sati Temple. While economic explanations cannot fully account for the popularity of certain gods and goddesses within the Hindu pantheon, the financial aspects of temple construction cannot be underestimated. The construction of a sati temple in Deorala, the site of Roop Kanwar's death, was understandably read by many as providing encouragement for sati. If temples and temple rituals related to sati were banned, neither Roop Kanwar's family nor Deorala villagers could profit from her death through contributions made for temple construction on this site. For this reason, protesters of Roop Kanwar's sati called for a general legal ban on the performance of the chunari mahotsav ceremony in any sati temple. Since Roop Kanwar's death in September 1987, Rani Sati temple authorities have made conscious attempts to distance themselves from the legal controversy surrounding satipuja. One way that Marwaris answer the legal charge about whether their worship glorifies sati is by making a distinction between authentic sati of the medieval period and inauthentic sati, which might occur in modern times. They creatively produce distinctions between the ambiguous identity of their community sati goddess Rani Sati and that of Roop Kanwar, whose death widely delegitimized practices of sati.
According to popular community legend, about six hundred years ago a fourteen year-old Hindu bride named Narayani Devi came home for the first time with her husband (of the Jalan lineage) just after their marriage. Her husband worked as a merchant in Jhunjhunu. Muslim invaders suddenly attacked her husband and his companions, brutally killing them. Only Narayani Devi and (in some versions) a loyal Muslim servant named "Rana" survived the attack. According to the story, Narayani Devi then bravely burned herself to death by spontaneously bursting into flames to avoid being captured and kidnapped by these invaders. The servant Rana, following Narayani Devis instructions, built a temple for her after her death, depositing and burying the ashes where his horse had stopped. This formed the site of the Rani Sati Temple. Some versions of the story claim that the name "Rani," which also means "queen," supposedly refers to a feminization of the servant Ranas name, in honor of the role he played in helping to establish the Rani Sati Temple. Rani was known as sati because she had sacrificed herself rather than become a widow, vulnerable to attack and violation by the invaders.
The Rani Sati myth appropriates many cultural values associated with the Rajputs, a traditional warrior class, including the importance placed on the kuldevi tradition. Some persons might argue that Rani Sati's
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death should be referred to as the Rajput johar, by which a woman would kill herself in order to avoid capture and rape, and thereby maintain the boundary lines of the community. In fact, Rani is referred to as "Dadiji," or "respected grandmother," and the ostensible matriarch of a longer extended lineage. 31 Rani is simultaneously associated with reputedly ancient Hindu traditions of sati and Rajput ideals of heroism in warfare. The burning of a wife, whether it be on a funeral pyre or in a spontaneous immolation such as johar, is considered a manifestation of truthfulness, exemplified by a womans self-sacrifice. The Marwaris, in emulating Rajput idioms, combine into one figure a kuldevi who is also a sati, a lineage goddess who provides a public representation of protection to the community as symbolized by the virtues of an inner domesticity. This ambiguous quality of the goddess has emerged as sati worship has become such a charged political topic.
A second way that Marwaris create ambiguity in the identity of the goddess is to claim that that they are totally opposed to the custom of sati, and that they are actually worshipping the goddess Durga or shakti. The original legend of sati, they claim, is a tale of gods and definitely not a human or historical phenomenon. The classical Hindu myth goes like this: Durga, in the incarnation (human form) of Sati, killed herself when the great god Daksha, her father, insulted her husband, Shiva, by not inviting him to some religious rituals. In this way Durga is seen as the first sati. In his rage after her death, Shiva carried her body across the earth and started his dance of destruction. To save humankind, Vishnu came up behind Shiva, and, taking his discus, cut the body of Sati into pieces. Wherever the pieces of the corpse of Sati fell, temples for shakti (strength) were established. By emphasizing this myth, and creating a distinction between historical time and mythical time, Marwaris produce a further ambiguity in the identity of the goddess. This distinction is important to the interpretation of the anti-sati legislation, because the state has declared it illegal to worship the sati of any historical individual. By at least publicly disconnecting satipuja from a purely historical Narayani Devi, and by assigning their goddess to mythology, they avoid problems with the law.
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In addition to the ambiguity created by the origin myths of the sati goddess, the symbol of sati found in temples is also obscure. The representation of Rani Sati as an idol in the Jhunjhunu temple is not, as one might expect, an image of a widow surrounded by flames. Rather, the idol, called a trishul, represents Shiva's trident, the weapon that Shiva used to carry the body of Sati. The trishul used to depict the goddess has two eyes on either side of the trident handle and a pair of lips below, along with a nose ring and a bindi, the red dot that Hindu women wear on the forehead to indicate that they are (or will someday be) married. The trishul is thus a multivalent symbol, making it unclear whether or not it symbolizes actual sati. In fact, this ambiguous depiction of the goddess-as-trishul has been an important defense used by the Marwaris in distancing themselves from the legal controversy surrounding satipuja. By using this representation, Marwaris claim that the image that they worship has absolutely nothing to do
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with a historical sati, which otherwise would leave them open to the legal charge of glorifying sati. Many other sati temples in Rajasthan have begun to use the same image of the trishul, borrowing the Marwari form. The proliferation and commodification of images of Roop Kanwar, however, are of a very different nature. The commodification of Roop Kanwar's death has included the reproduction and sale of life-size photos of Roop decked out as a bride in the moments before she became a sati.
Though a few Marwari families do have temples to Rani Sati within their private homes, the worship of Rani Sati occurs overwhelmingly in "public" temples. 32 The popularity of Rani Sati supposedly began six hundred years ago, when, according to popular legend, at first Rani Sati was worshipped in the homes of descendants of the Jalan lineage. As Marwari migration out of Rajasthan increased in the first part of the twentieth century, Rani Sati was adopted as a kuldevi of the emerging Marwari community. This fact is important in understanding the historicity of community formation in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. The patriarchal language of lineage (as symbolically represented by family, business, domesticity, and kinship) became a critical aspect in the formation of a wider public community of Marwaris that set itself apart from other communities, including the British. During the twentieth century, and especially over the last thirty years, Rani Sati has become a controversial public symbol of a community-identified goddess who reflects particular ideals of domesticity and gender roles that are valued within the Marwari community. This also suggests how the imagination of the modern community is tied to naturalized notions of fraternal brotherhood arising through the blood bonds of the lineage. A goddess that once protected the kul now protects the entire community.
This move from kul to community is potentially a critical site in understanding the transformation of lineage in modernity. Marwari practices of satipuja cut across the public and private divide, suggesting ideals of womens roles in creating both domesticity and a public communal identity. At first sight, sati might appear to be a strange representation of domesticity, especially if we take the word "domesticity" to refer to the household interior and the everyday labor ("housework") associated with the maintenance of the immediate nuclear family. Sati, we might argue, is the one who departs from the world and becomes divine, not everyday, and does not appear to be a part of the domestic order of things. Yet to understand the meanings of "domesticity" in Indian contexts, we need to extend our definition of domesticity to incorporate the hybrid nature of domestic practices in India as a mixture of European and local values. 33 In the nationalist movement, Indian domesticity became politicized in the European sense that the colonized household became the proverbial yardstick of civilization by which Indian readiness for self-rule and, indeed, political astuteness would be
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judged. Yet their cultural investment in the concept of kul plays a prominent role in how Indians create value in maintaining and preserving the family line, becoming an integral part of Indian appropriations of domesticity and domestic values. The common use of Hindi words such as kuldevi and kuldeepak (literally, "light of the lineage," or in our terms "shining star") attests to constellations of meaning attached to the importance of extended family and lineage.
But sati as a symbol goes beyond defining community boundaries. The term also suggests ideals of womanly conduct on an individual basis. As Harlan has pointed out, sati can refer to "a woman who has become capable of selfimmolation. sati as a person is something one becomes gradually through good behavior it articulates ways in which those Rajput women practice good behavior by keeping in mind (that is to say, by remembering) those who have died as satis." 34 The figure of the sati representing the devoted widow reflects the self-sacrificing nature that Marwari women are supposed to embody in their maintenance of the extended family, and indeed the entire kul. Sati, who serves as kuldevi, is the symbolic exemplar by which Marwari women should order their lives in ways that do not threaten the stability of the extended family lineage. A sati, in this sense, serves as a powerful symbol of women sustaining family, lineage, and domestic virtues. Worshipping the symbol of such ultimate devotion to kul, through performances that suggest the longevity, prosperity, and auspiciousness of lineage, creates a strong public identity. The kuldevi plays a central role in how communities understand their well-being. Marwari investment in sati and kuldevi as an index of wifely virtue has turned satipuja into a performance of community identity.
The practice of satipuja varies within the Marwari community in Calcutta, reflecting the ways that this community is internally differentiated by class and other status markers. Worship of Rani Sati generally varies by class position. Middle-class women living in Burabazar, the congested "old city" of northern Calcutta, might come out for the yearly December procession to honor Rani Sati's birthday. This occasion marks the only time during the year that more than five hundred Marwari women emerge from their homes to participate in an organized public or political event. I did not observe visibly wealthy Marwari women participating in the Calcutta march, which suggests that public participation and public advocacy for Rani Sati may include an element of class distinction. Wealthy sections of the Marwari community are likely to travel by plane to the main Rani Sati temple in Jhunjhunu to take darshan (divine viewing) of Rani Sati there. Once inside the temple, Marwari women defy the legal ban by offering their wedding veil to be blessed by the goddess for long married life and happiness.
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Satipuja also needs to be understood in light of the ambiguous

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identity and social role of the Marwari community in Calcutta. As we have seen throughout this text, the larger national debate over whether the Indian state should practice tolerance toward the Marwari communitys worship of sati is located within the more immediate context of the Marwaris troubled social identity within Calcutta and northern India generally. The tension between the migrant, money-making Marwaris and local populations results primarily from class conflicts over the tremendous expansion of Marwari indigenous capital in independent India. It was only after the 1920s and 1930s that many Marwari families took up full-time residence in Calcutta and other big cities such as Bombay and Delhi. At that time, many Marwaris amassed large fortunes through war profiteering, gambling, and speculation, and emerged as the dominant capitalist class in twentieth-century India. The structure of Marwari business, trade, and industry is predominately organized by the extended family. 35 Today, an overwhelming number of the top business houses in India are controlled by members of the Marwari community. Business itself is one very important reason why Marwaris continue to make such a strong cultural investment in the discourse of family. In short, this contentious economic history, which has played itself out in many areas of northern India, sets the stage for unwelcome receptions of controversial forms of Marwari culture on display in public life. The following is one such controversial event.
Under the aegis of the Rani Sati Sarva Sangh, Rani Sati devotees in New Delhi staged a procession on December 1, 1980. This procession, known as a kalash yatra, in which 108 Marwari women carried pots of water (in this case, a fertility symbol) on their heads to offer to the Rani Sati goddess, marked the construction of a new temple for Rani Sati at Jogiwar, near Chandhi Chowk. The trouble began when the Delhi police tried forcibly to stop their procession through the streets, warning the Marwari women that anti-sati activists might try to disrupt their procession. The women decided to march anyway, and confronted the group of feminist protesters with a loud exchange of angry words. One Rani Sati Sarva Sangh representative offered the following description of the clash:
Those women God knows who they were most were Christian and Muslims I think they kept telling our women, "Don't go there, theyll burn you." When our women tried to explain to them that it was only a puja, they just would not listen. And then when they tried to stop our puja, our women got very wild also, and started saying all kinds of things to them you know, things like, "You women are used to having seven, eight men at a time, what do you understand about piety and fidelity?" They too were annoyed. After all, how can you interfere with anybody's puja like that? Don't we have the freedom of worship guaranteed to us? 36
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The procession, and the views expressed in the quotation, help explain how the march constituted a performance of community for the Marwaris. (I might note that this quotation reflects a mans perspective, and what the women actually did or said may have been different, but that the basic sentiment is consistent with what Marwari women have said in other circumstances.) Through the procession, and in their clashes with feminists, Marwari women mark symbolic boundaries of community through an emphasis on difference in family relationships. In this case the Marwari women specifically referred to their sense of devotion, faithfulness, and piety toward their husbands, compared to other women who would have "seven, eight men at a time." The quotation also marks a common tension between the discourse of feminists, who argued that the women in the procession were in danger of being burned, and the discourse of Marwari women. While feminist activists focus their attention on the legal dimension of organizing a ban on the satipuja practice, because of the way it would lead to illegal sati, Marwari women express their concerns about the creation of domestic ideology focused on the values of piety and fidelity, and their commitment to those values. The Rani Sati Sarva Sangh representative even located the protesting feminist women as being generally outside of Hinduism, claiming, "most were Christian and Muslims." This statement, which places emphasis on an imagined essential Hinduness of Indian civilization, suggests that there is a linkage between values of female autonomy and foreign influence through Christianity and Islam, which create a continuum of otherness that Marwaris are allegedly committed to resisting.
The Marwari womens 1980 procession for satipuja came under the purview of the national government, and was discussed in both the upper and lower houses of the Indian parliament. In the Lok Sabha (the lower house), Pramila Dandavate of Bombay North Central argued that the procession of Marwari women in honor of sati was a dangerous revival of the culture of sati, threatening the status of Indian women. Dandavate contended that the Marwari womens procession was actually glorifying a recent sati in the neighboring district of Hissar. Addressing her remarks to the speaker, she stated, "We implore you to take steps to see that the capital of our country does not become a centre for illegal, retrograde steps leading to the denial of the right to life for our women." 37 Mr. Yogendra Makwana, minister of state for the home department, stated in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house) that the Rani Sati temple would be banned because the Sarva Sangh had caused a law and order problem. 38 Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister at the time, ultimately took a hard stand against the development of a new Rani Sati temple in Delhi, declaring that satipuja was a "barbaric, medieval, and illegal" practice.
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Paying attention to the timing and context of this initial public reaction against Rani Sati helps us to situate that set of events within a framework of more general anti-Marwari sentiment. The first time in recent memory that Marwari satipuja attracted public attention was in 1980, ostensibly in
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response to the Rani Sati procession in Delhi. At the same time, massive anti-Marwari riots broke out in Orissa. 40 One Marwari man, commenting in the Hindi journal Ravivar on the relationship between the Orissan riots and the Delhi procession, asked whether it was "a coincidence that we had this attack on Marwaris in Orissa when at the same time in Delhi there was also an attack. The difference between the two is that in Delhi business was not the target, but the center of the attack was on religious beliefs. Both religion and trade are part of the soul of the Marwari community, so naturally the attacks excite them." 41
Marwari promotion of sati temples represents an effort to elaborate a public performance of "community" that is at the same time a statement about the communitys internal life. This internal life, I argue, is modeled on the idea of the primordiality of the family lineage. By worshipping their lineage goddess, Rani Sati, Marwaris are asserting an ideal of wifely virtue in the public sphere that emphasizes the values of womens fidelity, selfsacrifice, and service to family. This then stands in for the identity of the community. The other part of the narrative being enacted through satipuja is a public assertion of the communitys loyalty and attachment to Rajasthan. The Rani Sati festival has never tried to adopt any local, Bengali temples to Rani Sati. Though Marwari families may only visit Rajasthan a few times in their lifetimes, and sometimes not at all, they still retain a very strong cultural identification with Rajasthan.
The migratory and diasporic component of Marwari religious rituals enacted in Rajasthan is critical to the Rani Sati story. Several traditional Marwari rituals associated with marriage and childbirth depend heavily on the reimagination of territory and place. New brides marrying into Marwari families are often taken on pilgrimage tours of the major Rajasthani temples, including Jhunjhunus Rani Sati temple, to receive religious blessings for a long and happy married life. This is a grand-scale imitation of the way that rural Rajasthani brides visit each of their husbands village shrines and pray at each one. When a son is born into a Marwari family, the family will customarily bring the infant back to Rajasthan for his first haircut, so that the baby boys locks of hair can be offered to the goddess in the native village. The same relationship between diaspora and homeland is true of the Rani Sati Temple. Though the major worship and celebratory rituals are centered around the Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu, the greatest support and enthusiasm for temple activities comes from outside of Rajasthan. While the two hundred Rani Sati temples scattered around India and in foreign countries serve the local needs of the diasporic Marwari community, the main Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu has a special place in the diasporic religious landscape. Rani Sati in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan
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The main Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, is about a five-hour drive from either New Delhi or Jaipur. Jhunjhunu is part of the Shekhawati area, from which most Marwaris emigrated, and encompasses the districts of Sikar and Jhunjhunu. The temple complex itself is located on the outer reaches of the dusty desert town of Jhunjhunu. Scooter rickshaws ferry pilgrims, devotees, tourists, and scholars from the central marketplace of Jhunjhunu to the temple site. As at most large Hindu temples, there are small shops outside and in front of the Rani Sati Temple, which sell coconuts and other offerings meant for giving directly to the deity, along with postcards, pictures, prayer books, images, icons, and other "religious" commodities to be taken home, blurring the line between sacred and secular. The temple is open for darshan (being in the presence of the god) from 4:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., with a short break for lunch. There are five major worship ceremonies performed each day. Generally, when there is no special festival, about two hundred people visit the Rani Sati Temple each day.
Like all Hindu temples, the Rani Sati Temple is organized hierarchically, with minor deities arranged toward the front, and the main god or goddess positioned toward the back. When walking towards the main Rani Sati image (located in the rear portion of the temple complex, signifying its relative importance), one passes by enormous walls that list the names, addresses, dates, and monetary amounts of the donations given for the temple complex. Philanthropy is a central part of the temple community. In the back portion of the temple complex, photography is not allowed and the armed guards enforce this rule very strictly. The guards even objected vehemently when I began to write down names of donors in my notebook. I went into the large prayer hall, and watched as three or four Marwari women performed puja before the shrine. The women stood quietly, bowing their heads and putting their hands together in prayer. An aarti (worship) ceremony was starting, and the priests chanted prayers and offered incense and flowers to the deity. Temple musicians on the sides of the prayer hall beat drums and rang bells. The sound was deafening. A chalkboard listed the names of donors who had given money for the days flowers and puja items.
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The Marwari families that I met at the temple complex spanned three generations, and included grandparents, parents and children. 42 Sometimes I observed that single men had come on their own, without their families. Several married women had brought their wedding veils (chunaris) to the temple to be blessed, in defiance of the legal ban on the chunari mahotsav ceremony since 1987. After taking some photographs of women posing for me as they held their chunaris, one woman and her family insisted on wrapping the chunari around my shoulders and taking my photograph, so that my marriage could also be blessed by Rani Sati. Obtaining the blessings of Rani Sati was a critical part of the Marwari experience of visiting the temple, and families would spiritually renew themselves through the blessing of the veil.
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The Rani Sati Temple has developed a national reputation. Officially known as the Shree Rani Sati Mandir, the temple was registered in Calcutta as a charitable trust in 195657. The first managing board of the society was comprised of twenty-one men, all described as "merchants,"with ten coming from Calcutta, five from Bombay, two from Jhunjhunu, and one each from Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Nagpur, and Ahmedabad. 43 According to the temples documentation, the registered office of the society is located in Calcutta with the principal management carried on from Calcutta. The managing body, called Rani Sati Seva Sangh, has established hundreds of temples across India and even abroad, with temples found in New York, Nepal, Singapore, and Rangoon. The location of the headquarters of the Rani Sati trust in Calcutta is significant in the cultural identification of a diasporic community with its imaginary homeland.
The sati temples that are officially recognized by the Sangh must fulfill certain requirements. For one thing, they must include a brick from the original Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu. Secondly, they must have an image of the trishul (trident) that has been made to order by the Jhunjhunu temple. Besides their religious purposes, the temples play important roles in providing charity and philanthropy in public life. According to a 1957 brochure entitled "The Memorandum and Rules and Regulations of Shree Rani Satiji Mandir," the following are part of the objectives of the Rani Sati Temple Society:
(A) To take over, carry on and manage the affairs of the charitable society known as "Shree Rani Satiji Mandir" established at Jhunjhunu in the state of Rajasthan and to conduct puja, worship and seva of Shree Rani Satiji Mataji and all other deities established in the temple premises belonging to the Society at Jhunjhunu and other place and places in India. (B) To establish and construct such other temple or temples or such other deity or deities and other places of worship as the Society may think fit and proper.
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(C) To start and maintain at any place in India alms houses, hospitals, dispensaries and medical stores for giving relief to the poor and needy people and Dhuramshalas according accommodation and lodgings to the sojourners belonging to the Agarwal Community. (D) To establish and maintain Charitable and religious institutions in conformity with the ideals of the Hindu religion.
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(E) To start, construct, establish, and maintain Hospitals, Schools, Colleges, Orphanages, Nari Ashrams, Widow Ashrams, and to render help to the widows and destitutes and distribute alms amongst the widows, destitutes and needy people.
(F) To search, find out, investigate and trace out the history of Shree Rani Sati Mata and other deities and to preach amongst the public the ideals and teachings of the said deities and to collect and preserve the Memorials of the said deities.
The list goes on to describe plans to create libraries, educational facilities, and exhibitions. Most important, goals A through F can be seen as "modern" goals for a temple, because they make claims to a secular moral legitimacy and in other contexts might alternatively be called "social work." The goals have the effect of redefining religion to conform to modern ideals of philanthropy and humanitarianism, by combining the worship of a deity with the construction of public institutions that contribute to civil society.
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This development of a sense of religious humanism through religious works in public life is important to how traditions of community and kinship can be reenergized with new symbols and reproduced in changing historical and social circumstances. One could easily make the argument that Victorian ideas about philanthropy influenced the development of Marwari (and Indian) humanism under colonialism. Yet at the same time, the cultural forms of Marwari philanthropy have qualities that make them uniquely Indian, reflecting a more indigenous character. The reproduction of the Marwari community through these "good works" depends heavily on very gendered definitions of community, tradition, and domesticity that are epitomized by the figure of the sati. Furthermore, these public-oriented goals help the community of Rani Sati devotees develop a social network through which both religious good works and business interests can be promoted at the same time. The compatibility between the mutual interests of economic and symbolic capital (to borrow Bourdieus terminology) becomes a fertile site where kinship patterns can be reproduced through the Marwaris construction of tradition, gender, domesticity, and community in public life. At the same time, the performative production of domesticity, through the public activities of the temple, reinforces sentimental attachments to ancestral and sacred homelands.
One way that the Rani Sati Temple purports to do good in public life can be seen in the following example. One of the trustees told me in an interview that the Rani Sati Temple promotes widow remarriage. On two separate occasions, the trustee claimed, temple authorities actually prevented women devotees from committing sati on the temple premises. In each case, a
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woman had come to the Rani Sati Temple with her ailing husband, who had then died during the visit. The two women, it was claimed, had both proclaimed their intentions to commit sati on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. Temple authorities solved the problem by locking the women up in their dharmasala rooms until after their husbands had been cremated, thus preventing them from becoming sati. Although I make no claims about the truthfulness of these stories, they were told to reinforce the idea that there was no connection between the sati temple and actual sati. While the Jhunjhunu temple no doubt holds a central place in the imagination of Rani Sati devotees, the regional temples also provide local (though regionalized) religious space for worshippers to do public puja. Rani Sati in Calcutta Since the Roop Kanwar sati in 1987, Marwari public practices of satipuja have been a contentious issue in Calcutta and West Bengal, due to the economic strength of the Marwari community residing there. Calcutta, even more than Rajasthan, has for a long time been seen as the hub of the Marwari community. Until the Roop Kanwar sati, however, the large number of Rani Sati temples in Calcutta went relatively unnoticed by the culturally dominant Bengali community. In October 1987, in the wake of the Roop Kanwar sati, the Bengali newspaper Aajkal carried a story about the oldest Rani Sati temple in Calcutta, the 1837 temple near VIP Road at Kankurgachi. The article was written by four Bengali historians who were surprised to find a sati temple in the middle of Calcutta. They wrote:
Many non-Bengalis live in the neighborhood. In this area, the sati temple is one hundred and fifty years old. The prevention of sati law was passed in 1829, and this temple was founded just eight years later. Now, within one month of accepting the Prevention of Sati bill in Bidhansabha [parliament], a religious fair is going to be held for the propaganda of sati. We thought that the temple would be small and many people would not know of it. But we were wrong. Local people helped us go to the temple. Seeing this big temple, it seems that the religious business is very successful here. It is said that the ash of the sati is buried under the altar. This temple is a branch of the sati temple in Jhunjhunu of Rajasthan.
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But the question is why did they have to borrow a sati image from Rajasthan? In Bengal especially, many women had become sati. Mohantas [one of the priests] could not answer this question. After all, in this area of Beliaghata, Bengalis are not a majority. Is this temple a part of the plan of expanding business by Rajasthani businessmen? There is a picture on the wall
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of a sati who is burning on her husband's pyre, and a goddess (Durga) is standing beside her. < On the way out of the temple, the four scholars were invited to come to the sati fair. Worship will be performed throughout the day. A booklet, describing the greatness of sati, will be distributed free of cost. 44
The question about regional identity that the four Bengali historians raised. of why the Marwaris chose a goddess of their own region and community to commemorate sati, is an important one in understanding the importance to the community ofsatipuja. Especially so, as the authors of the Aajkal article point out, because Bengal was itself home to hundreds of local sati and had a strong sati tradition. By using a goddess of the Jalan family, a lineage that ultimately became one of the main genealogical branches of their community, the Marwaris have one of their "own" women as sati, therefore constructing the sati as internal to the community.
The quoted passage also gives us insight into Bengali perceptions of Marwari identity. The four Bengali historians twice point out the predominance of "non-Bengalis" in the neighborhood, marking a sense of difference between themselves and the community who worships sati. The context of this statement is a city that has prided itself on its intellectual culture, and has had a progressive Marxist government for about twenty years. The presence of temples for the worship of sati is an embarrassment that most Bengalis would not care to acknowledge, especially in light of continuing Bengali pride about the "Bengal Renaissance" of the early nineteenth century. Even though Marwari families have lived in Bengal for generations, Bengalis still culturally locate the Marwaris (and their sati temple traditions) as living and belonging outside of Bengal. Bengalis believe that the Marwaris stay only to make money, and see them as outside an imagined Bengali public sphere defined by a common language, literature, and culture.
The publication of the Rani Sati article in Aajkal led to controversy. In Rajasthan, the Rani Sati Temple was shut down and preparations for the August festival on Bhadra Amavasya (a Hindu month) were halted. In Bengal, media attention focused on the dozens of sati temples in Calcutta. Having recently declared to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly that the state was not party to the practice of sati, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu was forced to take action when confronted with the glorification of sati occurring "right under his nose," as his critics suggested. The West Bengal government banned the sati mela, which had been held each year on November 15th.
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They also outlawed loudspeakers, fairs, and the processions associated with sati temples. 45 After all, persons who publicly defended Roop Kanwar's death claimed that Roop had been a lifelong devotee of Rani Sati, and had even visited Rani Sati temples during her childhood in Ranchi, Bihar. 46
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Owners, devotees, and patrons of the Calcutta Rani Sati temples, all coming from the Marwari community, protested the decision to ban the sati mela. A twelve-hour bundh (strike) was called in the old city quarter of Burabazar to protest the government ban on sati temples and sati glorification. The Rani Sati Mandir Trust raised the issue in the Calcutta High Court, claiming that the legal ruling violated their religious freedom. Eventually, the Calcutta High Court ruled that individuals had the right to worship in the Rani Sati temple and said that the temple should be protected from protesters who might try to interfere with the daily puja offerings. Despite granting these freedoms of individual worship, the court ruled that the annual public festival be subject to regulation by the state. It should be noted that there was a distinction between the way that Marwaris protested the banning of the mela and the way that they reacted to Roop Kanwar's death. While many Marwaris fought for their community rights in worshipping sati, some Marwari public organizations, as was noted by the press, protested against the Roop Kanwar sati. The president of the West Bengal Provincial Marwari Federation, Bishambhar Newar, publicly announced that the Marwari community did not support the practice of sati. 47
Although the public outrage over the death of Roop Kanwar caused many Rani Sati temples to cancel their public festivals in 1987, within a few years these temples resumed their usual activities. For nearly the last thirty years, on each December 4th an annual procession is held in Burabazar, Calcutta, to honor Rani Sati's birthday. At the procession I attended on December 4, 1996, I saw a large crowd of some 400 or 500 Marwari women, ranging in age from about twenty to sixty, waiting restlessly in the streets. All of the women were elaborately dressed in red saris and chunaris (veils) like Hindu brides, and wore elaborate jewelry and lipstick. This was an unusual sight in the lanes of the congested business district of Burabazar, where the public spaces of streets and bylanes are normally occupied by men. All the women were barefoot. Most of them held cups (lotas) of water on their heads, notably the same fertility symbol used in the kalash sati march in 1980. Yet when I arrived there, instead of marching down the streets in a procession, the entire group of women was waiting restlessly on the street. Police had temporarily halted the march because an official permit had not been issued. Marwari devotees organizing and participating in the procession said that the Burabazar procession had started in 1967, some thirty years ago, and there had never been any trouble with
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the police before this.
Teenage boys held up dividing ropes, marking off the group of Marwari women. The boys wore decorative pins with the Rani Sati symbol, the trishul (Shiva's trident). I walked around the dividing ropes chatting with the women. The women excitedly told me that today was Rani Sati's birthday. However, the women were somewhat impatient, as the police would not allow them to begin their march. According to one temple committee member, the temple authorities had originally received an oral agreement from the police allowing the procession. Yet on the actual day, some police came and stopped them, saying that the group needed written permission. The women stood and waited for at least an hour. The sun was scorching, even in "winter." A big water tanker from the Kashi Vishwanath Seva Samiti, a Marwari social service organization, was slowly rolling down the street. 48 Volunteers rushed cool glasses of water from the truck to the tired and heatstruck women. After some time, the women sat down on the street as negotiations between the police and temple authorities continued. From time to time, the women sang bhajans (hymns) to Rani Sati, often joyfully proclaiming "Rani Sati ki Jai" ("Victory to Rani Sati"). Another smaller group of twenty or so people assembled in front of the Marwari women. Most in the group were men, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, and a few elderly women. The women were not wearing bindis (the ornamental dot worn on either a marriagable or married woman's forehead), so they were probably widowed. Though this small group was excluded from partaking in the procession, they loudly sang bhajans and clapped their hands, dancing and taunting the two policemen who stood at the front of the crowd preventing the procession from taking place. The two policemen watched, expressionless. I asked a Marwari man, Suresh Agarwal, why the police had objected to the march. Suresh appeared to be part of the temple committee because he wore the trishul pin. In response to my question, Suresh said, "you know, this is sati. They are thinking too much, being too brainy. But they cannot stop us. If they should ban our march, we cannot simply stop our feelings because they tell us to. We cannot stop our feelings."
The police stood at the front of the crowd of women, making sure that the march did not go forward.
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Across the street, a large crowd had gathered in the Standard Chartered Bank. One young woman, Alka Jalan, wearing a temple badge, came to talk to me and said that the police were meeting in the bank, to decide about the procession. Speaking to me in fluent English, Alka informed me that she had just graduated from college. Since she was not married yet, Alka could not march in the procession. But her mother, aunt, and older sister were all marching together, and Alka took me over to meet them. At one point, Alka handed me a pin to wear that bore the image of the Rani Sati trishul, the same pin that she and the temple administrators were wearing. I felt that she was perhaps trying to show the importance of the event by incorporating a foreigner into the rituals. I was also confronted by thoughts about how my own investment in feminism was now directly at odds with that classic anthropological imperative for "participant observation." In my hesitation over whether or not to wear the pin and what the implications might be, Alka smiled and pinned the badge onto the shoulder of my salwaar kameez (a tunic shirt worn over baggy pants). At last, the police gave their permission. The women all stood up, rearranged their saris and the cups of water on their heads, while men shouted instructions of how to organize themselves in lines. The procession slowly started down the street. A few decorated temple floats accompanied them, carrying images of Rani Sati. Men performed aarti (worship) to the image before the motorized chariots set out. Another procession, of men carrying flags, was coming down the street, followed by a group of a dozen or so younger teenage girls, also dressed up in red like the women in the main part of the procession. A silver chariot carrying the abstract image of the trishul followed close behind, and the entire procession slowly made its way through the narrow and winding streets of Burabazar.
This vignette illuminates how "community" is re-imagined and rearticulated through the assertion of "private" norms of wifely virtue within that quintessential public space of the modern city, the street. The occasion marks the only time in the year when these middle-class Marwari women use a procession as a public forum for political participation to mark their traditions of community-identified domesticity. At the same time, this story also points to the exclusionary nature of the performance of community. Both widows and unmarried girls were excluded from participation in the main part of the march; only married women took a leading part in the procession. Rather than encouraging the practice of actual sati, Marwari satipuja contributes to the formation of a patriarchal, moral, and ritual community. The ritual is performative in the sense that it creates social meaning, and serves as an expression of particular social values. It would seem that sati serves as an image of the idealized relationship of the wife to the husband. These values include the propagation of a particular gender role for married women that reproduces the family in a way that preserves patrilineal descent and draws on connections to Rajasthan.
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The media coverage of the Burabazar procession or rather, the lack of it surprised me. Leading English newspapers such as the Statesman, Telegraph, and the Asian Age had no mention of it. Only the Hindi newspapers that the Marwari community would regularly read, such as Dainik Vishwamitra, Jansatta, Mahanagar, Parakh, Sevasansar, and Chhapte Chhapte carried news of this unusual and controversial event. The lack of coverage of the procession and the controversy in the English-speaking media suggests that in Calcutta, satipuja is a practice which is fully internal to the Hindi-speaking Marwari community. I was once told by a Rajasthani journalist that the media had been discouraged from reporting on the sati melas by temple authorities in Jhunjhunu who were loath to attract unwelcome notice and criticism of the event. Was the same true in Calcutta? Another surprising aspect of the Calcutta procession was that some Marwari-run Calcutta schools closed down for the occasion. Nopani School in Girish Park had been closed that day on account of Rani Sati's birthday. A special puja was being held in the Sati temple that is located inside the school premises. Marwari Women Debate the Valorization of Sati To understand the cultural meanings of satipuja among the Marwaris, it is important to look at the social status and practices of Marwari women inside kinship structures and in the community generally. Most Marwari women are housewives, and do not pursue a career outside the home. Increasingly, in recent years Marwari women have obtained higher levels of education. They have also assumed more active roles in public life through running their own businesses or involvement in charity work. The small percentage of Marwari women who do work outside of the home are likely either to work for the family business (especially if they are widows and running the deceased husband's firm) or else to take up entrepreneurial business ventures on their own, thus eliding the negative stigma attached to what Indians term "service" professions. In this way, they do not compromise the familys reputation by working for others, which would suggest that the family suffers from financial hardship.
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Even among these women entrepreneurs, one would be hard pressed to find many Marwari women who call themselves feminists, as is the case with Indian women in general. Many Marwari women have beliefs that are at odds with the Indian feminist movement, including those beliefs concerning satipuja. In an interview given to the Hindi newspaper Rashtriya Sahara, on October 12, 1993, Dr. (Mrs.) Kesum Khemani, well known in Calcutta for her work in developing Hindi literary culture, presented her views on womens rights in modern society. The reporter asked her, "What do you think about women and men both having rights?" Mrs. Khemanis answer provided insight into her attitude toward sati:
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Now, taking the situation about the law against sati as an example, the government destroyed this harsh [practice] in order to stop it. Previously there was a custom of voluntary sati, because when the king (ruler) attacked, the wives would save themselves in this manner. To be a sati was the knowledge of unrestrained love, but society forcibly made a custom of turning widows into servants. Society made up this rule so widows are forced to become workers.
Khemani went as far to say that sati was banned so that widows could be forced to labor. However, the majority of the middle-aged and elderly women whom I have met defend the practice of satipuja, making a sharp distinction between the medieval and modern phenomena. They speak proudly of Rajput traditions of johar, when a woman sacrificed herself on a fire rather than give in to invaders who attacked and killed the menfolk.
Marwari women often distinguish between what they see as authentic and inauthentic sati. These categories are often translated into a historical framework of medieval (authentic) and modern (inauthentic). One Marwari woman, Mrs. Kusum Kanoria, explained to me that a woman who is a true sati will burst into flames spontaneously, without external intervention. Roop Kanwar, she argued, suffered a forced burning and thus she is not a true sati. Another Marwari woman, Sushma Goenka, a novelist and industrialist, explained how horrified she was to hear of Roop Kanwar's sati in 1987, but that this does not affect her inner beliefs about satipuja. She told me that in moments of danger or fear, when she turns to prayer, she finds herself praying to Rani Sati and gains strength in remembering her courageous act.
Many Marwari women and men also worship ancient and medieval sati /kuldevi other than Rani Sati inside their homes. These sati are in their immediate family lineages and have a closer relationship with the family, thereby being less public and probably not even known to non-kin outsiders. Worshipping these lineage sati, along with other household deities, forms a part of daily puja activities. The ritual practices of sati worship, along with certain forms of vrata ("vow," usually in the form of a fast), storytelling, and songs are part of a large continuum of auspicious practices associated with domesticity that are common to many Hindu women, to whom the maintenance of enduring family ties remains a strong value. But the worship of Rani Sati, outside the Jalan clan, is of a slightly different nature; such worship comes in addition to worshipping these other sati, and remains for most a public and community event.
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The worship of Rani Sati in public life allows Marwaris to make a

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public statement about the internal values of the community. Though it can be argued that values of womens self-sacrifice and devotion to the domestic sphere are pan-Indian themes, Rani Sati as a lineage goddess identified with a particular kul expresses the domestic side of a particular community identity, perhaps combined with an overtly oppositional flavor in the wider context that defines sati as criminal. Rajesh Kanoria, whom I interviewed at the Calcutta procession, gave me this explanation of why the Marwaris practice satipuja: "In our community, we value a womans faithfulness to her husband, which is extremely important for the family. That is why we worship sati." When I asked him if Marwaris had any concept of male sata (in which a man would sacrifice himself on his wifes funeral pyre), at first Rajesh looked puzzled and then he burst out laughing. "No, no, nothing like that," he replied. This dismissal of the possibility of sata demonstrates how Marwari women are critical to maintaining family loyalty and cohesion. It is a womans wifely virtue, the festival claims, that makes the community virtuous in the public eye.
Besides visiting public sati temples, some Marwari families have Rani Sati temples in their own homes. One of the Rani Sati Temple trustees, whom I call Toontoonwala, offered to show me a Rani Sati temple in his backyard, just adjacent to his house. The main idol was a photograph of the Rani Sati image at Jhunjhunu. On the sides of the temple, there were other photographs and images. What really drew my attention, however, was a garishly painted picture hanging on the wall. The relentlessly realist picture featured a young woman, smiling as she held her dead husbands body in her lap, sitting in the midst of a large fire. I felt rather stunned to see such a graphic image, and I mumbled something to him about how realistic the portrayal was. "Yes," Toontoonwala said proudly, "my own daughter-in-law made it herself for our family temple. But we cannot allow pictures like this in Jhunjhunu, we can only have this one in our private temple." His comment referred to the 1988 Supreme Court ruling that explicitly stated that the temple image of Shri Nayarani Devi could not be associated with a historical sati, and therefore puja to the trishul (trident) image could not be considered satipuja. The public nature of the temple and the legal limits of public life are recognized in his statement. Hence the real and pressing legal need for ambiguity in the public and official image of the Rani Sati goddess. But in a temple housed in a private house, such as that of Toontoonwala, graphic illustrations of sati are displayed.
Despite the popularity of Rani Sati in the Marwari community, it would be wrong to say that all Marwaris are in favor of satipuja. A few Marwari women and men have spoken publicly against the practice, on the grounds that it is degrading to women. One prominent Marwari social reformer, B. M. Singhi, expressed his views on the subject in an 1981 interview in the Hindi magazine Raviwar, which focused on sati worship in response to the 1980 Delhi procession. Singhi maintained:
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It is wrong to say that satipuja has nothing to do with sati-pratha [sati as a cultural system]. If you do satipuja, then it is obvious that you will admire and want to do everything that Sati has done. It doesn't matter that you say you have no intention that women should become sati. Rani Sati is today so popular that there is the belief that if you worship her you will accumulate a lot of money. Marwaris therefore don't worship her because she was so courageous. That is only what they say. The real matter is money.
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From way back I was against satipuja. But today there is a critical situation. If you want to curb sati the people in the Marwari society who feel that this practice is disgraceful and wrong should not sit quietly. They should stand against it. If people stand against it, the result is that other people and government will realize that Marwari society consists of many people who are against the practice of sati and are standing up against it. It will become clear that the people practicing satipuja are not the majority of the society. If this is made clear, then government will feel assured that steps to curb satipuja are not hurting the sentiment of the entire Marwari community but are only against some orthodox and backward Marwaris. 49
Singhi's response gives us a critical insight into the problem of satipuja from within the Marwari community itself. Both Singhi and his wife, Sushila, are noteworthy for their long-standing efforts to encourage Marwari social reform on issues such as female education, widow remarriage, and child marriage. Though Singhi's argument also takes a developmentalist stand by considering satipuja to be backward, his critique of satipuja skims lightly over the potential problem that Marwari women might commit sati. Instead, Singhis appeal for a governmental implementation of a ban on satipuja arises from his concerns over the overly-powerful influence of money on Marwari society. Marwaris, he asserts, are only really interested in making money, and really have no deep connection with Rani Sati that would justify their worship practices. Singhis comment was a call to action to those who disagree with satipuja to come forward and voice their objections, and reminds us of the divisions that exist within the Marwari community. Clearly, we cannot understand the complexities of satipuja simply by adopting a Marwari point of view. After all, Singhi himself, though ostensibly an "insider," represents the kind of reductionism that I hope to avoid.
How, then, can the worship of sati be a valorized ingredient in the

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way the Marwari community constructs its public identity, even though there is widespread disapproval of the practice? The public controversy over Marwari sati worship cannot be understood without acknowledging the transregional history of the Marwaris as a migratory group. Instead of dismissing Marwari womens worship as either criminal or backward, or else as part of an eternal, static tradition, I have attempted to understand these controversial practices as part of an internal diasporic formation, with important links to the advent of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism. Marwari practices of worshipping Rani Sati create important emotional links between a diasporic community and Rajasthan. Though sati cannot be justified as an act, the Marwaris extract from the figure of the sati a valorized ethics of wifely devotion. A parallel could be made here with Christians venerating martyrs but not promoting martyrdom as a religious practice.
While others read Marwari practices of sati worship as a rationalization or justification of widow immolation, for the Marwaris sati has become a prescriptive metaphor of wifely devotion to husband, family, and the kul. A Marwari woman can be sati-like, some Marwaris contend, without actually becoming a sati. The fact that the rituals of satipuja are undoubtedly patriarchal and confining to these women may be a matter of debate but not one of legality. The Indian Supreme Court has not yet made a final decision about whether or not the worship of Rani Sati amounts to the glorification of sati. In the meantime, this legal delay allows for a legal and cultural space for Marwaris to practice their public worship of Rani Sati.
Notes: Note 1: The exact wording of government legislation against sati and sati glorification prompted much debate. In the Rajasthan State legislation, the first draft of the legislation proposed prohibiting the construction of new sati temples. This clause was objected to by Aruna Asaf Ali, who argued that merely excluding existing sati temples from the law would have no effect on the construction of a temple to venerate Roop Kanwars sati in 1987, for whom the legislation was originally passed. Ali argued that this went against the legislations original intention by giving protection to older forms of sati worship. Thus the legislation outlawing the glorification of sati for any historical individual was passed and is now under contention by groups whose ancient sati temples have been threatened.Back. Note 2: Shortly after the press announced Roop Kanwar's death, Marwari social clubs organized public protests to demonstrate their vehement disapproval of the practice of sati. Five hundred members of the Marwari Yuva Manch (Youth
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Organization) marched through the streets of north Calcutta, with banners proclaiming "Stop glorifying sati" and "Ban sati." See "Marwaris against sati," Telegraph (Calcutta), 11 October 1987.Back. Note 3: Dharmayug 1981, 13.Back. Note 4: Ibid., 12.Back. Note 5: Ibid., 12.Back. Note 6: Many devotees believe that the original Rani Sati temple in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, is actually seven hundred years old. But the devotees pursuing the legal case make claims that the original temple is just four hundred years old, because temple records are only available for the last four hundred years. Back. Note 7: S. Mahalingam, "Glorifying Sati: A Maha yagna under police gaze.," Frontline 27 December 1996.Back. Note 8: Soma Wadhwa, "Glorifying a Gory Tradition," Outlook 11 December 1996, 2024.Back. Note 9: Anapam Srivastava, "Women Activists stay away from yagna site in Rajasthan" Times of India (Bombay), 5 December 1996. Back. Note 10: Wadhwa, "Glorifying a Gory Tradition." Back. Note 11: Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition. Back. Note 12: Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California, 1998).Back. Note 13: Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120130. Back. Note 14: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women (New York: Routledge, 1993); Gouri Salvi, "Sati: a Disturbing Revival," Eve's Weekly, February 7-13, 1981: 17, 49. Back. Note 15: Jack Hawley provides an excellent summary of these developments. John Stratton Hawley, Sati: The Blessing and the Curse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Back. Note 16: "Sati: Putting the Clock Back," Link, 14 December 1980, 19; C.N.C. "Ominous Throwback," Mainstream, 20 December 1980; P. V. Parakal, "Macabre Middle-Ages Rite Enacted in Rajasthan," New Age, 35:38 (20 September 1987). Back. Note 17: Ashis Nandy, "Sati in Kali Yuga: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwars Death," The Savage Freud and Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).Back.
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Note 18: Veena Das, "Strange Response," Illustrated Weekly of India, 28 February 1988, 30-32. Back. Note 19: Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari, "Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan," Economic and Political Weekly, 27 April 1991: WS 2-18. Back. Note 20: Pradeep Shinde, "Shiv Sena Woos the Marwaris," Bombay, Mar. 7-21, 1991, 24-27. Back. Note 21: Paul Courtright, "Sati, sacrifice and marriage: The Modernity of Tradition," in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 184-203.Back. Note 22: John Stratton Hawley, ed., Fundamentalism and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14.Back. Note 23: Julia Leslie, "Suttee or Sati: Victim or Victor?" in Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women (Delhi: Motilala Banarasaidass Publishers, 1992): 175-189.Back. Note 24: Lindsey Harlan, Religion and Rajput Women: The Ethic of Protection in Contemporary Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Back. Note 25: Ibid., 113.Back. Note 26: Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 43.Back. Note 27: Mary Hancock, "The Dilemmas of Domesticity: Possession and Devotional Experience Among Urban Smarta Women" in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage, eds. Lindsey Harlan and Paul Courtright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 60-91.Back. Note 28: Fred Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press,1997). Back. Note 29: Census of India, "Rani Sati Fair" in Rajasthan: Fairs and Festivals Government of India Publications, 1961): 85-91.Back. Note 30: William Noble and Ram Sankhyan, "Signs of the Divine: Sati Memorials and Sati Worship in Rajasthan," in The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity: Volume I: Constructions, eds. Karine Schomer, Joan Erdman, Deryck Lodrick, and Lloyd Rudolph (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1994): 341389.Back. Note 31: According to the Memorandum and Rules and Regulations of Shree
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Rani Satiji Mandir, "Any Bansal Gotra descendant of Seth Jaliramji [Nararyani Devi's father-in-law] of the sixteenth century fame be eligible to be a member of the Society." In practice, there is not any exclusion of Marwari devotees due to genealogy. It is probably best not to take the details of foundational mythology too literally. (S. R. Jhunjhunwala. Memorandum and Rules and Regulations of Shree Rani Satiji Mandir. 1985.) Back. Note 32: This fact concurs with Harlans research (1992) on Rajput women that shows that the kuldevi is generally worshipped in temples found in public spaces. This is somewhat surprising, since the kuldevi ostensibly offers protection to both the battlefield and the home, which correspond to the male space (mardana) and the female space (zenana), suggesting how public life mediates private life.Back. Note 33: Karen Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1992).Back. Note 34: Harlan, Religion and Rajput Women,79.Back. Note 35: G. Piramal and M. Herdock, Indias Industrialists (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1986).Back. Note 36: Salvi, "Sati: A Disturbing Revival," 1981.Back. Note 37: Lok Sabha Debates. Seventh Series. Vol IX. No. 10. 1 December 1980. 337-338.Back. Note 38: Ikbal Kaul, "The Origin of Sati," The Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 January 1981, 28-29.Back. Note 39: Praful Bidwai, "Disgraceful Sati Episode: High Social Price of State Interaction,"Times of India, 28 September 1987, Editorial page.Back. Note 40: Patit Paban Misra, "Why Anti-Marwari Agitation in Orissa?" Mainstream, 1 November 1980: 6, 9.Back. Note 41: Raviwar 1981:7.Back. Note 42: Temple authorities assured me that the temple was open to all religions and castes, and was regularly visited by Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and all other castes and creeds. Despite these claims to multiculturalism, during my three-day visit to the temple I observed only Marwari families, who mostly came from Calcutta and Bombay.Back. Note 43: Jhunjhunwala. Memorandum and Rules and Regulations of Shree Rani Satiji Mandir, 2-3.Back. Note 44: Aajkal (Bengali), 1987, 13.Back. Note 45: Barun Das Gupta, "Sati Controversy in Calcutta," Mainstream, 9 December 1987, 22-23.Back.
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Note 46: V.P. Sharan, "Roop was a devotee of Rani Sati," Statesman (Calcutta), 14 October 1987.Back. Note 47: "State bans Sati Processions," Amrita Bazaar Patrika (Calcutta), 15 November 1987.Back. Note 48: The Kashi Vishwanath Seva Samiti is a Marwari voluntary organization that distributes free drinking water around the city whenever there is a special need. The distribution of drinking water is said to be part of the Marwari community's heritage of desert life, where the distribution of water was a humanitarian act of great importance.Back. Note 49: Shishir Gupta, "Aaj bhi sati pratha ka samarthan kyon? Yeh hamari dharmik swatantra par hastskep hey. Satipujan gulami ka pratik hey" ["Why is there still advocation of the sati-custom even today? This is an interference in our religious freedom. Satipuja is a symbol of Slavery"], Raviwar, 25 January 1981, 12-17.Back.
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Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987. Upreti, H. C., and Nandini Upreti. "Sati in Rajasthan and the Rajput Revival." In The Myth of Sati. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1991. Vaid, Sudesh. "Politics of Widow Immolation." Seminar 342 (1988): 20-23. Vaid, Sudesh, and Kumkum Sangari. "Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan." In Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia, edited by Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi De Alwis, 267-268, 1996. Vaughan, Kathleen Olga. The Purdah System and its effect on motherhood: osteomalacia caused by the absence of light in India. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., 1928. Visweswaran, Kamala. "Family Subjects: An ethnography of the "women's question" in Indian nationalism." Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1990. Vlastos, Stephen, ed. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Wacziarg, Francis, and Aman Nath. Rajasthan: The Painted Walls of Shekhawati. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982. Walsh, Major J. H. Tull. A History of the Murshidabad District (Bengal) with Biographies of some of its noted families. London: Jarrold, c. 1902. Watts, George. Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1972. Weber, Max. The Religion of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Wood, Dennis. "The Fine Line Between Mapping and Mapmaking." Cartographica 30, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 50-60. Wright, Gwendolyn. "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and urbanism in French Colonial Policy 1900-1930." Journal of Modern History 59 (1987).
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Yule, Col. Henry, and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discursive. Edited by William Crooke: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1903. Zenner, Walter. Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Albany: SUNY, 1991. Zetland, Lord. 'Essayez': The Memoirs of Lawrence, Second Marquess of Zetland. London: John Murray, 1956.
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Community and Public Culture: Glossary
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Glossary and Abbreviations Abbreviations BM British Museum CP Central Provinces CRNPB Central Report of the Native Newspapers of Bengal IOL India Office Library NAI National Archives of India NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Poll. Political (Dept.) RNNB Report of the Native Newspapers of Bengal Rs. Rupee UP United Provinces WBSA West Bengal State Archives
Glossary of Words in Bengali and Hindi aarti ahimsa akannaborti worship nonviolence literally, "sharing the same food," euphemism for joint family opium betting labor recruiter crook, bad guy tip, bribe Bengali language intermediary trader, mercantile community rain gambling thief charitable kitchen English-educated professional
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aphin ka satta arkati badmash baksheesh bangla baniya barsat ka satta batpuria basa bhadralok
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bhakti bhejal bindi Birla Burabazar Burobazar bustee chabutra chappan bhog chettiar chowkidar chunari darshan Dayabhaga dharmasala dhoti gaddi garbagriha ghee godown haveli hundi jaffrey Jagat Seth jati jhilmil johar jota sowda kacca kalash kambal kapus ka
Bengali middle-class personalized devotional worship adulterated, to mix with impure things ornamental dot worn on forehead name of prominent Marwari family The Big Bazar Old Lord Shiva's Bazar slum shrine platform fifty-six course meal caste cluster of trading groups in South India caretaker, guard wedding veil divine viewing, being in the presence of god legal system in which property is divided equally among sons charitable resthouse for pilgrim or traveler loose-fitting loincloth for men cushion, euphemism for office main temple image clarified butter warehouse, storage Rajput or Marwari mansion and ancestral home bill of credit lattice work Banker of the World origin, birth, caste, community wooden blinds spontaneous immolation gambling on the price of jute unprepared food earthenware or metal pitcher, symbolizing fertility blanket cotton and cloth gambling
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satta korbani kothal kul kuldeepak kuldevi lota mahatsov mardana maru Marwar
sacrifice, cow killing treasure
lineage light of the lineage lineage goddess water pot great festival men's quarters, male space desert mythical homeland of the Marwaris Marwari migrant trader from Rajasthan, or language spoken in Rajasthan mel circle of appropriate marriage partners mela fair, festival Mitakshara legal system of primogeniture found in Northern India mofussil countryside stations and outlying districts mori drain pahar three-hour period of time pakka fully cooked food parda veil, euphemism for seclusion of women pardanashin secluded women parta Marwari accounting system pash balish bolster pillow pativrata pinjrapole puja rui sahib sala salwaar kameez samaj sari satta
women's vow, fasting for the well-being of the husband literally, "caged courtyard" for cow keeping worship cotton Englishman brother-in-law, son of a bitch long tunic worn over loosefitting pants association a draped five-yard-long cloth for women's apparel commodity-figure gambling
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sati satimata shaharwale shakti shroff tezimandi thali tibba trishul vahi Vaishya yagna zenana
widow immolation deification of sati resident of or hailing from Murshidabad, Bengal goddess of strength traditional banker "rise-fall," euphemism for numbers gambling flat plate made of steel or silver sand dune Shiva's trident account books a varna traditional trading castes public fair organized around vedic sacrificial rituals women's quarters, female space
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Community and Public Culture The Marwaris in Calcutta

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Community and Public Culture: Acknowledgments

Community and Public Culture: Acknowledgments

Community and Public Culture: Acknowledgments

Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

subject.Back. Note 13: The gaddi is literally a mattress or floor cushion.Back.

Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: Introduction

Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997

Community and Public Culture: Preface

1. Community and Public Culture

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: Preface

Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta 1897-1997

Community and Public Culture: Chapter 2

2. Mapping Community in Rajasthan and Calcutta

Community and Public Culture: Chapter 2

Community and Public Culture: Chapter 2

Community and Public Culture: Chapter 2