“From the outside, the market in India is often seen as an exchange arena bound by state-imposed rules. Those within - buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, brokers and advertisers, financiers and debtors, police and inspectors - understand it differently. Such parties collude and compete in myriad everyday activities. These include those of accumulation and circulation, of production and speculation, and of arbitrage and management.

Involved actors, in short, experience the Indian market dissimilarly from the ways in which many planners and policymakers comprehend it. This market is best understood as an ensemble of practices and institutions. It has active and reactive patterns of economic and sociocultural practices, flexible adjustment and coping mechanisms, unforeseen contingencies and aberrations, and strategies of ambiguity and transgression. Transactional agents navigate gray areas and tacit understandings. They reproduce durable informal relations and customary practices. These dynamics only partially relate to state-led market-framing processes.”