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  • 4 - Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy

  • Edited by Ajay Gandhi, Universiteit Leiden, Barbara Harriss-White, University of Oxford, Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Sebastian Schwecke, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
  • Book:
    Rethinking Markets in Modern India
    Published online:
    24 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020, pp 85-115

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”