ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to reassert the economic and social centrality of markets in India, particularly in the towns and cities where markets are major public amenities for all classes. To read the anthropological literature on India is to gain the impression that the country lacks the linked regional marketing systems, the urban market places and the occupational groups of traders which loom large in studies of West Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Efforts to save Philadelphia’s city-owned Reading Terminal Market from the developers who want to build a convention center on the spot sound very familiar in the Indian context. In the dispersal or relocation of markets, traders risk being deprived of their very livelihood, since the work they do is highly dependent on location—the same kind of central location amidst the flow of commerce, pedestrian traffic and transportation routes which makes the real estate valuable in the first place.