ABSTRACT
This chapter explores debates on Mumbai pheriwalas to illuminate shifts in the cultural politics of property rights accompanying globalization in India. Market liberalization and the roughly concomitant growth of nationwide television pointed to the terra incognita of the majority society, whose political allegiance had been assumed in benevolent or not-so-benevolent forms of clientelism, and whose cultural allegiance hardly figured at all, given the disconnect between elite and popular spheres. Market liberalization triumphs, in its supporters’ accounts, by infusing and transforming despotic state regimes with the spirit of liberty and equality. Working at the bottom end of the market, pheriwalas perform a socializing function, exposing consumers to products, allowing them to assess the fair value of goods and establish civil relations with strangers on the basis of mutually acknowledged but differing interests. The changes wrought by markets and media together led, over time, to popular pressures increasing on established domains of politics.
