Ritu Birla

Speculation Illicit and Complicit: Contract, Uncertainty, and Governmentality

First regulated as gambling, even as similar practices abroad were formalized in private exchanges and consolidated in boards of trade, vernacular futures trading in India foregrounds speculation as a problem of law and governing. This essay addresses the colonial management of vernacular speculative activities in a period of global financialization, demonstrating how market engagements with uncertainty that were previously criminalized were slowly folded into legality and governance. It illuminates a range of informal, localized practices participating in global financial flows and deploys the colonial context as an analytical lever to pose broader questions concerning the legibility and translation of speculation as both an illicit outside and a complicit inside of the market. Charting key shifts in the two decades before 1947, it maps the governmentalization of speculation by colonial authorities and vernacular capitalists, a process that informs histories of and dynamics across the colonial rule of law, the idea of informality, and neoliberal thought.

Maine (and Weber) Against the Grain: Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of the Corporate Person

This essay forges ties between postcolonial methodologies and the economic sociology of law, emphasizing the history, legal production, and governmental habitus of that modern abstraction called ‘the economy’. It pursues three interrelated sites to do so: the categories of government and economy, via Weber and Foucault; classical legal discourse on corporate or group life and its temporizing from status to contract; and the relationship between the legal subject and homo economicus, investigated and telescoped through the figure of the corporate person. Empirically, focusing on India as a lens to highlight a colonial genealogy of neoliberal modernity, the analysis animates these themes via the history of colonial market governance, its relationship to the ‘embedded’ practices of vernacular capitalism, and emergent forms of economic citizenship today, seen through Indian case law on the corporate person and corporate veil‐piercing.

Jurisprudence of Emergence: Neo-Liberalism and the Public as Market in India

Highlighting legal–governmental techniques by which the public is conceptualised as the market and market activity as public agency, this article poses India as a key site for a globalised analysis of neo-liberal governance. It opens a genealogy for Indias ‘emerging market’ governance that extends back to colonial modernisation, highlighting ties between a coercive state, its benevolent performance and the making of a market society. Such a long view challenges the free market vs. strong state opposition so central to contemporary neo-liberal thought. It also calls attention to the nexus between powers of emergency and emerging markets. Elaborating, the essay engages Foucaults analysis of neo-liberal political economy to read recent Indian jurisprudence on financial markets, the rule of law, and public interest.

Speculation: Futures and Capitalism in India

Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictive practices that are motivated by contingency and aim to make uncertainty productive. India, a celebrated emerging market and dense arena of capitalist promise and failure, provides the foundations for our approach. The speculative practices we focus on challenge the distinction between formal and informal, the licit and illicit, because they fuel rationalized market regimes, as well as worlds of precarity. Our approach reveals the governmentalities, public cultures, and market actions that are characteristic of the present pursuit of value for profit and survival.

Guest Editors' Letter: Itineraries of Self-Rule

In the 2006 Bollywood hit Lage raho Munna Bhai (Carry on Munna Bhai), a petty gangster named Munna is visited by the specter of Gandhi, who advises him on winning the affections of a radio announcer by deploying the tactics of love and nonviolence. In the process Munna comes to realize the virtues of satyagraha, or truthforce, and abandons his thuggish ways. Provoking a revival of interest in the Mahatma among a younger generation of Indians, the film also signaled their unwillingness to identify Gandhi as a historical figure. For despite the comedy’s many references to India’s independence movement, the Mahatma who appeared to Munna Bhai explicitly rejected his memorialization by the state, which has made his image ubiquitous in the form of statuary, portraits, and even the rupee. Fleeing from official desires to embalm him, Gandhi, like all specters, refuses to remain in his own time. Lage raho Munna Bhai represents only one example of a revival of interest in Gandhi among scholars, artists, and activists of all kinds, for whom his thinking seems to offer new entry points for contemporary dilemmas, whether about popular revolution, war, the environment, or global capitalism. Indeed, Gandhi even offers intellectual sustenance to those who would alter the nature of politics itself in our time. And this might be so because the Mahatma’s practices of nonviolence were never bonded to traditional forms of organization such as political parties or states, which in many respects seem inadequate to the problems posed by contemporary politics. Indeed, for Gandhi, the term swaraj, which was often translated as “political independence” or “home rule,” became meaningful and fertile in its strictest translation as “selfrule” or “selfmastery.” The swaraj that Gandhi struggled to attain challenged the distinction between individual and collective and thus was available to anyone at any time without any recourse to some historical or ideological telos.