The economist Hernando de Soto’s
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Reading Professor Aseem Prakash’s Dalit Capital: State, Markets and Civil Society in Urban India , one realises that he has, indirectly, revealed flaws in such arguments. For instance, Prakash’s ethnographic study shows that secure property rights do not always translate into access to formal credit, and that there are complex “social networks” that mediate the relation between the formal and informal sectors. Credit flows are not fair and straightforward, they are layered with currents of discrimination. More generally, he shows that market outcomes are shaped not just by a socially detached demand and supply rationality but is rather embedded in religion, gender, caste, language as well as the informal labour networks, jugaad economy, the shadowy realms of bribery and corruption and all the microcosmically fuzzy informality that comes with our everyday life. The strict binary of formal and informal economies that de Soto assumes, gets fuzzy and diluted for Prakash. Dalit entrepreneurs do not easily receive credit from formal banking institutions even on having secure property rights, because these formal institutions are always and already mediated by the prejudice that Dalits are incapable of running a modern business. So a dhobi residing in Dhobi Katra (a community ghetto) in Lucknow wanting to start a laundry business was disqualified from accessing credit as the very mention of “Dhobi Katra” invoked “condescension and contempt in the minds of credit officials”. For Prakash, the economy is therefore co-constitutive of not just market rationality, but also laden with cultural prejudices of everyday life.
Dalit Capital is about the attempts made by Dalits in middle India (Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) to enter the market as owners of capital and earn their living as well as surplus through trade and commerce. The author provides an analysis that is theoretically insightful and based on sound methodology. The study is based on a reconstruction of business histories of about 90 Dalit entrepreneurs, from 13 districts, located in six states. It needs to be highlighted that 29% of these entrepreneurs have businesses emerging from within their existing caste locations (hair-cutting saloons, leather work, sanitary labour etc), 40% of Dalits entered into general businesses (fuel-wood, handloom material, grocery shops etc), while only 13% of Dalit entrepreneurs entered the traditionally prohibited market for goods and services (educational coaching, food and catering industry, priesthood etc).
This book has none of the chicken-soup-for-the-soul tales of inspirational Dalit triumph over all odds (read triumph of capitalism over rural, pre-modern, traditional) as found in the recently published
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In conclusion, three aspects of this book mark a significant contribution to the field: First , the ethnographic data collected based on detailed reconstruction of business histories of Dalit entrepreneurs is of definitive value; Second the conceptual deployment of “social networks” as a relational category in understanding complex inter-caste and inter-institutional relations in the political economy; and Third , making a reasonably strong case for the argument that Dalit owners of capital experience an “unfavourable inclusion” in market processes, though the degree of adversity varies with location and sector of markets.
Dalit Capital - State, Markets and Civil Society in Urban India: Aseem Prakash; Routledge, 912, Tolstoy House, 15-17, Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 795.