Community as public culture in modern India: The Marwaris in Calcutta c. 1897-1997.

Abstract

In my thesis I discuss how people under colonial rule come to see themselves as part of particular local and trans-regional communities. My dissertation research specifically examines and critiques theories about the invention of tradition and imagination of community and develops an analytic about the performance of identity as an alternative approach. I investigate how the analytical category of public culture is useful in understanding the public performances of group identities. In addressing these questions, my dissertation research examines the cultural politics of how community identity has been defined and contested by a wealthy and controversial migrant Hindu business group in Calcutta, the Marwaris. The Marwaris, who originally migrated from Rajasthan, have a national reputation as industrial, financial and business leaders who promote social and religious conservatism. As such, they provide a fascinating case study of how a powerful group has negotiated its own sense of difference and identity politics along the lines of ethnicity, regionality, capitalism, language, and gender. Through an examination of both archival and ethnographic evidence collected during my fieldwork, my thesis argues that community is constituted by a series of performances of identity in public life, which rely on idioms of gender, family and kinship. I make an argument for a model of 'familial cosmopolitanism,' through which Marwaris perform aspects of their identity in modern public arenas. My work contributes to broader discussions in anthropology and history related to the production of community identity through public practices of domesticity, patriarchal relations, and inter-ethnic violence in the context of colonial and postcolonial capitalism. My work contributes to broader discussions in anthropology and history related to community as a relational, performed, gendered and contested phenomenon, and attempts to complicate the relationship between culture and place. My interdisciplinary dissertation combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research, fulfilling the professional standards of both anthropology and history.