Governance of Marwari capital: Daily living as a decolonial ‘matrix-of-praxis’ intermeshing commercial, religious and familial spheres

Abstract

This paper is a narration on practices of unlimited liability Marwari businesses of a textile town in Western India. Although depicted as an ‘outdated’ form of incorporation, these businesses were surprisingly resilient prompting us to engage in exploration of their ways of doing business. We deployed Mignolo’s concept of colonial-matrix-of-power to anchor our interpretive sense-making of enactments of our participant businessmen. The daily doings of the businessmen and their families enacted a ‘way of life’, Marwaripan. Activities created an intermesh across ‘local’ spaces of family, business and religion, constituting, what we call, a decolonial matrix-of-praxis. It created a ‘local’ form of Marwari governance where circulation and access to capital depended on extensively (and labouriously) negotiated construction of ‘status’ within open spaces of ‘enunciation’. However, preserving Marwaripan also required arduous striving and collective toil to continuously construct subjectivities based on customary dharma through a communitarian pedagogy that could wean away actors from the state driven pedagogy of regular schools.