Bazaar

Abstract

The term ‘bazaar’ exists in uneasy translation, as do the physical and conceptual spaces it denotes. In Hindi, Urdu and Bangla (from Persian) it means a marketplace, or the market in general; in English it connotes an exotic ‘oriental’ market or informal sale, usually for charity. Its salience to South Asian media and cultural forms bears these colonial connotations of cultural difference and informality (Jain, 2007, 2012). Here its earliest association was with ‘bazaar art’: paintings and prints for a vernacular public, notably those produced around Calcutta’s Kalighat Kali Temple from the 1820s (GuhaThakurta, 1992). Kalighat paintings are particularly beloved to artists and scholars; featuring anti-elite or anti-Brahmin satire and themes from everyday life as well as religious icons, they had a critical edge lacking in later prints. But ‘bazaar’ also carries a much wider valence as the colonial descriptor for a vernacular realm of ‘native’ commerce, distinct from the official colonial economy. This usage has shaped the bazaar’s character as the key economic, social-political and aesthetic infrastructure for a range of vernacular forms, extending beyond paintings and prints to theatre, cinema, festivals, temples, museums, monuments, theme parks and now social media. The distinctive character of the bazaar was enshrined in the 1882 Indian Companies Act, which placed British governance of domestic bazaar firms under Hindu and Muslim personal law rather than corporate law (Birla, 2009). The bazaar was thus designated as a realm of pre-colonial religion and ‘custom,’ even as domestic trading communities played an essential comprador role as intermediaries in the colonial economy. Perpetuating ‘customary’ forms of power, sociality and commerce in the service of colonial exploitation, the bazaar became the colonial economy’s ‘constitutive outside’ (Derrida, 1988). This paradoxical position of the bazaar, as simultaneously different from and integral to the colonial economy, explains several features of the vernacular cultural forms whose financing, production and circulation emerged from – and continue to perpetuate – the bazaar’s mercantile ethos. This is not the hegemonically bourgeois, Protestant milieu within which mass culture, mass media and their theorisations developed in Europe and North America. However, it cannot be separated from the latter either, for these are co-constituted fields with ongoing, albeit uneven, interactions. So the bazaar is not urban, secular and modern rather than rural, religious and customary. It is better understood as a site of circulation between life-