Becoming Agarwal shows how a close-knit elite mercantile caste is reproduced as a privileged urban player in 'new' Hindu India. At this historical juncture, the baniya community is at the helm of not only economic but also political power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with ninety-one interlocutors, analysis of the oldest Hindi newsletter produced in Delhi over two decades, and ethnographic observations made over four years, the book shows the gendered and generational roles undertaken by women and men in self-making in neoliberal India. Elite men through their activities in the caste associations and philanthropy produce a moral and empowering narrative of belonging across class, while older women as mothers and mothers-in-law play regulatory roles within families to co-opt and refashion the desires of a younger generation of women. These desires have the potential to disrupt the reproduction of the caste group, and yet, are craftily absorbed.

‘In this subtle account of the making of a mercantile community in modern India, Ujithra Ponniah links the bania household and factory, the living quarters and the shop brilliantly – to indicate how caste capital, in the literal as well as affective sense of the term, is secured through modes of sexual governance. The intimate sphere, Ponniah suggests, structures the worlds of production and politics, with marriage and kin ties cementing property and caste relationships. Richly ethnographic, and replete with startling conceptual coinages – ‘pragmatic love', ‘the somatic stress of patriarchy' – this book extends and deepens our understanding of social reproduction, especially of women's emotional and care labour, which helps to sustain caste identities and boundaries.'

V. Geetha