Introduction
This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala, on the southwestern Indian coast (also known by the colonial name of Calicut).Footnote 1 Specifically, we are examining local debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We will argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”
The apparent confluence of these orientations and practices among Kozhikode Muslims, economically and culturally dominant in the city, might not be surprising. Historically, trade and commerce have been Kozhikode's most important economic activities. Muslims, in the absence of significant local Hindu or Christian trading communities, have participated energetically. Trade and commerce also hold a much wider relevance for local Muslims, who explicitly associate these activities with the spread and development of Islam in the region as well as with its later renewal via commercial interactions with Arab merchants and scholars. This long-term relationship is doubly significant: While a few Kozhikode Muslims claim direct descent from Hadrami (Yemeni) Sayyed traders who settled throughout northern coastal Kerala,Footnote 2 many others see themselves as the descendants of marriages between local upper-caste women and the Arab Muslims who regularly visited or settled in the city. These claims, common currency in Kozhikode, articulate a discourse of the inseparability of economic practice (trade/commerce), religious identity as Muslims, and Arab descent. Like other Muslim trading communities across the Indian Ocean,Footnote 3 such a relationship is in turn deployed to assert class and status distinction first from non-Muslims (who cannot claim an essentialized “natural” orientation toward trade and commerce) and then from other Muslims.Footnote 4
Rather than dismissing such a sense of self and group identity as a lingering of primordialist or premodern attachments—an all-too-common move in popular and academic representations of Muslims in India and beyond—we will argue that it expresses a very complex and contemporary involvement in transnational processes and relationships. Local self-representation, then, urges us to trace out another analysis: a direct relation between a self-styled “natural affinity” toward transoceanic trade and Muslims' successful transition from bazaar to cutting-edge global business, both in India and in the Gulf countries of West Asia, where large numbers of Malayalis have been migrating since the 1970s oil boom. As among Rajat Kanta Ray's and Claude Markowitz's nineteenth-century bazaar merchants,Footnote 5 time-honored trading skills learned in Kozhikode's bazaars have been sharpened by participation in Gulf economies and then redeployed in Kerala to forward business there, a process sustained by the flow of substantial remittances. At the same time, long-term participation in and familiarity with transoceanic Islam has fostered affinities toward Islamic reformism and a revived dar-ul-Islam.Footnote 6 This heightened sense of the self as a Muslim, in turn, underpins community-wide projects of self-transformation. While business, entrepreneurship, and economic success—all associated, since the 1970s, with Gulf migration—are increasingly standing at the core of a Muslim identity and of contemporary reformulations of Muslim morality, material progress and religious reform have become intertwined indices of modernity and class.Footnote 7 New styles of entrepreneurship—which combine meaningful activity in God's world, material success, and moral connectedness—have come to be seen as the exemplary contemporary way of being a modern, moral Muslim. Predictably, those who fail either to “modernize” or to make the most of life's chances—for instance, old-style bazaar traders and the working classes—are increasingly marked as morally lacking, standing in the way of “progress,” and thereby become the object of reformist intervention.
Debates concerning the transformation of Kozhikode's economy not only reveal the significance of the Gulf countries of West Asia as sites of capital accumulation and for the articulation of novel economic and cultural practices, but they also underscore the complexity of relationships engendered by migration. The actual experiences of migrants—and the way these are discussed, evaluated, and imagined in Kozhikode—give rise to inevitable ambiguity. For Kozhikode Muslims, migration to the Gulf has undoubtedly fostered the community's economic development while rekindling links with the geographical core of Islam, but it is also deemed to have produced many “social problems,” the weakening of conjugal relations and excessive consumption, for instance. Meanwhile, if the introduction in Kozhikode of new business styles and labor arrangements modeled on Gulf practices—the inevitable outcome of the globalization of capital—has allowed for a modernization of the local economy, in its wake it has fastened the end of many bazaar businesses and reduced the rights and income of scores of bazaar laborers. In the rest of the article, then, we will explore debates concerning the apparent decline of Kozhikode's bazaars and the emergence of a new economy, unravelling in the meantime the social and economic history of the city's Muslims.
Kozhikode Muslims and the Bazaar Economy
Located on the southwest coast of India, Kerala has a population of thirty-two million, split between various Hindu (fifty-four percent), Christian (nineteen percent), and Muslim (twenty-five percent) communities. With roughly half a million inhabitants, Kozhikode is Kerala's third largest city, and, although Muslims are not the majority, situated in the region of greatest concentration of Muslims, it is considered to be the Muslim capital of Kerala.
Kozhikode has been entangled with the circulation of people, ideas, and goods across the Indian Ocean for all its history. It was prosperous with maritime trade from the tenth to the fifteenth century, developing rapidly over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a commercial hub between West Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.Footnote 8 Like other Indian Ocean port cities, precolonial Kozhikode had a noticeable population of visiting or resident merchants from the East (China, Java, and Ceylon) and the West (Egypt, Yemen, and Persia). At the time of Ibn Battuta's visit in 1342, the chief merchant and harbor master was one Ibrahim from Bahrain, suggesting a strong Arab presence, confirmed by the existence of two mosques and a qazi (Muslim judge) of Arab origin.Footnote 9 Almost a century later, the Chinese Muslim traveller Ma Huan reported that in Kozhikode many of the king's subjects are Muslims and there were twenty or thirty mosques in the kingdom, adding that the king employed two Muslim administrators. “In Calicut,” Engseng Ho writes, “the Hindu ruler hosted four thousand foreign Muslim traders in the fourteenth century.”Footnote 10 Arriving in 1498, Vasco da Gama began a long and bloody struggle to wrench away control of the pepper trade from the “Moors,” Muslim merchants from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 11
While the presence and activities of a substantial Arab Muslim commercial community is well documented, the role played in trade by local Muslims is unclear. What is known, however, is that resistance against Portuguese conquest coalesced around Malayali Muslim seafarers headed by the famous Marakkars.Footnote 12 The Portuguese fleet never managed to control trade from the Malabar Coast: Arab dhows and Malayali boats—manned by predominantly Muslim crews—invariably defied sea blockades and, whenever the opportunity arose, disrupted European trade through so-called piracy. By the early nineteenth century, oceanic trade was firmly in British hands and intra-coastal commerce (to Bombay and Surat/Kachch) became dominated by Gujarati-owned and manned boats. But, as testified by Arab-sponsored building of a number of mosques in the city,Footnote 13 Kozhikode Muslims and their Arab partners continued to move goods between Malabar and the Arabian Peninsula, a trade deemed by the British as of little economic importance. By the late nineteenth century, Malayali Muslims lived predominantly along the Malabar Coast or in towns and villages on the banks of rivers, all locations through which trade could be conducted.
From the nineteenth century until the middle of the 1980s, the colonial and postcolonial economy gave a major boost to local trade: Kozhikode became a world center for timber export and, later, the center for the commerce of copra. Emerging as a major rice market in the region, the city also saw a resurgence of trade from the Arabian Peninsula. But when Kozhikode Muslims talk about the heyday of trade and commerce in the city, they are invariably referring to a relatively recent period, from 1947 to the mid-1980s.
Apart from a handful of merchants who either were directly involved in Arab trade or held lucrative contracts with the colonial administration to provide timber for the railways, colonial trade was dominated by Gujarati (Hindus or Muslim Bohras) “forwarding agents” who bought goods on behalf of mostly Mumbai companies; similarly, the wholesale commerce of rice, grains, and pulses was in the hands of a few Karachi-based Memon-owned companies. The vast majority of local Muslim bazaar merchants either acted as middlemen between these forwarding agents and producers—for example, for coir, copra/coconuts, and spices—or acted as retailers for rice bought from Karachi wholesalers. It was only the late colonial period that saw the emergence of a small, wealthy, local Muslim middle class—mostly timber merchants and Gulf traders—largely Anglophile and modernist in orientation, supporting both Islamic and British-inspired reform initiatives in, for example, the introduction of modern and rationalizing practices in education, business, and family life.
Post-independence, the removal of the colonial trade regulations that had penalized local business, together with an expansion of internal demand, boosted trade in Kozhikode's bazaars. Fortunes were made, and the city's economy thrived. Take, for example, P. K.,Footnote 14 one of the largest of Kozhikode's rice wholesalers. Originally from a town some kilometers north of the city, the business's founder joined the Kozhikode office of a Karachi-owned company as a junior clerk in the 1930s and was eventually sent to Rangoon, from where most rice was imported. After the Japanese invasion of Burma, he returned to Kozhikode jobless and, with some savings, started his own small rice retail business in the bazaar. Business developed rapidly after independence. Responding to a dire scarcity of local produce, he began to import rice from Burma—a trade he quickly monopolized through contacts and expertise gained during his Rangoon years—and, later, from Nepal. In the 1960s he was joined by his sons and son-in-law, and the business expanded yet again. Like many others, P. K. began to act as a “commission agent” (see below) for Andhra Pradesh mills, which had no contacts outside their own state; P. K. used their local contacts to sell rice on the mills' behalf in return for a percentage of the sales' value. While India's post-independence planned economy regulated the circulation of rice within India to the advantage of big mills, the “Licence Raj” regime allowed for the building of wholesale monopolies in the bazaar, headed by those who had the capital and political connections necessary for receiving trading licences from the government. P. K. was among this group, which further expanded the business by gaining—though connections with local politicians—contracts for the distribution of rice to the state government's ration shops. Within a few years, “P. K. Traders” had started a number of rice- and flourmills. The business was eventually partitioned amongst the sons of the founder. In the 1990s, one of them moved into steel production, now owning three steel plants, in south India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In the copra bazaar—where spices and coconut products are traded—we find a similar story. As in the nearby rice bazaar, business here used to be concentrated in the hands of a few traders closely related through kinship and marriage. During the colonial period these were predominantly middlemen who bought up coconuts or pepper directly from producers on behalf of forwarding agents, mostly of Gujarati origin. The latter purchased commodities on behalf of buyers—at a price fixed by the latter—which were often British-owned companies. Bombay buyers would pay a set fee—a commission—to the forwarding agent. The lifting of colonial regulations that had limited local traders' exports, together with an exponential expansion of demand on the national and international markets, boosted trade in both the copra bazaar and the timber trade.
Meanwhile, the most lucrative side of Kozhikode trade actually came from smuggling: During the two world wars, tires, gasoline, and gold went from Kozhikode to the Gulf; but from the 1950s onward—until the 1990s liberalization of gold imports—gold moved once again in the opposite direction, from the Gulf to Kozhikode.Footnote 15 Gold smuggling certainly brought enormous riches not only to those directly involved in various roles in this trade,Footnote 16 but to the whole Kozhikode Muslim community, eventually overtaking timber, spices, and rice as a site of capital accumulation.
The Decline of the Bazaar
In the late 1970s, the timber trade declined as a result of nationalization of hardwood forests. Following the Gulf oil boom, the last Arab residents left Kozhikode, and Arab ships stopped coming altogether to the city, leading to the eventual closure of all port facilities and warehouses. Meanwhile, Kozhikode bazaars have apparently become all but a shadow of what they were in the 1960s and 1970s. As in the rest of Kerala, since the 1980s Kozhikode's economy has become dependent upon the revenues, remittances, and investments generated by Gulf migration. Although the flow of currency through informal channels makes it difficult to assess with accuracy the overall volume of remittances from the Gulf to Kerala, Kannan and Hari calculate that “average annual remittances ranged from Rs. 536 croresFootnote 17 [Indian Rupees] during 1980-85 to Rs. 10,835 crores during 1995–2000. As a percentage of the State Domestic Product (SDP) remittances constituted, on an average, around 11 percent since early eighties to the early nineties … During the nineties it increased to around 21 percent[.]”Footnote 18 Zachariah et al.'s extensive survey of migrant households shows that the Muslim-majority Malappuram district received the largest amount of remittances and Muslim households across all Kerala districts received up to fifty percent of total remittances.Footnote 19
Bazaar traders commonly impute the decline of business to globalization—claiming with one voice that “globalization has ruined us.” Here, they offer us a predictable narrative in which time-honored practices are made obsolete by technological innovations and aggressive competition. Rice traders argue, for example, that major changes in wholesale distribution had a deleterious effect on business. Since the 1991 abolition of the licence system, rice mills no longer need to rely on local commission agents. The latter received large stocks on credit and settled bills only after selling all the rice. At the same time, following a 1991 laborers' strike that shut down the bazaar for forty-six days,Footnote 20 mills began to sell directly to customers—wholesalers and retailers alike—through canvassing agents, who gather orders and collect payments within two weeks from delivery. Such canvassers are employed by non-local agencies, often operating right across south India. This change has affected the bazaar in a number of ways. First, while local traders have to pay ready cash for rice deliveries in order to benefit from mills' discounts, market competition is such that they normally give up to six months' credit to their own clients. Secondly, competition has increased. This is not simply because newcomers have entered the bazaar on the strength of Gulf remittances, but it is also due to canvassing agents' willingness to sell rice anywhere—around nearby towns and rural areas—bypassing the bazaar altogether, a change made possible by the expansion of road transport and by ready access to mobile phones and the Internet. To retain their buyers, Kozhikode traders have no alternative but to lower prices and offer long-term credit, moves that limit both profits and cash flow. Third, in the late 1990s the railway line to Kozhikode closed down for a number of months following a train crash. Rice had to be downloaded further south, in Trichur. This city's Christian entrepreneurs were quick to exploit the opportunity, offering discounts and lower handling charges to Kozhikode's usual bazaar customers, eventually turning Trichur into a competing rice market. These changes, effectively undermining the monopoly and regional centrality of Kozhikode's bazaar, have affected mostly medium and small traders—that is, those traders who have a smaller capital at their disposal and rely heavily on regular cash returns from clients—forcing a number of them out of business. Wholesalers such as P. K. simply shifted to cash-only sales or moved out of the bazaar altogether.
While the rice bazaar is slowly turning into a predominantly local market—a transformation accelerated by the recent arrival in the city of two national supermarket chains—the adjacent copra bazaar appears to be in terminal decline. This is a Muslim-dominated business where traders' skills and experience are paramount in order to take advantage of “forward buying/selling.” Traders receive orders months in advance of the actual delivery, at a price fixed according to current rates. If for any reason producers' prices go up, traders lose money—often fortunes, if the orders are large—and vice versa. Until the end of the last century, Kozhikode traders had the upper hand. Buyers had to rely on their services, and sellers did not have the means to monitor the daily movement of prices on national or international commodity markets. Moreover, traders operated as a cartel, refusing to pay suppliers above agreed prices. But technological innovations and economic liberalization have brought substantial changes here as well. The main suppliers of Kerala pepper are Christian planters from the mountain district of Waynad, an area relatively isolated from the coast. Many members of this highly educated community migrated as professionals to the United States. Nowadays, planters can either use the Internet or telephone their relatives in the US directly to check the daily fluctuation of commodity markets. They can then decide prices or, indeed, whether to sell at all or to hold their commodity in storage.Footnote 21 Better roads have also allowed these Christian planters to sell directly to exporters in the port city of Ernakulam or in neighboring Tamil Nadu, bypassing Kozhikode bazaar altogether. At the same time, following liberalization, the Indian pepper market has been flooded by cheaper imports from Vietnam and Indonesia.
Copra is not faring any better either. Replacing coconuts as Kerala's main export, copra has been sold to local and national oil mills since the early 1950s. A drastic reduction in trade is due here to several factors. On the one hand, there has been a decline in supply—disease has badly affected Kerala crops; planters (again, mostly Christians) are also relocating their activities into low labor-cost areas outside the state. On the other hand, the 1990s introduction of cheaper imported palm oil has led to a reduction in local demand. In the meantime, the big north Indian buyers have expanded their operations, approaching producers directly and forcing prices down.
Is “Globalization” the Problem?
Surely, traders' pessimistic reflections on the decline of business are commonplace in bazaars across the world, wherever success depends on keeping competitors and sales tax officials at arm's length. And yet, as the chamber of commerce's figures confirm, the volume of trade has indeed declined, and many traders have gone out of business, apparently as the result of the deleterious effects of globalizing markets. This straightforward, and perhaps familiar, explanation is shared by both local traders and their archenemies—the unionized bazaar laborers—finding themselves for once in agreement. But this simple explanation, commonplace as it may be in the political propaganda of groups as diverse as Kerala's Communist parties and Islamist organizations, hides as much as it reveals about Kozhikode Muslims' participation in contemporary economic life. After all, the city's bazaars have always been embedded in wider commercial networks, hence all but local; as we have seen, Kozhikode Muslim businesses—from timber and spices to gold and, more recently, Gulf migrants' companies—have long thrived on the back of long-term relations with Arabs and participation in the colonial economy. And while traders have seldom determined the conditions under which their business is conducted, they have over time developed and deployed sharp practices—of which they are deeply proud—to make the most of new chances. An orientation toward risk-taking and opportunism is indeed the essential attribute of success, which, Muslims argue, differentiates them from traders of other communities. Most of our bazaar friends would readily admit that business is a game of chance, where you might win—with God's help—or lose with equal ease as prices rise and fall unpredictably. To be sure, increased competition is resented, especially from non-Kozhikode newcomers who can rely on Gulf remittances to subsidize business, but only to an extent. Newcomers are chided more for their incompetence than their aggressive practices. One of Kozhikode's former pepper kings—who went bust in a multimillion forward-buying deal with Russia—reminded us many times that unlike inexperienced newcomers panicking at the slightest market fluctuation, Kozhikode traders know how to keep steady nerves and to weather even the most severe financial setbacks.
That these bazaar Muslims have lacked neither the skills nor the resolve to profit from the various opportunities opened up by novel and fast-moving markets—just as they did in colonial and post-independence times—is indicated by the peculiarities of the current crisis. Usman and his partner Faizal are an example of how, even with a modicum of initial capital to invest, attitude, experience, and contacts can still make a business thrive. In his teens, Usman joined his sister's husband as an errand boy in a small rice shop, where, along with learning the ropes of bazaar trade, he built an extensive network of “well-wishers.” After eighteen years with his brother-in-law, he took over a moribund tapioca flour mill-cum-wholesale shop with his childhood friend Faizal, who had returned after years of migration. Faizal's modest savings and tenacity—cultivated in Tamil Nadu, Mumbai, and later in Bahrain—together with Usman's expertise, quickly turned the business to profit. To maintain a healthy cash flow, they personally visit clients—in rural areas and adjoining districts—to collect payments for credit sales.
At first sight, then, those most affected by the bazaars' crisis would appear to be those businesses whose owners do not have enough capital and expertise to withstand competition or manage credit sales. But in Kozhikode, boom-and-bust businesses are not necessarily the cause of despair or disgrace. Gulf migrants—keen on finding investments for their savings—regularly form partnerships to finance relatives' or friends' shops and stores. Availability of Gulf-earned cash is such that it is commonplace to find traders rapidly moving from one failed business to a new and, they hope, successful one—often in activities as diverse as rice wholesaling and shoe retailing or fast-food catering, all done in an attempt to cash in on new fashions. But although it is undoubtedly true that the recent influx of Gulf remittances has led to reckless investments, trade in Kozhikode bazaar has always been risky and open to the vagaries of chance. During previous periods of commercial growth—in the early twentieth century, for instance—Kozhikode Muslim traders and businessmen, worried by the possibility of bankruptcy and wary of colonial-driven reforms of marriage and inheritance system,Footnote 22 protected their sprawling mansions, shops, and warehouses by either registering them in their wives' names or by setting them as waqf donations, protected as charity under Islamic law. In other words, processes associated with contemporary forms of globalization have produced just as much continuity as breaks in bazaar traders' practices. The current moment only appears anomalous or particular if one takes a very short-term view of history.
New Orientations Toward Business and Entrepreneurship
Business partnerships—where both profits and losses are shared by investorsFootnote 23—and diversified investments are common strategies utilized to spread and manage risk. So we find that many of the same bazaar traders who claim to have been brought to their knees by the decline of the bazaar have in fact long since changed their activities. Over the last twenty years, urban land and plantations have become the preferred destination of such investments, as in the case of K. V. He can be found sitting in his Beach Road office, an old colonnade building where his father and father's father ran their trade with Arab merchants. Starting out as a timber merchant, by the late nineteenth century K. V.'s grandfather had set up business as a “commission agent,” buying local goods on behalf of Arab traders. He left a thriving business, which was partitioned between the sons, among them K. V.'s father. K. V.'s father took on Arab trade, which brought great fortunes from the 1940s to the 1960s thanks to the gold trade. K. V. has a similar inclination for business. He married the daughter of one of his father's closest business partners—Malabar's undisputed “timber king”—and joined his father's export business in the mid-1950s after sitting for BA exams. As the Arab trade eventually died out in the 1970s, he began to branch out into new commercial activities: a pharmaceutical company, jewelery franchises, real estate, and rubber and coconut plantations, which he runs together with his sons. P. K., whom we encountered earlier, did likewise: From wholesale of rice, he moved on to flourmills and, eventually, into steel production.
These two cases might be dismissed as exceptional examples of the particular personal abilities of some entrepreneurs who successfully mobilize bazaar skills and capital to make the most of emerging markets. But it is here that we discern a profound shift in the way Kozhikode Muslims evaluate and make sense of economic practices. Like the contemporary Malaysian entrepreneurs and Indonesian industrialists and management consultants discussed by Patricia SloaneFootnote 24 and Daromir Rudnyckyj,Footnote 25 respectively, who sharply criticise “old-style” fatalism, limited horizons, and corruption—framing them as un-Islamic because they are wasteful of the opportunities given by God—people like K. V. and P. K. would wish to see others follow their lead and take a more dynamic approach to business. An emerging public discourse attributes the relative “underdevelopment” of Kerala Muslims, and of Muslims worldwide, not only to their alleged aversion to “modern” education, but more generally to their failure to plan a long-term “systematic” life.
Abdul Qader, a successful frozen food exporter, argued:
Muslims in Kerala are certainly more advanced than in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, but actually we should be comparing them with other Malayali communities. In Kerala, Christians have the highest education because of their connection with missionaries; next come the Hindus. But Muslims are only now realizing the importance of education. When our young people go to the Gulf, they only get low jobs; white-collar jobs only go to those who are educated. Even now, Muslims stop studying after SSLC or Pre-degree to join a business. They have no patience and want to make money immediately. Other communities are prepared to wait longer before getting employment.
Here lack of ambition, an inability to defer gratification, and outright laziness are marked out as deleterious to individual and community advancement. “Kozhikode Muslims like to enjoy life,” Abdul Qader continued. “They are only interested in sumptuous houses and food. If a man makes money, his sons will spend everything, leaving the grandsons only debts to repay.” What needs cultivating, instead, is a “get out and go for it” attitude, a mix of hard work, persistence, and ambition—an attitude that ties in happily with much Islamic reformist discourse.
Orientations toward individual responsibility, energetic activity, and self-advancement are all part of the moral self cultivated by reformists. While Islamic reformist organizations have only ten percent of Kerala's Muslim population formally affiliated as followers, over the last thirty years they have set the agenda for the community in general, especially in Kozhikode. Nowadays, all Kerala Muslims recognize the need for moderate reform—from education, business, and employment to family life and everyday sociality: for the sake of community “progress”; to compete with more developed Kerala Hindu and Christians; and to be self-reliant in the face of a national politics dominated by hostile Hindu fundamentalist parties. Reformist efforts to transform religious practice are embedded in a wider project of self-transformation through an active ethical engagement with life as a whole, from self-presentation to employment. After all, reformists argue, “How can you be a good Muslim if you are poor, ignorant, and oppressed?” While Quranic and shari'ah obligations (such as zaqat or the injunction to care for orphans) are taken as examples of Islam's preoccupation with social responsibility, reformists try to reshape obligations into more engaged forms, such as using centrally collected zaqat funds to provide the poor with the means to make a decent livelihood. In Kozhikode, there are a host of “community” organizations that, as well as arranging Quran reading groups, nowadays campaign for and support children's formal education and organize regular camps or seminars to educate and inspire local Muslims. Through speeches, delivered by community leaders, educationalists, public health workers, or people felt to be useful community role models, on how to live a moral, active, and rationalized Muslim life, Muslims are introduced to the idea that they should be aiming for a “systematic life.” At the same time, spoken English, personality development, and leadership courses are regularly organized to equip the already educated with the interpersonal skills deemed necessary to successfully participate in an increasingly competitive economy—in India as much as in the Gulf—forwarding community progress while satisfying the demands of middle-class life.
Sadarudheen describes his busy daily schedule with great pride: managing his own furniture-making business, acting as a part-time sales agent for a pyramid-selling scheme—all while carving out time in the evening to help his sons with their school homework. Although he is not a reformist, he often compares with satisfaction his efforts “to give my family the best” to the attitudes of those many Muslim men who “sit the whole day in the bazaar chatting and drinking tea” and then proceed to spend every evening with friends, returning home only late at night when the children are already asleep. While new forms of conjugality and family life are being promoted by reformists, bazaar-specific forms of everyday male sociality have become the target of public critique.
Bazaar Sociality
In a Muslim-dominated neighborhood such as Thekkepuram—bordering the bazaar area—where trade and commerce are the main cultural, if not economic, referents of many men,Footnote 26 face-to-face relationships are valued and cultivated on a daily basis. Timber, rice, copra, or spice merchants, as well as other men involved in these businesses, are connected through overlapping webs of kinship and friendship—often spanning across generations—forming partnerships to expand business or to enter in new ventures. Trust and credit, central to success in the bazaar as much as in emerging businesses, depend directly on merchants' reputation and connections.Footnote 27 Indeed, Hindu and Muslim competitors alike fear Muslims' ability to mobilize substantial capital through relations of kinship and friendships. To a large extent, then, business, kinship, and friendship are inseparable, part and parcel of the bazaar economy, and crucial to community identity.
Everyday forms of male sociality have been produced historically at the intersection of bazaar economy, matrilineal kinship, and practices of gender segregation.Footnote 28 When men talk about the heyday of the bazaar—from the 1940s to early 1980s—they never fail to mention that the demands of business were such as to require traders and their staff to spend days and nights in their shops, eating and sleeping there for days on stretch as business required. Not only did they entertain clients—Gulf Arabs in particular—but feasted each other in their warehouses on a regular basis. Philanthropic projects underpinning Kozhikode Muslims' modernism in the first half of the twentieth century drew inspiration from the business interests and sociopolitical aspirations of competing groups of bazaar traders. In the meantime, political as well as religious sectarian affiliations unfolded along similar lines, connecting men through trade, kinship, and friendship. In other words, Thekkepuram's political and economic history—the sudden emergence of business alliances among men belonging to traditionally competing tharavadus, Footnote 29 for example—cannot be fully explained without taking into consideration the long-term unfolding of affective relations among men.
But bazaar life also had a much lighter side. In the evening men gathered in rooms above bazaar stores and shops, known locally as mugalil sanghams (literally, “upstairs associations”), to gamble and drink alcohol. In the precursors of today's “community centers” and a variety of other formal and informal expressions of male sociality—which existed alongside the more established and exclusive venues of the upper middle class and elite, such as the Cosmopolitan Club and the Cricket Club—fortunes could be won or lost at cards, while gambling debts and alleged cheating led to fights and, on a few occasions, murders. These were the days when trade was buoyant and the bazaar was awash with the profits of gold smuggling. At the height of bazaar expansion, gambling stood as a metaphor for trade, underscoring the rewards and pitfalls of risk taking, while reminding traders that success depends on chance and luck as much as on business skills.Footnote 30 Gambling, like trade, is about competition, players reinforcing friendships or making enemies with equal ease. Nowadays, all but a few of these clubs have closed down; those remaining keep a low profile. Open for only a couple of nights a week, they provide men a discreet space for card playing, accompanied by a few drinks and some hotel-delivered food.
Forms of everyday male sociality, which developed in the early twentieth century, have dwindled because they are no longer sustained by the requirements of a bazaar economy, which nowadays neither attracts investments nor produces long-term employment for the younger generations. Since the 1970s oil boom, men in the eighteen- to fifty-year-old bracket have been migrating in droves to the Gulf to the extent that, putting it simply, there are not enough economically and socially active men left in Thekkepuram to reproduce organized forms of sociality. And yet, local discourse attributes the decline of mugalil sanghams to the success of open critique articulated, in particular, by Islamic reformist organizations.
The Moral Crisis of the Bazaar
The crisis of Kozhikode bazaars, then, is represented to be moral as much as economic. While no one would think of bazaar traders' rule bending as immoral—it is generally taken for granted as necessary common practice to all business people—the bazaar no longer embodies community aspirations for the good life, where ambitions have grown more expansive. Trade and business in general remain at the core of ethnic identity and masculine personal ambition, but it is now imagined in a new configuration, beyond the bazaar. The latter, associated now through memory either to the decadent forms of Westernized colonial modernity or to the past of unreformed Islam, is marked as inherently “traditional” and morally lacking. It is perceived as a fetter to a future of progress, whose referent is the Islamic modern of the Gulf or, increasingly, of Malaysia and Indonesia. Various forms of “social work” have become the expression of a more sober, engaged, and morally acceptable male sociality.
In the middle of the twentieth century, Kerala middle-class Muslims produced themselves as modern through a generalized distancing from “tradition,” be it social, economic, or, indeed, religious. Undoubtedly, reformists' success and influence comes down to their ability to join forces with the modernizing middle classes on a platform of socio-religious reforms. This orientation toward reform led eventually to a confluence of interests and orientations on issues of community progress. While only a few among the new breed of entrepreneurs, businessmen, and traders we discuss are involved in organized reformist piety movements, most nevertheless strive to live (publicly) moral lives. And yet, while they seek ways of embedding their business practices within an Islamic framework of ethics and moral responsibilities, at the same time they are committed to reorienting local Muslim subjectivities and practices toward the requirements of neoliberal capitalism. In other words, an orientation toward self-transformation through education, adoption of a “systematic” lifestyle, and a generalized rationalization of practices—which has acquired wider currency among Kerala Muslims following reformists' influence—is mobilized to sustain novel forms of capital accumulation.
Unsurprisingly, emerging entrepreneurs and businessmen invariably talk of their success as depending solely on their hard work, dedication, and business skills, where “traditional” Muslim skills of the bazaar are refined with the adoption of modern business techniques—learned in the Gulf as much as at the desks of management institutes—to achieve success. The PS Group is owned by four young brothers (two commerce graduates, the other two high school dropouts), who, together with their MBA-educated sister's husband, have monopolized the Kerala palm oil market in the space of a few years. Their father—who was one of P. K.'s partners and married the latter's sister—died when they were still at school. As soon as their elder brother finished college, he used inheritance money to start a rice wholesale shop in the bazaar and was soon joined by his three brothers. In 1994, following economic liberalization, they were able to buy a moribund government-owned flourmill, which they rapidly made profitable by sacking all the Malayali unionized workers and replacing them with illiterate Muslim laborers brought in from Bihar, in north India. By 1998 they had acquired another three mills and started to import palm oil from Malaysia, soon making a fortune by becoming the sole palm oil suppliers to government ration shops. Eventually, they built two sprawling refineries and nowadays import palm oil by the tankerfull. The elder brother has no doubt that without innovation and investment businesses disappear. “The bazaar cannot be turned to profit because the workforce is too expensive and the labor practices are too old,” he argues. “Our business, on the contrary, requires cutting-edge expertise. We import millions of rupees' worth of palm oil every month; we check every two hours the price of oil on the international commodities market and buy accordingly.” “To make savings,” the brother-in-law explains, “we are implementing backward and forward integration of our business, so we have our own lorries, refineries, and we have also bought the company that developed our computer system. As soon as the state government gives us approval, we plan to start our own palm plantations here in Kerala and hope to develop our own port facilities. To do well you must be a trend setter. The problem in Kerala is that people want to copy successful businesses, but have no expertise.”
The PS Group, not unlike other Muslim businesses that have emerged in the last fifteen years in both Kerala and the Gulf,Footnote 31 embodies a novel orientation toward progress that, just as in the middle of the twentieth century, builds upon a convergence between middle-class practices and Islamic reformist discourse. Reformism, via the central tropes of enlightenment, education, rationality, and so on, has become imbricated with more generalized ideas about progress, which resonates with middle-class aspirations. Many reputed traders are winding down their commercial activities simply because their sons—university-educated following reformist influence—are no longer interested in pursuing bazaar business.
Morality and Class
The transformation of Kozhikode economy, then, does not simply entail an involution of the bazaar, but a shift toward novel forms of capital accumulation, taking place alongside attempts to redefine labor arrangements. If the bazaars are witnessing a progressive “detrading,”Footnote 32 Kozhikode old and new retail areas (for instance, SM Street and Mavoor Road) are booming. New shop complexes, shopping malls, and department stores are dotting the urban landscape, built through a combination of local and Gulf investments and, in some instances, financed by Islamic religious organizations. Fashion, electronics, jewelery, and vehicles are the most visible and fast-moving commodities retailed here, drawing customers from neighboring towns and districts. Although trade, as we have seen, is extremely competitive, losses are rare. The owners of new shopping premises know very well that the inflationary rise of land and property prices guarantees long-term returns on their investments. Given the steady demand for premises in “good” shopping areas, traders can sell at any time the lease of their shops for a substantial profit. Importantly, the emerging retail sector absorbs all those youths who, a generation ago, would have sought employment in the bazaars. Even as a temporary occupation taken up while waiting in the hope of getting a better-paid job in the Gulf or Bangalore, working as a shop assistant or managing a shop on behalf of a relative have a greater pull over a generation of educated and fashion-conscious youths.
In the meantime, the most successful players in the emerging economy have championed the introduction of new labor arrangements. Getting rid of local unionized workers, employing cheap labor from North India on a hire-and-fire basis, and extensive subcontracting are practices that have acquired increased legitimacy on the strength of the success of Gulf economies where they are implemented as a matter of fact. We encountered earlier P. K., who broke new ground in buying, modernizing, and making profitable an ailing government-owned steel plant. His success involved engaging in a bitter and long dispute with unionized workers and eventually breaking their strike, a path followed by other entrepreneurs. Nowadays, not only medium-size factories, but also small production units—in textiles and jewelery, for instance—employ non-Malayali workers, even when local skilled labor is readily available. In the bazaars, whenever possible, traders undermine organized manual labor by unloading goods in their own gated premises, which are excluded from government-sponsored pay agreements between unions and employers.Footnote 33 Importantly, bazaar laborers come under the criticism of local Muslim entrepreneurs not only for their traditionally militant stanceFootnote 34—leading to those high handling charges and restrictive labor practices that, allegedly, have diminished the competitiveness of local markets—but also because they practice devotional forms of Islamic religiosity.Footnote 35
New Muslim entrepreneurs' enthusiasm for the sharp business and labor practices of global capitalism reveals, then, the unfolding of a class-specific road map for the community's development. Ordinary Muslims are encouraged to embrace “modern Western education” and to learn English in order to compete in the global labor market, but they are also asked to accept “flexible” labor practices, the key to future employment. However, unlike the Turkish or Malaysian cases, Islamic reformism in Kerala, strongly influenced by state-wide progressive politics, has not yet abandoned condemnation of the “excesses of Western capitalism.” If anything, international political events of the last ten years have sharpened critique. Only an Islamic renaissance, reformists argue, can rid Kerala of the social problems—decline of family, consumerism, pornography—brought to bear on Muslim lives by globalization and in the meantime set the basis for counteracting “Western imperialism.” What is envisaged, as in the (often faintly romantic) talk about a revitalized dar-ul-Islam, is a properly Islamic globalized modernity that provides a moral framework for capitalist activity.
Conclusions
We have discussed some of the tensions, contradictions, and slippages that inform Kozhikode Muslims' experiences of economic change. We have mapped out the emergence of an economy of morality that, at times, draws together neoliberal and Islamists' orientations in the pursuit of community and individual progress. This takes the form of a generalized distancing from what are locally perceived as “outmoded traditions” in economic and religious practices alike. And yet, the relationship between discourse and practice is complex and contradictory. In the making of the P. S. Group's success, for example, extensive familial and political connections are recognized to have been as important as was the commitment to modern technocratic know-how. A number of Kerala Muslim entrepreneurs have made it big in the Gulf because, as we have argued elsewhere, they have combined cutting-edge management techniques with networking skills.Footnote 36 They thrive in the Gulf because they understand the politics of wasta and have developed close relations with Arabs, but they also benefit from close links with politicians who support their investments in Kerala. Eventually, success in the neoliberal economy depends just as much on connections, games of chance, and luck as it does on technocratic management and rational calculation. At the same time, a good dose of calculation and pragmatism informs engagement with the ethical demands of Islamic reformism. Entrepreneurs needing to rely on modern banking argue, for example, that the sin of usury (riba) applies to lenders and not to borrowers, leaving them free to rely on bank or government loans to expand their businesses. Reformism, likewise, is never disembedded but is also always deeply inflected by the specific historical and sociopolitical context in which it develops; so that, for instance, the orientation of transnational movements (for instance, Jamaati-I-Islami on crucial issues such as women's participation in communal prayers) varies considerably not just between India and Pakistan, but also between north India and Kerala.Footnote 37 In practice, then, even Islamist organizations make compromises, shift position, and offer pragmatic concessions that might take them away from their own avowed policy fundamentals.
We have also argued that local discourse underscores the inseparability of economic practice from religious identity and descent. In drawing connections and suggesting continuities—albeit imagined and mediated through novel orientations and sensibilities—between former glories and aspirations for a future of “progress” and success, it charts trajectories for dealing with what are locally perceived to be the shortcomings and challenges of the present. As we have demonstrated, Kozhikode traders and entrepreneurs are neither external nor peripheral to “globalization.” On the contrary, they are, as they always have been, deeply concerned with exploiting existing opportunities and creating new forms of capital accumulation well beyond the confines of the “local.” Discussions about the deleterious effects of globalization, then, are not simply reflections on the transformation of the bazaar economy and the emergence of new players. They emphasize that economic success depends on and articulates with the unfolding of complex local and transnational relations to which social actors participate simultaneously as subjects and objects.
As one might expect, the production of a discourse linking religious virtuosity to economic performance cannot but be fraught with unevenness, slippages, and tensions. Even for the most successful among the new elite of transnational entrepreneurs and professionals, participation in the global economy is not a straightforward affair. In the Gulf, Indian Muslim entrepreneurs have to operate within hierarchies of race and nationality running against the grain of those neoliberal ideals of meritocracy and open market competition to which these men are apparently committed. And while back in India the most successful transnational businessmen are celebrated as the embodiment of a bold and competitive “Global India Plc”—through the prestigious awards conferred to them, for example—they are simultaneously marginalized as Muslims. Meanwhile, at home in Kerala, they are often stigmatized as aggressive speculators. Similarly, appeals to pan-Islamism and a Muslim brotherhood made at home to encourage mutuality and to express community solidarity might sound hollow to many migrants whose experience in the Gulf is that of “second-class Muslims.” To complicate matters even further, in Kerala—as in the Hindu hegemony of India more generally—open support of pan-Islamic ideals increasingly draws accusation of disloyalty to the nation.Footnote 38
Contradictions and ambiguities revealed by lived experiences cannot be explained away by using a framework of defective or incomplete penetration of modernizing projects, in business as much as in matters of religion. Neither the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries nor India are marginal or external to the development and workings of neoliberal capitalism. Their rapid development and economic success, for example, based upon substantial deregulations of labor markets, puts them at the forefront of a global capitalism seeking unfettered access to accumulation. What we find here is that the universalizing discourse of neoliberalism—the dream of self-regulating markets disembedded from social, cultural, or political straitjackets—is at its very heart utterly implicated in the production of practices—central to its global working—that differentiate and advantage players on the basis of anything but purely economic criteria.Footnote 39 Strict regulation of migration and a fragmentation of labor markets according to hierarchies of race and ethnicity, for example, are intrinsic to the operation and success of GCC economies. And in Kerala, as much as in the Gulf, modern technocratic know-how remains indissoluble from bazaar-style social skills of “know-who.” The importance of social networks and social identities to business is by no means an imperfect moment in the wider sweep of the neoliberal project but is, we argue, a foundational feature of economic practice under global capitalism.Footnote 40 Meanwhile, in Kerala as elsewhere, Islamic reformism emerges within the “modern,” as a universalistic and rationalizing orientation (often, though mistakenly, compared to the Christian Reformation). As we have argued elsewhere, reformism is articulated in a complex dialogue with (at times in opposition to) colonial and postcolonial “Western” modernities, whereby an orientation toward universalism—through notions of pan-Islamism or of Muslim brotherhood—has to contend on the one hand with regimes of difference based on race, culture, class, and gender, and on the other with the inevitable determination of specific historical contexts.Footnote 41
Recent studies have traced out capital attempts to harness moral discourses produced within various religious traditions to foster novel work ethics and labor practices in tune with the demands of global markets.Footnote 42 At the same time, researchers have identified the emergence, on a global scale, of religious practices and theologies seeking to harness and control the opportunities engendered by global capitalism.Footnote 43 In Kozhikode, as we have seen, both processes proceed alongside each other, forcing us to analyze them together: Emerging entrepreneurs employ the discourse of reformist Islam to shore up and legitimize their long-term economic interests at the same time as Islamic reformism publicly asserts its authority over, and critique of, entrepreneurs' economic practices.Footnote 44 This, we argue, is neither unusual nor exceptional but, on the contrary, reveals the shortcomings of social theory that, in seeking to establish functional relations between formally defined domains of social practice—“economy” and “religion”—reduces one field to an epiphenomenon of the other.Footnote 45 Drawing on Geeta Patel's analysis of the relationship between sexuality and capital in post-liberalization India, we suggest that people do not engage in economic practices as already “moralized” subjects in the same way as capital does not occupy “a space external to and distinct” from morality.Footnote 46 That is, economic and religious practice alike entail processes of subjectivationFootnote 47 or habituation,Footnote 48 the inculcation and cultivation of qualities and dispositions in and through which social actors are produced and produce themselves as moral subjects and historical agents. The ethnography we presented suggests that relationships between the discourses/practices of neoliberalism and Islamic reformism cannot be reduced either to structural determination or elective affinity but are contingent upon historical configurations of power allowing for the articulation of specific socially located interests, orientations, and aesthetics.Footnote 49
It is not academics alone who produce essentialist and dichotomizing understandings of social practice, nor is such a “work of purification” exclusive to modernity.Footnote 50 Social actors themselves do objectify economic action and religiosity as separate socio-moral domains whose interaction is of wider concern. Yet, in other historical contexts, such an opposition is softened or dissolved altogether.Footnote 51 The conversations and debates that we have presented suggest that Kozhikode Muslims—unlike economists or Wall Street traders and bankers—recognize that economic rationality and pragmatism are not morally neutral. Economic practice—requiring as it does specific subjectivities, embodied disciplines, and structures of feeling to produce and reproduce itself—is necessarily wedded to notions of morality, even at the point of asserting its radical “amorality” and disembeddedness. At the same time, our respondents' experiences and reflections underscore the centrality of specific forms of material exchange and of economic engagement to the objectification of everyday religious experience.Footnote 52
