South Asia and the moral economy of charity

Modalities, ideologies, and aesthetics of giving undergird or are constitutive of a wide range of socio-cultural practices in South Asia, from those concerning the reproduction of caste status, kinship relations, and political patronage, to those objectifying specific soteriologies or religious rituals.Footnote ¹² Indeed, there is a rich vocabulary to define and differentiate the scope and direction of non-reciprocal modalities of giving—dana as ritual gift, dakshina as ritual payment, and bhiksha as alms, for instance—as well as their obligatory or voluntary nature—for example, the annual obligation to give zakat as opposed to the voluntary nature of sadaqa. Whilst the boundaries between different forms of giving might be blurred—typically between dana and dakshina, or between zakat and sadaqa—such a vocabulary underscores the different religious genealogies of practices such as those evoked by the notions of dana and zakat. At the same time, the multivocality of dana affords a shared language to differentiate non-reciprocal forms of giving from other prestations, as well as a means to encompass novel practices such as blood or organ donations that have become visible in more recent decades.Footnote ¹³ Whilst contributors to this collection are cognisant that positing hard and fast conceptual boundaries between different forms of giving in South Asia might run the risk of drawing accusations of unwarranted essentialism or facile reductionism, the articles in this volume build upon a time-honoured South Asianist scholarship to concentrate on modalities of giving ostensibly directed towards the public good—in whatever forms the latter might be conceptualized in different historical and social contexts—to reflect on the interests, connections, and imaginary they entail and evoke.

Alms to mendicants, contributions—whether of money, time, or in kind—to support the upliftment of individuals and communities, gifts to religious or secular organizations providing services or social protection, blood and organ donations, and such are acts that might be glossed as expressive of charitable or philanthropic dispositions, and indeed be analysed as such. The complex histories of South Asian modalities of giving should warn us, however, of the perils of such a move. The issue is not simply one of translation: canonical modalities of giving in South Asia—dana or zakat, for instance—cannot be glossed too easily by European or North American notions of charity. Charity and philanthropy are culturally and ideologically loaded terms, relating to modalities of giving embedded in a specific (theological, economic, and political) genealogy of Christian-secular understandings of relations between self and other, altruism and self-interest, immanence and transcendence.Footnote ¹⁴ In Europe, this history is oft—and unhelpfully—represented as a linear shift, from mediaeval and early modern Christian charity—a means to ensure personal salvation through acts of mercy and generosity—to nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanitarian philanthropy: the responsibility to alleviate the actual conditions of suffering of an undifferentiated humanity that is associated with the emergence of a liberal bourgeois self at the interstices of modern capitalism and protestant reformation.Footnote ¹⁵ Importantly, this universalizing teleology is undergirded by normative assumptions concerning the nature of charitable giving—namely its disinterested and non-reciprocal characterFootnote ¹⁶—against which historically or culturally specific practices of giving are benchmarked, and inevitably found wanting. Pitting altruism and self-interest against each other leads predictably—and unproductively, I might add—to questioning motivations and legitimacy whenever actual practice diverges, as it unavoidably does, from formal definitions of what constitute charity or pertains to economic practice.Footnote ¹⁷

The history of European charity, however, reveals degrees of complexity that ill fit modernist teleologies or ideal types, thus allowing us to dislodge South Asian modalities of giving from the iron cage of cultural exceptionalism. In late mediaeval Christian monastic institutions, for instance, the establishment of lay orders that protected and advanced monastic interests allowed the acceptance and management of substantial charitable donations without impinging on theologies of apostolic poverty and a soteriology of salvation.Footnote ¹⁸ And whilst in mediaeval Europe charitable donations to monasteries and to the poor entailed various degrees of self-interested calculation for the sake of salvationFootnote ¹⁹ as well as expectations of reciprocity via the prayers and blessings extended by recipients,Footnote ²⁰ in post-reformation England, charity to the poor was seldom anonymous and hidden. Donors to Protestant alms-houses expected to gain spiritual reward, ‘not only through the gift itself but through the ongoing prayers of the beneficiaries’.Footnote ²¹ At the same time, in sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic and Protestant charities established to provide respite from rapacious moneylenders, themselves lent money at an interest, and used the latter to support the poor. And, in Calvinist Germany, ‘deacons encouraged recipients of alms, especially those capable of working, to regard them as loans rather than gifts’.Footnote ²² In an opposite move, in sixteenth-century Catholic Spain, economic loans were represented as a generous act of (charitable) gift giving that elicited a counter-gift (antidora) from the recipient, rather than a repayment with accrued interests. Here, the vertical and horizontal integrative force of Christian charity—connecting the donor to God and to a community of brethren, respectively—was rhetorically privileged over the ostensibly immoral world of barefaced commerce and usury.Footnote ²³ That is, pace to differences between Catholic and Protestant theologies, there appear to be as much continuity as breaks in the history of Christian charity in Europe that undermine linear teleologies. Moreover, we find that both charity and commerce entail quantification, calculation, and careful accounting, suggesting that the economy of the market and the economy of piety can easily come together to sustain modalities of accumulation in which material wealth and spiritual merits might appear simultaneously as incommensurable and sustaining each other.

Two hundred years later, the instrumental and self-interested nature of eighteenth-century English charity is revealed in Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith's respective critiques of those who ‘stressed the identity of charitable virtue and mercantile interests’.Footnote ²⁴ Mandeville dismissed merchants’ charity as driven by ‘lust and vanity’ rather than Christian virtue; for Adam Smith, charity reproduced relations of patronage and dependency through which the poor were reduced to a condition of degrading quasi-slavery. For both, charity neither improved the lives of the poor nor did it enhance the economic prosperity of the nation, fostering instead dependency, sloth, and profligacy.Footnote ²⁵ The eventual waning of the moral economy of mercantilism paved the way to the formulation of novel techniques and pedagogies for reforming the poor via moral and vocational education extended by a plethora of charitable institutions. This is a major theme in nineteenth-century British philanthropy with its stress on ‘the deserving poor’, which was accompanied by an awareness of the potentially transforming impact of giving, but also the realization this might not lead to changes in life outcomes for recipients.Footnote ²⁶ Projects of socio-moral reform articulated through charitable interventions thus came to serve as prosthetics to the working of free-market commerce and enterprise.

Historically, then, the worlds of charity, economic practice, and political calculation have seldom been apart—a connection that has led some researchers to represent modern charity, perhaps too narrowly, as capitalism's handmaiden.Footnote ²⁷ In fact, religiosity continued to play an important role in various forms of modern charitable giving, so that nineteenth-century German nouveau riche gave liberally to cleanse themselves of the stink of new money.Footnote ²⁸ Here, the transformative nature of charitable and voluntary actions is quite clear: making saints out of sinners; absolving the giver of the taint of evil; mobilizing self-interest for the common good; or, more generally, creating pious subjects for a New Jerusalem.Footnote ²⁹ But this transformative effect is not limited to the world of the religious giver. The literature on more ostensibly secular philanthropists, for example, biographies of Rockefeller and Carnegie—not to mention the hagiographical literature on the so-called ‘new philanthropists’—are also replete with references to the transformative power of giving.Footnote ³⁰ Thus we find that amongst contemporary philanthropists—especially those participating in the tradition of North American individual and corporate giving animating powerful philanthropic foundations and charitable trustsFootnote ³¹—a rhetoric attributing accumulation of wealth solely to entrepreneurial skills, hard work, and virtuosity turns economic success into a moral responsibility to foster the common good. Here, the moral discourse of philanthropic benevolence not only engenders interventions that complement or replace altogether state welfare—thus producing influential clusters or networks of governance—but legitimizes and naturalizes class inequalities, and the privileges of elites whose philanthropic endeavours ostensibly trigger the trickle-down of wealth on society as a whole.Footnote ³² And yet, the opportunities afforded by charity and philanthropy of making economic success equivalent to moral worth have not been exploited solely by contemporary philanthrocapitalists in North America and beyond. From Renaissance ItalyFootnote ³³ and Ottoman TurkeyFootnote ³⁴ to late-Ming ChinaFootnote ³⁵ and, as I will discuss below, South Asia, emerging elites mobilized charitable giving not only to establish networks and build social connections, or to secure political alliances and elicit allegiances, but also to claim participation in, and eventually transform, existing hierarchies of status from the tainted position of the upstart nouveau riche.

We have seen that, in the history of Christian charity in Europe, immanence and transcendence went hand in hand regardless of theologies asserting the contrary, whilst European and North American philanthropy allow the simultaneous objectification of projects of individual self-aggrandizement and moral virtuosity. Moreover, the ingenuity of actual practice is such that it can ensure the smoothing-out of tensions between worldly passions and other-worldly yearnings. This is exemplified by the establishment of Christian lay orders entrusted to administer pious endowments without impinging on monastic asceticism, or by the translation of economic action into the language of Christian fellowship and charity.Footnote ³⁶ That is, the complex and contradictory history of ‘Western’ traditions of charitable or philanthropic giving destabilizes attempts to plot South Asian charity on a traditional/modern grid and, in so doing, allows us to consider instead specific instances through which social actors might bring together or keep apart the apparently contradictory qualities and expansive potentials of giving. When the contributors to this special issue employ notions such as ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’, then, they are mindful of the shortcomings of teleologies of giving that confine some practices to the realm of tradition and others to modernity, but also of the debates and technologies through which in colonial and post-colonial South Asia various modalities of giving come to be imagined and practised in the idioms of charity and philanthropy.

Historical ethnography of giving in South Asia

Reverend Samuel Mateer, a zealous London Missionary Society minister who spent more than 30 years (from 1859 to 1891) in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore on the south-west coast of India, described the place as

This is not an expression of charity Mateer condones. ‘[T]he influential classes,’ he continues, ‘are united in the support and defence of this formidable system of imposture and superstition.’Footnote ³⁸ After recounting the grandeur of royal festivals conducted at the Padmanabhaswamy temple, he lists the substantial expenses incurred for the various celebration to conclude that ‘much evil arises from the gluttony, disorder, and vice incidental upon the attendance of these crowds of sensual idolaters’.Footnote ³⁹

Mateer's lurid rhetoric is somewhat predictable. After all, his writing is directed to stir the repugnance of a God-fearing English audience whose Christian charity must be elicited to sustain the proselytizing efforts of the London Missionary Society in South India. Indeed, much of Mateer's book is devoted to reporting the spread of the Gospel in Travancore amongst ‘untouchable and slave castes’. Confidently, he reassures his readers that the charitable efforts of mission schools and hospitals were leading to the moral enlightenment of the ‘heathens’, as well as to the spread of novel dispositions towards industry and progress. He is also keen to distance Protestant missions from their Catholic counterparts who face far less opposition from upper-caste Hindus in that, Mateer notes, ‘in common with Hindus they practice image worship, processions and pompous ceremonies [and] they observe caste to some extent’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Reverend Mateer encouraged his readers to compare the wastefulness of native, as well as Catholic, charity to the enlightened charitable work of Protestant missions and the civilizing endeavour of empire.Footnote ⁴¹ The targets of his narrative are modalities of giving constitutive of pre-colonial Hindu kingship in South India, whereby donations to temple deities and Brahmins not only lent moral and political legitimacy to rulers, but allowed the integration of an otherwise fragmented polity,Footnote ⁴² as well as the accommodation of landowning or trading communities.Footnote ⁴³ As upholder of dharma, the ruler—either caretaker of the royal deity or by virtue of partaking in the divine substance of a deityFootnote ⁴⁴—participated in the hierarchical redistributions of ritual honours and resources flowing from temples. Although, by the time of British colonial expansion, the contours of such a galactic polityFootnote ⁴⁵—constituted by exchanges between rulers, local elites, and deities—were more marked in South India, elsewhere in the subcontinent, comparable politics of giving undergirded statecraft. Unlike previous Muslim ruling dynasties who established religious endowments (awqaf) to support mosques and madrassas, Mughal rulers made substantial personal grants to pirs and religious scholars as acts of piety and devotion, and to ensure ‘the loyalty, or at least acquiescence, of the prominent . . . religious lineages of Hindustan’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, in Ceylon, kingship was objectified and legitimated through the flow of gifts from rulers to the Buddhist sangha and laity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Beyond the realm of pre-colonial kingship, donations to temples, Brahmins, and religious institutions were part and parcel of landowning or merchant elites’ pursuit of piety, status, and reputation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Arguably, public performances of expansive munificence towards actual and would-be clients continue to this day to sustain and objectify South Asian big men and women's political ambitions at local and national level.Footnote ⁴⁹

What Reverend Mateer calls ‘native charity’ was more than a tool for the art of governing, but constituted—ontologically and practically—actual polities as well as economies. Across South Asia, land granted to temples, mosques, madrassas, and monasteries was rented out to various constituencies.Footnote ⁵⁰ South Indian temples used the revenues from endowments to lend money to traders and farmers, securing interest on repayments.Footnote ⁵¹ Merchants could utilize endowments to family temples and deities as a reserve of capital to finance debts or creditFootnote ⁵²; donations to temples allowed merchants to access novel markets and expand trade networks in South Asia and beyond.Footnote ⁵³ That is, pious dispositions and economic or political interests did not stand at opposite poles of the moral spectrum, but mutually constituted each other through various modalities of giving.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the rush to denounce the moral depravity of the ‘heathens’, Reverend Mateer had no inclination to interrogate the political and economic consequences of Christian charity extended by Protestant missions to South Indians. By the end of the nineteenth century, extensive conversions of members of ‘untouchable’ communities became a demographic threat to the caste-based politics of the Hindu princely state of Travancore, leading eventually to the abolition of rules restricting access to government employment, education, and temples to avarna Hindus.Footnote ⁵⁵ Protestant missionaries encouraged and facilitated the recruitment of converted ex-untouchable agricultural labourers as indentured coolie labour for the colonial plantation economy.Footnote ⁵⁶ These, I argue, are not unfortunate spillages of self-interested instrumentalism onto an idealized virtuous altruism of charity. In the practice of giving in South Asia, as much as in Europe or North America, interest and disinterest materialize as different sides of the same coin.Footnote ⁵⁷ Here, I am not seeking to gloss over the complex soteriological underpinnings and theological interpretations that differentiate practices of religious giving in South Asia or to deny their heterogeneity and historicity. Rather than imagining an implausible South Asian ‘culture of giving’, I simply underscore the productive power of giving that can be at best controlled or contained, but not entirely erased even when its returns might be utterly other-worldly and immaterial, as in promises of eventual salvation and release from cycles of rebirth,Footnote ⁵⁸ or in the ‘warm glow’ ensuing from secular practices of humanitarian giving.Footnote ⁵⁹ I also note that the sacrificial nature of givingFootnote ⁶⁰ entails both purification of the self and a notion of increase. What is given is returned multiplied, either as merits for the afterlife and/or wealth, fortune, and auspiciousness in this life. The merit economy of giving, that is, might—and does—produce material returns and underpin actual economies.

Colonialism, modernity, and the making of charity and philanthropy in South Asia

Reverend Mateer's avant-lettre Weberian narrative of inevitable rationalization, moral enlightenment, and socio-economic progress engendered by conversion to Protestant Christianity points us to wider debates taking place in nineteenth-century South Asia concerning the purpose and scope of ‘native charity’. In the closing years of the eighteenth- and early decades of the nineteenth-century colonial administrators, missionaries and British commercial concerns haphazardly supported schools, hospitals, and famine relief.Footnote ⁶¹ Colonial charity—first extended to provide assistance to indigent Europeans left stranded in the subcontinentFootnote ⁶²—was informed by contemporary notions of charity and philanthropy shaped as much as by Protestant theologies as by the theories and practices of British utilitarianism and liberalism. Bringing together the hidden hand of providence and that of the market,Footnote ⁶³ British (and north-European) charity had morphed from an act of unconditional mercy to a means to foster the common good and, along the way, to discipline the poor, the vagrants, the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this volume, the complex and counter-intuitive history of emerging ‘native’ philanthropy in a colonial environment is brought to light in Sumathi Ramaswamy's account of the posthumous making of Pachaiyappa Mudaliar—a notoriously sharp Tamil dubash—into the archetypical example of a modern benefactor who lived for the public good. Ironically, it was not Pachaiyappa Mudaliar's intention to bequeath his fortunes to modern learning, but the outcome of a protracted litigation over his inheritance for about half a century led the colonial state to appropriate the accumulated surplus for the foundation of the first native educational trust in the Madras Presidency. As a result, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar's life—purged of the unsavoury means through which he had accumulated his wealth—was memorialized as the embodiment of an ethical model of public service to be emulated by generations to come.

By the 1830s, South Asian merchants and entrepreneurial elites—whose trading interests had become dependent on a close interaction with the practices and cultures of the colonial economy—were encouraged to turn the largesse of their alms giving and religious endowments to the same purpose. From AllahabadFootnote ⁶⁵ and SuratFootnote ⁶⁶ to Bombay,Footnote ⁶⁷ Madras,Footnote ⁶⁸ and Colombo,Footnote ⁶⁹ participation in charitable initiatives prompted by colonial administration and British businesses, as well as the patronage of local institutions, arts, and culture—endeavours often rewarded with colonial titles and honours—afforded the emerging indigenous elites novel means to establish individual status and trustworthiness, to build political careers, to gain the goodwill of the colonial administration, and to participate in emerging politics of community building and assertion.Footnote ⁷⁰ Wealthy anglophile Gujarati and Parsee businessmen and entrepreneurs such as Jamsetji Jejeebhoy, Jamsetji Tata, Sir Dinshaw Petit, and Premchand Roychand—who, in some cases, had made substantial fortunes in the early nineteenth century through the trade of opium to ChinaFootnote ⁷¹—are exemplary figures of such a shift.Footnote ⁷² Brian Hatcher's article in this special issue takes inspiration from the writings of the Brahmo thinker Rajnarain Bose to delineate the contours of the intellectual environment of early colonial Calcutta that fostered the proliferation of expansive forms of modern associationism and philanthropy. Taking issue with both nationalist and post-colonial historiography, he recuperates the notion of ‘imitation’ to characterize a period of intense cultural elaboration that saw the reappraisal of existing modalities of public life, and the appropriation of colonial notions and practices of civic engagement. Short-lived as it might have been, such a process of creative imitation allowed the articulation of novel political and social sensibilities underpinning the emergence of a modern civil society. However, Ritu Birla's article in this collection reminds us that colonial cajoling of merchant and intellectual elites went hand in hand with the introduction of regulations seeking to define clear boundaries between hitherto overlapping practices of private—that is, directed to the benefit of the extended family or lineage—and public charity. Starting with the 1860 Societies Act, successive colonial legislation limited the scope of a time-honoured tradition of religious-cum-charitable endowments,Footnote ⁷³ establishing along the way a novel rhetoric of public duty. Colonial juridical interventions that introduced the instrument of the trust, Birla argues, inserted a wedge between the realm of self-interested profit-making and charity—redefining the latter in terms of ‘general public utility’. By doing so, it simultaneously disembedded the market from the responsibilities entailed in existing modalities of social co-dependency and, via the introduction of fiscal regulations and tax exemptions, turned charity ‘as a problem of the distribution of profit’,Footnote ⁷⁴ making it a matter of market governance through which the social whole could be brought within the reach of economic calculation.

Colonial recasting of ‘native charity’ in the idiom of common good and public utility began to chime with the politics of religious and community reforms animating late nineteenth-century South Asia.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Hatcher and Kasturi show in this volume, emerging religious, civic, and caste associations joined colonial critiques of traditional modalities of religious giving to call on the economic resources and time of a newly constituted modern public to support cultural enlightenment, religious reform, and social progress.Footnote ⁷⁶ The call of socio-religious reformism was answered in earnest by established commercial or banking elites, but also by the emerging urban middle class, constitutive of a novel aesthetic of self-making, individual and collective agency, and public visibility.Footnote ⁷⁷ Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for instance, could draw on donations and support from wealthy Muslims to establish the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University)—an institution that became the template for modern Muslim education across the subcontinent, from Peshawar to Colombo.Footnote ⁷⁸ Charity, then, took up the explicit pedagogical scope of transforming the spiritual and material wellbeing, as well as the cultural and social dispositions, of donors and recipients, as Ramaswamy also suggests in her article for this volume. Such an impetus toward eliciting individual and collective social responsibility brought together nineteenth-century colonial discourses about the idleness of the non-working poor, the moral value of education and work, and the profligacy of ‘idolatrous superstitions’ with various strands of Hindu,Footnote ⁷⁹ Buddhist,Footnote ⁸⁰ and IslamicFootnote ⁸¹ reformism and revivalism. The articulation of novel imaginations of charitable giving and the introduction of legal frameworks for the regulation of charitable institutions, however, were often contested and, as Malavika Kasturi discusses in her article in this collection, fraught with tension and contradictions. We find that north Indian sectarian monastic orders that colonial legislation had classified as private rather than charitable institutions faced the challenge of Hindu reformist organizations—the Hindu Mahasabha, for instance—over the administration and (mis)use of wealth donated by devotees. Whilst, in the first half of the twentieth century, monastic orders did not yield to reformist demands to turn themselves into charitable trusts devoted to supporting the constitution of an expansive Hindu national community, Kasturi goes on to show that, in post-independence India, they deployed reformist notions of charity as a means to shore up their own project of socio-religious transformation of a Hindu public.

South Asian anti-colonial nationalism stimulated further conceptual and practical transformations of indigenous charity into service (seva) for the moral, cultural, and economic upliftment of the soon-to-become independent nations—such ideas also fuelled by the Gandhian emphasis on sarvodaya (welfare for all). Although none of the contributors to this collection focuses on Gandhi, the Mahatma's intervention in twentieth-century understandings of philanthropy through his writings on the concept of trusteeship are important to flag. The doctrine of trusteeship was the compromise that enabled Gandhi to hold onto two key ethical principles: aparigraha (non-possession) and ahimsa (non-violence). The ‘sin’ of wealth accumulation in the hands of a few could be ‘non-violently’ mitigated by persuading the capitalist that he held his riches in trust on behalf of those who after all helped him accumulate his capital. In his own lifetime, Gandhi had a few spectacular successes in winning over some capitalist acolytes to his cause in men like G. D. Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj. The bhoodan (land-gift) and gramdan (village-gift) movements led by the Gandhian activist Vinoba Bhave also carried forward such ideas in the immediate aftermath of Indian independence. Although Gandhian trusteeship is frequently dismissed as a pipe dream, it is worth our scholarly attention, especially if we see it as a serious attempt to provincialize Andrew Carnegie's pronouncements in this regard that emerges from the subcontinent.Footnote ⁸² In a parallel move, the political theology of Abu al-Ala Maududi—the founder of Jama'at Islam—sets almsgiving, zakat, and sadaqa as a means to provide social welfare in a future polity that would be inspired neither by capitalism nor communism, but by Islamic principles of mutuality and redistribution.Footnote ⁸³

Post-colonial politics of giving in South Asia

In contemporary India, the rhetoric of seva and enlightened service continues to be mobilized by secular, religious, or community-based organizations to elicit donations from a (oft transnational) public of followers, devotees, and well-wishers to sustain countless public initiatives, from building a simple roadside bus shelter, to constructing and running super-speciality hospitals and colleges, as in the case, amongst countless others, of the Kerala-based Mata Amritanandamayi Mission. Built in 1981 to fulfil the Mother's spiritual duty ‘to alleviate humanity's suffering’, the Mission nowadays ‘runs a wide network of charitable and other institutions in India, ranging from orphanages, hospices and a high-cost “multi-super-speciality” hospital in Kerala, to modern schools, computer institutes, and engineering and management colleges’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Inspired by Christian missionary practicesFootnote ⁸⁵and Hindu reformist traditions,Footnote ⁸⁶ organizations such as the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission bring together market principles and charitable endeavour to deliver services, particularly in the fields of education and health.Footnote ⁸⁷ There is little doubt that the aesthetics of associationism and voluntarism inspired by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious reformism, nationalist politics, and middle-class modernism to which Hatcher alludes continue to inspire the rhetoric and practices of contemporary charities. However, much charitable activity often takes place within the ambit of individual religious traditions or communities. This is most obvious where the results of charitable activity are the construction of religious buildings, mosques, temples, and churches, but it is also clear that individual or collective acts of charity tend to link givers and receivers within the same community, or they are imagined to do so. More generally, there is a degree of tension between particularistic and universalistic approaches to charity and a continual questioning as to whether or not charity should be aimed at ‘our own’ or to a broader humanitarian constituency. As Kasturi demonstrates in her article—and underscored in recurrent allegations about the possible instrumental use of charity to foster religious conversionsFootnote ⁸⁸—the social body of the post-colonial nation interpellated and mobilized through charity is indeed experienced in practice through the lenses of community, religion, or region.

In post-colonial India, changes in corporate governance, the emergence of new large corporate players, and political demands for a more decisive contribution by private businesses to national developmental have also impelled the work of existing charitable foundations, and to the consolidation of corporate philanthropy,Footnote ⁸⁹ the precursor of contemporary programmes of corporate social responsibility (CSR).Footnote ⁹⁰ Take the case of a transnational corporation such as Tata, whose founding partners were Parsee.Footnote ⁹¹ One of India's oldest, largest, and most established companies, Tata has been engaged in philanthropic activities since its establishment in 1868.Footnote ⁹² Instrumental not only in the development of Indian heavy industry, but in the funding of the independence movement, Tata enjoyed a close relationship with the Indian National Congress since its inceptionFootnote ⁹³ and, in post-liberalization India, it has become a standard-bearer for CSR.Footnote ⁹⁴ The new philanthrocapitalism—which encompasses CSR—promises an alternative to state-led development, in which the social and environmental costs of rapid industrialization may well be ameliorated by business itself.Footnote ⁹⁵ CSR is often presented as a radical break from colonial forms of industrial philanthropy and post-colonial paternalism but, like its predecessors, it continues to be a means to negotiate relations with state and market, and to objectify pious dispositions. In Sri Lanka, for instance, Muslim owners of family-run businesses discharge their obligation to give zakat and sadaqa by funnelling funds into their companies’ CSR programmes. At the same time, the latter might be deployed to support government initiatives, as a means to avert Sinhala-Buddhist xenophobia, which has led recently to violent anti-Muslim campaigns.Footnote ⁹⁶ That since 1980 in Pakistan, zakat is collected and distributed by the stateFootnote ⁹⁷ and a new company law introduced in India in 2013 (and amended in 2014) mandates large private and public corporations to devote 2 per cent of their average profits over three years towards CSR initiativesFootnote ⁹⁸ underscores the role of the state in regulating charity, as well as in the production of specific aesthetics and modalities of private and public giving.

Considering the genealogy of legislation regulating charitable organizations in post-independence India, Ritu Birla argues in her article for this collection that the apparent continuities between pre-colonial charity and contemporary corporate philanthropy are built first on a radical separation of charity from profit-making and later on the imbrication of the former into the latter via the articulation of the notion of ‘general public utility’ at the core of the modern charitable trust. In contemporary modalities of CSR, then, philanthropy becomes a technology of (neoliberal) governance through which ‘the rights of citizens are mediated by the responsibilities of corporations’Footnote ⁹⁹ portrayed as trustees of the nation's wealth. By folding philanthropy into the working of corporations and business, in recent legislation, the objects of CSR interventions are no longer imagined either through the intimacy of kinship and the hierarchical mutuality of caste or the political boundaries of the nation, but as members of ‘communities that are understood as the environment of business’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Tensions between ‘traditional’ forms of giving and CSR programmes are also underscored in Katy Gardner's study of the flow of philanthropy to rural Bangladesh—in an area characterized by substantial migration to Britain and, more recently, by the arrival of an international energy corporation extracting natural gas from extensive local underground reserves. Gardner explores the moral incommensurability of philanthropy extended by the Bangladeshi diaspora to their homeland and from the CSR programmes of the global energy corporation. Both modalities of philanthropic giving are clearly the outcome of the working of contemporary global capitalism. However, the former is embedded in hierarchical feelings of compassion for the suffering of known people, and in expectations of long-term support from those who have made it good through migration, which are objectified through Islamic modalities of giving. CSR interventions, on the contrary, not only seek to elide hierarchical relations between givers and receivers, but are also driven by (Christian-secular) humanitarian concerns about the fate of unknown strangers.

Gardner's article also alerts us to the fact that, whilst practices of giving have historically contributed to projects of self and community making, they have often done so on a translocal and transnational stage. South Asian trading communities have been prominent in the port cities of the Indian Ocean for centuries, constituting networks that facilitated flows of credit and commercial information,Footnote ¹⁰¹ but also in circulation of moral reasoning concerning the ways individual wealth could and should contribute to the collective good.Footnote ¹⁰² South Asian religious endowments and charity might be extended as far as the Hijaz to objectify and assert participation to the theologies, cultures, and politics of a transregional ummah,Footnote ¹⁰³ or could be mobilized to support political or humanitarian causes beyond the confines of the subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Whilst the influences of South Asian modalities of giving on the development of modern European or North American philanthropy remain largely unexplored, there is ample evidence of the increasing importance of diaspora charity on South Asian economies and politics. Diaspora communities are encouraged to make donations to formal and informal organizations supporting the development process in the native or ancestral homeland, whereby the flow of migrant remittances goes alongside the transnational circulation of charity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The economic and intellectual resources of the diaspora are also mobilized with increased regularity to sustain political life in South Asia—the ethno-nationalist movements for Khalistan or Tamil Eelam, for instance—thus engendering transnational reconfigurations of South Asian politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is not just mosques and gurudwaras, but Hindu temples as well that have become the sites for the proliferation of diaspora philanthropy, as illustrated by Siddharthan Maunaguru and Jonathan Spencer in their article for this collection. On the one hand, they document how, even in a ‘faraway’ place like the South London suburb of Tooting, the Hindu temple or kovil continues to play out its historic role as a ‘sovereign’ vehicle for receiving and reciprocity, and as a status engine that powers new ‘big men’ (periyar). On the other hand, and ironically, its very involvement in charitable work brings it to the (unwanted) attention of the Charity Commission of England and Wales, reminding us that the regulatory apparatus of the modern state is the principal means through which the ‘good work’ of philanthropy is brought to heel, so to speak.

Indeed, a ‘professional’ approach to charity built around notions of bureaucratic efficiency and economic efficacy, as well as the discourse of charity-as-development, has become currency in charitable organizations across the South Asia partly as an effect of the circulation of practices and discourses brought to the region by international charities, and mediated by their local partners. Sanam Roohi discusses in detail the professionalization and institutionalization of transnational philanthropy. As in Gardner's case, we find that skilled and professional Telugu migrants who have settled in North America maintain strong connections with and presence in their homeland via philanthropic donations that individuals and migrant organizations send regularly from the United States of America to coastal Andhra Pradesh. Here, however, Roohi identifies apparent transformations in the ethics and practices of philanthropic giving. In recent years, the form of responsive giving based on hierarchies of class and status that we also encountered in Gardner's Bangladesh ethnography has been replaced by a novel project-focused meritocratic system directed towards ‘deserving recipients’. And yet, in emerging horizontal practices of transnational giving that draw on the tradition of North American philanthropy, meritocracy hides rather than extinguishes existing politics of caste reproduction.

Pre-colonial modalities of giving are clearly different from organized forms of charity and corporate philanthropy that emerged in South Asia since the middle of the nineteenth century, and have continued to undergo transformations in the post-independence and economic liberalization periods. Leilah Vevaina's article on Parsi philanthropy in Bombay/Mumbai resonates with Birla, Roohi, and Hatcher's attention to continuities and breaks between what Hatcher calls the ‘then and now’. During the colonial period, Parsi public charitable trusts replaced customary inheritance as a means to circulate resources across generations, shifting emphasis from kinship to community reproduction. Vevaina argues that, in recent times, the apparent demographic and social weakening of the Parsi community has engendered a shift in the direction and scope of philanthropic interventions. Time-honoured support for education, medical care, and the poor that built the unique reputation of Parsi philanthropy during colonial time has given way to programmes directed to shore up the demographic decline of the community, providing access to housing to newlywed Parsi couples, for instance. If Vevaina's article shows the bureaucratization of giving at an institutional level, anthropologist Chris Taylor's ethnographic work in Lucknow among Muslim alms givers of the old city reveals that even the individual's charitable disposition cannot escape the modern demand for accounting and accountability. The receipt (rasit) given in exchange for the voluntary charitable donation (chanda) is only one among many other print documents—fundraising flyers, forms documenting details of acts of giving, financial statements laying out moneys received and dispensed, and so on—that come to proliferate in the world of everyday charity. Alongside materializing acts of pious giving, such documents, Taylor shows, are Islamic philanthropy's answer to print capitalism even as they offer evidence of the transformation it has undergone in order to cater to the modern state's intervention in the business of building trust(s).

Whilst colonial and post-colonial modernity transformed understandings and technologies of giving, these processes of change have taken place at different speeds and not always according to a predictable teleology. Morphing the devotional idiom of seva and the sacrificial nature of dana into modern notions of humanitarianism and active citizenshipFootnote ¹⁰⁷ or mobilizing the religious obligation to give zakat for the sake of community or national development require substantial moral and epistemological shifts. The work of turning religious obligations into civic duty toward community and nation or of refashioning religious giving as humanitarian care is inevitably unstable. Although the contemporary South Asian publics respond to the fundraising appeals of charitable organizations, individuals continue to distribute a substantial part of their donations in person and to one another.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And it is through these everyday acts that the ‘impulse of giving’ reveals itself in all its complexities. In South Asian affective economies of giving, compassion for a mendicant, fear of a hijra’s curse, securing the auspiciousness of a lifecycle ritual or success in a business deal, negative planetary configurations in one's horoscope or a sudden illness, feeling responsibility for the welfare of a poor kin or neighbour, and more are all motivations for giving that might intersect with, but cannot entirely be subsumed into, ethics of religious piety, civic duty, and national or community development.

While we might ask questions about the motivation behind charitable acts, we also have to recognize the complexities and ambiguities of the context in which giving takes place. By concentrating on the intentions, orientations, and practices of givers—individuals and organizations—existing research has almost entirely erased the presence of those who receive charity or are the object of charitable interventions. This is neither an anonymous nor a heterogeneous body of recipients, and seldom are the latter passive beneficiaries of charity in whatever form it might come.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the experience of receiving is just as unruly as the practice of giving. Filippo Osella and Tom Widger's ethnography demonstrates that, by receiving and giving sadaqa and zakat, poor and working-class Muslims in a Colombo neighbourhood imagine inclusion and belonging to the wider Muslim community in Colombo—a participation that is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and (middle-class) pious donors, but hinges on the mutuality of social proximity and the pleasure of fulfilling God's will. At the same time, recipients might prefer the lesser but more reliable help of their equals to the unpredictable flow of charity and, in any case, the shame, status hierarchies, or possible ritual dangers entailed in receiving non-reciprocal charitable donations can be mitigated or altogether undermined by re-signifying charity in the language of the rights and duties of kinship or patronage.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The subject position of recipients, then, lays bare both the power and dangers of South Asian politics of giving and receiving charity. The discourse of recipients is also frequently ‘the scene of critique’ of the very act of giving. As anthropologists Dwaipayan Banerjee and Jacob Copeman demonstrate in their article for this collection on campaigns for blood donation in north India, every act of giving draws attention to the ‘ungiven’, as well as to those who do not give. Indeed, as demonstrated by the ‘extreme’ generosity displayed by some ‘high-net-worth’ individuals in recent years, the inadequacy of the state and governments that do not give is shown up in such acts, which is frequently read as the lack of care for the citizenry. Thus, as the authors insist, the study of philanthropic practice has to necessarily incorporate critique and self-critiques.

Albeit not addressed directly in any of the articles in this special issue, the gendered underpinnings of charitable giving, as well as its gendering effects, require attention. By representing women as vulnerable and helpless—whose predicaments call for protection, support, and, eventually, reformFootnote ¹¹¹—the (neo-patriarchal) developmental discourses of colonial and post-colonial modernity have turned (impoverished and destitute) South Asian women into the favoured object of charity. Indeed, it is often poor women and their children who appear nowadays in photographs published in newspapers or websites of charitable organizations seeking to entice donations from local and global publics.Footnote ¹¹² However, such a feminization of poverty and, as a result, of charity itself also chimes with women's practical role in charitable acts. More often than not, the status and class hierarchies engendered and reproduced by receiving charity are assuaged by delegating to women the task of approaching wealthy givers for help or, as Osella and Widger's article shows, queuing publicly to receive hand-outs from pious benefactors. And, within circles of kin and neighbours, it is women who discreetly extend assistance to needy relatives or acquaintances in an attempt to conceal or make more palatable the uncomfortable status distance between giver and recipient that unreciprocated giving inevitably objectifies.

Given that South Asian women have been represented as passive recipients of charitable interventions, it comes as little surprise that the generous patron who mobilizes various modalities of giving to ensure clients’ allegiance and to build political alliances is invariably represented as male, the iconic South Asian big man. Whilst some studies have explored the expansive masculinity engendered by such a politics of giving,Footnote ¹¹³ much less is known about South Asian women as givers and donors. Historical evidence suggests that, in pre-colonial South Asia, royal women,Footnote ¹¹⁴ as well as women associated with temple worship—South Indian devadasis, for instanceFootnote ¹¹⁵—could and did support a variety of religious institutions through grants and donations. The ascendency of colonial forms of charity saw South Asian women participating enthusiastically in philanthropic initiatives alongside their wealthy husbands or male relatives—albeit at times independently from them—to embody a gendered aesthetic of compassion and benevolence that satisfied the demands of modern class respectability and sophistication.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The world of the upper caste and wealthy benefactress eventually blended with Gandhi's call for Indian women to join the independence struggle by doing seva (service) for the nation. Arguably, this practice of civic engagement not only opened up the public sphere of civil society to women, but ‘[lay] the foundation for social work to serve as a gateway to political careers for women’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Novel configurations of seva, that is, have become a means through which women can engage with and participate to political society, from dalit politicsFootnote ¹¹⁸ to hindutva activism.Footnote ¹¹⁹

We have seen that although charity and philanthropy cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of political or economic relations, neither can they be separated from the hierarchies and interests engendered by the latter. Whether driven by piety, humanitarianism, or barefaced instrumentalism, charitable acts participate in the constitution or reproduction of economies, and elicit, implicitly or explicitly, specific dispositions and subjectivities that can be mobilized as tools for governing donors and recipients alike. Charity and philanthropy might allow the objectification of ethics of compassion for the destitute, provide a degree of social protection for the poor, sustain the developmental ambitions of communities and nations, or, more generally, promote the common good. But the resources mobilized through charity and philanthropy might be extended selectively, or withdrawn at the whim of the giver, locking recipients into hierarchies of status, gender, class, and powerFootnote ¹²⁰ within communities and nations, and beyond.Footnote ¹²¹ Indeed, this is a far cry from the ideals of rights-based citizenship underpinning post-colonial state welfare. And yet, as neoliberal reforms blur the boundaries between beneficence and state-led provision of social care and protection—by drawing charitable organizations and CSR programmes into the delivery of services or development programmes, for instance—charity and philanthropy, and the politics of subjection and subjectification they entail, will become even more visible in the everyday lives of South Asians for years to come.