Abstract:
This discussion contributes to the history of the colonial rule of law that governed
market practice in India using the South Asian indigenous credit institution known as
hundi. A centuries-old artery of credit for Indian merchant networks, and a living
institution that has largely been driven underground by twenty-first-century laws,
hundi provides a window into the dynamics of colonial law from the commercial and
financial legislation of the 1880s to the final attempt to codify hundi in the 1960s and
1970s in a bid to bridge the growing disconnect between the Indian indigenous
banking sector and modern banking. I chart the British colonial and postindependence
history of hundi as means of understanding the wider political,
legislative and economic dynamics of colonial state formation and the legacies of
legislation.
