Abstract
This paper uncovers a hitherto unnoticed pattern of communal segregation among establishments located in some of Delhi’s most important bazars. It demonstrates that this pattern, emerging between 1913 and 1932, was driven by structural features of the ways in which Delhi’s trade and retail interacted with communal violence in the 1920s. Those features include the dislocating effects of communal violence on bazars. More strident political activity by merchants, however, was important fuel to this fire. Merchants did not, also, restrict themselves to repeating communal tropes developed elsewhere. Their self-organisation gave shape to a conception of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ trades. Rather than see a communal ‘pre-Partition’ in the 1930s, this evidence suggests that communal segregation was already well on the rise in the 1920s. Business as usual, then, was a source of deepening communal antagonisms rather than, as is sometimes assumed, a source of everyday bonhomie.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2024.2283683?src=exp-la
