The Space of the Bazār: Site; Economy; and Survival in a South Asian City.

The word bazār, derived from Persian, has at least two connotations in South Asia: spatial and systemic. Firstly, it may mean a marketplace, whether architecturally planned or informal, where the business of buying and selling goods is conducted through person-to-person transactions. Secondly, in colonial India, the term acquired the larger economic sense of the indigenous money market which financed the wholesale and forward trade over the longer distances in British India. In the first application of the term, the physical phenomenon being described is common over the whole of South, South-East, and Central Asia and extends up to western Asia and North Africa. Notable examples of bazārs may be encountered not only in South Asia but in cities on the Silk Route, in Tashkent and Samarqand, and in Istanbul and Cairo. It is in this sense that the term has entered English and inhabits both a spatial and a specular economy. But in the second meaning, the “native” bazār functions in parallel to, though it is conceptually distinct from, the “western” market. It is a specific set of commercial relations which fixes the rates (the bazār rate) at which commodities are bought and sold in a vast interrelated chain of transactions all over the country. In this paper, I examine Barabazār, a physical, spatial example of a pre-colonial bazār in the city of Kolkata, India, which also demonstrates the functioning of the bazār economy.