Description
Book SynopsisAlthough numbering fewer than 60,000 in a city of more than 12 million people, Mumbai’s Parsi community is one of the largest private landowners in the city due to its network of public charitable trusts. In
Trust Matters Leilah Vevaina explores the dynamics and consequences of this conjunction of religion and capital as well as the activities of giving, disputing, living, and dying it enables. As she shows, communal trusts are the legal infrastructure behind formal religious giving and ritual in urban India that influence communal life. Vevaina proposes the trusts as a horoscope of the city—a constellation of housing, temples, and other spaces providing possible futures. She explores the charitable trust as a technology of time, originating in the nineteenth century, one that structures intergenerational obligations for Mumbai’s Parsis, connecting past and present, the worldly and the sacred. By approaching Mumbai through the legal mechanism of the trust and t
Trade Review“This fascinating ethnography’s twinned focus on the charitable trust as a property form and on the Parsi community of Mumbai brings to light the tensions for both in maintaining a perpetual life. If trusts fix property and obligation, Leilah Vevaina shows how their perpetuity strains against community divisions, urban development, and global networks of philanthropic capital. This is a strikingly original and at times surprising book, with implications that stretch beyond Mumbai and toward rethinkings of unlikely modes of capital and forms of wealth that seem ‘forever.’” -- Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine
“Leilah Vevaina presents a fascinating array of processes, lives, and practices of the Parsi community in Mumbai across legal, spiritual, and material spaces to illuminate the dynamic workings of the public charitable trusts it operates throughout the city. This book makes important contributions to theoretical discussions in anthropology, law, and South Asian studies.” -- Ritu Birla, author of * Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Inheritances 1
1. In Perpetuity: The Trust and Timely Obligations 27
2. Presents and Futures: The Trust and Obligation’s Asymmetries 52
3. No House, No Spouse: The Bombay Parsi Punchayet 75
4. The Beneficiary, the Law, and Sacred Space 105
5. From Excarnation to Ashes: Trust to Trust 128
6. Awakening the “Dead Hand”: Liquid and Solid Properties 146
Conclusion: An Unsettled (E)state 167
Notes 175
References 185
Index 201
