Can the Homemaker Contribute to Commerce? Alignment of Household Micro-Practices with Strategizing Principles of Marwari Businesses

Extant scholarship on Indigenous business communities of India explicates their core values, systems and operating principles that enable them to prosper on an ongoing basis. In doing so, the role of women, their skills and the daily labor is restricted to the household only and not viewing them in any way interacting with what businessmen practice in the bazaar. However, our ethnographic inquiry of an Indigenous business community in a postcolonial society revealed that homemakers play a crucial ongoing role within the framework of vernacular capitalism. Our microstoria provides an antenarrative to the dominant patriarchal view through the stories of Marwari homemakers, whose daily labor within the household space characterized by their skillset was found to be harmonious to and facilitative of fundamental commercial principles of the Marwari business community in India. We show how the homemakers’ daily labor goes into making the family life that is in tandem with the Indigenous commercial values and strategies of Marwaris such as frugality, immunity against volatility, and intelligence gathering. Towards this, we also highlight the female child-rearing practices of Marwaris that genders them into womanhood, and in process inculcating long-held inter-generational logics of the business community.