Cash, Cashlessness and Criminality: Hawala in the Indian political imagination

Abstract

This paper examines how the term “hawala” gets stigmatized as criminal and deployed with enormous political force within the Indian context. It does so through a focus on informal commercial credit which has been the mainstay of capital accumulation in wholesale markets – including in Srinagar where I conducted fieldwork. Informal credit comprises promissory payments settled according to vernacular patterns and timelines. These systems are also regarded with acute suspicion outside their networks of circulation, particularly by the state. In Indian-controlled Kashmir this suspicion acquires another layer due to associations of informal credit with “hawala” transactions that putatively channel  “black money”  for financing  “terrorist activities”. Showing informal credit as a ubiquitous mechanism that moves in and out of “formal” finance, I trace how hawala has an tendency to explode from ordinary transactional networks (that blur lines between licit, illicit, illegal) into public scandals, thereby tracing the stigmatization of hawala through legal cases, demonetization and the territorialization of disputed borders.