Financial superstitions: Hawala accusations and boundary-making in Kashmir

Abstract

Trust-based informal credit forms an important basis for capital and commodity circulation in the bazaars of South Asia, comprising promissory payments settled according to vernacular timelines and practices. These systems are also regarded with acute suspicion outside their networks of circulation. In Indian-administered Kashmir, this suspicion acquires another layer due to associations of informal credit with putatively illegal hawala transactions, viewed by the state as channels for ‘black money’ that fund anti-state protests and militant activities. I set trust-based credit practices alongside national controversies around hawala in India to examine how and when such informal credit transgresses boundaries between licit and illicit domains. By studying legal pronouncements, national ‘scandals’, the rhetoric around demonetization and the experience of traders operating amid political violence in Kashmir, I trace how hawala becomes criminalized and how the indeterminacies of informal credit are exploited by the state to enforce spatio-political rather than financial boundaries.