Let us say you were in an Indian town at the onset of winter, and you had forgotten to pack a warm sweater. In all likelihood, all you would need to do was to get a taxi or rickshaw and ask the driver to take you to the ‘Tibetan sweater market’. Most drivers would immediately know where to go: to a market or a bunch of market stalls, built by Tibetan itinerant traders, where you would be able to choose from a wide range of sweaters to keep you warm. Since the 1980s, Tibetans in India have very successfully filled the economic niche of selling sweaters during the winter months. Their market stalls have become a fixture of the winter scenery in many towns all over India. For the Tibetan traders, this involves buying sweaters wholesale from Indian manufacturers and merchants in industrial centres such as Ludhiana and Delhi, and reselling them during the winter season on temporary markets in Indian cities and towns across the subcontinent. The traders themselves call this activity tshong, Tibetan for ‘business’.
The sweater business necessitates that Tibetan traders spend a significant part of the year outside their refugee settlements and in intensive engagement with the Indian host society. As the traders buy and sell sweaters, they operate inside Indian local economies and engage with Indian merchants and customers. In this chapter, I will examine how Tibetans build relationships and boundaries between themselves and Indians through trade interactions. The material objects of the trade – the sweaters bought, transported, stored, displayed, haggled over and sold – will take prominent place in the ethnographic narrative I will develop. In other words, this chapter traces the exchange and significance of sweaters in the Tibetan itinerant trade. It follows a commodity through various kinds of exchange to produce a social analysis, and could therefore be seen to follow in the analytic style of The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986). Similar to the contributions in that seminal volume, the value of the objects in question will be highly significant for my argument. In the present study, this value will appear mainly in the guise of risk and the techniques of its management. However, the sweaters as material objects are not merely placeholders of value and risk. They are also, and very importantly, things through which persons engage in social relations with each other. This perspective will allow me to discuss how Tibetan traders relate to Indians through the objects exchanged between them. I will show that, while the traders evaluate their relationships with merchants and customers in both positive and negative terms, the risk-management techniques employed in the trade are simultaneously based on and give rise to notions of trust. In a social field of marked ambivalence in which Tibetan traders may perceive themselves to be exploited, they nonetheless establish and express personal trust-based relationships with Indians through the exchange of sweaters. In the course of my argument, I will draw out the theoretical implications of this for our understanding of the social aspects of commodity exchange, and suggest that we may view the sweaters traded as objects which mediate agency. In conclusion, I will show that the idioms of trust and distrust connect exchange and belonging as two central concerns of Tibetan traders in the Indian diaspora.
Since the 1950s Tibetans have come to India as refugees, and today their number is estimated at over one hundred thousand. Of the first tens of thousands of Tibetans who came to India, the vast majority had been farmers who had relied on livestock and agriculture in Tibet. Since they had to leave land and animals behind, they lost the basis for their subsistence and lacked economic skills matching their new circumstances. Tibetan refugees arriving in India initially found homelessness and poverty, and the absence of economic opportunities which accorded with their skills and knowledge. The first economic foothold they gained was working on road construction sites in the northern states of India, where over twenty thousand Tibetan refugees were employed by the Indian government in just under a hundred road construction sites. Although Indians thought of Tibetans as physically suited to working in high-altitude mountainous terrain (Kharat 2003: 288), many of the Tibetans working in harsh conditions died of diseases or in landslides.
In this context, the business of selling sweaters during the colder winter months as street vendors outside Indian shops, or roaming through Indian villages, was initially discovered as an economic niche in the 1960s by a handful of Tibetan refugees from the province of Amdo (Lau 2007). As the practice proved to be lucrative, it spread among the Tibetan refugee population. From its humble beginnings, itinerant trade involving sweaters had by the late 1980s evolved into the main economic activity of Tibetans in India. In the estimation of my Tibetan informants, including officials of the Dalai Lama’s Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), most Tibetan households in India are today involved in the trade through one or more of their members. In many cases, the market stalls have been passed on from the original traders to their children, who are themselves now adults and continue the trade their parents first engaged in. Some of these second-generation traders bring their own children along in the school holidays, providing them with some first-hand trade experience and early insight into the functioning of the sweater market.
For a significant proportion of the Tibetan refugee population in India, then, the itinerant sweater trade takes central place in the annual calendar. The Tibetan traders leave their home settlements in October to start the trading season, selling sweaters on more or less makeshift markets or from roadside stalls in Indian towns, and most do not return home again until February or March the following year. They form transient communities, disbanding and reforming anew every year at their trade destination, where they are organized in market associations. These associations count the Tibetan traders of a particular market as their members and fulfil a number of functions, both as trade associations within Indian local economic contexts, and as new and democratic institutions regulating Tibetan sociality in the market (ibid.).
The particularity of the traders is clearly reflected in both Indian and Tibetan perceptions of Tibetans as sweater sellers. In India, the distinctive identification of named groups associated with a certain professional activity has long-standing roots. This idea is, of course, basic to the social ideology of caste. Although the particular idea of caste does not readily apply to Tibetan traders, Indian local economies have incorporated them as a named group of traders. For Tibetans themselves, however, the label of being sweater sellers has become intrinsically connected to their own understanding of their refugee identity. Although some Tibetans do work in a range of professions in India, from call-centre operators to academics, most of them stay in refugee settlements where economic opportunities are far and few between. They sell sweaters during the winter, and many are either involved in other petty trading activities or remain economically inactive for the rest of the year. Very often, this goes hand in hand with the assumption that they cannot choose another profession. In spite of evidence to the contrary, many of my informants would say: ‘We are refugees, therefore we have to do sweater business’. At first, this may seem like Tibetans exist in isolation from the Indian economy and larger society. But, as sweater sellers, Tibetans are in fact interacting closely with their Indian host society.
~~ESSAY :SWEATER BUSINESS: COMMODITY EXCHANGE AND THE MEDIATION OF AGENCY IN THE TIBETAN ITINERANT SWEATER TRADE IN INDIA -by- Timm Lau
~~Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions -ed- Maruška Svašek
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