Trust Matters: Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City

Although 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 the people who live within its bounds as well as those who challenge or support it, Vevaina offers a new pathway into exploring property, religion, and kinship in the urban global South.

Author: Leilah Vevaina
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 12/01/2023
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.51d
ISBN13: 9781478025399
ISBN10: 1478025395
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- History | Asia | South | India
- Law | Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice