This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.

本介绍首先简要概述了影响印度经济生活和交易的三个主要因素，正如编辑卷《现代印度的反思市场》中的贡献所阐述的那样：嵌入式交易、有争议的管辖权和灵活的市场。所有贡献的总体逻辑是，印度市场必须被理解为路径依赖的，即表达历史轨迹以及具体的、不断变化的政治和道德制度。本导言的其余部分讨论了民族主义对帝国的批评中“经济”和“文化”之间区别的起源，以及这些批评如何导致印度对日常生活商业化普遍存在的道德矛盾心理。今天跨越政治领域。