My broader interest is a theme of growing importance within the social sciences, the financialisation of daily life, which has been understood as the study of the how business and life cycles are connected. For this project, I explore the financialisation of the countryside, with distinct ideas of thrift, profligacy and the ‘correct’ forms of credit for the peasantry. This project uses official state archives and other non-official sources including newspapers and magazines to investigate the different business forms, including nidhis, involved in financing rural settings in the Madras province and the princely state of Mysore.
The nidhis in South India were both ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern’. The word nidhi was both translated as “provident society” and “loan society” by colonial administrators in the late nineteenth century while the more literal translation into English was simply ‘treasure’. Going beyond just nidhis, I hope to map the complex differentiated, overlapped and stratified market that consisted of friendly societies, provident societies, marriage, birth and death societies, small-scale life insurance, small loan societies, and dividing societies, agricultural banking, cooperative credit societies amongst others other financial forms.

