This book discussion examines how a dominant mercantile caste reproduces itself as a cohesive and influential elite in contemporary urban India. Drawing on ninety-one interviews, long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi, and community archives, Becoming Agarwal traces the gendered and generational labour through which caste privilege, kinship unity, and economic power are sustained across class fractions. The book explores how marriage choices, family expectations, and everyday socialisation within households shape younger women’s understanding of love, duty, and community. It examines the role of older women in sustaining kinship structures and the ways in which men consolidate caste capital in the public sphere through philanthropy, religious programmes, and the construction of a shared mercantile ancestry. Moving between elite households, shopkeeping families, and caste associations, the book shows how caste, gender, kinship, and economic power work together in the reproduction of a close-knit community. It also considers the points at which these structures are questioned, negotiated, or placed under strain.

Speaker

Dr Ujithra Ponniah

Ujithra Ponniah is a Senior Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research examines economic elites, gender, caste, and race across India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Prior to joining SCIS, she taught at the School of Gender Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad.

Chair

Dr Pratim Ghosal

Pratim Ghosal is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the King’s India Institute. He recently completed his DPhil at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, where his doctoral research examined the relationship between provincial business elites and politics in urban India. His work takes an interdisciplinary and bottom-up approach to understanding business-state relations in contemporary India. At the King’s India Institute, his current research focuses on diaspora politics and the international mainstreaming of national populism, with particular attention to the political and economic integration of the Indian diaspora in the UK and the role of diasporic elites. His broader research interests include democracy and development, business and politics, Indian politics, populism, and elites.