Description: The book offers a rich historical study of goods and commodities in modern India, focusing on three iconic objects, namely the Godrej Storwel, the office chair, and the refrigerator. It pays close attention to the larger material context in which manufacturing experiments were undertaken by a premier business house, namely Godrej & Boyce, whose goods became household names, and were sought after by an emerging middle class. It simultaneously documents and analyses the emergence and success of a business firm over time, through a period of chronic shortages, government oversight, and a narrow consumer base that changed with liberalization in the 1990s. It makes a strong pitch for a careful and critical reading of business archives and demonstrates how these can be deployed to write a nuanced history of production and consumption.
Brief description: Lakshmi Subramanian retired as Professor of History from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and as Visiting Professor at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS, Goa, India. Her areas of interest include the history of Indian business and of the Indian Ocean, as well as music and performance history of South India. Her publications include A History of India 1707-1857 (Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2010) and The Sovereign and the Pirate Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2016).