Trust Matters

“This fascinating ethnography’s twinned focus on the charitable trust as a property form and on the Parsi community of Mumbai brings to light the tensions for both in maintaining a perpetual life. If trusts fix property and obligation, Leilah Vevaina shows how their perpetuity strains against community divisions, urban development, and global networks of philanthropic capital. This is a strikingly original and at times surprising book, with implications that stretch beyond Mumbai and toward rethinkings of unlikely modes of capital and forms of wealth that seem ‘forever.’” - Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine

“Leilah Vevaina presents a fascinating array of processes, lives, and practices of the Parsi community in Mumbai across legal, spiritual, and material spaces to illuminate the dynamic workings of the public charitable trusts it operates throughout the city. This book makes important contributions to theoretical discussions in anthropology, law, and South Asian studies.” - Ritu Birla, author of Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India

"It is not simply Vevaina’s methodology that makes Trust Matters a formative work of scholarship. From the first pages of her text, she models a socially accountable ethnographic approach. . . . Trust Matters offers scholars of religion an innovative account of the 'persistent instruments' of capital that shape our spaces as well as an ethically responsible example of its production (174)." - Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, Reading Religion

"Trust Matters captures the essence of how research comes alive through ethnographic fieldwork. Leilah Vevaina beautifully encapsulates details from her interviews, conversations, experiences, and observations in and around Bombay city, the Parsi community, and the courts." - Rahela Khorakiwala, Journal of Anthropological Research

"Trust Matters is a well-researched ethnographic study on Parsi charitable trusts and their decisive influence on the urban topography of Bombay/Mumbai. This book, highly useful for understanding the larger implications of the relationship between faith and the economy, is a timely contribution to the underexplored theme of religious charity in anthropology and sociology, with the potential to inspire and guide future research in this area." - E. K. Muhammed, Contemporary South Asia

"Trust Matters is a truly fascinating book for it proves to be a canonical example of how relevant contemporary ethnography is. In a landscape of a dense ethnographic repertoire, Vevaina shows how maneuvering across anthropological canons can unravel an object of inquiry not touched within the palimpsestic view of the city. . . . This ethnography of a people and their properties in a subjunctive temporal sense of what is a good relation with assets will appeal to scholars across disciplines interested in anthropology of religion, urban space, law and Parsi life in India." - Arman Hasan, South Asian Review

"Trust Matters provides an excellent ethnographic window on a crucial historical thread of colonial and post-colonial Mumbai. It is a welcome contribution for students and scholars familiar with legal anthropology, but it is also broadly accessible to a more generic anthropological readership." - Roberto Rizzo, Social Anthropology