Speculation on Racing Odds in India

Puri, Stine Simonsen

Published in: Economy and Society

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2020.1712856

Publication date: 2020

Citation for published version (APA): Puri, S. S. (2020). Speculation on Racing Odds in India. Economy and Society, 49(1), 170-186. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2020.1712856

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Speculation on racing odds in India

Stine Simonsen Puri

To cite this article: Stine Simonsen Puri (2020) Speculation on racing odds in India, Economy and Society, 49:1, 170-186, DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2020.1712856 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2020.1712856

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=reso20 Economy and Society Volume 49 Number 1 2020: 170–186 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2020.1712856 Speculation on racing odds in India

Stine Simonsen Puri

Abstract

Horse racing has existed in India since the British established race clubs across the continent as places for socializing and legal gambling. Today, betting on horses in Delhi is a form of speculation, where bettors not only calculate probabilities of horses, but try to figure out insider knowledge of rigged races by observing the odds. This becomes particularly evident when betting odds on a particular horse suddenly change with an accelerating speed because people start betting for the same horse – a phenomenon, in finance, known as ‘herding’. Inspired by Clifford Geertz’ study of the connection between betting odds and deep play, the study identifies deeper causes of market volatility, beyond market strategies and crowd psychology, in the cosmology of uncertainty of the society in which the speculative market is located.

Keywords: gambling; speculation; horse racing; odds; India; acceleration.

Introduction

Betting on horses at the Delhi Race Club might seem to be a very particular prac- tice of speculation, but this paper suggests that it resembles futures trading (in particular before this went online) and broader popular practices of using social imaginaries to calculate the future. Betting on horses takes place in a space of con- densed market information where the process of decision-making, actual exchange and evaluation occurs within short periods of time. This is interspersed with pauses between races that lead participants into wider conversations about

Stine Simonsen Puri, Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixensvej 4, Building 10, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 171 social life. Every 30 minutes, 10 minutes before the horses are due to take off, bettors go to the betting ring to observe the constantly shifting odds. Based on this, they make their final decision on which horse(s) to bet on. The Delhi Race Club provides a highly significant microcosm from within which to study practices of speculation on moving numbers for profit. This speculation centres around a particular kind of numerical calculation of odds. In general usage, odds is often used as another word for probability, but in gambling, odds also refer to the pay-out ratio, which changes according to what others are betting. Initially, odds are set based on the probability of the horses winning based on their past performance. However, the numbers change as soon as the bookmakers start receiving bets. They are adjusted according to how much betting has taken place on the various horses, so that bookmakers can manage their risks (or pari-mutual betting systems can make their margins). They thus end up being a reflection of what others are betting. In India, odds are called bhav, which refers to a price or rate at a particular point in time. This price constantly changes according to supply and demand or relations between buyers and sellers. Odds therefore mimic the dynamic forms of pricing of commodities or legal instruments in financial markets. Importantly, like the prices of financial commodities and instruments, the odds at the Delhi racecourse are highly volatile. Just a few minutes before the horses are about to spring out of their gates, the odds on one of the horses can take off in an accelerating spurt. This results in bettors from diverse social backgrounds frantically running around the ‘ring’, placing bets with the bookmakers lined up in a circle. The bookmakers constantly adjust the odds as more and more bets are placed. This sudden acceleration can turn things around, and make a poorly rated horse into the crowd’s favourite. With odds below one, in this situation bettors are willing to stake more money than they are able to make as profit. The accelerated betting means that odds start to polarize. This creates a regular situation in which one horse has very short odds with a small pay-out ratio and the rest have relatively long odds. This creates the possibility that one can win up to 30 times what one has staked. This potentiality emerges as the bettors all start betting on the same horse. In economics, such extreme market volatility has been understood as a process of ‘herding’, where financial traders copy what others are doing. Classic theories argued that this was the irrational behaviour of people acting collectively out of emotion rather than clear-headed calculations of facts (Borch, 2007). In later literature, ‘rational herding’ is identified as a conscious strategy, because in the end, markets move where people go. In this body of work, it is assumed that people calculate at a meta-level that they can profit by following the crowd, so herding is rational (Devenow & Welch, 1996). In all of these economic approaches (and in more recent accounts of algorithmic machine trading) such volatility is considered a central threat to market stability, as it can cause both bubbles and market crashes (Borch, 2016). In this paper, I will radically depart from this economic literature by using ethnographies of gambling to understand market volatility. This is a ‘forbidden’ 172 Economy and Society move since economics is always at pains to separate out gambling from the ways in which formal financial markets discover prices. This distinction was at the core of the interventions of colonial and other states in the regulation of exchange, as well as at being at the heart of neo-Keynesian and neoliberal economics (Birla, 2009). To achieve this move I will draw on Clifford Geertz’ (1973) piece on gambling on cockfighting in Bali. In the long paragraph titled ‘Odds and even money’, Geertz bridges his early economic anthropology and his later interpretative analysis to connect the patterns of odds with the cultural context. In this discussion, Geertz shows how the numbers in a speculative market develop out of a cultural ‘depth’ or from a cosmology. Crucially, the betting odds are not tied to the cockerels fighting in the ring. Instead, they emerge in accordance with what others are betting, and ultimately from the status and connections between the men who own the cockerels. For those present, the cockfight and betting drama constitutes a meta-commentary on their own culture, society and masculine status within it. Geertz builds his argument on a distinction between status and money gambling. The first occurs where there is a lot of masculine prestige at stake and is manifest in balanced odds close to even money. In this situation, the two cockerels about to fight are backed equally as their owners and their kin place large amounts of money on the bird independent of its physical chances of winning. In this case, the cockerels are being bet on as symbols of male power. In contrast, with money gambling another order takes over and less status is at stake. The odds tend to change once the betting gets started and then polarize, with odds going up for one and down for another bird. What is interesting is that it is only in the absence of calculations of honour and status that the odds end up differentiating from one another. Geertz’s analysis is helpful in that it alerts us to the significance of masculinity and status in betting, but, as I will show, it has a dichotomous representation of status versus money gambling. The case of the Delhi racecourse, where prices are highly volatile and odds become stretched, does not just demonstrate a ‘rational’ calculation of the physical potential of horses. Instead, something more akin to masculine status betting occurs; except what is being bet on is the imagination of forms of masculine sociality associated with the informal, corrupt economy of urban life. Alongside this, concepts of cosmology are at work, of betting as an already rigged game, as it is represented in Indian mythology. Significantly odds, and by implication all sorts of market prices, are not made volatile by pure rational calculation as in Geertz’s model or by irrational herding as in economic theories. They are made volatile by imaginings of uncertain, hidden social and cosmological orders behind the surface of prices. Betting on horses at the Delhi Race Club is thus a form of speculation, characterized by an engagement with uncertainty, which is more oriented towards the unknown – and the potentially hidden – than towards known facts (Bear et al., 2015). Importantly this makes betting in this context perhaps part of a broader global social shift towards financialisation (Miyazaki, 2013; Zaloom, 2003). In fact, it echoes similar changes in poker strategies Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 173 discussed by Ole Bjerg (2011). According to Appadurai (2012), to understand such a shift from probability to possibility in finance and in gambling, we need to explore cultural understandings of the connection between uncertainty and ethics in the Weberian sense. Following Thomas Malaby (2003), we can understand gambling as a specific ethically inflected way of ‘dealing with’ the uncertainties of the culture and society in which one lives, as interpersonal and institutional tensions rise to the surface. As I will show at the New Delhi race track, the specific uncertainty at play is that of the tensions of urban life associated with networks of corruption. Bettors do not play on the abilities of the horses, but on the assumed power of the men behind the horses. Every 30 minutes, when horses run over the finishing line, bettors are witnessing a race that has potentially been manipulated. When they bet, they invest money on the likelihood of money exchanges – bribes – between jockeys, bookmakers, horse owners or the mafia. They therefore keep a constant eye on what others – who might know something crucial – are betting. They use the odds that react to large bets as a guide to this process – as these bets may have been placed by people who had arranged for a particular horse to win or lose. This is not at all demotivating for participants. On the contrary, through their betting they have the chance to figure out, and profit from, what they consider to be a larger game of money and power. This is much more intriguing for them than figuring out the potential of any single horse. Such powers appear to come to the surface when odds start to accelerate. When this occurs it provokes speculative conversations among the bettors about what is really going on in a hidden web of connections beneath the surface of things. In between races, bettors – like many inhabitants of Delhi – complained that the melting pot of Delhi lacked ‘culture’. What they meant was that people were always cheating, were not concerned with honour but with money, and that to get things done one had to deal in bribes. These commentaries on how events unfolded at the race club mirrored the experience of getting by in Delhi. Odds were seen as a hyper-social numerical value, and when they started moving fast, the cultural context from where they drew their power became magnified. In that sense, the odds came to manifest the disorder of contemporary Delhi, where the influx of new money and urban corruption challenged older more stable power structures. Yet, to overcome this uncertainty, my informants also projected a principle of order behind the disorder. They repeatedly told me that to understand the culture of gambling at the race club, I could find answers in Hindu mythology. In Hindu mythology, there are several stories of gods gambling, which always involves cheating. These accounts rest on the principle that gambling is not an engagement with an abstract force of chance or fate, but with flawed players who try to manipulate future results. At the same time, bettors have also insisted that what they were doing when betting was the same as anyone does on Wall Street. While staking a relatively large amount of money, they would recognize that they sometimes could not help themselves. They held that they themselves, just as those doing race fixing, where driven by greed, 174 Economy and Society characteristic of the current stage of human history in Hindu cosmology. From these accounts, they built justifications for their actions, as flawed human beings driven by greed, and as agents who could manipulate for profit the manipulations of others. In this, while they are using a Hindu cosmology, as we will see they may have something to tell us about Wall Street as well. Overall, this discussion will unfold a connection between speculation in numbers and cultural cosmologies pushing back against an economistic, ration- alistic or psychological interpretation of price formation. In the following sec- tions, after a short introduction to horse racing in India, the focus of the paper moves gradually from inside the betting ring to the outside, the city of Delhi itself.

Horse racing in India

Horse racing in India began in the second half of the eighteenth century, during colonial rule and around military cantonments as a pastime for British officers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, clubs were built around the racetracks and became a central social meeting place for the British and later also for the Indian elite (Chettiyappaya, 1995; Frith, 1976). By the end of the nineteenth century, new technologies for betting – such as the totalizator offering pari- mutual betting – ensured race clubs an income from betting through mechani- cally calculated odds and systematized taxes. This profitability led to racecourses opening up to the wider Indian public. As with other colonial sports, horse racing may have appealed to the Indian public as a way of experiencing the mysteries of the British upper class (Appadurai, 1995). But importantly, too, due to legislation following trends in Europe and the United States (Munting, 1996), racetracks became the only legal place to gamble. In fact, in India, the development of gambling legislation was instrumental in establishing a legal framework for contemporary futures markets as well (Birla, 2009). The racecourses were established in most large cities and had segregated spaces built inside, enabling the upper, middle and lower classes to bet separately. Horses have a long history in India. Nevertheless, indigenous Indian horses, such as the Marwari, were never really integrated into horse racing and were not allowed to show their strength against the imported horses – thoroughbreds. These came from Britain and performed well in short- but not long-distance races (Chettiyappaya, 1995). Throughout its history in India, the legitimacy of horse racing has been challenged. People have questioned the fairness of the sport itself as well as its associated betting technologies and possible cheating by jockeys, horse owners and stewards (Frith, 1976). Gandhi even warned the Indian population that horse racing was an example of a cultural import of the British that had the power to corrupt the Indian people (Gandhi, 1952). Pre- viously, the race clubs had staged and challenged the cultural values and hierarchy of colonial India. When India became independent, the British lost their Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 175 dominance at the race clubs, and upper-caste Indian men took over as horse owners employing lower-caste jockeys. Today, the race clubs, as the only legal place for betting, are still popular with men of all classes, yet Delhi Race Club is less segregated. Here you find fruit sellers, teachers and businessmen alike huddled together when betting. Unlike the trend in most western countries, horse race betting in India is on the rise. In 2017, according to official statistics, turnover was more than $500 million – double the amount 10 years previously (International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, 2017). The real numbers, however, are much higher, since the vast majority of all bets escape taxation, with bookmakers offering both taxed and untaxed betting. This leaves bettors and bookmakers speculating on the real extent of the betting market (Thompson, 2009). A survey conducted by this author with the help of an assistant at Delhi racecourse, in 2010, showed that less than 1 per cent of all betting is reported. In particular, Delhi Race Club is known for its loose regulation of betting due to bribery activity. Bookmakers there offer some of the best odds in the country, as they do not have to pay the betting tax of around 20 per cent. This makes Delhi a popular place for bettors all over India, who call up middlemen to place bets at the racecourse in their absence. Although other race clubs, such as those in Mumbai and Calcutta, have far more impressive racecourses, Delhi, which, in the aftermath of colonialism, was not allocated enough land for a racetrack to be established, is the centre for horse betting in India. Built in the final stage of British colonialism, Delhi Race Club is located on a beautiful boulevard next to the prime minister’s home. Today, however, the race club is in decay, with unpainted fractured walls, broken plastic chairs and outdated technology. Because of the limited money that ends up in the race club corporation in the absence of full betting taxation, the club has few resources. The club is surrounded by a slum area where low-rated horses live alongside their caretakers in huts, next to people working as riding boys, jockeys, ticket salesmen, and so on, living in small tin houses. Still, these conditions do not make the racecourse any less attractive. Because it is not a place for social gatherings of the elite, bettors of all classes, excluding only those who cannot pay the 20 rupee entry fee, can be left to themselves to bet without any media attention. Every day, around 3,000 bettors come to the races between 12:00 pm and 6:00 pm from all corners of the city, betting from 10 rupees to 500,000 rupees with each wager. Betting on the weekly live races in Delhi or the daily televised races in other Indian cities can be done through a totalizator that executes computer-calculated odds, or in the betting ring through bookmakers, which is by far the preferred mode of betting as it is an exciting place to be. The betting ring consists of an oval dirt area covered with a tin roof, encircled by 25 iron-rod booths raised above the crowd on platforms. Inside sit accountants writing down bets in large account books, one handling the smaller legal bets and two handling the larger illegal bets. Attached to these bookmaker booths are blackboards on which the odds are written in char- coal. A man standing outside the booths adjusts the odds, following the 176 Economy and Society directions of the bookmaker in charge, who quotes the odds and accepts the bets. In the minutes leading up to a race, most people at the racecourse will be found in the betting ring. In the following section, I will present an example of how betting in ring usually takes place, which both indicates the resemblances to speculation in futures markets and portrays a picture of the sociality and social imagination that emerges from the uncertainties of ever- shifting odds.

A run after racing odds

It is 10 minutes before the Air Force Gold Cup race is due to start, with nine horses running the distance of 1,100 metres. I am sitting on a broken plastic chair next to Chipper, discussing what to bet while looking through a small booklet with the information on today’s horses. The mare Royal Beauty in the upcoming race is listed as the ‘Day’s Best’ bet. Chipper says she is a likely winner and he will bet on her. He points out a few figures from Royal Beauty’s past performance listed in the booklet that show that there is a likelihood that she could win. Just after the horses have left the paddock for the racetrack, we walk towards the betting ring. Once inside the ring, Chipper disappears. I feel the heat from the density of around 1,000 bodies and smell a mixture of sweat, cologne and the dust from the dirt floor. The odds for Royal Beauty are 1:1, which means that if I bet 100 rupees I can either lose or win 100 rupees. The other horses have odds between 3:1 and 10:1, giving a clear picture of which are expected to win. I decide to wait before placing a bet. I want to see what happens with the figures. Perhaps I can get better odds. After a while, the odds go up a bit to 1.5:1 with one bookmaker, which means I can now make 150 rupees from a 100-rupee bet. I go to join a group of people in front of the bookmaker booth, pushing their way forward to place a bet. Their arms are stretched out, some holding notes in their hands, as they shout out the amount of money they want to put on which horse. Bettors who are betting larger amounts and who have ‘accounts’ with the bookmakers do not need to pay until the end of the day. They just make a quick signal on what they are betting and their transaction is made, which enables them to place more than one bet within the time frame. In the background, the ballroom music that has been playing from a scratchy loudspeaker as the horses walk the long route to the gate is abruptly replaced by the voice of an English-speaking commentator announcing that the first horse is now in front of its gate, ready to run. I know that it will be just a few minutes more before all the horses are set to run. I hear some shouting around another bookmaker booth and the group in which I stand dissolves as the men go to watch what is happening at the other end of the betting ring. I notice that the odds of another horse, Tricky, have been adjusted from 5:1 to 3:1. I still have my eyes on Royal Beauty, whose odds have just been raised to 2:1, and I start running to the next Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 177 bookmaker to check out his odds. On the way, Chipper bumps into me without noticing as he runs to the other end of the betting ring to check the odds there. The noise level is high, with people shouting and mobile phones ringing of men reporting odds and placing bets for absent bettors. The odds for Tricky suddenly start dropping fast, from 3:1 to 2:1 to 1:1 within just a minute. Now men are running even faster to place a bet on Tricky with the best odds before they drop further. The bookmaker in front of me is so busy taking bets and adjusting the odds for Tricky that Royal Beauty’s odds are not changed immediately and only after a while drop drastically to 6:1. I cannot hear what the commentator is saying, but the intensity of his voice seems to indi- cate that the last horse has been stalled and the race is about to start. The odds for Tricky are now 50:100, which means that bettors are willing to stake 100 rupees for the chance of winning 50. A bell rings and the bettors leave the betting ring to walk over to one of the TV screens to watch the race. For a moment it is quiet before the excitement builds up again as the horses reach the last curve in the track and head for the finishing line.

Seeing the hidden truths in numbers

Tricky won by half a length, followed by Royal Beauty. When I met Chipper again a couple of minutes after the race at the stand, he was busy looking into what to bet on in the next race. He asked me the common question: what had I bet and at what odds. I asked him how he had done. He said he had more or less ‘broken even’. He had first placed a small bet on ‘number 4’, Royal Beauty (horses are always called by the number of the gate they were running from), thinking she was the best horse. But as he saw Tricky’s odds suddenly changing, he started doubting that Royal Beauty could win. He thought that someone who was aware of the future result had suddenly put down a large bet on Tricky, which made the bookies adjust the odds. He said that could have been arranged by local bookmakers – or the Mumbai mafia might have been involved. Once Chipper saw the odds starting to move, he had lost interest in Royal Beauty, and he had waited a bit to see whether the direction of the odds would continue. If there was no change in the direction of the odds again, this would show that the change in the odds had not been manipulated by the bookmakers or caused by a ‘fake’ bet placed by the owner to try to lead bettors in another direction. Chipper had first bet 10,000 rupees on Royal Beauty with odds of 1:1, and had later placed 10,000 rupees on Tricky with odds of 80:100, which meant that he had lost 2,000 rupees plus a betting fee of 1,800 rupees (9 per cent for unreported bets). His friend, who, like him, was from a middle-class background, but had benefitted from family business dealing with real estate and imports involving a large sum of black money in the form of bribes, and had gotten black money from receiving bribes, agreed that there must have been someone fixing the race because Tricky was not the best horse. 178 Economy and Society

For good reasons, I was never able to verify the existence of race fixing, which by its nature is secret, although I did get hints from both jockeys and bookmakers that they had been involved with this. In another piece, I have explained different procedures for decision-making that, whether applying mathematical calculations or buying expensive inside information, have in common the fact that they take into account the possibility of manipulated races (Puri, 2015). Chipper was one of those bettors who would buy information if it were available to him from a reliable source. Chipper was from a middle-class farming background and had moved to Delhi to set up a business, spending some of the money his father-turned-politician had received through bribes. When Chipper did not have any inside information, he would initially try to calculate the horse’s chance of winning from the information on its past performances. However once in the betting ring, he would also use the odds as an indication of what people with inside information were doing. What I have not had the chance to describe in a previous paper on decision-making is the role of odds in decision-making (Puri, 2015). In previous work I have outlined how bookmakers read into the odds (Puri, 2013), but not how bettors do. What I want to highlight here is that betting is not simply about executing the bet that one has decided upon from reading the race statistics or talking to people with potential inside information. The betting ring presents information that can challenge the decisions one makes before entering it, as decision-making becomes less a matter of individual calculation. Mr Singh, from an upper-caste background, known to be a good ‘handicapper’– someone who calculates probabilities, after spending a long time studying all calcul- able factors of the horses running, including timings of last races, who the jockey was, whether the jockey was using a whip, and so on – once stated: ‘The problem is the ring’.Hesaidthatoncehecomestotheringandseestheodds, he would start to doubt his own calculations. Mr Singh, in evaluating the races, would always consider the countless ways that people could cheat. I learnt that just five minutes into my fieldwork. I had come to the racecourse with Mr Singh, when he had encouraged me to bet on Oriental Speed. However, just as I thought I was winning, the horse dropped dead as it was about to cross the finishing line. Mr Singh laughed and said someone who did not want it to win had drugged the horse. He said that he would take this into account next time the same owner had a horse running. He made a mark in his book, and if he later observed the same owner’s horse’s odds acting weirdly, he would consider adjusting his betting. In the case of Tricky, who ended up winning the race, the odds became proof that the horse had been cast to win. The accelerating odds led to a change in the valuation of Royal Beauty: from a potentially strong horse who could win to a horse controlled by powerful men in the betting industry or the Indian under- world who were making deals with the poor jockeys, who could win 100 times more by losing a race than by winning it. The suddenly falling odds were interpreted as a sign that someone with inside knowledge had bet a large amount on that horse – an amount you would only bet if you had reason to be certain beyond the certainty of probability. Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 179

If Tricky had not won, accelerating odds could likewise validate the idea of hidden intentions as they were taken as a sign that someone had manipulated the odds, for example by sending a ‘front man’ to place a small bet to move the odds before the real bet was placed (Scott, 1968) – something, in finance, known as a ‘spoofer’ (Zaloom, 2003, p. 267). The attempt to control odds in horse racing was also observed by Scott (1968, p. 58) in the first ethnographic study on horse race betting in the United States in the 1960s. Drawing on Goff- man’s distinction between front stage and backstage, Scott saw the techniques of manipulating the odds as a kind of ‘impression management’, which, at times, could even create a ‘bandwagoning effect’. In Delhi, not only bettors, but also bookmakers, take part in this process. This happens as they adjust their odds not only in accordance with incoming bets, but also in line with the possibility that races are fixed when the evidence indicates that the odds of the other bookmakers have changed beyond the expected (Puri, 2013). This extra speculative layer can enlarge the polarization of the odds, as the market facilitators are not just enabling the transactions, but are themselves betting on the market by adjusting the price of their product. The point is that in either case, the odds are read as signs of manipulations. Laura Bear (2015) challenges the foundation for contemporary economic approaches to economic decision-making and behaviour by questioning it as a consequence of an individual methodology based on received information or signals. She argues that the foundation for coordinated economic action is the ‘technology of imagination’ as a kind of divination that seeks to uncover hidden patterns of society that can put together past, present and future events within an explanatory framework. In line with this, the races and the odds in conjunction become a ‘truth event’, especially in the evaluation of races. The odds accelerations in the betting market are not merely reactions to ideas of race manipulations; they also validate these imaginations. As evident in the conversations after the betting and the races are over, the odds, and in particular accelerating odds, thus come to show the truth of the Delhi Race Club for bettors and also that betting is a speculation in the ways this truth is orchestrated. The truth behind accelerating odds concerns issues that not only have to do with the culture of racing, but also with the dominant culture of Delhi.

The depth of odds short of status

The acceleration of odds as described above did not take place before every race. Sometimes the change in odds was less dramatic, and sometimes the odds remained more stable. The jumpiness of the odds depended on the kind of race that was about to take place. I observed that the odds accelerations occurred more often at the less prestigious races, where low-ranked horses were running without much public attention. As in England (Cassidy, 2002), in India horses have been associated with both monetary and political power as technologies of trade and warfare. In that sense 180 Economy and Society the horse, like cockerels, exists as a potent symbol of power. With the finding of a bronze statue of the so-called Harrapan horse, horses have even become central to the discussion on the origin of Indian civilization, used as proof of a superior Aryan race as part of a Hindu-nationalist discourse. Nevertheless, the status of the horse is challenged at the racecourse. Among bettors, there were sexual jokes about the horses focused on the male ability to control and ride/have intercourse with the female horses. Thus, the horses did not give power to the men, as in the case of cockerels as an extension of male sexuality, but they represented subordination to man. The dying of the horse on the first day of my fieldwork, and the black blanket that it was covered with lying at the side of the finishing line, I came to see as an image of the death of the symbolic super-power of the horses. The power displayed in the race of the odds is not only concerned with status and old money associated with upper-caste horse owners, but also with the power of black money and its control through bribery activity. This is similar to the kind of power described by Hansen and Vervaaik (2009) and ascribed to those they call urban specialists in post-colonial cities (such as the mafia and others who know how to work the system), who can direct the behaviour of aspiring poor money-seeking labourers (such as jockeys living in slums). Thus bookmakers, who historically have been associated with the trading castes of the Marwaris and have been looked down upon (Birla, 2009), can – with black money at hand – go behind the back of the horse owners and make a deal with jockeys, by offering them more money than they would otherwise get from winning. Like Geertz, I was able to ethnographically identify a difference in two patterns of odds, which is associated with a difference between status gambling and money gambling. During the Derby at Delhi, when outside society – in the form of wives, Bollywood stars, politicians and video cameras – was brought into the racecourse, status was brought to the fore and the odds were much more stable and did not suddenly accelerate. On such days (unlike in Bali), there was in fact less betting activity, which suggests that part of the excitement of betting in Delhi is its potential to uncover and profit from race manipulation. When all the horses were ‘on job’ and running to win, betting was not about trying to figure out the secrets in the system; it was ‘just’ about single horses. Here, rich upper-caste men were spending some of their money on expensive horses. ‘They just want their pictures clicked [holding the winning prize]’,I was told by Mr Singh. On regular days, where it was mostly the same old low-ranked horses from the surrounding huts running again and again, the odds were much more volatile. It was on such days that odds could suddenly take off. The earlier example of escalating racing odds was from such a race, where there were no fancy hats, and very few women. Neither the horse owners present nor bettors had brought their family members. The differentiation between status gambling and money gambling is thus turned on its head. It is when there is status at stake that bettors pay more attention to the horse (and not its owners), and when it is primarily Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 181 money at stake, they pay more attention to the men behind the horses – not just owners, but also jockeys and others associated with the horses. In both cases, the odds are determined by the cultural context in which the activity takes place, yet it is with money gambling that the cultural ‘depth’ emerges, in the sense that betting is done on the cultural system rather than the horses. The difference in the odds has come to represent two existing power structures in Delhi – one defined by the status of the upper-castes and one by the power of ‘new money’, as it was called. In a paper on current patterns of valuation, Jane Guyer (2010) compares the prices of race horses with the salaries of CEOs in the United States. She identifies a pattern of a ‘parabolic curve’, characterized by only a few units with a very high value at the top, descending in a curve to many units of comparably low value at the bottom. In India, apart from in the prestigious races where the best horses are running, in most races horses are ‘handicapped’ so that they have equal chances to win, by adjusting the extra weight they are carrying in their saddle. Nevertheless, the betting odds when ‘released’ to the Delhi market end up polarized, in a curve that resembles that of horses, with one at the top and a lot at the bottom. Guyer takes this pattern of valuation to be exemplary of the practices of valuation inherent in capitalism. This pattern, however, goes deeper than the economic system. The parabolic curved order of valuation – of humans and animals alike – she sees as a mirror of the symbolic order of the Great Chain part of Christian cosmology. What lies behind the process of ranking, she notes, is a schismogenetic process where differences are intensified, which she argues is a pattern of valuation basic to capitalism. In a similar vein, the tendency for horses in India to be valued along a parabolic curve independent of the equalizing effect of handicapping could be seen as ending up mirroring a hierarchical ideology, basic to Indian society, as famously described by Louis Dumont (1970). However, the hierarchy that the polarized odds refer back to is not the hierarchy of caste but of black money, enabling the mafia to pay off jockeys and bribes to the race club officials to allow this to happen. This does not mean that a Hindu cosmology cannot be present in the patterns of ranking horses through odds; however, we may need to look beyond the common framework of caste hierarchy.

In the absence of chance

When I first came to Delhi, and told bettors as well as people I encountered outside the racecourse that I was an anthropologist interested in studying gambling, practically everyone, Hindu and non-Hindu, told me to look into the Mahabharata, and that I would find my answers there. The Mahabharata is the story of the beginning of the stage in the current cycle of human history, the Kali Yuga, which, from 3000 BC to 7000 AD, was defined, among other things, by greed and moral decay. It tells the stories of two semi-gods that start a game of betting on outcomes in a game of Parcheesi. The otherwise 182 Economy and Society righteous king gets so swept up in the game, as he starts raising the stakes, that he ends up losing everything he has, including his clothes, his wife and his kingdom. This happens as his cousin, whom he plays against, keeps cheating. Even though he is aware of it, he keeps on playing. This triggers a devastating war between them that almost leads to the destruction of humankind, until Krishna comes and, through the words of the Bhagavad Gita, preaches duty while ordering the king to bend the rules of war. When I asked bettors to clarify how the Mahabharata gave insight into gambling in India, I was told two things: that gambling is in the genes of Indians; and that, in the end, it is difficult to win because the game is rigged. Gerda Reith (2006) has argued, as part of an extensive research on the history of gambling in the West, that in modern history the engagement with the future in gambling has moved from being understood in terms of divine interventions and luck, to something that is subject to the laws of nature and the chance of probability. The history of gambling thus illustrates a move towards what she calls the ‘age of chance’, a view supported by Johan Huizinga’s(1955) cultural history of play, when he comments – after writing on the Mahabharata – that cheating in games is a trait of the past. The genealogy of chance has also been mapped by Ian Hacking (2001) as entwined with the development of trading in financial markets. Yet, newer ethnographic studies on gambling seem to challenge this evol- utionist narrative of gambling and chance. What is at stake in gambling settings is not an engagement with chance, but with world views. For example, in South Africa, poor people buying lottery coupons believed the numbers were picked by powerful men, and would therefore seek the help of diviners to direct the choice of these men in power (van Wyk, 2012). Jackson Lears (2003), in a study of mythmaking in the popular culture representation of gambling, has gone as far as to argue that the belief in luck in gambling in America (and not Protestantism as suggested by Weber) may explain behaviour in the economic system. People act out of a belief that they could be chosen independently of what effort they put into making money. In India, the Mahabharata is far from the only myth involving gambling. In fact, it seems as if the Hindu gods, such as Shiva and Parvati, love to gamble, and they do so just because they feel like it. Their games, however, can have devastating consequences for humanity. In the Hindu stories of gambling in mythology – and today also in Bollywood movies – outcomes are always pro- duced through cheating, or some kind of manipulation of results. Even integrated into the largest yearly religious celebration of Diwali, cheating in games of cards that are bet on is a ritualized event. In some families, the first game of cards is thus manipulated to ensure that the head of the household wins. The card games come to reflect the order of the family, similar to ritua- listic games that were part of the coronation of Hindu kings in the past (Handel- man & Shulman, 1997). The myths and rituals of gambling thus do not show gambling as a game of chance, but as a play with chance. The stories and rituals represent a cosmology Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 183 where the future unfolds as created events that reflect who is in power rather than as an event defined by unpredictability. When asked about dreams for the future and the role of gambling in this, bettors would state something like, ‘It is up to God’, or, ‘only God knows’. At the same time, when I asked whether they would pray to God before betting, they would say that they would not do so because gambling was not a good thing. So when I state that Hindu cosmology is reflected in the gambling odds, it is not because gambling engages Hindu numerology or prayers to gods of luck such as Ganesh. Hindu cosmology, as present in gambling myths, is present at a more existential level, in the sense that gambling – as a reflection of life – is not an engagement with chance, but with a future that is out of one’s hand. The perspective on the future that I came to know at the race club and in Delhi was not defined by the laws of karma, and how one’s actions determine one’s future, but on the unpredictability of a cosmological world where the results were out of one’s hand. Attempts to interpret the movements of the odds – not the horses – were thus ways of engaging with a particular world view, or understanding how things come to happen. This came out in conversations, which did not involve the gods but, rather, large-scale problems in Delhi, such as manipulated election results and the extended bribes that formed part of the Delhi Commonwealth Games. This is not to say that cheating was considered part of an Indian culture per se. According to Mr Singh, ‘the British invented corruption’. They did this by inventing political institutions that enabled large-scale manipulations. The colonial sport of racing, with its extended rules, is in many ways an example of this kind of institutionalized power, and the Delhi Race Club shows how it is subject to manipulation. When there were objections to the outcome of races, bettors assumed that it was the stewards taking advantage of their pos- ition, trying to make sure the horse they had bet on had won, while comparing them to judges in the judicial system outside the racecourse, who were considered corrupt. Furthermore, it was well known that the race club management received a daily bribe to allow bookmakers to do most of their business off the record, while it was acknowledged as the only way to get things done in Delhi. The money from the betting industry thus went into the race club management’s pockets rather than towards prize money or improving conditions for the horses, those living in slums, and the racing public, sitting on broken plastic chairs. According to Mr Singh, who himself used to own horses but gave it up because he did not feel he could trust his trainer and jockey, it had not always been the case. ‘It used to be about the horses’, he said. Overall, bettors reflected on the state of the race club as an example of the state of current times. Bettors – like other inhabitants of Delhi – complained daily that the inhabitants of Delhi were driven by money, not honour. What was going on at the racecourse was a reflection of an accelerating greed and the loss of honour and duty as personal goals. This was to be expected in the time of the Kali Yuga – our current corrupted age that fittingly has emerged in part out of the temptations of gambling profits. 184 Economy and Society

It is in this context – of the experience of greed and disorder – that bettors and bookmakers try to predict the near future by speculating on possible hidden intentions and reacting to quickly moving odds as attempts to engage with a manipulated future. I am not trying to establish a direct link between Hindu cosmology and perceptions of corruption, but rather I wish to show that the experience of disorder in society is reflected in betting odds. Cultural disorders come together in the odds, making up for their depth and allowing their acceleration.

Conclusion

Like cockfights in Bali, bets on horses in Delhi are not laid on an animal and its potential, but on imaginations of the social and cultural (dis)order in which the animals are set to compete. When bettors bet at the Delhi Race Club, they speculate on the potential that the races may be fixed. When they do this, they approach the racing industry as a mirror of an existing social life in Delhi, where it is to be expected that underpaid jockeys receives bribes from powerful horse owners and bookmakers who try to control the future out of greed. The uncertainty on whether it is the true potential of the horses that is being tested can cause the odds to accelerate, as there is a hyper-awareness of what others in the know might be doing. The starting point for this discussion was the observation that, at the Delhi Race Club, there is a tendency for betting odds to suddenly change direction at a fast speed, reflecting a sudden collective change in the perception of the horses about to run. The paper suggests that instead of seeing this as an example of herding, where people copy each other, we may examine the social and cultural imagination behind this reaction to the numbers. At the Delhi Race Club the acceleration of odds gave information beyond the capabilities of the horses, revealing the hidden power of men to fix race results. Through a com- parison with the betting on cockerels in Bali as described by Clifford Geertz, but departing from his binary opposition between status and money gambling, my paper highlights how the social and cultural context directs risk behaviour, crowd psychology and individual decision-making. Narrowing economic action to a momentary orientation to a calculative act misses this important fact. Prices and odds are technologies of imagination, that contain within them these socio-cultural meta-reflections on the state of society and of the world. In the contemporary stage of capitalism defined by increased financialization, a study of gambling odds can bring insight into how speculation in numbers works in formal financial and other markets. Despite the uncovering of hidden agendas, insider trading and illegal conduct within the financial system, more and more people are attracted by the possibility of becoming citizen-speculators. My ethnography of horse-racing in Delhi suggests that ideas of a rigged system do not necessarily prevent people from taking part, but on the contrary offer an opportunity for exciting agency in a world Stine Simonsen Puri: Speculation on racing odds in India 185 otherwise out of one’s control. There is an excitement to guessing the hidden social order behind the surface of numbers. Furthermore, it shows that betting on a flawed system may in fact create market volatility, as the idea of market secrets and manipulations leads people to go along with sudden accelerations. As we are increasingly exposed to fast-moving numbers it is important to develop methodologies for a cultural analysis of our engagements with these. At the Delhi Race Club, even though the changes in odds were quite extreme, they still followed a pattern, and could thus be interpreted within a stable framework. In cases where numbers change at a scale unprecedented in the recent past, when they ‘escalate’ suddenly (Højer et al., 2018), these shifts not only bring about material changes but can also alter the interpretative framework for understanding the numbers themselves.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Danish Research Council for Independent Research/Humanities for funding the study of sudden accelerations and escalations, together with my colleagues Lars Højer, Anja Kublitz and Andreas Bandak (DFF – 4001-00223), as well as the fieldwork part of my PhD, which the paper is based upon (FI-09065456). Also many thanks must go to Laura Bear and Ritu Birla for their cooperation in the analytical framing of speculation at an earlier stage of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Stine Simonsen Puri is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies. A trained anthropologist, she has conducted long-term fieldwork in both urban and rural India, studying betting and speculation on horses, rain and agricul- tural products. Together with Laura Bear and Ritu Birla, she has edited a special section on speculation in India in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She has furthermore been part of a joint research project engaging with the theorization of rapid change, in markets and elsewhere, published in Anthropological Theory.