Speculation on racing odds in India

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

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stine Simonsen Puri

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 agricultural 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.