The word vyavhaar – વ્યવહાર in Gujarati – exists in many Indian languages and has one basic meaning across them all: ‘conduct’ or ‘behaviour’. This consensus is misleading; the separate regions and their communities make certain words mean many – and sometimes different – things. Vyavhaar, in Gujarati, has absorbed the region’s association with commerce and mercantilism, and the word now has multiple, untranslatable meanings that reflect Gujarat’s world view.

Friendship and business in Gujarat intertwine and become almost inseparable, so vyavhaar can, at times, mean a measurable economic transaction within social events, such as a marriage. To ask ‘How much vyavhaar do we have to do for this wedding?’ is essentially asking, ‘How much money do we need to give to the bride and groom?’ The question is an implicit clarification of how this relationship is defined socially, and what its literal financial value is. Vyavhaar is also therefore a give and take: just as it values social interactions, it can also function as a term that makes economic transactions legible as social events. It is not uncommon to do business with someone who can be trusted in his vyavhaar – as in his dealings with other traders and business are clean and governed by the social and economic protocols of both the society and market. This usage does not occlude vyavhaar’s official definition of behaviour or conduct, but instead it becomes pregnant with protocols of a mercantile community that sees good vyavhaar as good business.

This concept of vyavhaar as representative of a world structured around negotiations and transactions, where actions are reciprocal and systems of give and take are maintained, is also sometimes opposed by parmaarth: a more spiritual world, where every action directs towards a divine spiritual goal. In Angaliyat by Joseph Macwan, a Dalit novel I translated from Gujarati, Bhavaan Bhagat, the oldest and wisest man in the community, strives for parmaarth by detaching from the world of vyavhaar: he refuses to attend social functions or to arbitrate disputes and simply goes away on a pilgrimage when he feels like it. When one of the young men in the community is murdered violently by the upper castes, the old man decides that the Dalit community cannot afford to be otherworldly before they can set right their world of vyavhaar – this world. The word vyavhaar occurs several times in the novel, using every dimension of its meaning: sometimes as a social relation, sometimes as conduct and sometimes as a negotiation in highly intricate and caste-based relations.

Vyavhaar is not entirely absent of spiritual meaning, though – its quotidian notions of exchange and trade have potential to lead to the spiritual. In Jainism, it can refer to sacred periods of discipline that, through small everyday actions, shape the soul and prepare it for liberation. In Vedanta it refers to the everyday words and concepts that are used as stepping stones that expand to arrive at new, more spiritual meanings.

My first learning of vyavhaar was in the context of caste, where it is so embedded that it doesn’t even need to be spelled out. The matrix of caste is sustained by knowledge of who belongs to which caste, which then determines the kind of vyavhaar that must be employed to maintain the caste ecology: when an upper-caste member finds out (by sleight of speech or gesture) that the person they are talking to belongs to the so-called lower caste, the vyavhaar of eating together, inviting someone home, accepting food from that person, is revised silently. It becomes clear that the quotidian vyavhaar is also a word that keeps status quo and power relations intact, under the guide of mere ‘good manners’.

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