Abstract

Business law in India is typically narrated as a technical framework that enables commerce: contracts provide certainty, companies provide structure, regulation provides trust, and courts provide remedies. In this picture, markets appear as spaces of voluntary exchange among autonomous agents, while law appears as a neutral referee that intervenes only when rules are broken. This paper argues that such a picture misunderstands the socio-legal reality of business. In practice, business law does not merely “support” markets; it actively produces the kind of market that can exist by deciding who counts as a credible actor, what counts as a valid promise, and which forms of enterprise are treated as legitimate. Written in a conceptual rhythm associated with S. N. Balagangadhara’s style, this paper treats contract and compliance not as neutral tools but as cultural and institutional forms that reshape Indian enterprise into legible categories. It shows how the regime of documentation, standard-form contracts, and compliance-driven formalisation reorganises business life by converting trust into verification and relationships into transaction records. The paper develops the argument through three sites: the everyday contract world of MSMEs, the rise of standard-form contractual governance in platform markets, and the compliance state created by corporate and tax regulation. The paper concludes that the central business-law challenge in India is not merely enforcement delay or regulatory burden; it is the deeper mismatch between a relational economy and a legal imagination that presumes impersonal exchange, producing exclusion and dependency through the very devices meant to create certainty.

Keywords

Business, Contract, Compliance, Economy, Regulations

Citation (APA Format)

Jyoti. (2025). Contract, compliance, and the myth of the “free” market: Business law as the hidden architecture of Indian enterprise. International Journal of Politics, Law and Management, 4(3), 7–15. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18013501