Merchants of Virtue

Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-520-39005-8
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 284 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

Reihe: South Asia Across the Disciplines

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Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences

Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cherian, Divya

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Hinduismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Note on Transliterations and Citations 

Introduction 
1. Power 

PART ONE. OTHER 
2. Purity 
3. Hierarchy 
4. Discipline 

PART TWO. SELF 
5. Nonharm 
6. Austerity 
7. Chastity 

Epilogue 
Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.