Merchants of Virtue

Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

Divya Cherian (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

284 Seiten

2022
University of California Press (Verlag)
9780520390058 (ISBN)

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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.

Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	04.02.2023
Reihe/Serie	South Asia Across the Disciplines
Zusatzinfo	7 color illustrations; 2 maps
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9780520390058 / 9780520390058
Zustand	Neuware