Merchants of Virtue (eBook)

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

Divya Cherian (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022
284 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
9780520390065 (ISBN)

Infos

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visitwww.luminosoa.orgto learn more. Winner of the 2022 Joseph W.ElderPrize in the Indian Social SciencesMerchants 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.

Inhalt

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
 

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.12.2022
• Reihe/Serie: South Asia Across the Disciplines
• Reihe/Serie: South Asia Across the Disciplines
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: alcohol consumption • Brahmans • caste history • Cows • Goats • Hindu and Muslim identities • Hinduism • historiography of South Asia • injury to living beings • Jainism • Kingship • leatherworkers • Maharaja Vijai Singh • meat • pre-colonial India • Rajputs • untouchability
• ISBN-13: 9780520390065 / 9780520390065