Description
Book SynopsisA 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.
Trade Review"Divya Cherian’s
Merchants of Virtue is a vibrant and engaging intervention in the historiography of South Asia and caste history. Its strong arguments, rich analysis of historical sources, and careful scholarship will prove stimulating for scholars of South Asia, South Asian religions, history, the social sciences, and archival studies." * Reading Religion *
Table of ContentsContents
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
