Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

Divya Cherian

Open Access Published by University of California Press 2022

Merchants of Virtue

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

Divya Cherian

In the series South Asia Across the Disciplines

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520390065

Overview
Contents

About this book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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.

Author / Editor information

Cherian Divya :

Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Note on Transliterations and Citations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
part one. other Open Access Download PDF	41
part two. self Open Access Download PDF	105
Epilogue Open Access Download PDF	155
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	169
Notes Open Access Download PDF	175
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	223
Index Open Access Download PDF	245

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 284

eBook

Published: December 20, 2022
ISBN: 9780520390065