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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.

eBook - ePub
Merchants of Virtue
Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia
- 284 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Information
Edition
1Subtopic
HinduismusTable of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Note on Transliterations and Citations
- Introduction
- 1. Power
- PART ONE. OTHER
- PART TWO. SELF
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
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Yes, you can access Merchants of Virtue by Divya Cherian in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.