Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

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

Cherian, Divya

Paperback

Series: South Asia Across the Disciplines

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesHinduism

ISBN10: 0520390059
ISBN13: 9780520390058
Publisher: Univ Of California Pr
Published: Dec 27 2022
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
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.

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