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

Divya Cherian discusses her new book, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia. The book explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. 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.

Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. Her focus is early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in South Asian Studies

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