Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia
Lecture from Divya Cherian (Princeton University)

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What did it mean to be Hindu in pre-colonial India? Through a discussion of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this presentation will show that an alliance between existing landed elites and a newly ascendant mercantile class remade the category “Hindu.” A key element of this new articulation of an early modern Hindu identity were vegetarianism and an embrace of non-harm (ahimsa). Based on extensive research into the administrative records of the region, this presentation will show how political mobilizations of the ethical ideal of non-harm as the pre-colonial era came to a close fashioned not just a new Hindu identity but also a more starkly defined “Untouchable.” This research challenges the projection of dyadic conceptions of Hindu and Muslim onto the pre-colonial past and demonstrates the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and its imagination of inadmissible others.

Divya Cherian is a historian of late pre-colonial and early colonial South Asia. She is an associate professor at the Department of History at Princeton. Most centrally, she is driven to write histories that help explain how caste and other forms of embodied difference came to be normalized and how these normalizations were contested. She grew up in New Delhi, India and trained to be a historian at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Columbia.

Supported in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Resource Centers Program. The content of this event does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.