Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth Century India
Eggers Hall, 341
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The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents a book talk by Divya Cherian of Princeton University.
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 was vegetarianism and an embrace of non-violence.
Divya Cherian is a historian of early modern South Asia. She is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Her book, "Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia" (University of California Press, 2023), offers a fine-grained study of pre-colonial reconfigurations of the Hindu Self and its inadmissible Others pursued through local politics, state law and bodily practice.
This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of History and Religion.
Category
Social Science and Public Policy
Type
Talks
Region
Main Campus
Open to
Public
Organizers
MAX-South Asia Center, MAX-History, CAS-Department of Religion
Accessibility
Contact Matt Baxter to request accommodations
We’re Turning 100!
To mark our centennial in the fall of 2024, the Maxwell School will hold special events and engagement opportunities to celebrate the many ways—across disciplines and borders—our community ever strives to, as the Oath says, “transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”
Throughout the year leading up to the centennial, engagement opportunities will be held for our diverse, highly accomplished community that now boasts more than 38,500 alumni across the globe.