Talk by Divya Cherian (History, 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. 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 fashioned not just a new Hindu identity but also a more starkly defined “Untouchable.” These findings challenge 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 early modern South Asia. She is an assistant professor at the Department of History at Princeton. 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. Cherian is now working on her next book project, which is a history of "magic," sex, and political life in pre- and early colonial India.