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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.

"Divya Cherian’s Merchants of Virtue is a vibrant and engaging intervention in the historiography of South Asia and caste history. Its strong arguments, rich analysis of historical sources, and careful scholarship will prove stimulating for scholars of South Asia, South Asian religions, history, the social sciences, and archival studies." - Reading Religion

"Cherian’s work does a superb job of reading the fine-grained archival evidence of evolving caste identities within a minutely detailed regional history while also making connections to the global patterns and regional networks that made this transformation a historically significant one. It brings forth new questions about the degree to which regional networks drove larger social changes, while still preserving the nuances and counternarratives that may be traced in this framing."
  - Eighteenth-Century Studies

"As generative of new questions as it is scrupulously anchored in the archive, Merchants of Virtue is a new milestone in South Asian history. This is essential reading for anyone interested in caste, Hinduism, merchants, and the early modern state." - The New Rambler