Abstract
Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-century South Asia (USA: University of California Press), 2023, 284 pp., (Pb.).
The author gives a detailed account of how her book came to be written, initially at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and, then, in the United States (pp. 1–64). (It does, however, seem rather unnecessary for the author in her introduction (p. 3) to make a disparaging remark about Gandhiji, ‘a merchant-caste man’, which has little or nothing to do with her own thesis.) The thesis is about what a Rajput state could do to enforce caste-dharma alongside the pursuit of its own financial gain. The state was that of Marwar, which, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, had no longer any superior authority or power to answer to.
The author compiles her information on the fiscal and tyrannical behaviour of the state (guided by both caste orthodoxy and simple venality) on the basis of her close study of the voluminous state records of the period (Jodhpur Sanad Parwana Bahis), now preserved in the Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner (see p. 176, n.16). There was also in that state an increasing hostility to animal slaughter, under both Jain and Vaishnav influences (this came, so holds the author, particularly through the merchants’ penetration of the administration). There followed, therefore, a considerable degree of persecution of both the low castes and the Muslims.
Despite an occasional tendency to be repetitive, Cherian has given us a book that presents a troubling picture of what an independent ‘native’ state could be like; and, perhaps, it explains why, for so long, ordinary Indians often found British administration, if not less exploitative, yet much less intrusive in the subjects’ private matters and more predictable in its functioning—all in all, a disturbing book.