In Merchants of Virtue, historian Divya Cherian argues that merchants in eighteenth-century Marwar helped turn ideals such as vegetarianism and bodily restraint into public markers of elite Hindu identity. They did so not only through personal practice, but by using petitions, political alliances, and state administration to shape rules and enforce them. Cherian’s account also shows how this identity-making reinforced caste hierarchy and exclusion; it is a regional history, not a claim that Hindu identity developed the same way throughout South Asia.
What the book argues about merchants and identity
Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia is a study of everyday life and local politics in Marwar, a kingdom in western India that is now part of Rajasthan. Cherian asks what it meant to be Hindu in this setting. Her answer puts merchants at the center of political change: they helped promote caste ideals as broader standards of religious and social belonging.
Vegetarianism, protection of nonhuman life, and bodily austerity were not simply private virtues in this account. Merchant communities sought to make them public norms, using legal strategies and influence within the state. Cherian describes a shift from merchants participating in state machinery to merchants leading political change. The result was an elite identity shaped through both ethical self-discipline and the power to define who stood outside it.
How caste hierarchy shaped the boundaries of belonging
The argument is not a simple story of Hindus defining themselves against Muslims. Cherian emphasizes caste hierarchy and the exclusion of people designated “Untouchable.” In the historical records she examines, the term achhep could encompass Muslims as well as leatherworkers, landless vagrants, and communities assigned waste-clearing work. These were classifications imposed in a particular historical setting, not neutral descriptions of present-day communities.
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This framing shows how religious identity could be entangled with caste-inflected ideas about bodies and social status. The book examines both the state’s treatment of excluded groups and the ethical self-fashioning of merchants and other elites. Its claims concern Marwar’s archive and political world; they should not be generalized into a single account of precolonial South Asia.
How merchants and the state enforced ideals
Merchant communities could combine regional political authority with wider fiscal power. Cherian traces how they promoted protection of animal life and bodily restraint, then sought to have such ideals given force through law across the kingdom. The policies and campaigns discussed in the book extended beyond slaughter and meat eating to matters such as abortion, gambling, and drinking, alongside efforts to uphold chastity and distinguish “high” from “low” and “Hindu” from “Untouchable.”
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The 1799 Pali campaign against slaughter
A documented episode shows how local action and royal administration could reinforce one another. In 1799, mahajans in Pali paid local butchers five rupees in exchange for a promise to stop slaughtering animals. When the Rathor crown learned of the effort, the dīvān, Osvāl merchant-administrator Mumhta Sardar Mal, ordered the governor of Pali to give the mahajans a copy of the crown’s order against violence toward animals. The order could strengthen their local campaign by joining merchant pressure to state authority.
Royal policy and religious influence
Cherian’s account also places policy in a wider political and religious context. Maharaja Vijai Singh’s initiation into the Vaishnav Vallabhite sect in 1765 likely played an important role in the kingdom-wide imposition of animal-slaughter bans, according to the author. The book’s broader point is that ideals and enforcement did not arise from merchants alone: they took shape through interactions among merchant communities, rulers, and administrative officials.
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What the archive can—and cannot—show
Cherian draws on Rathor state orders, petitions, and localized disputes to examine how untouchability was constructed and practiced in everyday settings. Her analysis treats law and administrative machinery as integral to caste order, including when officials intervened in ways that favored local elites. One example from 1785 is an order directing officials to distinguish people designated “Hindu” from a list classified as achhep, while also having magistracy men announce devotional recitation in town. It illustrates how classification could be an administrative act, not only a social idea.
The archive does not provide unmediated testimony from people classified as lowly or untouchable. Petitions and accounts were mediated by scribes, and the records survive in truncated form. Cherian therefore does not claim to recover those communities’ voices in an unfiltered way. That limit matters: the book is especially revealing about the practices of state and local elites, while the people subjected to their classifications are often visible through records produced by others.
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How the book is organized
The book moves from political power to the making of social boundaries and then to elite ethical practice. Its chapters are grouped into two parts, “Other” and “Self.”
- Power: establishes the political setting and merchants’ relationship to state authority.
- Other: examines “Purity,” “Hierarchy,” and “Discipline,” including the classification and regulation of excluded groups.
- Self: explores “Nonharm,” “Austerity,” and “Chastity” as ideals of conduct and identity.
Who should read Merchants of Virtue
This scholarly monograph is a strong fit for readers interested in South Asian history, caste, religion, state formation, or the political role of merchant communities. It offers a focused regional case study rather than a broad survey, and its value lies in showing how identity could be shaped through everyday disputes, administrative decisions, and campaigns over conduct. The University of California Press lists a paper edition and an open-access ebook through its Luminos program. The publisher also lists the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences as a 2022 award.
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