Lineages of Brahman Power: Caste, Family, and the State in Western India, 1600–1900 (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)
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- Synopsis
- Traces the role that western India's influential Brahman communities played in shaping India's modern caste system.Western India's Brahman communities have played a key role in the shaping of India's modern caste system. In Lineages of Brahman Power, Rosalind O'Hanlon focuses on their rise to power between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, exploring the ways in which some Brahman intellectuals sought to defend the hierarchies of caste against the social changes of the early modern era while others looked for compromise. Drawing on Marathi vernacular sources, O'Hanlon also examines the household, family, and lineage as key sites for Brahman accumulation of skills and cultural capital. This approach also reveals Brahman identity itself as contested, as Brahman subcastes competed with each other not only for service positions and state patronage but also to define who could actually be considered a Brahman, and of what kind. This focus on Brahman social history is novel, in that most historians focus on Brahman power as emerging out of their religious prestige and dominance of intellectual and literary cultures. The emphasis on Brahman identity itself as complex and internally contested also helps to avoid essentializing Brahman power as always and everywhere the same.
- Copyright:
- 2025
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 452 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9798855803235
- Related ISBNs:
- 9798855803242, 9798855803228
- Publisher:
- State University of New York Press
- Date of Addition:
- 07/01/25
- Copyrighted By:
- Rosalind O'Hanlon
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Religion and Spirituality, Social Studies
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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