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Lineages of Brahman Power: Caste, Family, and the State in Western India, 1600-1900

Name: Lineages of Brahman Power: Caste, Family, and the State in Western India, 1600-1900
Brand: State University of New York Press
SKU: 9798855803228
Price: 146.99 USD
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Contributors:

Rosalind O'Hanlon

Publisher:

State University of New York Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

History, Religion, Social Science

Book Subcategory:

Asia, Hinduism, Cultural & Ethnic Studies

Book Topic:

South, History, Asian Studies

Series:

Suny Hindu Studies

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

7/1/2025

ISBN 13:

9798855803228

Weight:

1.71 lbs

Size:

9.00 x 6.00 x 1.13 inches

Pages:

452

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product description

Description

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.

About the Author

Rosalind O'Hanlon is Professor Emeritus of Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives, coedited with David Washbrook, and At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India.

Lineages of Brahman Power: Caste, Family, and the State in Western India, 1600-1900

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