"Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in pre-colonial South Asia. Turning to the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India, Divya Cherian, through a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics, uncovers how Marwari 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 up in contrast to "Untouchable" in a process that also reconfigured Muslims 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. The book relies on an analysis of hundreds of orders issued by the Rathor court to its provincial offices. These orders intervene in localized disputes, including those involving individuals from such occupational groups as cobblers, tailors, birdcatchers, and bangle makers"