Burning the Dead - Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition

"A magisterial piece of work. David Arnold spins an amazing tale of death, ritual, commemoration, and nation-building in which the Raj is the center of the modern death cosmos as well as the universal exemplar of cremation practice in a global context."—Antoinette Burton, author of The Trouble with Empire

"A global history of South Asian cremation practices, Burning the Dead demonstrates the extent to which the corpse straddles the complicated regulatory and religious spaces between the personal, the familial, and the state, contributing to debates about biopolitics and necropolitics in colonial India."—Kama Maclean, Professor of History, South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg

List of contents

List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. The Spectacle of Fire
1. Burning Issues 
2. Colonial Necro-Politics and the Polysemic Corpse

Part Two. Questing Fire
3. The City and Its Dead
4. Consuming Fire
5. The Global Dead

Part Three. The Fire Triumphant
6. The Rebirth of Cremation
7. Cremation and the Nation
Epilogue: Rethinking the Hindu Pyre

A Note on Weights and Currency
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

David Arnold is Professor Emeritus of Asian and Global History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India and Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity.  

Product details

• Authors: David Arnold
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.02.2021
• EAN: 9780520379343
• ISBN: 978-0-520-37934-3
• No. of pages: 268
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Asian, RELIGION / Hinduism / General, RELIGION / Hinduism / History, RELIGION / Hinduism / Rituals & Practice, Colonialism & imperialism, Politics & government, History of Religion, Hinduism, Politics and government, Colonialism and imperialism, Asian History, Indian sub-continent, South Asia (Indian sub-continent), Hindu Life & Practice, Hindu life and practice, HISTORY / Asia / South / General