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

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.

Product details

• Authors: O'Hanlon Rosalind
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 09.12.2025
• EAN: 9798855803242
• ISBN: 979-8-8558-0324-2
• No. of pages: 452
• Series: SUNY series in Hindu Studies
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Ethnic Studies, RELIGION / History, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, RELIGION / Hinduism / History, History of Religion, Hinduism, Social and cultural history, Asian History, Social classes, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, HISTORY / Asia / South / India, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / Asian Studies, Ethnic studies / Ethnicity