Home Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition by David Arnold (ISBN: 9780520379343)

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Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition Hardcover - 2021

Name: Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition
Price: 41.98 USD
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Author: Arnold, David
ISBN: 9780520379343

by David Arnold

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From the publisher

Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the so-called traditional practice of Hindu cremation on an open-air funeral pyre was culturally transformed and materially refashioned under British rule, following intense Western hostility, colonial sanitary acceptance, and Indian adaptation. David Arnold examines the critical reception of Hindu cremation abroad, particularly in Britain, where India formed a primary reference point for the cremation debates of the late nineteenth century, and explores the struggle for official recognition of cremation among Hindu and Sikh communities around the globe. Above all, Arnold foregrounds the growing public presence and assertive political use made of Hindu cremation, its increasing social inclusivity, and its close identification with Hindu reform movements and modern Indian nationhood.

From the rear cover

"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

Details

Title Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition
Author David Arnold
Binding Hardcover
Pages 268
Volumes 1
Language ENG
Publisher University of California Press
Date 2021-02-02
ISBN 9780520379343 / 0520379349
Weight 1.15 lbs (0.52 kg)
Dimensions 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 in (23.62 x 16.00 x 2.54 cm)
Themes
- Cultural Region: Asian - General
- Cultural Region: Indian
Library of Congress subjects India - Religious life and customs, Hinduism - Customs and practices
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2020026923
Dewey Decimal Code 294.538

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.