Narratives of Penance and Purification in Western India, c. 1650-1850

Abstract

Ritual purification constituted an important dimension of the lives of a broad range of Brahman and ‘clean caste’ Hindus in early modern western India. The purification of individuals was overseen by an array of local community institutions and pandit assemblies located in the shrine towns of western India. These processes shed light on contemporary understandings of individual moral responsibility as well as the critical role of local opinion in rehabilitating offenders. The expanding use of paper records in this period contributed to the ease with which information about individuals and their conduct could be communicated at these local levels. From the 1720s, these local community institutions came under increasing pressure from the centralising ambitions of the Maratha peshwa governments in Pune. Missionary pressures under the early colonial state further transformed the setting in which judgements about purification and community rehabilitation were made, prefiguring later nineteenth century developments in Hindu political thought.

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