A01=David Arnold
Author_David Arnold
Category=JHM
Category=NHF
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Indian nationhood
reference point
social inclusivity
South Asian diaspora
traditional practice
Western hostility
Product details
- ISBN 9789360808051
- Dimensions: 170 x 250mm
- Publication Date: 28 Feb 2025
- Publisher: Manohar Publishers and Distributors
- Publication City/Country: IN
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
