Rosalind O'Hanlon

TL;DR: In the field of social and cultural anthropology, the issues raised by European representations of non-European 'others' have recently received an enormous amount of critical attention as discussed by the authors, and this intensified critical awareness goes beyond the familiar ethnographic concern with the development of cultural empathy, to a much more fundamental exploration of the epistemological constitution of nonEuropean and colonial societies as objects of knowledge within the disciplines of western social science.

TL;DR: The authors examined the ways in which one high imperial servant in the early seventeenth century inherited, developed and reflected on these themes, and related them to his own personal experience, and suggested that one of their consequences may have been to intensify the strains in Mughal service morale.

TL;DR: Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as discussed by the authors, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity.

TL;DR: The question "Who is a Brahman?" was the focus of sustained and intense debate among the many small and competing Brahman communities of western India's Konkan littoral during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

TL;DR: By the early sixteenth century, a substantial community of Maratha Brahman scholar families had emerged in Mughal Banaras as discussed by the authors, which mobilized substantial cultural and practical resources to address the challenges that early modernity posed to Brahman communities such as themselves.