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Religious Gifting and Inland Commerce in Seventeenth-Century South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

David West Rudner
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Abstracts

Most accounts of South Indian commerce in the seventeenth century depend on European documents and focus on Indo-European trade along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. This article makes use of indigenous documents to analyze the way a caste of itinerant salt traders, the Nakarattars, combined worship and commerce in the interior of Tamil-speaking South India. It focuses on Nakarattar activities in the seventeenth century before they had achieved power under their better-known name, Nattukottai Chettiars, and at a time when their commercial expansion wasjust getting under way and when the close association of this expansion with rituals of religious gifting was already apparent. The two main purposes of the article are to illuminate the ritual dimension of commercial activity in precolonial South India and to enrich current transactional models of the relationship between temples and small groups in South India by incorporating a mercantile perspective.

Type
Giving in Asia–A Symposium
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , May 1987 , pp. 361 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1987

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