Burning the Dead

Auteur
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.  

Texte du rabat
"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

Contenu
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. The Spectacle of Fire

1. Burning Issues 

2. Colonial Necro-Politics and the Polysemic Corpse

   Part Two. Questing Fire

3. The City and Its Dead
4. Consuming Fire

5. The Global Dead

   Part Three. The Fire Triumphant

6. The Rebirth of Cremation

7. Cremation and the Nation
   Epilogue: Rethinking the Hindu Pyre

   A Note on Weights and Currency
   List of Abbreviations
   Glossary
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index