Gordon Stewart. Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India

Oxford University Press, 1994. — 232 p.This set of historical essays challenges many cherished assumptions about the century between the Mughal empire and the British colonial period. Based mainly on archival material in old Marathi, a language inaccessible to most scholars, Stewart Gordon examines the caste system in eighteenth-century India by reconsidering castes as open groups defining themselves through processes of power and military service, not as closed groups reinforced by marriage and ideas of ritual purity.