1906 · Third edition

Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies

Abbé J. A. Dubois · Translated and edited by Henry K. Beauchamp

The substantial 1906 Clarendon Press edition of Abbé Dubois’s influential account of Hindu society, caste, ritual and religious life.

Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois spent more than thirty years in southern India, adopting local dress, travelling extensively and recording the structures of everyday life with a degree of detail unusual for his time. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies became one of the most widely read early European accounts of caste, domestic observance, Brahminical life, ritual purity, religious practice and social organisation.

This authoritative Clarendon Press edition was translated from Dubois’s later French manuscript and edited with notes, corrections and a biographical account by Henry K. Beauchamp. It includes a prefatory note by F. Max Müller and the portrait of Dubois, bringing together the work’s historical text and the scholarship through which it entered the twentieth century.

The present copy retains its handsome original Oxford cloth with gilt lettering and university device. An early Bombay ownership inscription dated November 1915 gives it an appealing Indian history of use. The binding shows honest age-related wear, while the portrait and title matter remain clear and attractive.

Publication

Oxford · At the Clarendon Press, 1906

Language

English

Format

Octavo · Original blue publisher’s cloth · Gilt spine · Portrait frontispiece · xxxiv, 741 pages

Completeness

Complete as issued, including the portrait frontispiece.

Condition

Good. The original cloth remains sound and attractive, with rubbing, marks and wear at the extremities, including fraying at the head of the spine. The interior shows age-toning and scattered spotting consistent with the period.

Provenance

Early ownership inscription, Bombay, November 1915.

Rarity

A desirable early twentieth-century Clarendon Press edition of a foundational source on Hindu social and religious life, retaining its original binding and an early Indian ownership association.

Status

On request