Acknowledgments
Amonograph is never the work of a single author. Many people have contributed to this book, materially, intellectually, and emotionally. First of all is the institution that Jan Plamper has so aptly named our ‘Berlin Feel Tank’, the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, under the directorship of Ute Frevert. It is a rare luxury to be able to work closely with such wonderful colleagues over many years on a wide plethora of subjects that have the history of emotions at the core. A big thank you to all of my colleagues for the countless discussions and the generous sharing of ideas, specifically to Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, Anja Laukötter, Bettina Hitzer, and Jan Plamper. Almost all the chapters were discussed in my PhD and postdoc colloquium on ‘South Asia and Beyond’, and I am most grateful to my students, past and present, notably to Daniel Kolland, Soheb Niazi, Frederik Schröer, Luc Wodzicki, and Leonie Wolters, and to the extraordinary postdocs working on India that our institute has hosted over the years, notably Mana Kia, Joel Lee, Kedar Kulkarni, Razak Khan, Deepra Dandekar, Rukmini Barua, and most of all, Imke Rajamani and Max Stille. From among the external members of the colloquium, I most gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Gautam Chakrabarti, Stefan Binder, Anandita Bajpai, and Maria Magdalena Fuchs.
This book would not have seen the light of day without the support of Anja Berkes, who is much more than an office manager. Over the years she provided me with the material I needed, kept me organized and on track, read every word that I have written, and complemented the footnotes. In this she was helped by a whole series of extraordinary,
Acknowledgments
talented student assistants: Rachel Johnson, Luc Wodzicki, Frederik Schröer, Maurice Boer, and Caitlin Turner. Ilana Brown, the best copyeditor I have ever worked with, went over the text meticulously and eliminated the last traces of Euro-English.
Two collaborative projects I have been involved with were crucial in shaping this book. For three years, Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from three continents at a number of conferences and workshops in Paris to research Emotions in Political Mobilization in South Asia (EMOPOLIS program at CEIAS, Paris). Helge Jordheim and I led a project on the concepts of civility and civilization in Europe and Asia, which ended in a book co-authored by thirteen scholars, Christian Bailey, Emmanuelle Saada, Einar Wigen, Orit Bashkin, Mana Kia, Mohinder Singh, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika Messner, Oleg Benesh, MyoungKyu Park, and Jan Ifversen. Both the projects have shown me over and over again how much emotions matter in research—not only as a topic, but also as a resource. There is hardly anything more rewarding and more joyful than to dive deep into a topic in the company of friends!
I had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited for a visiting professorship to the University of Pennsylvania when the first draft of most of the chapters was done. For six weeks the colleagues and students sat patiently through lecture after lecture and each week gave me the best comments and advice any author could hope for, and left me with much time for the rest of the week to work the suggestions into revised versions of the chapter. A huge thank you especially to Lisa Mitchell, Ramya Sreenivasan, and Daud Ali for giving me an intellectual home across the ocean!
My second intellectual home in the USA has since many years been the University of Chicago. For this I thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, C.M. Naim, Ulrike Stark, and, most of all, my dearest friend Rochona Majumdar.
The chapters here have been presented and discussed at many universities over the years. A special thank you for invitations and/or for discussions outside a formal venue to Sunil Sharma, SherAli Tareen, Samira Shaikh, Kamran Asdar Ali, Indrani Chatterjee, Anand Yang, Carla Petievich, David Lelyveld, and Ali Mian in the USA, Katherine Schofield, Francesca Orsini, and Francis Robinson in the UK, and
Neeladri Bhattacharya, Sudhir Chandra, Seema Alavi, as well as Rajeev and Tani Bhargava in India.
Finally, the book would have been very different, and not nearly as complex, without the impact of my dear friends and sparring partners from the history of concepts, notably Martin Burke, Jan Ifversen, Jani Marjanen, Helge Jordheim, and Willibald Steinmetz.
Introduction 1
In 1765, a young man, Mirza Shaikh Iʿtisam ud Din, boarded the ship that was to take him to London. Upon his return, he wrote a travel account in Persian,1 a fascinating document, in which he gave lively descriptions of the people and natural phenomena he had encountered. He devoted the same curiosity to ‘the Saiyid in Pegu’, who married a fairy ‘who lived with him for seven years and bore him children’;2 to the inhabitants of Madagascar, whom he described as having a diabolical physiognomy, despite being human; and to jinns and mermaids, flying fishes, sea cows, and the buildings and gardens of Paris. Of course inventions in Britain such as water and wind mills and chronometers caught his attention as well. The latter would become the staple of travel description in the nineteenth century. The prevailing emotion was one of wonder and delight.3
1 Iʿtisam al Din (1827); Iʿtesamuddin (2008). While the Persian original has never been published, there exist several English translations, which follow the original more or less closely. To avoid the colonial reinterpretation of Alexander’s translation, I used Haq’s work, though it is an English translation from a Bengali translation of the Persian original. For the history of the publications and translations, see Marjanen et al. (2019). For the background of travel writing in Persian, see Alam and Subrahmanyam (2007). On the transition period, see Sohrabi (2012). On Iʿtisam ud Din’s travel, see Fisher (2008).
2 Iʿtisam al Din (1827), p. 33.
3 For literature focusing wonder as the governing emotion in the European context, see also Daston and Park (2001).
EmotionsandModernityinColonialIndia:FromBalancetoFervor. Margrit Pernau, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199497775.003.0001
Once in England, his comparative gaze encountered much that he liked. He did not hesitate to suggest that the industriousness of the British, their dedication to learning new things, their physical prowess and endurance be used as a model, especially for the indolent aristocratic Nawabs, whom he and his readers had been criticizing even before he had embarked on his trip. Moreover, the differences he noted were neither absolute nor always to the detriment of the Indians. Even the British ladies, fairy-faced and enchanting though they were, in the end could not compete with the dusky Indian women. This was the reason he refused the urgent invitation to prolong his stay in Britain and decided to forgo the possibility of ‘acquiring riches or temporal advantages’ and returned home.4
A little more than a century later, another traveler took the boat to England. Saiyid Ahmad Khan was already well known as the leader of the Aligarh movement, which aimed to reform the Indian Muslim community through modern education and through a close collaboration with the colonial government.5 Unlike Iʿtisam ud Din, whose text circulated only in manuscript form and among a small and select audience, Saiyid Ahmad Khan sent home letters from his voyage to London, written in modern and simple prose, which he deemed fitting for the new and modern age. These letters were published in the Aligarh Institute Gazette, where they raised such a storm of criticism that the publication had to be discontinued.6
In tune with Saiyid Ahmad’s reformist program and his fight against what he perceived as superstitions, wonder had disappeared from his travelogue. Technical innovations no longer sat side by side with other curiosities, but had become signs of progress and of the civilization British society had attained. The differences between the British and the Indians had become so profound that they had moved into the bodies. Indians consequently almost ranged with beasts rather than with British humans. Saiyad Ahmed wrote, ‘Our Hindu and Muslim
4 Iʿtisam al Din (1827), p. 176. Iʿtisam ud Din was not an exceptional case in the way he observed and interacted with his British hosts. See Cole (1992); Fisher (2004); Green (2009a). For a comparative gaze, see Tavakoli-Targhi (2011). For a more detailed development of changes in temporal structure, see Pernau and Jordheim (2015).
5 Still unsurpassed: Lelyveld (1978); Troll (1978).
6 Majchrowicz (2015), p. 151.
compatriots are still trapped in the deep well of ignorance’.7 The comparative gaze on ‘qualities pertaining to culture and upbringing such as politeness, graciousness, hygiene, and sanitation, good manners, ability and talent’8 no longer led to wondrous delight, but to a deep sense of shame and humiliation. These emotions, Saiyid Ahmad Khan hoped, might become the driving forces for Indians to overcome their shortcomings, even if it might take several generations to match the British.9
The Experience of Modernity and Its Interpretation
Like a burning glass, these vignettes bring into focus some of the central themes of Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India. Modernity has long been viewed as a process that went hand in hand with increasing control over emotions—whether the control was regarded as linked with capitalism, with the modern bureaucratic state, or seen as a process where external control mechanisms moved inside the subjects. The vignettes give a first indication that emotions did not disappear, quite the contrary. New emotions came to the forefront—delight was replaced by shame in our example—and even more importantly, they gained in intensity. Iʿtisam ud Din’s sense of delight at the wonders he encountered afforded him pleasure, but his emotions retained their balance. Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s shame and his desire for a different future, on the other hand, were visceral feelings that pervaded his entire being, and he fervently wanted to convey that to his compatriots and co-religionists. The emotional mobilization—which was to bring people out into the streets by the hundreds of thousands in the twentieth century, ready to suffer loss and violence (and at times also to inflict it)—started right here, and it cannot be captured through the toolbox of discipline studies only.
Historians have become increasingly critical of the concept of modernity over the last generation or so, if they have not judged it as
7 Saiyid Ahmad Khan (2011a), p. 182.
8 Saiyid Ahmad Khan (2011a), pp. 168, 177f. For the Urdu text, see Saiyid Ahmad Khan (2009).
9 Saiyid Ahmad Khan (2011a), p. 178. For a more detailed reading of the text, see Chapter 3.
4Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India
loaded beyond redemption and therefore avoided it altogether.10 What has been pushed to the background together with the analytical concept is the experience of the actors, and the way they used the concept of modernity to talk about and make sense of their experiences. Even if we do not find the concept helpful any longer, there is no denying that it was one of the central concepts used by nineteenth-century writers to talk and write about the world they were living in, and it is as such that it deserves our attention.11
This is the starting point for the intervention of this book. Modernity, the two vignettes have shown, implied a very specific way to negotiate difference—for the actors. What they could observe elsewhere was not simply different, but this difference could be mapped onto a timeline, which allowed for a precise diagnosis of how far a society had progressed and where it stood in comparison to other societies.12 Iʿtisam ud Din still took it for granted that he shared the present with the British. Saiyid Ahmad suffered from what he identified as the Indians, and especially the Muslims, lagging behind the British in the race towards modernity. Modernity still implied the ability to create technical innovation—the ‘wonders’ that Iʿtisam ud Din had marveled at—but even more, it had become a moral and an emotional category: being modern meant feeling the right emotions, and feeling them with the required degree of control and passion.
This interpretation was part of a global discourse, originating not in the West in blissful isolation from the Rest, but during and through colonialism—which was not a happy and peaceful cultural-encounter program, as some politicians want to re-imagine it at present,13 but a violent and bloody process. The fact that the discourse was global also did not mean that it played out in the same way everywhere, but rather that the shapes it took were profoundly entangled. Nor was the fear of being left behind by modernity and progress limited to the colonies and the countries under European dominance without being formally colonized. While Britain and France (and slightly later the
10 For a detailed look on the different strategies to re-conceptualize the concept, see the conclusion of this book.
11 Cooper (2005).
12 Epple (2018).
13 L’Express (2016).
United States) could, to some extent, imagine themselves as being the vanguard of progress, traveling to an uncharted future, in which their former experience would no longer serve them as a guide, the idea that the future was already happening somewhere else and that latecomers had to hurry along to catch up with it formed part of the discourse on modernity and the emotions that were linked to it in many parts of Europe as well. It was the comparative gaze that thus increasingly supplemented, but also dislocated the space of experience. Though this monograph studies the example of the Muslims of North India, its framework is much larger. A similar argument could have been made for Bengali Hindus, for Ottoman Turks, or for that matter for many Germans, to name just a few. In no case should this book be read as a study in Muslim exceptionalism—it is not because I believe Indian Muslims to be either intrinsically more emotional than others or to have become more passionate after the Revolt of 1857 (they were not) that I chose this particular case study over another one, but because this is the group of people whose history I am most familiar with and whose texts I read with reasonable fluency. This also forbids reading this analysis as an explanation or a prehistory of Partition through the figure of the emotional Muslim.
Whether they traveled to Europe or stayed in India, Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s contemporaries saw profound transformation in the world around them. New technologies, from the railway to steam ships, from the printing press to the bicycle, and from the local sugar mill to factories began to mark the daily life of an increasing number of people.14 New knowledge changed the frame of interpretation, new forms of relationship marked family life, the contact between men and women, but also between elder and younger men. New temporal regimes emphasized punctuality and planning. These could have been perceived as random changes. What held them together was the actors’ interpretation that these were the harbingers of a new age. Whether as historians we choose to use the concept of modernity or not, we need to remain aware that for the men and women of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this was one of the most important concepts through which they endowed with meaning their experiences of rapid change.
14 Arnold (2013).
‘New’ became the key concept with which to make sense of this experience: naya daur, the new epoch; na ʾi roshni, the new light or enlightenment; na ʾi tahzib, the new civility. In a slightly more elaborate code, drawing on Persian and Arabic, naya might be replaced by jadid, carrying basically the same meaning, but relating back to the religious and reformist discourse of renewal, tajdid, and the renewer, mujaddid This vocabulary had gained importance in the Indo-Muslim context at least since the seventeenth century, the beginning of the second Islamic millennium.15 The choice of ‘new’ instead of ‘modern’ had a double effect. On the one hand, it opened up a space for multiple modernities avant la lettre. What contemporaries were experiencing was an intense change, but unlike modernity, this change did not carry the connotation of uniqueness. If nineteenth-century Muslims had to go to Britain to experience the new times in their purest form, they pointed out that in yesteryears it had been the Europeans who had gone to Baghdad, Granada, or Istanbul for the same purpose. Stages of development were acknowledged, but they did not happen along a singular time line, but according to the laws of rise and fall, of ebb and flow,16 thus supplementing the present-day experience by history.
Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India is designed to address broader concerns, even if the source corpus draws mainly on Indian texts in Urdu.17 The micro level of everyday practices I look at in the empirical part of the chapters is deeply marked by global discourse. But these practices are not only influenced by the macro level, they are also used by the actors with the aim to transform the global order, or at least their community’s ranking in its hierarchy. This entanglement of the global and the local allows the hypothesis that neither the emotions induced by modernity nor the increasing cultivation of fervor and
15 Friedmann (1971).
16 Hali (1997). Though the idea of the stages of development had become predominant in Britain since the end of the eighteenth century, it was never unchallenged. Notably the increasing fears of decadence and decay in the decades leading up to the First World War point back to older interpretations of rise and decline. See Pernau (2015a) with further references.
17 It was language, not religion, which was the criterion of selection. While the language was still shared to a large extent among Hindus and Muslims in the middle of the nineteenth century, after 1890 it increasingly became identified as a Muslim language.
enthusiasm as a reaction to modernity were unique to Indian Muslims, even if some of the language used was specific.18 It is certainly not the aim of the book to contribute to a narrative of ‘the emotional Muslim’ or even ‘the emotional Oriental’. The literature suggests that there existed not only a family resemblance between the emotions of Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus, but that bringing in emotions to understand modernity could also make sense for other colonies and for at least some European countries as well.19
Modernity, Discipline, and Emotions
At first sight this seems to run counter to much of the current interpretation of what modernity is and what effects it produced. Whether it is Karl Marx and Max Weber, Norbert Elias, or a little later Michel Foucault and all the research they have triggered: the typical spaces of modernity have been identified as the factory, the army, and the bureaucracy, and once the attention shifted to surveillance and governmentality, the prison, the clinic, and the lunatic asylum. All of them, so we learned, were geared to produce modern subjects, who were increasingly rational and disciplined and who interiorized the control that had previously been imposed upon them from the outside. Emotions, and notably strong, passionate, and excessive emotions, in this view belonged to an earlier world—whether this was seen as progress to be welcomed, as a history of loss, or as simply unavoidable. That modernity also went along with strong emotions is of course not unknown—one only has to recall the images of nationalism and mass mobilization, but also of the arts in the twentieth century. However, this knowledge seldom made it into the grand narratives.
Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India does not aim at replacing the attentiontothediscipliningprojectwithafocusontheemotionalization project. The arguments on modernity as a process in which emotions
18 For a comparative approach, see the different regional chapters in Pernau et al. (2015).
19 See the literature review in the appendix, which covers works on Muslims as well as on Hindus. References on other countries have not been worked in systematically, but pointed out wherever I felt the need (and the competence) to do so.
were submitted to increasing control and to increasing interiorization of this control—whether through education or through the creation of an environment geared towards surveillance—have produced a wealth of outstanding empirical studies. They are here to stay, and I am in no way denying their intellectual power. However, they leave out equally fascinating fields, in which emotions were important and became even more important during the time under investigation. The literature on South Asia suggests that even for the time span between the Revolt and the First World War, the high noon of imperialism and the period where the colonial state was most effective, emotions had not disappeared or lost their importance, nor had they been restricted to the private sphere. Passionate and unbounded emotions did not merely happen; they were increasingly regarded as important for society, for its day-to-day functioning, and for its struggle for survival on a global scale. It is my aim in this book to complicate the narrative on the development of the relation between emotions and discipline, not to replace a simplistic ‘from emotions to discipline’ with an equally simplistic ‘from discipline to emotions’. What I do argue is that in the debates, the keyword ʿadl, translatable as balance or harmony, was since the 1870s increasingly displaced by josh, ebullition, enthusiasm, or fervor. While ʿadl had been central to Indo-Persianate discussions of the body, social interactions, and morality to the polity, and aimed at establishing harmonious relations within and between the microcosms and the macrocosms, it became progressively marginal and disappeared from the debates on emotions before the First World War. The emphasis on josh, its links to the virility and youthfulness needed for the survival of the community and the nation, was a new development that should not be underestimated. Even though the claim for josh was framed in a universal language, introducing no restrictions on who should feel it and how and when it should be displayed, the following chapters show that male authors were decidedly uncomfortable with strong emotions in women (though women started to claim these emotions for themselves) and children. Attention to the emotions of the lower classes started to develop only in the years immediately preceding the First World War. At that moment, however, they were co-opted into the struggle for the nation and the community and its strong emotions. The practices to which josh could lead are even more ambivalent and rarely spelt out clearly. Writing articles and books and giving passionate
speeches certainly qualified, as did the sacrifice of time and money for voluntary associations and community projects like the foundation of the Aligarh College. But also hard work and the striving for a life of punctuality, which are usually regarded as belonging to the disciplining project, in the texts under investigation come across as signs of a fervent striving, not so different from the lover in the ghazal, joyfully sacrificing everything for his beloved or the soldiers fighting in the army of the Prophet. If some emotions are to be subdued in order for one to become the kind of person who is able to save the community, this struggle itself is depicted in the language of josh
As will be elaborated in more detail in the literature review in the appendix, besides a growing corpus of works focusing explicitly on emotions, there is much literature not labeled as emotion history, which can be read for what it says on emotions, their transformation and their impact at specific historical moments—from classics such as Gyanendra Pandey’s work on communalism and David Lelyveld’s study of Aligarh, to more recent works on family and marriage, or on political mobilization.20 Emotions have surely been disciplined in a number of areas, but in others, they have gained in strength and been valued for their quality of excess—and this was not a remainder from an earlier period, but a new development starting in the second half of the nineteenth century and increasing in importance in the years leading up to the First World War. Feelings of love and intimacy retained or even enhanced their political meaning. If friendship had a long history as a political emotion, this now extended to spousal love and love between children and parents. Religious practices had an intense emotional coloring, as did the construction of religious communities and the hardening of their boundaries. This development was not restricted to religion, but also informed linguistic and national communities and the mass movements to which they led, whether they were peaceful or became violent.
Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India builds upon this body of research and expands it. Its central emphasis is on the investigation into how emotions changed, in intensity as well as in quality. The actors not only reflected more on their emotions and the emotions they encountered (or missed in their encounters), they increasingly
20 Hansen (2011); Lelyveld (1978); Majumdar (2009); Pandey (1990).
valued strong, visceral, and even indomitable passions. They strove to experience these emotions and attempted to inculcate them in others, and they devised new languages and practices to bring about these feelings. In the conclusion, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India will bring these findings into dialogue with the well-established field of the studies of modernity and argue for a more nuanced narrative of what modernity meant for those who experienced it.
Approaches to the History of Emotions
The disciplines dominant in the production of public knowledge on emotions today are not history, nor are they sociology, anthropology, or political sciences, instead they are in the realms of psychology and neurosciences. For a long time these disciplines have claimed privileged access to test persons’ emotions by measuring their bodily reaction to diverse stimuli, generating knowledge that, they claimed, was different and superior to the test persons’ self-reports. People were held not to be the best judges about what they or others might be feeling, and language was at best an inadequate tool to express these emotions, which were viewed as existing independently of their expression and interpretation.21 This was based on certain assumptions: first, that the real emotions were situated inside the subject and hence not accessible without special knowledge; second, that they were always expressed through the body, and that unlike language the body could not lie but provided an authentic insight to the interior emotions; and third, that bodies changed only in the time scale of evolution and remained universal across cultures.22 Even if the expression actors chose to give to their emotions might be socially marked and hence historically variable, this did not impact the emotions themselves. These assumptions have by now been partially disputed from within the field of psychological studies, but they still mark public discourse, and it is by this discourse that historians and social scientists are asked endlessly how they can speak at all about emotions in actors they cannot examine psychologically and neurologically during their field studies, or actors who are anyhow long since dead.
21 Katz (2009); Majid (2012).
22 Ekman (1999).
William Reddy has challenged the assumption that the link between an emotion and its expression was a one-way street.23 An actor’s identifying and expressing of an emotion is not a process that comes into play in previously fully formed emotions, but is crucial to the way emotions take shape. Expanding on John Austin’s speech act theory,24 Reddy suggested calling these speech acts which labeled feelings emotives. Emotives, according to him, are ‘emotional utterances that take the form of first-person, present tense emotion claims … constituting a form of speech that is neither descriptive nor performative’.25 Unlike Austin’s performatives, they are influenced, he claimed, by what they refer to, but unlike constatives, they not only describe the world, but also change it.26 Emotives become ‘translations into … language of a small part of the flow of coded messages that an awake body generates’.27 These bodily messages, however, are fluid and can be developed in different directions. It is the naming process that allows the navigation between emotions, the decision whether the vague feeling is anger or perhaps rather sadness and hence the closing down of its alternative possibilities and the elimination of its vagueness and hesitation.28
William Reddy has had a significant impact on the nascent field of emotion history since the beginning of the 2000s, not least because he was one of the rare historians who simultaneously trained as a psychologist and could build bridges between the fields, or so historians of emotion hoped. But he was also criticized from the beginning for his logocentrism, for the assumption of the central role a specific use of language and words played in how people felt, which might be more specific to a certain geographical region and period of history than he acknowledged.29 He later agreed that symbols, too, could be emotives, but only under the condition that they were unequivocal and performed the same work of precisely identifying and classifying an emotion.30 This, however, only partially solved the problem; it left
23 Reddy (2001).
24 Austin (1962).
25 Reddy (2001), p. 104.
26 Reddy (2001), p. 105.
27 Reddy (2001), p. 110.
28 Reddy (2001), pp. 118–22.
29 Rosenwein (2002a), pp. 1181–2; see also Rosenwein (2002b), pp. 821–45.
30 Reddy (2011).
open the greater challenge of moving beyond a conception of the self, where emotions were still situated in the inside, constituting the core of a personality, and where subjects devoted constant attention to observing and managing their inner lives.
Imke Rajamani and I developed a model, which allowed for the formation of emotions not only within subjects, in some inaccessible interior space, which could only be known by the subjects themselves, but also between them and in the interaction between them and the material world. Moreover, it did not limit interpretation to language, but brought in the possibility of using modes and media based on visual, auditory, tactile signs or a combination of all of them.31 On the one hand, the experience of emotions is premised upon bodily and sensory experiences. This does not contradict what has been stated earlier that imagination can also trigger real emotions with real consequences. But even emotions based on mental representations or memories draw on experiences, previous or present. On the other hand, emotions are not unmediated reactions to the impact of the material world: the body and the senses are as much a product of nurture as of nature. The interpretation of previous experiences changes how present impressions are made sense of and how these impressions also transform the body and the senses. No interpretation of the world would be possible without bodies interacting with the world, but interpretation has already shaped the body that is experiencing something. Not the body in its actual shape, but its potential to be transformed by experience. We claim that this is universal.
The second universal Rajamani and I put forth in this article is to regard humans as beings who interpret the world around them with the help of signs and generate knowledge about the world. Again, it is neither the interpretation they give to the world, nor the way they arrive at an interpretation, nor the signs and concepts they use that are universal, rather it is the fact that they strive to make sense of what they sense and feel, and that this interpretation is based on some form of communication and hence is social in nature. The interpretation then is what needs to be investigated and traced in its historical changes and further related back to bodies—both as a source and a result of this semantic activity. The sources that have been gathered in archives and
31 Pernau and Rajamani (2016).
with which we have been trained to work will often favor a focus on written interpretations, but this model allows venturing beyond texts wherever sources are or can be made available, whether it is the visual archive and films, architecture and the division of space, music and sounds, or the observation of habitualized bodily reactions to smell. All of these sources do not exist in isolation. Written texts assume their readers’ visual knowledge, pictures presuppose texts, but also assume awareness of auditive or tactile signs. Wherever this happens, the analysis needs to bring out this intermodality and intermediality.
32
What can be said in these different media shapes what can be done, without determining it. But interpretations do not directly change reality, they transform the ways the body and the senses can experience the material world, and they generate (bodily) practices, which in turn have the potential to effect material changes.
33 The three aspects—experience, interpretation, and practice—are interdependent; they come together to bring forth and shape emotions. They are so tightly linked that they can only be distinguished analytically with some difficulty, and they constantly influence and produce each other. It is this interrelation that permits us to investigate not only what people said about their emotions and how they practiced them, but to argue that this had an impact on what they actually felt. This does not provide us with certainty at the individual level, but with a high degree of probability at the social echelon: if within a specific group at a specific time people agree what a certain emotion means, how it should be interpreted and valued, and if they practice this emotion accordingly in a significant number of cases (all areas that historians have a long experience in investigating), we can safely assume that many of them will not fake it, or at least, that after some time faking it will lead to making it and to feeling it.34
32 The history and multimediality of the monsoon as a concept of emotion is discussed in Rajamani et al. (2018).
33 For a slightly different concept of practice, see Scheer (2012). Scheer’s practices involve the mindful body; they encompass what we have distinguished from practices, namely experiences and interpretation.
34 This does not preclude the possibility that emotions can also fail. See the international conference titled ‘Failing at Feelings: Historical Perspectives (1800–2000)’ at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, 15–16 December 2016, organized by Uffa Jensen and Pascal Eitler.
Chapters and Topics
The case studies in Emotions and Modernity in India focus on the time between the Revolt of 1857 and the outbreak of the First World War, with occasional glances at earlier developments and in exceptional cases following them up to a later period. Though I have attempted (but not always succeeded) to avoid writing the history of individual great men and instead give space to lesser known writers of textbooks, advice literature, journals and newspapers, male and female; the ashraf, the well-born and respectable, once again occupy an important place. For once, this may be seen as strengthening the argument the book wants to make. These people, rather than the masses, were the ones thought to be rational and self-disciplined. To show that even here an emotionalization took place that was at least as important as the disciplining project, might therefore carry some weight. Most of the chapters focus on reflections of the contemporary actors on emotions—what emotions are, if and why they matter, which emotions should be cultivated and to what extent. To remind us that emotions have a life beyond these reflections and that emotion history is not a counter-narrative to political history, but another way of looking at it, the book is framed by two chapters putting emotions and physical violence center stage.
The first chapter looks at the Revolt of 1857, known for its carnage and the excessive emotions it generated on both sides, even more so since the massacre of British women and children in Kanpur, which gave rise to the battle cry ‘for the ladies and the babies!’. The British endeavor to restore a violated moral order through publicly inflicting gruesome punishments on the body of the offender was something that was usually linked to the pre-modern state, not to a modern army. In 1857, irrespective of traditional injunctions towards balance and self-control, violence and the extreme passions that powered it were believed to be legitimate and even a moral duty. The chapter investigates three areas: the emotions of the British and the Indians read as an entangled history, the narrative of trust and its betrayal at the origin of the events; the creation of a violent masculinity expressed through emotional excess; and the mobilization of emotions needed for the continuation of a long drawn-out battle.
The second chapter turns to the development of emotion concepts and investigates how actors at different times drew the boundaries
