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ABSTRACT
This article explores the emotion of friendship among merchant communities in early modern South Asia. Based on the autobiography of a Jain merchant, Banarasidas, it argues that friendship as an emotion was invoked in multiple social contexts, sometimes to reinforce normative boundaries, and other times to subvert them. Even so, friendship was always multivalent, and extended beyond dyadic relationships. The social outreach of friendship was crucial in reinforcing community and kin ties. In the case of merchant communities, friendship played a crucial role in trade and business activities and very often it was the sentiment of friendship that sustained business partnerships. Friendship also ensured trust among merchants, enabling the free flow of goods and services in early modern South Asia. The autobiography of Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka is written in versified Braj language. In exploring the text for emotion history, I have also looked at the relationship between language and emotions. Written in a vernacular language, the text combines literacy with performativity and this, I argue, imbues the text with a specific language of emotions that is intense, sensorial and embodied. At the same time, the choice of genre and its relations with emotions is no less significant. Within an autobiographical genre, emotions serve as indices to the constitution of selfhood. The articulation of friendship in Ardhakathanaka allows Banarasidas to situate his social self within a thick web of intimate relationships. Focusing on Ardhakathanaka, this paper looks at the entangled relationship between the choice of language, style and genre, and the articulation of specific emotions. Even as emotions are not entirely constituted in and through discourse, I still wish to suggest that language and emotions are co-dependent entities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For details refer to Orsini, Print and Pleasure, Orsini and Schofield, eds. Tellings and Texts and Petievich and Stille, “Emotions in Performance,” 67–102, along with many others.,
2. For details refer to Orsini, Love in South Asia.
3. Pernau, “Mapping Emotions, Constructing Feelings,” 634–67.
4. Frevert, “The Modern History of Emotions: A Research Center in Berlin,” 39.
5. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 194.
6. Ibid.
7. For instance, see works like Jain, “Piety, Laity and Royalty: Jains under the Mughals in the first half of the seventeenth century,” 67–92, Vanina, “The “Ardhakathanaka” by Banarasi Das,” 211–24 and Raychaudhuri and Habib, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, 264, 341–3, 351.
8. For instance, see works like Hasan, “Presenting the Self,” 105–22 and Martinez, “Gathering the Threads,” 250–77.
9. Heller, A Theory of Feelings, 92–4.
10. Frevert, Emotional Lexicons, 203.
11. Orality or oral literary practices have been one of the important characteristics of South Asian societies. Moreover, scholars like Allison Busch etc. have argued that Indians were great textualizers as well, for two millennia before the colonizers came (Busch, Poetry of Kings, 243). For instance, the rapid spread of the manuscript culture during the Mughal period is a testimony to that. Banarasidas’s Ardhakathanaka too represents a perfect blend of literacy and orality as on one hand it was steeped in the riti written literary tradition, while on the other its colloquial Braj made it easy to be performed in assemblies and gatherings.
12. Malhotra and Lambert- Hurley, eds. Speaking of the Self. 14.
13. Lath, Ardhakathanaka, Introduction.
14. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 35.
15. Kia, “Indian Friends,” 401.
16. Zaman, “Instructive Memory,” 694–6.
17. See note 13 above.
18. Ibid.
19. Lath, Ardhakathanaka, 224.
20. Ibid., 275.
21. See note 13 above.
22. Hasan, “Presenting the Self,” 108.
23. Martinez, “Gathering the Threads,” 261.
24. Plamper, Reddy, Rosenwein and Stearns, “The History of Emotions”. 243.
25. See for instance, works by Pernau, “Feeling Communities,” Frevert, Emotional Lexicons among others.
26. Pernau, “Feeling Communities,” 7.
27. Frevert, Emotional Lexicons, 202–3.
28. Ali and Flatt, “Friendship in Indian History,” 5.
29. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 5.
30. Orsini, Print and Pleasure, 8.
31. It denotes the corpus of courtly literary culture which was the hallmark of 17th century Mughal India. According to Allison Busch, the main interest of these poets was in Adopting older Sanskrit practices (or concepts from Sanskrit rhetoric, such as rasa-literary emotion or alankara-figures of speech), particularly courtly genres, to the vernacular literary culture of their own period. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 9–10.
32. Ibid., 3–20.
33. The 16th- 17th century in India witnessed multiple literary productions written in languages like Awadhi, Braj etc.; all of which drew on diverse linguistic and religio-cultural traditions. The period from 16th century onwards is referred to as the ‘vernacular millennium’ by Sheldon Pollock where poets and other literati increasingly began to use spoken, regional and other demotic languages for their compositions. Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire, 202.
34. For details see Selby, “The Ecology of Friendship,” 26–35, Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship and Mauss, The Gift.
35. For details see Ali, “The Death of a Friend,” 36–60, Gordon, “Babur: Salt, Social Closeness and Friendship,” 82–97.
36. For details see Ali, “The Death of a Friend,” 36–60.
37. For details see Khanna, “The Female Companion in a World of Men,” 98–116.
38. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 198. (These terms are taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
39. Ibid.,184.
40. Ibid., 148.
41. Ibid., 202.
42. Ibid., 196.
43. Ibid., 52.
44. Ibid., 168.
45. Ibid., 224.
46. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 68. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
47. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 69.
48. For details refer to works by Dale, Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, 9 etc.
49. Flatt, “Practicing Friendship,” 61–81.
50. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 483. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
51. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 435–7.
52. For a long time, academic historians have been ambivalent about the genre of Biography. According to them biographical studies take the individual as the only intellectual and analytical centre of the argument, devoid of any particular historical context. Many are sceptical of its capacity to convey the kind of analytically sophisticated interpretation of the past that academics have long expected. However, the first decade of the 21st century saw an efflorescence of the historian’s interest in these biographies. This led to many round table discussions on the subject of ‘biography and history’ in the historical circles of the Western world. The reason for this recent interest in biographical studies, opine David Nasaw is that ‘biographies help the historian to move beyond the strictures of identity politics without having to expand its ever increasing and often useful categories … Moreover, it offers a way of transcending the theoretical divide between empiricist social history and linguistic-turn cultural history without sacrificing the methodological or epistemological gains of either … ’. Nasaw, “Introduction,” 573–8.
53. Arnold and Blackburn, eds. Telling Lives in India, 22.
54. Hasan, “Presenting the Self,” 117–8.
55. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 166. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
56. Ibid., 202.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., xiv.
59. Ibid.
60. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 202.
61. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 168. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
62. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 228.
63. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 228. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
64. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice”. 199.
65. Ibid., 201–2.
66. Ibid., 202.
67. The Oswal (sometime spelled Oshwal or Oswal) are a Jain community with origins in the Marwar region of Rajasthan and Tharparkar district in Sindh (Babb, Alchemies of Violence, 164–78).
68. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 146. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
69. Ibid., 148.
70. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 149.
71. Ibid., 147.
72. Ibid., 150.
73. Ibid., 72.
74. Ibid., 86.
75. For details refer to, Lath, 239 and Chowdhury, 84.
76. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 84. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
77. Ibid., 85.
78. Ibid., 82.
79. Ibid.
80. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 83.
81. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 82. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
82. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 83.
83. See note 81 above.
84. Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka, 83.
85. Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka, 165. (This ref. is taken from the original Braj text included in the translation of Ardhakathanaka by Rohini Chowdhury, Ardhakathanaka: A Half Story).
86. Ibid., 248.
87. Lath, Ardhakathanaka, 638–9.
88. Ibid., Introduction, xxix-xxxviii.
89. Ibid., 284.
90. Ibid., 246–50.
91. Ibid., 262–4.
92. For details refer to the works by Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies and Bashir, Sufi Bodies.
93. Kia, “Indian Friends,” 405.
94. Ibid., 272.