Studying emotions in South Asia

ABSTRACT

Emotions are not a new comer in South Asian studies. Putting them centre stage, however, allow for an increasing complexity and reflexivity in the categories we are researching: Instead of assuming that we already know what love, anger, or fear is and hence can use them to explain interactions and developments, the categories themselves have become open to inquiry. Emotions matter at three levels. They impact the way humans experience the world; they play an important role in the process through which individuals and social groups endow their experiences with meaning; and they are important in providing the motivation to act in the world.

This article introduces a collection of articles focusing on emotions in South Asia, extending from the classical period to the present and bringing together a number of disciplines, from literary and religious studies, to history, anthropology, and sociology. It provides an overview over the work that has been done in the field of emotion studies in the last decade with specific reference to South Asia. From there, it questions the relationship between theoretical and methodological reflections on how to study emotions, which until now have been developed mainly on the basis of European and American materials, and the study of South Asian emotions. Three topics stand at the core of the debate: the contribution of emotion to the creation of selves and communities; their place between the micro and the macro level; and finally the role of the non-representational in the study of emotions.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• affects
• theories of emotions
• methodology
• South Asia

In the wake of the linguistic turn, the proclamation of turns has become fashionable, suggesting a discarding of previous questions and approaches, and their replacement by something radically new. Like an avantgarde, the propagators of new ideas no longer walk in the same direction, but turn around and try to take their discipline with them in the attempt to bring about an epistemic break. In this sense, there is no emotional turn in South Asia. Emotions have been present for many years as one object of inquiry in larger studies, in anthropology, with monographs on love, violence, political mobilizations, and religion; in gender studies and history through the investigation of communalism and nationalism; in religious studies, notably with the investigation of emotions in bhakti, in Sufism, or in Shia rituals; but also in philosophical and literary studies, focusing on rasa and the fine distinctions it allows to make between different variations of emotions and sentiments. Many of these books have stood the test of time, and their contributions to emotion studies are still very much worth considering.¹ We do not need an emotional turn here.

What the increasing number of publications explicitly devoted to emotions opens our gaze to is twofold. On the one hand, it allows for an increasing complexity and reflexivity in the categories we are researching.² If older literature, at times, thought it enough to rely on common sense knowledge about emotions and how to detect their working in the field and in texts, recent debates have brought about a refinement of our toolbox. Instead of assuming that we already know what love, anger, or fear is and hence can use them to explain interactions and developments, the categories themselves have become open to inquiry: What was considered an emotion in the eighteenth century (and what was not)? How were people socialized into feeling the way they did, and did love or anger even feel and work the same way we experience them today? These questions have to be addressed before we can use emotions as an explanation. On the other hand, emotion studies constitute a new approach to questions which have already been on the table for a long time. Emotion studies is not a counter-program to political and social history and to an anthropology sensitive to power structures, but can add to our understanding how hierarchies are constituted, how power is created and used, how violence arises, how social, political, and economic relations link up with a sense of self and identity. To take up the image of the turn once again: We are not turning away from the topics and questions which have been at the core of our disciplines for a long time, but scholars may discover that integrating emotion studies into their own research may help them to further move along their chosen path, and on the way discover new ways to conceptualize the problems they are interested in and find new answers.

In the takeoff phase of the increasing worldwide interest in emotion studies, anthropology (and to a lesser degree, history) of regions outside of Europe played a crucial role, providing the empirical evidence that emotions, in the shape they had taken in Western societies, were neither universal nor natural.³ This was an important intervention, but it led to newer problems: While designed to carve out a space to conceive of emotions in non-Eurocentric ways, European scholars remained the main audience in this struggle for difference. As long as emotions were unfamiliar, it did not really matter whether anthropologists wrote about the Inuit or the Ifaluk, about Tamilians or about Pathans; and as long as difference was at the core – the more radical the better – the path to a more nuanced exploration of the impact of global forces, from colonialism to capitalism, was blocked. And most importantly, once difference was acknowledged, any shared agenda disappeared. Of course, not all the anthropological emotion studies of that time subscribed to this limiting agenda. Studies like Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on emotions, gender, and expression among the Awlad Ali in northern Egypt are less interested in positing their research as Europe’s other, than in investigating the way their actors are embedded in global structures, which mark not only their lifeworlds, but also the way they think and feel about them.⁴

Most of the recent introductions to emotion studies are quite unabashedly Eurocentric, whether it is musing about the appropriate geographical boundaries for a history of emotions, or reducing the venture into the non-European world to the emotions of European missionaries and traders.⁵ Those who do mention studies about non-European emotions, most often just add them to the references, without exploring their potential to challenge European narratives.⁶ Bringing together scholars specialized on emotions in a multitude of regions can be deeply rewarding, but the questions need to move beyond the comparative gaze geared towards finding out how different ‘they’ are from ‘us.’ Some suggestions will be offered below.

If investigations of European and American emotions have the potential to generate larger interventions into theory and methodology, which transcend their empirical basis, so have studies on South Asia. Most of the articles in this volume take up the dialogue with emotion studies elsewhere. We neither have to re-invent the wheel, nor can we assume that every approach will work for our questions – some will need to be adapted or reformulated, others might work for certain aspects and not for others, and some will have to be discarded and replaced by reflections more in tune with the questions generated by the engagement with our material and the debates pre-eminent in our field. If this in turn generates wheels that the Europeans don’t have to re-invent, all the better. It is up to them to decide what will prove useful for their questions and what not. But this contribution to European research cannot be the only justification for the existence of South Asian emotion studies.

Emotions matter at three different levels.⁷ First, they impact the way humans experience the world around them. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, or tasting are bodily sensations, but the body, which perceives them, is not only a biological entity, but inseparably marked by culture and society – to an extent that nature and nurture are no longer distinguishable, but come together as bioculture.⁸ Sensory experiences are not emotionally neutral. As Joel Lee shows in his article on disgust and untouchability, smell can be strongly linked to disgust towards certain substances, but through association, also towards certain groups of people. It is this embedding of moral and affective reactions in the bodily sensations which gives them their extraordinary tenacity, and in turn contributes to the stability of social hierarchies or group attachments.⁹

Second, emotions play an important role in the process by which individuals and social groups endow their experiences with meaning and understand the world. In her article, Katherine Schofield explores the laments of eighteenth-century poets and musicians who had to leave Delhi after the sack of the city. The anxiety over a lost world and lifestyle makes painful sense of the experiences of devastation and loss and thereby contributes to creating a historical narrative, which provides an interpretation to what happened, and anchors the actors in the world.¹⁰ Depending on the nature of the experiences, the emotions can come more or less to the foreground, but they are rarely if ever completely absent. Creating a dichotomy between emotions and rational analysis overlooks both the knowledge producing capacity of emotions and the emotional grounding of practicing rationality. This is followed up by Stefan Binder in his investigation of the emotional styles that are at the basis of South Indian religious communities and of atheists – rather than eschewing feelings, the pursuit of rationalism is endowed with specific emotions of its own.¹¹

Third, emotions are central in providing the motivational energy to transform the interpretation of the world into an acting in the world. As I argue in my article on riots, the appeal to interests is important to motivate people to take to the streets and become ready to resort to violence. But neither are interests emotionally neutral, nor does this explain why people are ready to sacrifice their interests in their desire to experience passions associated with martyrdom and the celebration of virility.¹²

These three levels can be distinguished only at an analytical level, and they do not follow the logic of a before and after, starting with experience and ending in practices. Rather, they are connected through multiple feedback loops. Repeated practices transform the sensorium. Interpretations impact not only concrete experiences, but the very possibility to experience events through the senses in one way and not in another. Finally, practices provide a testing ground for interpretation and world-creation. The tricky question whether sensory experiences can also directly lead to practices without the structuring intervention of the meaning creating process will be taken up below in section 3.

Emotions, selves, and communities

Few books on emotions had more of an impact than William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feelings, published in 2001.¹³ Partly, the attraction of the book rested on the fact that its author was not only a well-known specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century French history, but had also trained as a cognitive psychologist, who brought to the field the promise of developing a theory and a methodology with reconciled the approach of the humanities with that of the life sciences without giving in to ahistorical and unchanging basic emotions. Central to his argument was the introduction of the concept of emotives, situated between John Austin’s constative and performative speech acts. Emotives are crucial to the navigation of feelings; they help the individual to explore what exactly he or she is feeling: Is it fear, anxiety, or perhaps even anger? Or might it rather be sadness? Through this process, a vague feeling is named and thereby transformed into a specific emotion.¹⁴

In spite of Reddy’s stance against social constructivism, this opens up the possibility and creates the need to investigate the emotional vocabulary the actors can draw on for labelling their emotions. Whether a language offers the possibility to differentiate between wrath and fury, or whether they come together as one broad category of anger; whether affections guided by the will are deemed similar or not to passions originating in the body and overwhelming an individual; whether we recognize shame by blushing and love by the increase in heartbeat; or whether we also pay attention to emotions that do not manifest themselves in such obvious bodily transformations, is central according to Reddy’s model. Only through language can emotions be recognized, labelled, and thus experienced.¹⁵

Early on, the medieval historian Barbara Rosenwein has criticized Reddy for his logocentrism, which does not sit well with the way emotions were experienced in other temporal and cultural contexts. Reddy conceded that emotives need not always be verbal in nature, but could also encompass gestures or acts, as long as these were performed with the intention of finding out and clarifying the nature of the emotion experienced.¹⁶

The problem for South Asia (but not only) is that this presupposes a certain conception of emotions as situated inside the subject and perceptible only through introspection,¹⁷ and also a socially grounded, if not institutionalized, habit of such an introspection and an interest in it. This assumption makes sense for Europe in the post-Reformation era, where confession and its secularization in diary writing established a close link between emotions and salvation and thus the need to precisely identify the emotion experienced.¹⁸ These assumptions and practices do not seem to be universal. In the rather rare cases of pre-modern autobiographies and diaries that have survived for India, emotions are by no means absent, as Shivangini Tandon shows in her reading of the life story of the seventeenth-century merchant Banarsidas. The author of the Ardhakathanaka provides us with detailed information about his religious feelings as well as his emotions towards his friends.¹⁹ But while the emotions are important, their precise labelling is not. This might be different in the religious traditions, but we lack detailed studies that would allow a strong argument. As a hypothesis, we might reflect whether the fact that within some Islamic traditions, the role of the Sufi shaikh might work in a comparable way when he helps a disciple to identify his emotions, in order to detect sinful tendencies and to rid himself of them. These activities could find an institutional backing in the conversations between the master and his disciples, recorded in the malfuzat, but also in the exchange of letters through which disciples seek guidance.²⁰ But even for the few who had access to such personalized instruction, the identification of emotions was not necessarily tied to a space of interiority or of constant self-reflection. The shaikh’s labelling capacity was linked to his saintly power, which allowed him non-mediated knowledge of what others felt. It was thus neither dependent on the disciple’s report of the emotions he experienced, nor available to the latter without the intervention of the master. Given the close ties between the conception of the shaikh and his murid and the guru and his chela, comparable conceptions can probably be found in other Indian religious traditions as well. Rasa theory, in turn, offers a very fine-tuned taxonomy of emotions, which might seem similar at the first sight, and places an emphasis on distinguishing between them. While some of this knowledge would be available beyond a selected group of rasikas, an elite who had undergone the required training to recognize these emotions, it was rarely employed for recognizing emotions in everyday life, but rather on stage and in an aestheticized environment.²¹

This has a number of implications for the way we study emotions. Reddy taps into a perception of emotions which has become commonsensical far beyond the European middle classes, an interpretation of emotions that places them not only inside the self, but makes introspection the only way to arrive at the ‘real’ emotions – even the performative aspect of the emotive is still something which happens in this well-guarded space of interiority. It is only once an emotion is fully formed through its labelling that the individual can decide whether to reveal it to the outside world or not. It is this assumption of a secret life of the emotions that makes their decoding through lie detectors, through micro-facial expressions, or through the MRI such intriguing possibilities. But as the short excursion into practices of introspection has pointed out, this is not the only way to conceive of the self, and interiority is not the first place to look for emotions for everyone. Already in the 1970s, McKim Marriot has argued for a notion of the dividual, as opposed to the Western individual, in order to capture the way Indian actors conceptualized the self not as a bounded entity, but drawing on relationality.²² Charles Taylor took this up as a distinction between a porous and a buffered self,²³ depending on the quality and the importance of the boundaries between a self and its surrounding. Unlike in the buffered self, with its assumptions of individual autonomy, in which emotions constitute the inner core, the porous self is in constant communication with its surroundings, with other people, but also with objects. Emotions are not (only) inside, but in-between. This makes the sharp distinction between emotions and their expression obsolete: There is no ‘real’ emotion hiding behind its expression. The navigation of feeling, the explorative character of emotions, can be kept as a useful approach, but this navigation does not take place in solitude, but in a relation.

As the work of South Asian scholars shows, we need not follow Charles Taylor in his teleological approach: There is no straight line from a pre-modern porous self to the modern buffered self. Instead of using the distinction as yet another indicator for placing societies on a certain stage of development or for pointing to an incomplete modernization, it can, on the contrary, serve to dismantle the claim of a certain form of selfhood – self-contained, autonomous, and with a strong sense of interiority – as universally valid. Far from being pre-modern and oriental, this concept of the self can be linked to reflections on atmosphere in the phenomenological tradition,²⁴ and can also be brought into a fruitful dialogue with affect studies (with whom it shares the emphasis on the openness of the self and the body, but not the downplaying of representations).²⁵ However, my argument is not that we need to replace Reddy’s navigation of feelings through emotives by some other universal way of conceiving emotions. Rather, the concept of the self is crucial for determining where the actors direct their attention when they want to adjust their emotions. This decides whether it is more important to consolidate the self and to become a consistent personality, a character that transcends different situations, or to be in tune with the surroundings, even if this implies feeling and being different according to the requirements of an institutional or a social setting. Ideally, therefore, we need to expand our methodology to include not only the investigation of the vocabulary available to the actors in order to perceive, navigate, and ultimately feel their emotions, but also of their sense of personhood and of the practices socially and institutionally available for exploring the self and its emotions.

This sense of the self and the location of the emotions also has important repercussions for the way in which communities can be conceived. Barbara Rosenwein introduced the idea of emotional communities in response to Peter and Carol Stearns’ claim that societies as a whole have certain standards for emotions. This emotionology impacts, but does not determine, the way individuals adjust their feelings and express them, verbally or through actions.²⁶ Rosenwein pointed out that societies were much less homogeneous than this model led us to suppose, and that at any given time, a society could encompass multiple different smaller communities, which valued and practiced similar emotions. Though the communities were constituted by social and economic factors and not by emotions (which made it possible to continue using the established social and economic history paradigms for change), emotions provided the affective glue to hold them together.²⁷ Benno Gammerl has drawn our attention to the fact that emotions may also have performative power: They are not only shared by pre-existing communities, but shared emotional styles also generate bonds and create communities.²⁸ In his article on courtly emotions in early medieval India, Daud Ali goes a step further and investigates how emotions are at the core of court politics. It is the cluster of feelings linking men together in various forms of friendship and patronage that is constitutive for political relations, taking up and further developing his earlier argument that it is through the love for courtesans that noblemen and rulers learn the intricacies of social interactions, aimed at creating emotional dependencies without becoming dependent. Emotions thus are no longer an add-on to communities or even a medium for creating them, but the very medium through which communities exist.²⁹

Here the different concepts of the self are important. If consistency of character is valued, an individual may interact with different and overlapping communities, but will only share their emotional values and practices to the extent that differences do not lead to contradiction. But multiplicity comes in multiple ways. If emotions float between people rather than being cultivated within each person’s interiority, and if adjustment happens situationally, contradictions between communities becomes much less of a problem. A person can be pious in the mosque and mock the shaikh in the poetic assembly – in fact, the institutions and genre conventions require that person to follow different emotional rules. Someone who subscribes to the rules of the mosque at the mushaira and draws offence from the fun poked at the shaikh can no longer be part of this community, as the ghazal lives from the transcendence of what is perceived as conventional piety. Reformers can fight against wasteful customs during daytime and cry tears of blood over the disappearance of a lifestyle at night.³⁰ People taking part in a variety of volunteer organizations can sincerely believe in non-violence and a feeling of brotherhood across religions in a meeting of Gandhians, while passionately engaging in a violent fight for the supremacy of their own religious community, without perceiving this to be the contradiction the present-day social scientist (but also some of their contemporaries) might judge it to be. As the reference to violence already implies, the adjustment of feelings to situational social groups does not necessarily lead to happy multiplicity and plurality if the communities themselves are in conflict. In turn, the awareness of multiple and contradictory forms of contradictions and the need to look at their emic conceptualizations should also not lead us to essentialize an ‘Indian’ (or ‘Islamic’ or ‘Hindu’) self and its relation to emotional communities.

The micro and the macro

The post-enlightenment European image of the autonomous self, together with the impact of psychology and neurosciences on the conception of emotions tend to suggest it is the individuals and their interaction with their immediate surroundings that are the appropriate units of observation for emotion studies. It is only there, so it seems, that we can hope to trace feelings in their complexity, their fluctuations from one moment to the other and from one interactive moment to the next. Micro-history, micro-sociology, and the detailed investigation of micro-case studies, one might think, are the obvious approaches to the study of emotions.

This holds true even once we set aside the interiority of emotions and focus on expressions no longer as an afterthought to the real thing, but as an inextricable part of the emotion itself. Individuals are embedded in communities, as the previous section has shown, and these communities do not stand in isolation, but are in turn interwoven by larger structures and movements. However, it is only by reducing the scales that we are able to follow the variations implied in a movement between communities, on a daily basis or within the course of a lifetime, and avoid a facile derivation of emotional expressions and practices from socio-economic contexts or even from emotion rules and regimes. Instead, the close reading of a corpus of texts, the strategy followed by Heidi Pauwels in her exploration of bhakti poetry³¹ and by Kedar Kulkarni in his analysis of lavani songs,³² can show how different ‘emotional tones and flavors’³³ are both an expression of emotions and also a creation of a vocabulary that makes emotional experiences possible. Some of the articles in this collection focus on single case studies: On a single merchant and his friends in Shivangini Tandon’s article,³⁴ or on a musician and a poet in the analysis by Katherine Schofield,³⁵ and all of them draw on examples at the micro-level. This is what gives the rich texture to the volume.

But what is it that these micro-engagements show, especially in the field of emotion studies? Two aspects need to be addressed. The first aspect is the question how we can use the micro to reach conclusions which have pertinence beyond the single case study; the second aspect points in the opposite direction, and asks whether we are even able to tell a micro-story without bringing in a larger social and political context. The alternative, to use case studies to defend and even celebrate the fragments, the fragmentary character of history and society, while refusing to consider the study of an individual or a small group only meaningful in relation to something bigger, is an important political statement.³⁶ But academically it might lead to an impasse: If tracing heterogeneity is a value in itself and the main argument of research, the investigations become repetitive in their results and almost exchangeable.

Assuming, then, that we want to link the micro to some form of the macro, I would suggest three different options. All three come with their own assumptions about what an emotion is and how it arises. The first option is to treat the case study as representative of a larger set of cases. This is relatively unproblematic if we start from the assumption that emotions are universal and that beneath the cultural variations, we can detect a common human core. In this instance, a few case studies are enough to prove the argument, as every human being can be substituted for every other, and what is found out for one holds true for all. Unlike in some branches of the life sciences, these assumptions are rarely held by historians and anthropologists of emotions. But even if a case is not exemplary for humanity as a whole, it might still stand in for an emotional style prevalent in a feeling community, whether as large as Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,³⁷ or as small as the attendants of female gatherings during Muharram in the present.³⁸ As long as the emotional community is based on an anteceding social or political group, the investigation of a few, judiciously chosen cases goes a long way.³⁹ It becomes much more difficult when the case studies are not only meant to establish how existing and stable communities felt, but are also required to help trace the shifting boundaries of these communities and their interactions and overlaps with over communities: Representativeness is only possible for fairly homogeneous groups, and the larger the groups are, the more diversity will exist.

But, and this leads to the second option, the aim of micro-studies of the emotions of a limited set of people is not always to find out what people at large felt at a given point in history. As argued in the beginning, the history of emotions is not only interesting for its own sake, but also because it provides us with a different approach to political, social, and cultural history. This links up with micro-histories as they were discussed in the 1980s and 1990s, associated with names like Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Revel in France, and Hans Medick and David Sabean in Germany and the United States, to name just a few of the leading figures, and developed further by the Subaltern Studies collective in India.⁴⁰ Here, the emphasis was not on the representativeness of the case studies – often it was studies of people at the margins that attracted the attention – but on the light that they could shed on larger processes, be it the social organization of the rural population for Ginzburg and Le Roy Ladurie; proto-industrialization, demographic changes, and the constitution of classes for Medick and Sabean; or nationalism and colonial modernity for the Subalterns. The micro here is conceived as embedded in larger structures. These structures set a frame for what is happening at the everyday, but they are also reinterpreted and subverted from below.⁴¹ For the history of emotions this means that it is not only the typical and representative which is worth investigating, but also the counterexample to what has been assumed as a rule. Shivangini Tandon argues that it is the very fact that Banarsidas was an atypical merchant, who provoked adverse reactions in his family, that throws light on the emotions prevalent among Jain merchants of the seventeenth century.⁴²

The third option is to avoid the dichotomy between micro and macro altogether and to focus on their relations instead.⁴³ The macro is not the sum of many micros, nor the micro a small fraction of the macro, as suggested by the approach based on representativeness. Neither is the micro-level only the result of macro-structures, tempered at best by resistance and the subalterns’ reinterpretations of the world they are thrown into, nor is the macro-level nothing but an accumulation of acts and practices at the micro-level. Instead of essentializing both categories, endowing them with strict borders, and then being faced with the problem of how to overcome a gap we have ourselves created,⁴⁴ the investigation here focuses on how the micro and the macro constantly co-produce each other (and the many levels in between). This calls for playing with the scales throughout the analysis: What Jacques Revel has famously called the Jeux d’échelles.⁴⁵

This approach responds to a number of problems that have been worrying scholars of emotions for quite some time. First, irrespective of whether subjects perceive their emotions as floating between people or as safely stowed away in an interior space (see above, section 1), the very historicity of even biosocial emotions points to their acquired character, their plasticity, and hence to learning processes. This in turn links the individuals and small groups to larger structures and institutions. The emotional language and the concepts available for their self-interpretation and their meaningful acting in the world are not developed in an ad hoc fashion by the individuals themselves. They are social and as such bear traces of the macro-level, which have to be brought out in the interpretation, without however reducing the actual feelings into a mere result of the larger structures: Language and concepts shape, but they do not determine what can be said or done. In turn, they are transformed by the practices to which they are put.⁴⁶

Second, this approach figures in power systematically and at all levels. If emotions are situated between people, linking them, but also drawing them apart, they are a constitutive part of the relations between the micro and the macro. Daud Ali shows the importance of homosocial emotions for political relations in a courtly society.⁴⁷ Joel Lee argues for the important role of disgust, based on the emotional interpretation of a sensory experience. Disgust is central for the stability of the caste system, and notably of untouchability, and this holds true even for people who in a different context are committed to its abolition.⁴⁸ Ammara Maqsood takes up the same inquiry into the relation between emotions and hierarchical structures, and shows the work romantic love – an emotion based on the feelings of two individuals for each other, but nevertheless embedded in the context of the family and the search for social approbation – performs in the constitution of a middle class in present day Pakistan.⁴⁹ Taken together, the articles teach us how relational emotions develop in a field marked by hierarchies of caste and patriarchy, but also how they are central to the perpetuation of these hierarchies. At the same time, the articles of Katherine Schofield and Heidi Pauwels can be read as an emphasis that the power of the overarching structures – the sphere of the court, the political, or the colonial – is rarely total. They are met by practices coming from different roots, which provide a reinterpretation of these structures or simply carve out spaces in which they can be ignored for a certain time.⁵⁰

Third, this approach shows the way emotion studies can bring together larger geographic frames with more interesting questions than a comparison between two or more units imagined as self-contained. Processes of globalization that most scholars experience in their own lives have directed their attention to moving actors in the present and in the past. Studies of the emotions of migrants and of those who do not leave their familiar space, but experience its de-familiarization either because of the arrival of migrants or because of members of their family leaving, have been at the focus of a number of studies in recent years.⁵¹ A second field of studies has developed around emotions and encounters, starting from the question how communication of feelings becomes possible if we forgo the assumption of basic emotions and focus on people who meet without sharing a common socialization into standards of expression and into ways of endowing an encounter with meaning.⁵² The third field aims at tracing the development of emotional communities and emotional styles at a transnational level. The turn away from the civilizational optimism and its faith in progress at the turn of the nineteenth century is a case in point. This could be traced through a number of micro-studies – from the emotions of transcendentalists in the United States to vegetarians in London, from the interest in Tolstoy’s experiments in lifestyle to Gandhi’s first settlements in South Africa and his elaborations on non-violence and a moral regime based on the training of the body, from feminism to theosophy. Leela Gandhi and Joy Dixon have shown how these movements not only influenced and drew on each other, but how the actors actually met and read each other, and how much they were aware of forming part of a larger movement of cultural critique experimenting with new emotions and new relations between people.⁵³ Still underdeveloped, but worth enquiring into both in a historical perspective as well as for the present, is the study of the global as an object towards which emotions are directed. Here again, the case studies would need to be local, but the explanatory potential lies in linking up these micro-studies with global structures.

Beyond meaning? The un-learned and the un-sayable

This is not the place for a full engagement with affect theories.⁵⁴ However, some of the questions raised by the debate on affects versus emotions need to be addressed to avoid misunderstandings about what this volume aims at and what it does not.

Affect theories strive to avoid an emphasis on language and meaning and to foreground the bodily and hardwired aspects of affective reactions. Therefore, a good number from among a field that has become very heterogeneous by now have developed an interest in the dialogue with life sciences. On the one hand, this can translate into an emphasis on the micro-facial expressions that are central to the concept of Basic Emotions propagated by Paul Ekman, which has generated a tremendous influence outside of academia. On the other hand, this favours micro-temporalities, arguing that the reaction time between a bodily sensation and the corresponding affect is extremely short – we’re talking of fragments of a second here. Only after that, almost as an afterthought, does appraisal, and with it the possibility of a culturally formed reaction, come in. Even for micro-historians and anthropologists devoted to very detailed case studies, this usually is too microscopic a lens. The observations with which we work only rarely allow us to perceive micro-facial expressions and never to trace micro-temporalities, even if we were to deem these insights important for our research. However, if these first-reaction affects are anyhow to be overwritten and corrected by appraisal, we can assume that it is these longer-term reactions which generate the kind of effects and explanations that we find most relevant.

Not all affect scholars are interested in short term changes, but all of them foreground the importance of the body. As already elaborated above, this does not necessarily distinguish them from students of emotions, many of whom have also developed a strong interest in the body. A strict distinction between affect and emotion might well reintroduce the division between nature and nurture we have been struggling to overcome; a division between affects, as only biological, and emotions, as only cultural. Even if our sources do not always allow us to trace the minute details of bodily reactions, there seems to be a consensus among the authors in this volume to take the body into consideration and to view it as a biocultural unity: The body and the brain show traces of what they have experienced and how they have been used; in turn, we can only perceive culture if it is materialized in bodies and in objects which can be apprehended by the senses, both those of the actors and our own, when looking at or listening to our sources.

More interesting and more challenging is the claim of affect scholars that affects are non-representational. Instead of considering feelings a form of thinking, or at least trying to bridge the gap between emotionality and rationality by investigating how emotions, too, can create knowledge and how processes of rational deduction can have a foundation in strong feelings, affects are viewed here as the other of thoughts: They are neither triggered off by arguments or appraisals, nor is it possible to reduce them ex post to a representation.⁵⁵ The arguments for the non-representational character of affects are diverse and need to be taken seriously, if we want to avoid an unnecessary flattening of our research.⁵⁶

The first set of arguments points to the fact that affective reactions can (but need not) be intentional and conscious. This seems to take up the older psycho-history, but unlike it, does not try to unravel the unconscious through psychological analysis in the Freudian or some other model deemed valid across time and space.⁵⁷ However, the unconscious and unintentional need not be theorized as a category completely apart from conscious and rational behaviour, nor is it of necessity non-representational and non-cultural. The emphasis on the learning of emotions shows many different strategies through which emotions can be habitualized, to an extent that they feel natural and spontaneous. While advice books and moral teachings address the will of the subject, often to the exclusion of any other factor, the children’s stories that Eve Tignol analyzes in her article, work much more subtly, leaving a space where children can feel their way into an emotion, vicariously experience its consequences, and draw their own conclusions.⁵⁸ The argument that emotions are practices that are turned over time into a habit, has been one of the most influential in the last couple of years,⁵⁹ but it already dates back to the advice al-Ghazali (1058–1111) or Nasir ud-Din Tusi (1201–1274) gave readers seeking good counsel for education and self-education.

In a wonderful study about schooling practices in present day Maharashtra, Véronique Bénéï follows in detail how this creation of emotional habits is systematically planned. Aiming to educate children to feel strong passions towards the Indian nation and the Hindu community, the emphasis is on a form of moral teaching that draws on existing emotions towards the family and especially towards the mother, in order to transpose them onto a new object. But of equal weight is bodily training, which allows an embodiment and a habitualization of emotional reactions through group performance (saluting the flag, recitation of pledges, singing of nationalist songs, marching in step).⁶⁰

Historical reflections on education in South Asia, and especially on the education of emotions, went further in their acknowledgement of unconscious and unintentional emotions. As Heidi Pauwels shows in her article, mimesis was an important way of learning devotional emotions, not as an intellectual pursuit, but as a way of tuning into an atmosphere and of feeling one’s way into the desired emotions by performing and listening to vernacular songs and reliving the memories they evoked.⁶¹ Similarly, reflections on education in the tradition of akhlaq writings on ethics and morality always emphasized the need to carefully monitor the company children kept and, at a later stage, to pay close attention to the friends one kept.⁶² This was not only a matter of having good role models to imitate. Virtuous emotions were infectious, and so were vices. They floated between people, and while the will was involved in deciding in which company to move, the emotions themselves were caught like a cold.

The second way of talking about non-representational affects is more radical, in that it tries to do away with the category of cultural meaning altogether. Above we have discussed the importance of language for emotives, but also for the interpretation of experiences and for situating the emotional self in the world. This can be extended to genres and rhetorical conventions, as Max Stille has shown for sermons in the setting of the waz mahfil and Kedar Kulkarni for the erotic poems of lavani and the way their meaning changed in different contexts of performance.⁶³ Imke Rajamani and I have attempted to take this approach beyond language and into multimodality and multimediality, arguing that the creation of meaning is not necessarily bound to words and texts or oral performances, but can also take place through genres linked to the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling, or even tasting.⁶⁴ But we still retained a central position for meaning – practices might transform the body and the senses and thus impact experiences, but there was no direct way leading from experiences, from what the body and the senses felt, onto practices, without the attempt to endow the world with meaning.

The body, the brain, and the senses are certainly biological realities, but they cannot be reduced to this. People interpret their experiences and endow them with meaning. This can be more or less successful and the meanings can be more or less stable or apt to change with new experiences. The interpretation of previous experiences and the way this leads to specific ways of using the body are bound to leave their traces – the senses are already marked by their previous uses, even if in a particular situation the meaning making process is not obvious.⁶⁵ The successful creation of an emotional habitus implies that reactions at a specific point in time do not need to be based on a conscious decision, but can take place quasi-automatically.⁶⁶ This does not mean, however, that the habitus is situated before or beyond meaning and representation: It is its very success that makes it appear ‘natural’ and emanating directly from the body.

The third and most radical way of arguing for the non-representational is to denude affects from any content and to reduce them to pure intensity.⁶⁷ This is an important point, and there are a number of occasions, from the dance floor to the football match to ecstatic religious practices, during which the feeling aroused either cannot be named, or the naming becomes unimportant compared to the viscerality of the affect, to the way it engulfs the actor and makes the boundaries of the self dilute in a commonly shared overwhelming experience. However, we need to distinguish between intensity as an analytical category (which can either be linked to meaning or not) and the emphasis on intensity by historical or contemporary actors. In the latter case, as I show in my article on riots and the desire for passions, intensity and even the claim to be overwhelmed to the extent that words fail and the body takes over, is part of a specific historical situation. Excess is valued and can even be read as a moral category to be learned, cultivated, and practiced.⁶⁸ The emphasis on the non-representational and the space beyond meaning is an important contribution, but perhaps one which itself needs to be historicized.

Conclusion

Taking into account the historicity of emotions can lead us to discover differences – between cultures, between social groups, between times. Historicity in this context refers not only to the writing of emotion history, but to the awareness that emotions are produced in time, whether past or the present. The interdisciplinary scope of the articles in this collection allows us to approach emotions from different angles and bring together a large variety of sources. If we take the intertwining between the macro and micro levels and the need to play with the scales we are using in our work seriously, we can also look for developments, which are larger than the groups and emotional communities often forming the core of our research. The concepts of civility and civilization became central for the imagination and the creation of a world order in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The way people in a specific society managed their emotions – their own and those of the men and women around them – lay at the centre of their classification as either savage, barbaric, or more or less civilized. Through colonialism, these assumptions gained traction in many parts of the world, not always because the colonized found them intellectually convincing, but because the degree of civilization ascribed to them mattered at many different levels, from their country’s position in international law to their possibility of participating in political decisions through associations and assemblies. Nevertheless, the accommodation of the colonial interpretation of the civilizing mission cannot be reduced to a top-down process, but involved multiple strands of translation, adaptation, and reinterpretation at a societal, but also at the most private level. For instance, in the way couples strove for a more companionate marriage, because this was the civilized thing to do, or young men built up their muscles, in order to train their bodies to overcome the timidity and cowardice ascribed to them as members of a not-yet civilized race.⁶⁹

While civility cannot be reduced to the controlling of emotions, it did imply the control of emotional excess, attributed to societies that have not yet overcome their child-like stage. This changed at a global scale at the end of the nineteenth century – not everywhere, and not for every social group, but for enough of them to warrant our attention. Some strands of the critique of civilization focused on its inherent violence and advocated a return to simpler forms of living – these were the authors on which Gandhi drew for his own critique in Hind Swaraj.⁷⁰ The other strand, drawing its inspiration from Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, also criticized the goals of the civilizing and self-civilizing mission, but out of anxiety that the emphasis on subduing and controlling emotions would lead to a sapping of the vital forces of a community and to its decay and decadence. In the anticipated struggle for survival, it would only be the hot-blooded, virile, and passionate nations that would be able to carve out a future for themselves and their descendants. The desire for josh, for fervour and enthusiasm, which marked the discourse in North India since the turn of the century, and which became the emotional ideal for at least two generations of young men since the First World War, was certainly not the only emotional style prevalent in politics between the two wars, but its influence stretched far beyond the volunteer organizations which formed its core and also marked the Gandhian movement: Being and being seen as a satyagrahi generated a lot of josh as well, and this might have been one of its attractions.⁷¹

The horrors of the War and of Partition discredited strong and indomitable passions for a while, in Europe no less than in India. This seems to have changed since some time. Since the 1960s, different movements and emotional styles criticized what they perceived as the repression of feelings, which destroyed the creative force of individuals. While these movements were based on a critique of capitalism, the same decades saw an increasing commercialization of feelings. Emotions are now promised in advertisements, and if they are not themselves for sale, the props required for strong emotional experiences – from candlelight dinners and the paraphernalia of an unforgettable wedding to travels to exotic places – are. Emotions and consumption have become strongly linked, at least for the new middle classes emerging worldwide since the 1990s.⁷²

If emotions sell, it is because there is a powerful desire to experience strong feelings. People are seeking out occasions that will provide this experience. We have research showing this for cinema and for music, the same could also be shown for sport events.⁷³ It would be a hypothesis worth following up in more detail whether some form of mass politics might work in a similar way. Books and articles about populism and, especially for South Asia, about hurt sentiments fill entire libraries.⁷⁴ While most of them acknowledge that these phenomena are somehow linked to emotions, only a few place emotion studies at the centre of their attention.⁷⁵ What would be the result if we were to see emotions not as a side effect of these political styles, as an affect that gets triggered, overwhelms the actors with the power of an Ur-force from deep within their guts or primaeval regions of their brains, and obliterates any form of cultural formation, but on the contrary, as the moving force behind these developments? If it was the possibility to experience overwhelming emotions that would draw people to a rally, as it draws them to a concert or a cricket match? If moral emotions, too, can be sought out and consumed?

This would allow us to start our analysis with a craving for intense emotions, strong enough to override other interests – not as a transhistorical force, but as something which is linked to certain times and spaces, and subdued or absent in others.⁷⁶ Their strength does not imply that these emotions are beyond meaning. On the contrary, it is their ability to generate meaning for the actors – a world endowed with sense and a role for them to perform in this world – that makes them so attractive. At the same time, performing these emotions also lays a claim to virtue and vitality, for the individual as much as for the community. The valuation of intensity itself is widely shared across spaces and political parties, even if what triggers the passions may be radically different.

Hardly any introduction to the history of emotions starts without pointing out the increasing interest in emotions we are currently witnessing. As emotion historians, anthropologists and political scientists, and scholars of literature or music, we have long known that this is behind the interest in our work (and the willingness to fund our research projects and the entire centres that host them). What we have less explored is that the importance we give to emotions, and all the more so to intensity and visceral feelings and affects, might be part of the same development which is also changing social and political communication: Not only from ‘I think’ to ‘I feel,’ but also to claiming importance for one’s passions and considering them an inalienable part of one’s selfhood and sense of identity, and thus making the compromise at the heart of democratic institutions ever more hard to achieve.⁷⁷ Could it be that the desire for something beyond linguistic representation, visceral passions hailing directly from the body, something deeper and more meaningful than the cultural contestations we are trained to analyse, is part of the same longue durée development in the emotional styles we research?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As examples, see Trawick, Notes on Love; Lynch, Divine Passions; Desjarlais, Body and Emotions; Derné, Culture in Action; Tambiah, Levelling Crowds; Werbner and Basu, Embodying Charisma; Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti; Pauwels, Mobilizing Krishna’s World; Bard, Desolate Victory; Pinault, Horses of Karbala; Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities; Ahearn, Invitation to Love; Ray, Exploring Emotional History; Ray, The Felt Community; Bilimoria and Wenta, Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems; and Pollock, A Rasa Reader. Although they did not conceive of their work as emotion studies, both Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, and Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, also consider in detail the impact of emotions on the changes they are describing.

2. The recent years have seen the publication of a number of collective volumes and special issues: Orsini, Love in South Asia; Blom and Jaoul, “Outrages Communities”; Khan, Space and Emotions; Pernau, “Emotion Concepts”; Chatterjee, Krishnan, and Robb, Feeling Modern; Pernau, Feeling Communities; Ali and Flatt, Friendship in Pre-Modern South Asia; Rajamani, Pernau, and Schofield, Monsoon Feelings; and Blom and Lama-Reval, Emotions, Mobilizations. These collections also provide a guide to the rapidly increasing market for monographs and single articles on emotions and affects across the disciplines.

3. For many others, see Lutz, Unnatural Emotions; see also Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics. For the universalist side of the debate, see Reddy, “Against Constructionism.”

4. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments.

5. Matt and Stearns, Doing Emotions History, 5; and Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions.

6. An important exception to this trend: Plamper, Introduction to the History of Emotions.

7. The following draws on and further develops an article Imke Rajamani and I have co-authored. Pernau and Rajamani, “Emotional Translations.”

8. For a lucid elaboration on the biocultural, see Boddice, The History of Emotions. For an accessible introduction to recent studies on plasticity in neuroscience and to the way experiences transform the brain, see Barrett, How Emotions are Made.

9. See below, Lee, “Disgust and Untouchability.” See also Rao, The Caste Question; and Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability.

10. See below, Schofield, “Emotions in Indian Music History”; see also Tignol, “Nostalgia and the City”; Siddique, “Remembering the Revolt,” chapter 1, “Remembering Through Lament,” 34–80.

11. See below, Binder, “Feeling Religious – Feeling Secular?”; see also Binder, “Total Atheism.”

12. See below, Pernau, “Riots, Masculinity.”

13. Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings.

14. Ibid., 104–105.

15. For the history of South Asian concepts of love, see Francesca Orsini, ‘Introduction,’ in Love in South Asia, 1–43; and Oesterheld, ‘Changing Landscapes of Love’; for the concept of compassion, see Stille, ‘Conceptualizing Compassion in Communication’; for the development of a concept of emotion (jazbat), Pernau, Emotions and Modernity, chapter 2. For investigations into the British, French, and German vocabulary, see Frevert, Emotional Lexicons.

16. Plamper, “The History of Emotions”; and Stille, “Emotion Studies.”

17. Scheer, “Topographies of Emotion.”

18. Hahn and Kapp, Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis.

19. See below, Tandon, “Friendship and the Social Life of Merchants.”

20. For a detailed reading of the large corpus of sources related to Ashraf Ali Thanavi, and notably the way emotions are created through and recorded in his sermons, his malfuzat, and his collections of letters, see Mian, “Surviving Modernity,” with further literature. A huge thank you to Ali Mian, who most generously shared his knowledge of Sufi practices and literature and helped me think through these questions in a long Skype conversation.

21. Pollock, Rasa Reader.

22. Marriot, “Hindu Transactions.” This concept was further developed in Daniel, Fluid Signs. See also Fuchs and Rüpke, “Religious Individualisation.”

23. Taylor, A Secular Age.

24. Schmitz, Atmosphären; and Böhme, Atmosphäre. For a good introduction into the topic and its literature, see Runkel, “Collective Atmospheres.”

25. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect; and Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader; for a critical perspective, see Leys, The Ascent of Affect.

26. Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology.”

27. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Rosenwein, Generations of Feelings; and Rosenwein, “Theories of Change.”

28. Gammerl, “Emotional Styles.” See also Pernau, “Feeling Communities: Introduction.”

29. See below, Ali, “Toward a History”; see also Ali, “Anxieties of Attachment.”

30. Pernau, “Nostalgia.”

31. See below Pauwels, “Cultivating Emotion.”

32. See below Kulkarni, “Performing Intimacy.”

33. Pauwels, “Cultivating Emotion.”

34. See note 19 above.

35. Schofield, “Emotions in Indian Music History.”

36. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Pandey, “In Defenseof the Fragment”; and Pandey, Routine Violence.

37. Raychaudhuri, Perception, Emotions, Sensibilities.

38. Bard, Desolate Victory.

39. Barbara Rosenwein has argued for this approach and shown its potential in her own work, see Generation of Feelings; and earlier, Emotional Communities.

40. For a good introduction into the history of micro-history, see Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory? For many other studies from the Subaltern Studies collective, see Guha, “Chandra’s Death”; Sarkar, “The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur”; also a micro-history of sorts: Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory.

41. Guha, “Small Voice of History.”

42. See note 19 above.

43. Thought-provoking for this approach, Epple, “Lokalität und die Dimensionen des Globalen.”

44. This is the problem at the core of the concept of emotionology, which strictly divides feeling rules from experiences and practices and thus cuts off the possibility of using one to explain the other. Stearns and Stearns, Emotionology.

45. Revel, Jeux d’échelles.

46. See the works on concepts of emotions quoted in footnote 15.

47. Ali, “Toward a History.”

48. Lee, “Disgust and Untouchability.”

49. Maqsood, “Love in Liminality.”

50. Schofield, “Emotions in Indian Music History”; and Pauwels, “Cultivating Emotion.”

51. Wise, “Sensuous Multiculturalism”; Velayutham and Wise, “Moral Economies”; Conference “Representation of Migration and Emotions of Exclusion,” Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, 20–21 March 2019, organized by Sonia Cancian, Deepra Dandekar, and Soňa Mikulová.

52. Gammerl, Nielsen, and Pernau, Encounters with Emotions; and “Introduction,” in ibid., 1–37, with further references to recent literature.

53. Gandhi, Affective Communities; and Dixon, Divine Feminine.

54. For a presentation of the most influential strands of affect theory, see Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader. An introduction into the different strands of affect studies and their intellectual foundations can be found in Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling.” For a balanced critique, see Plamper, Introduction to the History of Emotions; Leys, “The Turn to Affect”; and Leys, The Ascent of Affect.

55. Mazzarella, “Affect.”

56. For an affect studies approach in this volume, see Gandhi, “Shock and Shove.”

57. For many others, see deMause, The New Psychohistory; Gay, The Bourgeois Experience; and with an affinity towards Freudian psychohistory, Ray, Exploring Emotional History.

58. See below Tignol, “The Language of Shame.” See also Ute Frevert, Learning How to Feel, especially Eitler, Olsen, and Jensen, “Introduction.”

59. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice.”

60. Bénéï, Schooling Passions.

61. Pauwels, “Cultivating Emotion.”

62. Kia, “Indian Friends, Iranian Selves.”; and Pernau, “From Morality to Psychology.”

63. Stille, “Public Piety and Islamic Preaching”; see also Stille, “Between the Numinous and the Melodramatic” and Kulkarni, “Performing Intimacy.”

64. Pernau and Rajamani, “Emotional Translations.”

65. Ibid., with further references. See also Kasmani, Audible Spectres.

66. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice.”

67. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.

68. Pernau, “Riots, Masculinity.”

69. In greater detail and with case studies for a number of countries and languages: Pernau, Civilizing Emotions.

70. Sharma and Suhrud, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.

71. For a more elaborate discussion on the relation between modernity as discipline and modernity also involving a cultivation of excess, see Pernau, Emotions and Modernity.

72. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia; Illouz, Emotions as Commodities.

73. For cinema, see Rajamani, Angry Young Men, with further references; for music, see the thought provoking works of Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, and Making Sense of Reality.

74. As an introduction to the literature on Indian populism, see Jaffrelot and Tillin, “Populism in India”; Gudavarthy, India after Modi. For the policy of hurt, see Ramdev, Nambiar, and Bhattacharya, Sentiment, Politics, Censorship; an excellent summary of the history of hurt sentiments is offered by Ahmed, “Specters of Macaulay.” See also Rollier, Frøystad, and Ruud, Outrage.

75. For an analysis of populism and the rise of vigilantism through the medium of popular films and the emotions they shape, see Rajamani, Angry Young Men.

76. This argument needs to be distinguished from the approach of Adorno and Habermas, as if there are times in which emotions are authentic and others in which they lose their authenticity due to their link to consumption culture.

77. A big thank you to Philipp Nielsen for many discussions that brought this relation to my attention.