Overview

Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India investigates the experiences, interpretations and practices of emotions in India between 1857 and the First World War. It is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many explored for the first time. These sources range from philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality to advice literature, from journals to newspapers, from children's literature to nostalgic descriptions of the courtly culture, from sermons to psychological essays. Modernity for long has been viewed as a process which went along with a growing control over emotions - whether this control was regarded as linked to capitalism, to the modern bureaucratic state or interpreted as a process through which external control mechanisms moved inside the subject. As the case studies of this book show, this discipline has to be viewed together with the transformation from the ideal of balance and harmony to a desire for strong, visceral and even indomitable passions, showing the youthfulness and vigor of the community. Men (and a little later also women) increasingly strove for an experience of these strong emotions and attempted to inculcate them in others as well, and they devised new languages and practices to bring about these feelings.

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9780190990831

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Margrit Pernau, Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Margrit Pernau is Senior Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Extraordinary Professor at the Freie Universit�t Berlin. She holds a PhD from Heidelberg University and a Habilitation from Bielefeld University. Her latest publications include, Ashraf into Middle Classes. Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi, OUP Delhi 2013; Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, OUP Oxford 2015(with Helge Jordheim et al.); Feeling Communities (Special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2017; Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (with Imke Rajamani and Katherine Schofield), Delhi, Niyogi Books, 2018. Besides, she has written numerous articles on the history of emotions, modern Indian history, historical semantics, comparative studies, and translation studies. She is presently working on emotions and temporality, focusing on the concept of modernity in Urdu in the twentieth century.

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