With this pioneering project, Margrit Pernau brings the ‘history of emotions’ approach to South Asian studies. A theoretically sophisticated and erudite investigation, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India maps the history of emotions in India between the uprising of 1857 and World War I. Situating the prevalent experiences, interpretations, and practices of emotions of the time within the context of the major political events of colonial India, Pernau goes beyond the dominant narrative of colonial modernity and its fixation with discipline and restrain, and traces the contemporary transformation from a balance in emotions to the resurgence of fervor. The current volume is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many being explored for the first time. Pernau grounds her work on such diverse sources as philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality, advice literature, journals and newspapers, nostalgic descriptions of courtly culture, and even children’s literature. This close look into individual experiences, practices, and interpretations reveals the myriad emotions of the day, and the importance of these micro-histories in presenting an alternative account of colonial India.

The product of years of cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaboration, this is an innovative volume of essays situated at the intersection of multi-disciplinary fields: postcolonial/subaltern theory; comparative literary analysis, especially with a South Asian and transnational focus; the study of 'alternative' and 'indigenous' modernities

The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

With the onset of modernity in twentieth-century India, new social arrangements gave rise to new forms of music-making. The musicians were no longer performing exclusively in the princely courts or in the private homes of the wealthy. Not only did the act of listening to and appreciating music change, it became an important feature of public life, thus influencing how modernity shaped itself. This volume attempts to study the connections between music and the creation of new ideas of publicness during the early twentieth century. How was music labelled as folk or classical? How did music come to play such a catalytic role in forming identities of nationhood, politics, or ethnicity? And how did twentieth-century technologies of sound reproduction and commercial marketing contribute to changing notions of cultural distinction? Exploring these interdisciplinary questions across multiple languages, regions, and musical genres, the essays provide fresh perspectives on the history of musicians and migration in colonial India, the formation of modern spaces of performance, and the articulation of national as well as nationalist traditions.

Our main discussion in this book Indian society, polity and culture of the colonial period. Indian society in the 19th century was caught in an inhuman web created by religious superstition and social obscuration. Hinduism, has become a compound of magic, animation and superstition and monstrous rites like animal sacrifice and physical torture had replaced the worship of God. The most painful was position of women. The British conquest and dissemination colonial culture and ideology led to introspection about the strength and weakness of indigenous culture and civilization. The social reform movements which emerged in India in the 19th century arose to the challenges that colonial Indian society faced. The well-known issues are that of sati, child marriage, ban on widow remarriage and caste discrimination. It is not that attempts were not made to fight social discrimination in pre-colonial India. They were central to Buddhism, to Bhakti and Sufi movements. What marked these 19th century social reform attempts were the modern context and mix of ideas. It was a creative combination of modern ideas of western liberalism and a new look on traditional literature.We hope that students will benefited a lot from reading this book.