Margrit Pernau

SherAli Tareen

Defending Muhammad in Modernity

Katherine Butler Schofield

Imke Rajamani

* This book presents a different vision of the monsoon and the feelings associated with the rainy season: monsoon feelings have a history, which encompasses both continuity and change* The essays in the book explore the rain-drenched worlds of poetry, songs, paintings, architecture, films, gardens, festivals, music, and medicine, in South Asia from the twelfth century to the present* Each of the essays in the book is written by a specialist in the field of South Asian arts and cultureThe monsoon is the season of pouring rain and intense emotions: love and longing, hope and fear, pleasure and pain, devotion and joyous excess. Through a series of evocative essays exploring rain-drenched worlds of poetry, songs, paintings, architecture, films, gardens, festivals, music, and medicine, this lavishly illustrated collection examines the history of monsoon feelings in South Asia from the twelfth century to the present. Each essay is written by a specialist in the field of South Asian arts and culture, and investigates emotions as reflections and agents of social, cultural, and political change across borders of language and religion and between different arts and cultural practices. This history of emotions in the rain is as rich, surprising, beautiful and devastating as the thundering monsoon clouds, and will delight general and scholarly audiences alike. Contents: Note on Transliteration; Monsoon Feelings: Introduction - Imke Rajamani; The Spring of Hindustan : Love and War in the Monsoon in Indo-Persian Poetry - Sunil Sharma; A Theology of Feeling: The Radhavallabhi Monsoon in the Eighteenth Century - Richard David Williams; Clouds, Cuckoos and an Empty Bed: Emotions in Hindi-Urdu Barahmasas - Francesca Orsini; Dark, Overwhelming, yet Joyful: The Monsoon in Rajput Painting - Molly Emma Aitken; It is a Day for Enjoyment and Revelry : The Monsoon Garden - Catherine B. Asher; Delight, Devotion and the Music of the Monsoon at the Court of Emperor Shah Alam II - David Lunn and Katherine Butler Schofield; The Cuckoo's Song: Imagery and Movement in Monsoon Ragas - Laura Leante; Rimjhim ke Taraane Leke Aayi Barsaat : Songs of Love and Longing in the Bombay Rain - Rachel Dwyer; Hindi Cinema's Rainmaking Formula: Thodasa Roomani Ho Jaayen and Lagaan - Imke Rajamani; The Most Dangerous Season of All : Monsoon in Unani Medical Writings - Claudia Preckell Celebrating Monsoon Feelings: The Flower-Sellers Festival of Delhi - Margrit Pernau; Coda. A Meeting of Earth and Sky: The Monsoon in the Repertoire of Thumri - Vidya Rao; Authors' Biographies; Glossary; List of Figures; Bibliography; Filmography; Acknowledgements; Index.

A History of Emotions in the Rain

Monsoon Feelings

Yunus Jaffery

Through a study of three nineteenth century akhbarat (handwritten Persian newsletters) this volume seeks to analyse the creation of knowledge and of the public sphere during the years of interface between the British and the Mughal culture. Since the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar a system had evolved to guarantee the flow of information from the centre to the peripheries and vice versa and between different centres. These newsletters written on bi-weekly basis by newswriters appointed by the rulers are well-known for the period between 16th and 18th centuries. This same system for collection and reporting of news in manuscript form continued to exist and even flourish in North India right until the uprising of 1857. Rich in details of the social and cultural life of the subcontinent, these reports provide significant material for historical research but have been largely inaccessible to the non-Persian speaking audience. An incisive introduction provides a useful summary of the changing values in the context of the tension between tradition and modernity.

Persian Newsletters from Mughal Delhi

Information and the Public Sphere

Benno Gammerl

Ute Frevert

Pascal Eitler

Monique Scheer

Bettina Hitzer

Nina Verheyen

Christian Bailey

Anne Schmidt

Emotions are as old as humankind. But what do we know about them and what importance do we assign to them? Emotional Lexicons is the first cultural history of terms of emotion found in German, French, and English language encyclopaedias since the late seventeenth century. Insofar as these reference works formulated normative concepts, they documented shifts in the way the educated middle classes were taught to conceptualise emotion by a literary medium targeted specifically to them. As well as providing a record of changing language use (and the surrounding debates), many encyclopaedia articles went further than simply providing basic knowledge; they also presented a moral vision to their readers and guidelines for behaviour. Implicitly or explicitly, they participated in fundamental discussions on human nature: Are emotions in the mind or in the body? Can we "read" another person's feelings in their face? Do animals have feelings? Are men less emotional than women? Are there differences between the emotions of children and adults? Can emotions be "civilised"? Can they make us sick? Do groups feel together? Do our emotions connect us with others or create distance? The answers to these questions are historically contingent, showing that emotional knowledge was and still is closely linked to the social, cultural, and political structures of modern societies. Emotional Lexicons analyses European discourses in science, as well as in broader society, about affects, passions, sentiments, and emotions. It does not presume to refine our understanding of what emotions actually are, but rather to present the spectrum of knowledge about emotion embodied in concepts whose meanings shift through time, in order to enrich our own concept of emotion and to lend nuances to the interdisciplinary conversation about them.

Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000

Emotional Lexicons

Helge Jordheim

Orit Bashkin

Tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilisation, 'Civilizing Emotions' chooses a global perspective and highlights the role of civility and civilisation in the creation of a new and hierarchised global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements, focusing on the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries. Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the political project of the civilising process. 'Civilizing Emotions' brings out the role of emotions as an object of the civilising process.

Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe

Civilizing Emotions

This Element brings together the history of emotions and temporalities, offering a new perspective on both. Time was often imagined as a movement from the past to the future: the past is gone and the future not yet here. Only present-day subjects could establish relations to other times, recovering history as well as imagining and anticipating the future. In a movement paralleling the emphasis on the porous self, constituted by emotions situated not inside but between subjects, this Element argues for a porous present, which is open to the intervention of ghosts coming from the past and from the future. What needs investigating is the flow between times as much as the creation of boundaries between them, which first banishes the ghosts and then denies their existence. Emotions are the most important way through which subjects situate and understand themselves in time.

Emotions and Temporalities

Philipp Nielsen

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.

Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity

Encounters with Emotions

Jan Plamper

Uffa Jensen

Stephanie Olsen

Anja Laukötter

Daniel Brückenhaus

Magdalena Beljan

Juliane Brauer

Joachim C. Häberlen

Learning How to Feel explores the ways in which children and adolescents learn not just how to express emotions that are thought to be pre-existing, but actually how to feel. The volume assumes that the embryonic ability to feel unfolds through a complex dialogue with the social and cultural environment and specifically through reading material. The fundamental formation takes place in childhood and youth. A multi-authored historical monograph, Learning How to Feel uses children's literature and advice manuals to access the training practices and learning processes for a wide range of emotions in the modern age, circa 1870-1970. The study takes an international approach, covering a broad array of social, cultural, and political milieus in Britain, Germany, India, Russia, France, Canada, and the United States. Learning How to Feel places multidirectional learning processes at the centre of the discussion, through the concept of practical knowledge. The book innovatively draws a framework for broad historical change during the course of the period. Emotional interaction between adult and child gave way to a focus on emotional interactions among children, while gender categories became less distinct. Children were increasingly taught to take responsibility for their own emotional development, to find 'authenticity' for themselves. In the context of changing social, political, cultural, and gender agendas, the building of nations, subjects and citizens, and the forging of moral and religious values, Learning How to Feel demonstrates how children were provided with emotional learning tools through their reading matter to navigate their emotional lives.

Children's Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970

Learning How to Feel

Margrit Pernau

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