Ashraf ʿAli Thanavi

Chapter 7 looks at the sermons of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanavi, known for the Bihishti Zewar, his best-selling advice book for female readers. At first sight, Thanavi fitted perfectly into the pattern of reading reformist Islam as a contributing force both to modernity and to the disciplining project. The ideal and the practices he encouraged seemed to aim at a constant vigilance over the movements of the soul and at a control of emotional outbursts. However, in apparent contradiction, the anecdotes surrounding Thanavi’s life point to a valuation of religious passions. His sermons very often overwhelmed his audience, leaving them shaking and crying or bringing about spiritual ecstasy— features which added to his reputation as a preacher and which he did not want to censor or prevent, though like the other reformers, he was much more comfortable with men giving in to strong feeling than with emotional women. Righteous emotions and righteous behavior, for him, were intertwined with the creation of the righteous polity.

1857

Chapter 2 looks at the Revolt of 1857, known for its violence and the excessive emotions it generated on both sides, such as the massacre of British women and children in Cawnpore, which gave rise to the battle cry ‘for the ladies and the babies!’ At least the British emotions did not fit the narrative of the disciplining project. The endeavor to restore a violated moral order through publicly inflicting gruesome punishments on the bodies of offenders was seen as the response of a pre-modern state, not a modern army. However, in 1857, excessive emotions and the resultant violence were believed to be legitimate and even a moral duty. The chapter investigates three areas: the narrative of trust and its betrayal at the origin of the events; the creation of a violent masculinity expressed through emotional excess; and the mobilization of emotions needed for the continuation of a long-drawn battle.

Kanpur 1913

Chapter 10 returns to Kanpur. Fifty-six years after the Revolt, Kanpur was again the locality for a violent incident and again the emotional repercussions could be felt throughout North India. It was one of the most important incidents in the years before the First World War and a decisive step to alienate the Muslims from the colonial power and open them to the possibility of joining the non-cooperation campaign a few years later. What constituted the emotional core of the events, this chapter argues, was not anger, but josh—an emotion which in this context carries the connotations of enthusiasm or fervor. Orators and journalists exhorted their audiences to show their josh for the house of God and for Islam. Emotional excess, the ability to deeply experience hurt sentiments, was no longer a danger to be avoided, but an ideal, a proof for the ethical substance of the actor’s character.

The Begams of Bhopal

Chapter 5 looks at three generations of Begams of Bhopal, rulers of a semi-independent princely state known for its commitment to Islamic reformism and to education projects, notably for women. Each of the Begams wrote and published books advising Muslim women. Foregrounding the category of gender, the chapter shows how these texts went in line with the Indo-Muslim reformist discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Begams’ books showed the same transition from Aristotelian tradition, premised on the concept of balance, to the increasing importance of the expression and feeling of emotions. That these texts were written by women did not lead to a radical dissociation from the reformist program—piety and modernity, not feminism, were the Begams’ aims. But their patriarchal leanings notwithstanding, at no point did they reduce female education and emotion only to a function of the Muslim community and the upbringing of the next generation—women’s emotions mattered and contributed to the community’s welfare no less than men’s emotions. Women, too, therefore had the duty—and the right—to feel strongly.

Emotion Concepts

Chapter 3 explores the development of emotion concepts, investigating how actors at different times drew the boundaries that defined emotions and distinguished them from non-emotions. It argues that concepts that were centered on notions of equilibrium and balance were transformed into concepts which emphasized and even celebrated the elementary power of emotions and their capacity to overwhelm the individual. This development went hand in hand with the integration of some elements of the Sufi knowledge and poetic imagery of emotions into the public discourse. The first section looks at ethical texts, which drew on the Aristotelian tradition in its Persianate shape. This genre had a long history, but was reframed considerably in the nineteenth century. The second section focuses on the Sufi tradition, while the third takes up the relatively new genre of journal articles, mainly from Tahzib ul Akhlaq, the flagship journal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the argument of the book: modernity has been investigated as a process of discipline, this needs to be supplemented by an investigation of the increasing role emotions have played. If, until the later decades of the nineteenth century, the actors had aimed at avoiding excesses and achieving a balance, the years leading up to the First World War discovered intense fervor as their ideal—no longer were restraint and control to save the nation and the community, but the ability to feel passionately and to translate these passions into action. The investigation of this process requires to look beyond social norms shaping emotions. It brings together the experience of the actors, the interpretation they gave to their experience and the knowledge they produced on its basis, as well as the practices into which they translated their interpretation.

Conclusion

The conclusion discusses the empirical findings of the book—the movement from balance to fervor—against the backdrop of the question: how does the inclusion of emotions allow us to rethink the grand narrative of modernity beyond the disciplining project? For this it engages in a sustained way with the attempts to conceptualize modernity, starting from the idea of the stages of development brought forth by Enlightenment philosophers, moving on to multiple or alternative modernities, and finally considering colonial modernities and the possibilities it offered for bringing colonialism and modernity together as a single development. From modernity, the chapter moves on to the emotions/discipline side of the equation, re-reading the classical works of Elias, Marx, Weber, and Foucault against the findings of the book. The last section develops the argument that letting go of modernity as an analytical concept aiming at a periodization and replacing it with empty time would allow us to create a space where the experiences of the actors and their interpretations can receive more attention.

Nostalgia

Chapter 9 historicizes nostalgia by looking at literary texts in Urdu, written in Delhi and looking back to the years before 1857. It traces its development from the testimonies of the immediate survivors of the revolt. The loss and grief characterizing nostalgia, for this generation were still embedded in a temporal regime in which the space of experience and the horizon of expectation had not yet parted company. This already was different for the anthropologists who were attempting to recover the memories of Delhi, and mainly of the Mughal court, before they were irretrievably forgotten. Their project was taken up by the reformers, who saw progress as inevitable and also worth striving for, but who at the same time mourned the passing of a lost world and posited it as a counter-narrative to the colonial present and to modernity. Following the changes of nostalgic feelings in detail allows us to uncover the emotional ambivalences linked to modernity.

ʿAbdul Majid Daryabadi

Chapter 8 looks at Abdul Majid Daryabadi, who first translated Western emotion knowledge into Urdu, as brought forth by the new discipline of psychology. The psychology of emotions in the writings of Daryabadi was divided not only from religion, but from any considerations of morality. On the one hand, this is due to his downplaying of the role of the will, which was no longer an autonomous force guided by rationality as in the Aristotelian tradition, but only one power among many, and not one of the strongest—the will could neither reach the subconscious nor fight the forces of heredity. On the other hand, emotions no longer needed a moral education, which transformed them from a brute fact of nature into a polished work of art fit for civilized society. Nature could not and should not be tamed by morality, but on the contrary indicated the path the race had to travel to secure its survival and its position of dominance.

Journals for Children

If the right emotions were so important for the prosperity and even survival of the community, it was important to teach children how to feel from a young age. Chapter 6 therefore reads children’s journals for the moral feelings they aimed to bring forth and devotes a special interest to the articles written by children themselves. Men not only allowed themselves violent passions, but even held the ability to be overcome by strong feelings to be essential for the survival of the community. They were much more ambivalent about uncontrolled female emotions. For children, emotional education at first glance meant producing an obedient, punctual, and hard-working subject, who was not to be swerved from the path of duty by sudden strong desires. However, emotions were not only controlled, but also woven into the stories.