Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan 9004352953, 9789004352957

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Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352964_001

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Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia Editors Paolo Santangelo (Sapienza University of Rome) Cheuk Yin Lee (National University of Singapore)

VOLUME 6

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/esma





Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan Edited by

Barbara Schuler

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Gandhi’s room at the Birla Bhavan, Birla Bhavan, Delhi, November 2015. © Padma D. Maitland. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017034007

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1878-8084 isbn 978-90-04-35295-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-35296-4 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contents

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Contents

Preface vii List of Figures and Tables viii Conventions ix Notes on Contributors xii

Introduction: Historicizing Asian Community-Based Emotion Practices 1 Barbara Schuler

India 1 A House for the Nation to Remember: A Correspondence of Emotions between Jawaharlal Nehru and G. D. Birla, 1948 33 Padma D. Maitland 2 Food and Emotion: Can Emotions Be Worked On and Altered in Material Ways?—A Short Research Note on South India 57 Barbara Schuler 3 From Constant Yearning and Casual Bliss to Hurt Sentiments: An Emotional Shift in the Varkari Tradition (India) 71 Irina Glushkova 4 Salvation through Colorful Emotions: Aesthetics, Colorimetry, and Theology in Early Modern South Asia 100 Kiyokazu Okita 5 Loving Śiva’s Liṅga: The Changing Emotional Valences of a Beloved Image in the Tamil-Speaking Śaiva Tradition 113 Anne E. Monius 6 Contested Emotionality, Religious Icons in Ancient India 146 Gérard Colas 7 Giving Gifts in Pre-Modern India: The Motivation of the Donors 193 Katrin Einicke

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China 8 Seeing Suchness: Emotional and Material Means of Perceiving Reality in Chinese Buddhist Divination Rituals 261 Beverley McGuire

Japan 9 When Sad Is Good: Affect among Friends in and out of Japanese Picturebooks 297 Heather Blair Index 327 000

PrefacePreface

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Preface This volume is concerned with the history of emotion, in particular with moments of change in community-based emotional practice. This is a field of research that is almost unexplored in Asian Studies, although it has been widely researched in Western contexts. The contributors to this collection come from various scholarly disciplines, including Indian, Chinese, and Japa­ nese studies, as well as architecture, and approach the issue from the angles of their respective areas of research. This publication had its beginnings in a panel I organized at the XXI World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) in Erfurt, Germany in August 2015. The contributions in this volume—both selected essays based on presentations at the IAHR and supplementary works— bring together a great spectrum of solid empirical research in a new terrain. They offer not only new geographical scope to the history of emotions, but also new voices from cultures and subcultures so far not included in that field. Suffice it to say that it is not my intent, nor would it have been possible, to cover all of this exhaustively. The majority of the articles focus on India, with one contribution based on research in China and Japan respectively. This asymmetry is due to the availability (or lack) of scholars in various parts of Asia working on the exact issue on which the volume is focused. This volume would have not been possible without the generous support of BRILL Publishers. I would like to acknowledge, too, my appreciation to the general editors of the ESMA Emotions and States of Mind in Asia series, who welcomed the volume, and the anonymous peer reviewer for very helpful comments. Last but not least, I am immensely grateful to the contributors for their cutting-edge research, which is at the heart of this volume. Barbara Schuler

Hamburg, March 2017

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List of Figures and Tables

List Of Figures And Tables

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 9.1

Martyr’s Column, Birla Bhavan, Delhi, November 2015 34 Gandhi’s room at the Birla Bhavan, Birla Bhavan, Delhi, November 2015 35 The few possessions of Gandhi, Birla Bhavan, Delhi, November 2015 54 Vitthal alias Vithoba alias Pandurang 74 Tukaram 75 Elizabeth-ekadashi promotion advertisment 1 92 Elizabeth-ekadashi promotion advertisment 2 92 “Pippo ran. To her precious, precious friend.” From Pippo no tabi (Pippo’s Journey) El viaje de Pipo 308 9.2 “A life with no one to bother about you is nice and comfortable.” From Berunaru-san no bōshi (Bernard’s Hat) Mr. Brown’s Fantastic Hat 311 9.3 “Being with the birds, Bernard felt as if his heart too were floating in the sky.” From Berunaru-san no bōshi (Bernard’s Hat) Mr. Brown’s Fantastic Hat 313



Tables

7.5.1 The wording of the dedication phrase 236–239

Conventions Conventions

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Conventions The orthographic conventions for Indo-Aryan languages (including Sanskrit, Marathi, and Hindi) and the Tamil language follow the transliteration standards of the authors’ respective disciplines. Generally, non-English terms are uncapitalized and italicized, and plurals in Sanskrit are indicated by the addition of a non-italicized English -s (e.g., sutras), while adjectivizations are indicated by the addition of a non-italicized English -ic (e.g., purāṇic). These standardized systems allow for some flexibility in choosing which terms are transliterated and which are anglicized. Chapter 3 dispenses with using diacritical marks when such words are used in text translated into English (e.g., anand/anand). This is also the case for well-known geographical and proper names (e.g., Tukaram), and citations in various writing styles (e.g., Varkari/ Warkari, morca/morcha, etc.). Any square brackets [ ] used within citations contain text added by the contributors, unless otherwise stated. For Chinese and Japanese authors and titles the standard international conventions are followed.

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Notes on Contributors

Notes On Contributors

Notes on Contributors Blair, Heather is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Her research focuses on lay religiosity and the visual, spatial, and ritual dimensions of Japanese religious culture. Her latest publications are: “Mothers of the Buddhas: Scriptural Invention and Reproductive Soteriology in the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas (Tennyo jōbutsukyō),” Monu­ menta Nipponica 71.2 (2016): 263–293; “Ladylike Religion: Ritual and Agency in the Life of an Eleventh-Century Japanese Noblewoman,” History of Religions 56.1 (2016): 1–22; and Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). Colas, Gérard is Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris). He writes about paleography, rituals, Vaiṣṇavism, Indian epistemologies and the 18th century Christian missionary literature in Sanskrit and Telugu. His recent publications include: “Evolution of Deism and Theism up to the 12th Century: Some Considerations,” in Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions: The God Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, edited by Marcus Schmücker, 305–334 (Vienna, forthcoming). For a bibliography up to January 2015, see . Einicke, Katrin was trained an Indologist and was a staff member of the seminar of Indology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her latest publications are: Der Bote im vormodernen Indien—Nach inschriftlichen Quellen (Halle: Universitatsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2017); Illustrated Rājataraṅgiṇī: Together with Eugen Hultzsch’s Critical Notes and Stein’s Maps / Marc Aurel Stein, edited by Luther Obrock (in collab. with Katrin Einicke) (Halle: Uni­ versitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2013); and Korrektur, Differenzierung und Abkürzung in indischen Inschriften und Handschriften (Wiesbaden: Harrasso­ witz, 2010). Glushkova, Irina is a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Indian Studies of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Her field of academic interest ranges from religion and politics of Indian regions (primarily Maharashtra and Hindi belt) to dynamics of cultural integration and new

Notes on Contributors

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methodological “turns” in the humanities. She is in charge of an interdisciplinary project “Under the Skies of South Asia” () and the general editor of its seven-volume series (of which the volume on emotions is under preparation at the moment). Her latest English publications include: “Objects of Worship as a Free Choice: Viṭhobā (God), Dñyāneśvar (Saint), the Dñyāneśvarī (Book), or samādhī (Grave)?,” in Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions: Forms, Practices and Meanings, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, Mikael Aktor, and Kristina Myrvold (London: Routledge, 2015); and “Banāras, the Concept of tristhaḷī(-yātrā) and the Inflow of the Marathas: An Alternative View,” in Banāras Revisited: Scholarly Pilgrimages to the City of Light, edited by István Keul (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014). Maitland, Padma D. is a PhD candidate in the Departments of Architecture and South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is a Ful­ bright-Nehru Scholar, conducting research in India as part of a project titled, “Buddhist Modernisms: Sites of Revival and the Limits of Common Ground.” His latest publications include: “Object Emotions” (co-authored with Marta Figlerowicz and Christopher Patrick Miller), symplokē 24.1–2 (2016): 155–170; and “Mandalas: Whole Symbols,” Architecture of Life, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2015). McGuire, Beverley is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her three latest publications are: Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu (Columbia University Press, 2014); “Playing with Karma: A Buddhist Board Game,” Material Religion 10.1 (March 2014): 4–28; and “Divining Karma in Chinese Buddhism,” Religion Compass 7.10 (October 2013): 413–422. Monius, Anne E. has been Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School since 2004. She received her PhD from Harvard University’s Committee on the Study of Religion with a dissertation entitled, “In Search of ‘Tamil Buddhism’: Language, Literary Culture, and Religious Community in Tamil-speaking South India” (published as Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-speaking South India, Oxford University Press, 2001). Her three latest publications are: “Linguistic Anxiety and Geographical Aspiration in the Tamiḻ Śaiva Literary World,” The Journal of Hindu Studies

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8.3 (2015): 265–273; “And we shall compose a poem to establish these truths: The Power of Narrative Art in South Asian Literary Cultures,” in Narrative, Philosophy, and Life, edited by Allen Speight (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015); and “Local Literatures: Tamil,” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Volume 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 813–818. Okita, Kiyokazu is an Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, University of Oxford as well as a visiting faculty at the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions, University of Florida. He obtained his D.Phil. from the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis focuses on Vaiṣṇava Vedānta in Early Modern North India. In his current project God as Paramour: Ethic and Aesthetic in Early Modern South Asia, he examines a complex relation between devotion (bhakti), aesthetic delight (rasa) and ethics (dharma) in the Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition. His most important publications include: Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia: The Rise of Devotionalism and the Politics of Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2014). Schuler, Barbara is an Indologist (classical and modern), with a focus on Tamil, History of Religion, and Social Anthropology at Hamburg University, Germany. Her research includes popular religiosity, and the literary, ritual, and visual dimensions of Tamil-speaking subcultures. Her current research focuses on the history of emotions in India. Her recent publications in this field include: “The Dynamics of Emotions in the Ritual of a Hot Goddess,” Nidan: An International Journal for the Study of Hinduism 24 (Special Issue, December 2012): 16–40.

Introduction

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Introduction

Historicizing Asian Community-Based Emotion Practices Barbara Schuler

The history of emotions is indeed a booming field. One can barely keep up with noticing, let alone reading, the various books, articles, and thematic issues that have set out to theorize and historicize emotions.1 While studies on the 1 An overview of the international state of research on the history of emotions is given by Plamper, Jan, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Hitzer, Bettina, “Emotionsgeschichte—ein Anfang mit Folgen” [History of Emotions—A Beginning with Consequences], in H-Soz-u-Kult 23.11.2011, accessed March 30, 2017 . See also Hitzer (ibid.) for an overview of the research centers and new series that have been established around the world. For a recent update, see Dror, Otniel E. et al., “An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions,” Osiris 31 (2016): 2, n. 3; and Rosenwein, Barbara H., and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming). Recent larger emotion-historical research includes Rosenwein, Barbara H., Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Frevert, Ute et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Lilie, Jonas, ed., A History of Emotions, 1200–1800 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012); for India, see research unit “Geschichte der Gefühle: Schwerpunkt Indien” [History of Feelings: Focus India], Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin (since 2008), accessed March 30, 2017 . For scholarship on the history of emotions in Japan, see Giannoulis, Elena, “Iki: A Japanese Concept of Coolness,” in The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan, ed. Ulla Haselstein et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 215–36; Klien, Susanne, and Christoph Wulf, eds, Well-Being: Emotions, Rituals and Performances in Japan, in Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 22.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2013). For the history of emotions in China, see Lee, Haiyan, “The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Vernacular Happiness,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese (forthcoming 2017); Messner, Angelika C., Zirkulierende Leidenschaft: Eine Geschichte der Gefühle im China des 17. Jahrhunderts [Circulating Passions: A History of Emotions in 17th-Century China] (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2016); collected papers of Angelika C. Messner on the History of Emotions in China are to be published; Kutcher, Norman, “The Skein of Chinese Emotions History,” in Doing Emotions History, ed. Matt, Susan J. and Peter N. Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 57–73.—Recent debates have foregrounded the body and space. For this turn

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352964_002

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history of emotion in the meantime quite naturally draw on emotion-historical analysis strategies,2 they have rarely received treatment in the field of emotion research, at least in the case of India (the country about which I have read most widely).3 But there is terrain for research on the history of emotions toward the body, see Bähr, Andreas, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit: Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert [Fear and Fearlessness: Divine Power and Selfconstitution in the Seventeenth Century] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Eitler, Pascal, and Monique Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte: Eine heuristische Perspektive auf religiöse Konversionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert” [History of Emotions as History of the Body], Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009): 282–313. For a very recent approach on the role of the body and emotions to mediate human interpretations of material reality in an Indian context, see Pernau, Margrit, and Imke Rajamani, “Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language,” History and Theory 55 (February 2016): 46–65, accessed March 15, 2017, doi:10.1111/hith.10787; for China, see Messner, Angelika C., “Towards a History of the Corporeal Dimensions of Emotions: The Case of Pain,” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 66.4 (2013): 943–72. For the turn toward space as a field of inquiry, see Reckwitz, Andreas, “Affective Spaces: A Proxeological Outlook,” Rethinking History 16.2 (June 2012): 241–58; for India, see Pernau, Margrit, “Space and Emotion: Building to Feel,” History Compass 12.7 (2014): 541–9, accessed March 15, 2017, doi:10.1111/hic3.12170. For a theorization on how the material conditions of a space affect bodies and emotions, see Gammerl, Benno, and Rainer Herrn, “Raumgefühle—Gefühlsräume: Perspektiven auf die Verschränkung von emotionalen Praktiken und Topografien der Moderne” [Spatial Feelings—Emotional Spaces], Sub\urban 3.2 (2015): 7–22, accessed March 30, 2017 ; for works on the material impact of bodies and spaces onto feelings in North Indian Muslim cultures, see Pernau, Margrit, “Mapping Emotions, Constructing Feelings: Delhi in the 1840s,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 634–67, accessed March 15, 2017, doi:10.1163/15685209-12341386; and Pernau, Margrit, “The Indian Body and unani Medicine: Body History as Entangled History,” Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 18 (2009): 107–18, accessed March 15, 2017, doi:10.1524/ para.2009.0008. 2 The important strategies at this point are: “emotional regimes” (William M. Reddy), “emotional communities” (Barbara H. Rosenwein), “emotional styles” (Benno Gammerl), and “emotional practice” (Monique Scheer). The approach summed up under the term “emotional practice,” under which various categories are embedded, is, in my view, so far the most inclusive. It integrates all of the other strategies mentioned as basic components. 3 Despite important inroads in scholarly works on historical emotion research on North Indian Muslims in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see the Indian group around Margrit Pernau at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin), it is apparent that the existing scholarship is uneven in its distribution, with pronounced emphasis on Western cultures. For the problem of the neglect of non-Western emotions in historicizing emotion research, see Messner, Angelika C., “Aspects of Emotion in Late Imperial China: Editor’s Introduction to the Thematic Section,” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 66.4 (2013): 893– 913; and Giannoulis, “Iki: A Japanese Concept of Coolness,” 230, n. 1.

Introduction

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that deserves to be explored. Against this background, the contributions included in this volume are particulary inspiring. This introductory essay argues less for a new theory than for an application of theories that have already proved useful for the history of emotions in Western cultures. Notions such as group-based “emotional practice” can be used to understand by whom, when, where, and how historically mutable emotional practices are altered, learned, or even newly invented. They can also show which emotional practices are foregrounded, which are supposed to be evoked, and which are discouraged in the longue durée. The case studies and large-scale research on South and East Asian cultures in this volume illustrate how such an approach might be used to interpret various source materials in Asian studies. This introductory essay frames the volume by introducing concepts that will help readers readily explore the chapters herein. 1

The Cultural Dimension

1.1 Emotional Cultures We need to first spell out the special usage of the concept “emotional culture,” as it is used here in the introduction and in the chapters that follow. In this volume, we conceptualize emotional culture not as a universal system, but rather as varying across cultures and subcultures.4 Anger is not the same from culture to culture and group to group (monks, lay people, children, protesters, deities). In some cultures, anger is viewed with approval; in others with disapproval.5 There are differences in emotion rules regarding what is appropriate and what is not: differences in the repertory of emotions;6 differences in lan-

4 For “emotions across cultures,” see Solomon, Robert C., True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 252ff. 5 See Briggs, Jean, Never in Anger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) about Utku Inuits, for whom anger is not a prevalent emotion; and Foolen, Ad, “The Heart as a Source of Semiosis: The Case of Dutch,” in Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs Across Cultures and Languages, ed. F. Sharifian, R. Dirven, N. Yu and S. Niemeier (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 377, about Tahitians, among whom anger plays a significant role. 6 For the Ifaluk emotion of fago, see Lutz, Catherine, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For the Japanese emotion amae, see Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 259.

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guage and vocabulary;7 differences in modes of expression (i.e., verbal and gestural); differences in practice and situatedness;8 differences in the role and function of emotions; differences in what causes a particular emotion; and, last but not least, differences in emotion taxonomies.9 2

Doing Emotion

Doing emotion10 goes hand in hand with multiple-coded practices, be it in the way that emotions are externalized through practice or that certain practices shape people’s emotional life.11 Emotional practice is defined here as habitual practice involving the language, material things, situational context, and other actors, which may change over time.12 Emotional practice is worshipping an icon (see Colas, in this volume), singing a devotional poem (Monius), march7

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See Santangelo, Paolo, “Introduction,” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions: Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization, ed. Paolo Santangelo (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–34, particularly p. 3f.; see “shame” in Irina Glushkova, in this volume; and Briggs, Never in Anger, 311; also, Pernau, Margrit, “Introduction: Concepts of Emotions in Indian Languages,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 11.1 (Summer 2016): 24–37, accessed March 30, 2017, doi: 10.3167/choc.2016.110102. For two pioneering works on Hindu concepts of emotion, see Hara, Minoru, “Hindu Concepts of Anger: manyu and krodha,” in Le Parole e i Marmi. Studi in Onore di Raniero Gnoli nel suo 70 compleanno, ed. Raffaele Torella, (Roma: Instituto Italiano Per L’Africa e L’Oriente, 2001), 419–44; and Hara, Minoru, “Hindu Concept of Shame: Sanskrit lajjā, vrīḍā, hrī,” Indologica Taurinensia: Official Organ of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies 32 (2006): 141–95. See Messner, Angelika C., “Knowing and Doing Emotions in Times of Crisis and Radical Change,” Paru dans L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques. Revue électronique du C.R.H. (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) 16 (2016): 1–18. For differences in context (genre and compartmentalization), see Kutcher, “The Skein of Chinese Emotions History,” 64–7. For a comparison of the Indian Sanskrit Nāṭyaśāstra with Darwin’s classification, see Dharwadker, Vinay, “Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory,” PMLA 130.5 (2015): 1381–404. See the philosopher Robert C. Solomon, who thinks that emotion is something we do and not something that just happens to us, Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 190ff.; see also Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 135. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 153. Cf. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)?: A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 193.

Introduction

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ing and chanting at demonstrations in shared outrage (Glushkova), feeling joy in giving gifts (Einicke), exchanging affective personal letters (Maitland), theorizing emotions (Okita), doing divination rituals (McGuire), doing emotion learning (Blair, Glushkova), or manipulating emotions through cuisine (Schuler). In this volume, I conceive of emotional practice in terms of four basic categories, mainly based on the theoretical model of Monique Scheer:13 the modulating/working on/training category,14 the naming category, the communicating category, and the regulating category. The first category of emotional practice refers to emotion management or emotion work (see Schuler, in this volume), in which emotions may be reconfigured and adjusted in relation to emotion norms or rules. “These practices are very often … carried out together with other people, artifacts, aesthetic arrangements, and technologies.”15 The second category of emotional practice comprises the “naming” of the evoked emotion, such as “I am afraid.”16 The use of such emotives or verbal emotional expressions is emotional practice in the form of “emotion talk.”17 This also holds true for emotives adapted from Western languages.18 The third category of emotional practice stresses the communicative capacity of emotions, that is both sending or “[r]eading emotion in faces, gestures, vocal patterns, bodily postures, or manifestations such as tears, changing skin

13 14 15 16

17 18

Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 209ff. Scheer, ibid., terms this category “mobilizing.” I choose to not use this term, but rather to call the category “modulating/working on/training.” Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 209ff. William Reddy terms this emotional expression an “emotive.” Emotives are bound to a situation (gesture, voice, how, by, and to whom exerted). For emotives and William Reddy’s discussion on verbal expression, see Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 212. For “I love you” in India, see Scheer, ibid., 212–4. Although this English phrase is not part of the vernacular languages in India and an exposed falling-in-love model not part of the traditional Indian cultural norms, it has entered today’s young lovers’ courtship dialogues through Bollywood films, a clear example of creating a new emotional repertoire. In contrast, “falling in love” in traditional India is, rather, a kind of disorder with symptoms, including anorexia, insomnia, and being lost in thought, to mention the most visible. However, classical Sanskrit kāvya and Tamil Caṅkam poetry celebrate this emotional state quite vividly. For similarities in Indonesia, see Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt, “Emotion und Kultur: Einige Grundfragen,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 127 (2002): 147–62, in particular 153–7.

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color, or heavy breathing.” This again involves registers of knowledge such as the “judgements about the situational context, the actors involved, and social expectations.”19 The fourth category of emotional practice encompasses, firstly, emotion rules, which inform “proper” emotions for a culture or social group; secondly, “emotional communities,”20 or groups of various kinds and sizes whose members adhere to the same valuation of emotions and emotional styles (i.e., soldiers, political parties, professional classes, same-sex individuals, religious bodies, monks, deities, members of specific elites, kings, intellectuals, etc.) and their practices that generate and sustain an emotional community; thirdly, emotional styles that are practiced by emotional groups (some groups may practice hostility and aggression, others servility or noble reserve in their social interactions, and yet again others—the dominant social group—may practice the “emotional standard”21). These specific views on emotion practices offer opportunities for systematic investigation. The reduction of complexity is in many cases a prerequisite for historical case studies. Consequently, in carrying out historical research, it seems legitimate and often necessary to isolate one notion and follow its potential in particular historical times and places. Therefore, from among the four categories of emotional practices mentioned above, I will focus more explicitly on the fourth category of emotional communities—their emotion styles and practices—given its shared theme in all of the chapters in this volume as well as its potential. There is clearly a lot to recommend this approach. It allows investigations on longer-term patterns of continuity and change, patterns that we distinctly find in South and East Asian pre-modern cultures. Moreover, it integrates the various views on emotion norms and styles and remains flexible enough to acknowledge differences in terms of the hierarchies of emotions of specific groups in specific time periods. Although in theory there is very little that might challenge this research tool, it nevertheless presents the historian with a number of serious problems. First and foremost, it is by no means clear whether “emotional community” should be considered as a guiding principle in every single study of the history 19 20

21

Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 214. For examples of the communicative capacity of emotions, see Glushkova in this volume. This term was coined by Rosenwein, Barbara, H. in her “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107.3 (2002): 845 and in Rosenwein, Barbara H., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). She updates the term’s definition several times. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 217.

Introduction

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of emotions or whether it should remain reserved for pre-modern, longer term-patterned studies.22 Second, the imbalance of existing systematic research across time periods makes comparative studies on historical change and innovation of community-bound emotional practice rather difficult. There is, and I take again the example of India, virtually no coherent body of research on medieval emotion cultures in the subcontinent that could be compared and put into perspective with the results of the booming medieval history of emotions in Western cultures, let alone group-bound emotional practice studies. It is important to amass adequate source material and examples to enable sufficient comparative perspectives. Here, a lot remains to be done before any historicized comparative perspective worth the name can honestly be taken up. Third, the body of evidence that may illuminate a certain emotional community varies significantly in terms of density, the conventions of the genre, and the social dominance or marginality. I do not mean to suggest that this is an impossible task. But, it still seems a substantial practical challenge that is not easily met. 3

Emotions and Their Material Practice

I proceed on the assumption that the notion of emotional practice is compatible with an historical study of emotion.23 I further assume that the notion of emotional practice also involves material things.24 This offers a way to integrate the material world with emotion practice.25 But the material things 22

23 24

25

Pernau, Margrit, “Feeling Communities: Introduction,” The Indian Economic and Social History 54.1 (2017): 10, accessed March 15, 2017, doi:10.1177/0019464616683477, perceives shortcomings in Rosenwein’s concept of emotional community: “[It] highlights certain kinds of stable communities, but not others, which come together rapidly and dissolve just as rapidly—it is more apt to explain the emotional community of courtly society and distinguish it from the emotions valued in monasteries, than to account for the sudden flaring up of emotions which went hand in hand with the crusades.” See Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 193. I should note that I am using the term “material thing” here in a general sense. For works that deal with a synergy between emotion and material culture, see Rosenwein, Barbara H., “Emotions and Material Culture: A ‘Site under Construction,’” in Emotions and Material Culture: International Round Table-Discussion Krems an der Donau, October 7 and 8, 2002, ed. Gerhard Jaritz (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003), 165–72; and Kieschnick, John, “Material Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223–37. See Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 220.

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we are talking about here are not objects that have the character of closed boxes. In contrast, the materialities appear to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely.26 They are like open drawers filled with qualities,27 emotions, ideas, values, and, at times, even breath. Thus it comes as no surprise that religious statues in India can be seen as sentient beings who bleed or weep, see and listen, and are recognized as legal personalities (i.e., owners of property).28 Once we agree that emotions and their material practices are not timeless but rather underlie historical change,29 and once we agree that notions such as emotional communities and their emotional styles prove particularly helpful for our approach, a set of opportunities for uncovering critical historical turning-points emerges. 3.1 Awareness of Change But how does one recognize change—especially in the context of the long structural continuities of traditional societies? What kind of tool is available to describe moments of change? One place to begin is with the above-mentioned notion of “emotional community,” famously coined by the American medieval historian Barbara Rosenwein.30 This notion seems particularly apt for medi26

27

28

29 30

“[I]n the South Asian traditions the limits of what may count as the “material” … are wide. … The sources of various sensory experiences, whether sonic, visual, olfactory, gustatory, or somatosensory, are perceived by the religious traditions as being material,” cited from Jacobsen, Knut A., Mikael Aktor, and Kristina Myrvold, “Material Objects of Worship in the Lived Religions of South Asia,” in Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions: Forms, Practices, and Meanings, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen, Mikael Aktor and Kristina Myrvold (London: Routledge, 2015), 3. See the inner quality (guṇa) notion of food, for instance, in chapter 2, in this volume. For the Indian guṇa-theory in general, see Malinar, Angelika, “Guṇa,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen et al., accessed March 15, 2017 . First published online: 2012. See Colas and Schuler, in this volume. For deities as legal personalities, see Sontheimer, Günther-Dietz, “Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, einschließlich der ethnologischen Rechtsforschung 67 (1965): 45–100. It should be by now clear that the focal interest here is not the potency of the material, but rather its historical actuality. For a very recent publication that offers a new take on the term “emotional community,” see Pernau, “Feeling Communities: Introduction.” Her focal point is the creation of “feeling communities” (i.e., crowds, mobs), the emotions that are part of the creation, and the way in which collective emotions are conceptualized. The German historian Beno Gammerl has also dealt with Rosenwein’s “emotional community” and has suggested the

Introduction

9

eval histories of emotion, as not only Rosenwein’s work but also our volume’s pre-modern case studies show. Another starting point is surveying emotionally coded objects, through which a historical reading of emotion practice may be possible. To begin with objects, they can manifest themselves in an emotion, but not just any emotion; rather, in an emotion that is socially or religiously desired. Which emotion is desired and thus appropriate for the object is defined by the communities or groups practicing the emotion. Relevant understanding comes from the experience with the object and the exposure to actual instances. Sufficient exposure may lead to transmission, but a transmission does not necessarily mean that the emotion or set of emotions associated with the object is also transmitted. We have cases where the emotion mutates over time (see Maitland, Glushkova, Monius, in this volume), and vice versa, where the materialities mutate over time (see Schuler, Einicke). The problem with this is that the emotion-as-material practice is not solid. As it is socially or ritually transmitted, as it moves through space and time, it changes, taking on a new guise. Where there is new experience in regard to an object, there are new emotions toward it. What mutates depends in part on the interrelationship with religious or cultural trends. So it can happen that, initially, emotions a, b, c, d pick out an object O1, O2, O3, O4. But as that object mutates over time, the original emotion adheres to it less and less effectively. By the time it becomes O4, it is unrecognizable and will not fit anymore to emotion a.31 The question “why do emotional communities change over time?” has been quite satisfactorily answered by Rosenwein,32 who lists several causes that may initiate change: (1) a charismatic personality, (2) competition among groups, (3) imitating prestigious groups to seek advantage, (4) social and economic changes, (5) new accepted theories, (6) new generations who adopt earlier practices and combine them in new ways, or (7) needs, ideologies, and predi-

31 32

alternative category “emotional spaces,” each of which would be linked to specific emotional styles; see Gammerl, Benno, “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16.2 (2012): 163, accessed March 30, 2017, doi:10.1080/13642529.2012.681189. See, for instance, the case study discussed in chapter 2, “Food and Emotion,” in this volume. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 318. For another approach to agents of historical change, see Reddy’s notion of “emotives,” “emotional suffering” due to “emotional regimes” and the search for emotive liberty (“emotional refuges”) in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; for a convenient summary of this theory, see Rosenwein, Barbara H, “Theories of Change in the History of Emotions,” in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 11.

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lections. For all of these “whys” we also find examples in various chapters in this volume. However, the way specific emotional communities in Indian and other Asian cultures (not Western cultures) change over time, and how their emotional interpretation of objects alter, remains an open question that I would like to take up by looking at the historical turning-points, innovations, or even continuities of the specific emotional groups presented in this volume. Examples of Historicized Community-Based Practices of Emotion in South and East Asia: Shifts and Changes, Innovations and Continuity I have assigned individual studies in this volume to different categories, derived (with slight alteration) from the why change list above. If we are to spot any turning points, shifts, and innovations, then we must pose the questions by whom, when, where, what-by, and how did change occur. Here cultural variation reenters the process in the shape of different social, religious, and political histories. Some of the essays exemplify multiple dimensions and could fit under more than one heading. I will, however, be brief in this preliminary review, paying attention particularly to prehistories of definable group practices (including emotionally coded things) and developments of new practices that cut across regions and time. 3.2

3.2.1

Examples of Innovation and Change of Emotional Practice Due to a Charismatic Personality: By Whom, When, Where, What, and How? To explore how emotional communities and their practices change over time, we must look out for charismatic personalities, such as court and temple poets, hagiographers, and philosophers. Through a series of comparisons, we can seek to position these individuals within the various traditions, while trying to define their emotional practices, whether newly invented, partly overlapping, combined in new ways, or repurposed and reworked from local or other traditions.33 The three bhakti34 case studies in this volume offer the opportunity to look at a historical phenomenon of affective, devotional religiosity in India that is tied together by certain assumptions, particular emotion rules,35 and agreed33 34 35

Cf. examples in the European medieval history of emotions in Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling. The term is derived from the Sanskrit verb root √bhaj. It is a rule that no ferocious (Sanskrit ugra) emotions are approved in devotional bhakti. Cf. Sontheimer, Günther D., “Hinduism: The Five Components and Their Interaction,” in

Introduction

11

upon modes of expression. Although the rise of bhakti was a signal of momen­ tous change in the Hindu religious spectrum, it did not appear simultaneously in all regions. While the full history of bhakti across South Asia is yet to be written, recent scholarship suggests that such a history is fragmented and regionally disparate, certainly neither a “movement” nor a unifed religious force.36 The authors of the chapters in this volume that deal with the different bhakti traditions agree that there is an agentive capacity of objects to elicit human emotional response. All would also agree that the emotional communities are agents of change. Of course, not every emotional community stands at the foundation of a new emotional era (as the earliest Tamil bhakti poet-saints did),37 but every emotional community or group has highly specific contours in the emotion-as-material practice of its time and place. None is congruent with another, although some interpracticality is visible where identifiable groups38 are tied together by shared text and an audience that must have overlapped.39 It is only when we look at the emotional styles of groups smaller than the South Asian bhakti phenomenon in conjunction with their emotion-asmaterial practice that we are able to see how diverse but also sometimes common they were. One commonality we can detect in all the bhakti chapters is the high intensity of emotion—the ideal of a state in which an emotion is fully developed. The chapters also portray some blatantly political emotions (Glushkova) and shifts from religious to political or secular to religious spheres, processes by which, in the latter case (Okita), the notion of aesthetic distance, so prominent for the literary rasa theory, is obliterated. The series of bhakti chapters also shows how, in a relatively short span of time, different emotional practices come to the fore or fade into the background. It is noteworthy that the

36

37 38 39

Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Günther D. Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 206. I would like to thank Anne Monius for discussing this matter with me. See Hawley, John Stratton, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Hawley also shows how Muslim contributions to devotional religiosity in India were often marginalized. See the Tamil case T1 below. See, for instance, the Tamil cases T1 and T3 below. It is assumed that if a hagiographer described the saints and humble devotees of Śiva in a certain manner, then he expected his audience to approve his view as the prevailing norm.

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fragmented and regionally disparate bhakti traditions as presented in this volume, have never ceased to boldly repurpose and rework their practices. The Tamil Śaiva Case I will start with the South Indian Tamil Śaiva case (Monius), in which we find that the liṅga, which has previously been associated with awe, is no longer linked to that emotion at all. In addition, over the course of time, the nature of the liṅga has also changed, in turn, from fiery to stone/metal to internal. Whereas the emotions of awe and adoration were originally seen as the proper way to connect emotionally with the fiery liṅga, the locus of unappeasable longing (T1), it was later the stone/metal liṅga (unperishable and bleeding) that came to be the locus of vehemently expressed emotions associated with a violent tenor privileging excessive, unruly passionate behavior (T3), and then, finally, the ideal inward liṅga associated with discipline and self-awareness, at which point the emotion-as-material practice was visibly obliterated (T4). But there was one more emotional community between T1 and T3. If the earliest poet-saints (T1, 7th–9th c.) were awestruck, the next poet-saint generation (T2, 9th c.) came up with an approach to the liṅga that then evoked joy, an emotional style that brought a highly laudatory attitude toward the female to the foreground. Indeed, none of the other three Tamil Śaiva emotional communities that we have seen associated women’s emotions (joy, desire) and playful sexuality with the god as did group T2. Taken together with the poet’s celebration of joyous emotions in general, it was a defining characteristic of this group. The Bengali Vaiṣṇava Case If we search for identifiable communities in terms of emotional style we must look at the Bengali case (Okita), where we find in the influential theoretician of Bengali Vaiṣṇava bhakti, Rūpa Gosvāmī, a later emotional community that is apparently similar to the Tamil case T2. Even though this sixteenth-century North Indian community (B2) is not contemporary with the ninth-century Tamil emotional group T2, and there is no direct adoption, we find a strong overlapping of emotional style in the two communities marked by and famous for intensity of feeling, “sweet” emotional vocabulary, and the notion of a female lover–beloved god, a view constructed out of the idea that a bhakta devotee should approach the god as female devotee. Unlike the Tamil case T2, the Bengali Vaiṣṇava theoretician does not deal with the god Śiva but with Kṛṣṇa, not with a phallic object but with color that is filled with the idea of intense emotion, while the locus of the changing emotional register of colors is ideally a female devotee and her beloved god Kṛṣṇa. Since the three-color theory of emotions-as-colors is, as Kiyokazu Okita convincingly demonstrates,

Introduction

13

an adoption from an Andhra prince of the fourteenth century, the identifiable textual community to B2 is a secular emotional community that composed secular Sanskrit literature (B1). The Bengali case provides not only the best evidence for there being no pre-modern Indian divide of religious and non-religious emotions, but also for influential thinkers and theological innovators transforming notions of emotions by repurposing and recombining them in theories that shape the emotions the Vaiṣṇava bhaktas then accept. Thinkers thus become mediators of emotional norms by making use of specific emotion-as-material practices, including poems, color references, and theoretical treatises. Thus, this Bengali case also exemplifies moments of change through the appearance of new theories. The Marathi Vaiṣṇava Case From the Bengali (B2) attempt to put emotions on a religious footing and integrate them into sixteenth-century Vaiṣṇava emotional practice, we turn to the Marathi-speaking region (Glushkova) where another example of a turning point in emotion practice comes to light. It connects the line between the seventeenth-century emotional community (M1) of Vaiṣṇava poet Tukārām, characterized by the poet’s yearning for seeing, touching, and experiencing a spatially remote god (a god who triggers the poet’s emotional oscillation between bliss and suffering), and the modern Vārkarīs’ (M2) religious-turnedpolitical emotion of righteous anger due to an insult to faith. It is precisely this upheaval of emotion that makes this case study so compelling. If the earlier Vārkarīs privileged painful longing toward their god Viṭṭhal (also known as Viṭhobā or Pāṇḍuraṅg), then the new generations favor the opposite. If the emotional impulse and emotion rules of seventeenth-century Tukārām may be likened to the style that was en vogue among the Tamil emotional community T1 of the seventh to ninth centuries, then the modern Vārkarīs bring new practices from outside to the scene, namely models en vogue among right-wing Hindu protesters who practice anger, hate, and reveling in rancor. It shows how Vārkarīs in need of finding new emotional approaches to a changing Marathi world proceed through a series of emotion rules set forth by the modern Vārkarīs with a clear trajectory to power. Indeed, this “new” emotional community (M2) positions itself within a whole complex of processes involving constellations of power and control. Thus, the emotional upheaval of the emotional group M2 is a good example that fits well into the examples in paragraph 3.2.2 below. The Marathi case makes one thing clear: we should not suppose, if there is no preoccupation with outraged emotions in medieval religious texts, that a shift from religious to political emotions must be lacking. In the early Tamil

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bhakti period, when the eighth-century poet-saint Campantar was pas­sionately active, aggression against the competitive Jains was recorded (see Monius). 3.2.2

Examples of Change of Emotional Practice Due to Needs, Ideologies, and Predilections The general ambivalence toward “emotions in things” has long been a subject of interest in Indian discourse40 practices and is similarly emphasized in Gérard Cola’s article. As the historicized discourse shows, there were in all major Indian religions observable practices, theoretical viewpoints, and concepts about material things that divided the discourse on “emotions in things” into two emotional communities: one of approval (A1) and one of censure (C1). This was particularly true with regard to icons. If the C1 censure wing (consisting of members from literary circles, aristocratic milieus, and philosophers) deplored the idea of icons being deities or homes of deities and was uncomfortable with the effusiveness of worshipping things, then the A1 approval wing would encourage, valorize, and emphasize the emotionality of icons. Not all philosophers were C1 “contra” adherents (see the Buddhist Śantideva), and not all from the emotional community of bhaktas were A1 “pro” (see the poet-saint Kabīr), encouraging the intimately passionate relationship with icon-deities. It is, indeed, very likely, that the discursive practices of both approvers and critics, which brought into question the certainty of emotions in things, existed at any time and any place in a more than two thousand-year continuity.41 Even if one of the two communities in question no longer shows up in the extant sources of a certain time period, it may have nevertheless perpetuated itself.42 A very interesting development, indeed, is, then, the ever expanding holding force of A1 in times of radical political upheaval and colonial rule43 (18th c. onward), and even more so the only recently practiced worship of guru relicts celebrated by a “new” emotional community, A2.

40

41

42 43

Discourse in the sense of indigenous theories or “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak,” Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 49. This is even more likely in light of the “Five-components-theory” of Hindu religions (1. works and teachings of the Brahmins, 2. asceticism and renunciation, 3. bhakti, 4. folk religion, and 5. tribal religion), which assumes that Hindus may practice more than one component at the time. See Sontheimer, “Hinduism,” 201ff. Suffice it to say that the debate is also implicit in some of the essays presented in this volume. The expansion of the emotional community of A1 took place perhaps precisely because of foreign rule. Tanjavur was taken by the British Wellesley in 1799.

Introduction

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3.2.3

Examples of Change of Emotional Practice Due to Competition among Groups and Imitating Prestigious Groups to Seek Advantage The rural entities described in Barbara Schuler’s article fall under the category of competitive food-as-emotion-work practice. We look here at two coexisting emotional communities in one location in Tamil-speaking South India, specifically at their ritual practices that address one and the same female deity who possesses corporality; eats food in the form of offerings; rewards worshippers with boons; and is attentive, responsive, and, above all, a legal person.44 One emotional community is a dominant social elite group (EC1); the other, economically weak (EC2). Whereas the high-ranking emotional community EC1 for more than three centuries did not worry about the violent emotional style of its goddess and her desire for non-vegetarian cuisine (in their goddess’ world all sorts of emotions were recognized, and, if not celebrated, nevertheless unabashedly memorialized in songs), in contrast, the emotional community EC2 that only came to the fore in 1985—strikingly new with regard to ritual competence (a key skill for social status and upwardly-mobile groups)—did, indeed, worry, and decided not to imitate the elite group EC1, but rather the prestigious Brahmins and their vegetarian diet system. This not only shows a change in the emotional style of the goddess—who was no longer seen as angry, but rather peaceful and auspicious—but also shows her transformation into a perfect candidate for bhakti worship.45 3.2.4

Examples of Change in Emotional Practice Due to New Political Facts and Social Expectations Letters seem to provide the best evidence for emotion talk, as Padma Maitland’s article illustrates. Through the correspondence of two public personalities, G. D. Birla and J. Nehru—the former an industrialist, donor to the national movement, and spiritual pupil of Mahatma Gandhi; the latter a politician and the first prime minister of independent India—we come to know about two emotional communities of twentieth-century India. Both men were contemporaries of the assassinated Gandhi, but did not belong to his emotional community in which asceticism and ahiṃsa (non-harming) was celebrated, although Birla partly overlapped with the emotional community in which Gandhi lived. It is an interesting emotional discourse that we find here, with affective content 44 45

Cf. Sontheimer, “Hinduism,” 204f. For the concept of bhakti that rejects the feature of fierce/ferocious (Sanskrit ugra), but highly values and celebrates the peaceful/auspicious (saumya) aspect, see Sontheimer, “Hinduism,” 206.

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and an edifice (Birla House) serving as the material locus of those emotions. The letters not only address a broad emotional panoply (affection, fear of loss, compulsion to self-sacrifice) evoked in Birla by the house and show Nehru (the political stakeholder and initiator of a Gandhi memorial-turned-Birla House) far more at ease with emotions, pursuing the politics of emotion. But the letters also reveal the potential of Birla House to explain the two parties’ emotional investment in the property. Perhaps “emotional mobility” is a useful term to characterize the emotional tenor of Birla, the industrialist-donor, who navigated between the private-intimate and the public, while newly arranging his emotions (and his inarticulated value-system as well) toward the house. 3.2.5

Examples of Change in Emotional Practice Due to Personal Experience and New Registers of Knowledge Beverley McGuire’s article looks at an emotional community through the writings of one person,46 the Chinese Buddhist monk Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655), who practiced divination (Buddhist monastic codes are opposed to this practice, but the rulers of the Ming and Qing dynasties were not) that addressed shame and fear. This is not at all an anti-emotional practice, but one that celebrates weeping, vulnerability and weakness, and polluted materiality (toilet, feces, etc.) as well as ways to one’s own transformation and revelation of reality-as-itis. If the early Ouyi experienced frustration and shame, and the middle Ouyi sincerity, then the late Ouyi celebrates joy and appreciation of one’s own Buddha nature. The monk’s case provides the best argument for emotions to be encouraged as stimuli to elicit a response (in this case from the Buddha), but also for its emphasis on material objects as training tools for practicing equating/sameness. 3.2.6 Examples of Continuity of Emotional Practice The Indian Case In India’s medieval world (third to twelfth centuries), which was marked by a great diversity of religions, including Buddhism and Jainism, we find further examples of emotional communities that we are pleased to have been able to include in the present volume (see Einicke)—two emotional communities that flourished in abundance: one that practiced giving/donating (G1) and another that practiced receiving (R1), both doing so in various material ways 46

The methodological problem here is to take one man’s writing as a reflection of a larger community, but I consider the monk’s work to represent the practice of the monastic community for which he wrote and in which he lived. I follow here Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 30.

Introduction

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(land, protection, cows, gold, enjoyment, clothes, lamps, fruits) and for different reasons. If the givers and donors (among others, kings) practiced the materiality of generosity, duty, and emotions (joy, gratitude, shame, fear), then the worthy recipients (Brahmins, temples, monks, and nuns) offered merit in return. Practicing the materiality of duty may seem an abnegation. In fact, to the contrary, it allowed givers and donors to celebrate the joy of giving. Through this group (G1) we come to know a community that, according to normative texts, must have practiced absence of anger, lack of envy, a moral life, and, above all, did not belong to a polluted caste, since otherwise giving is rendered worthless. This brings in another angle of materiality’s efficient capacity. As long it is non-harming and legal, it allows the effects (spiritual reward, worldly gain) to emerge. It is an outstanding characteristic of the two emotional communities, both of which had a privileged place in society, that they did not change significantly, even though times were changing. The Japanese Case We end with the emotional community of kindergarten children in twentieth and twenty-first-century Japan (see Blair), where a child’s emotional life is not stifled, but, on the contrary, is cultivated with regard to empathy, melancholy loneliness, and satisfying sadness, the last two of which are highly valued and taught as prerequisites for making friends. Picturebooks are emotional agents used to train children in these socially desirable emotions.47 The preference for emotional practice that considers sadness and other emotions of a troubled mind as good, shows an astonishing continuity for at least the last seventy-five years despite ongoing socioeconomic changes. 4

About the Chapters

What unites the very different chapters in this volume is the importance they place on emotion practices,48 including emotionally coded things (such as food and icons) and what I call emotional groups or communities. With few exceptions, the contributing authors do not use these exact terms, but none47

48

For the discourse on learning emotions, see a recent book by Frevert, Ute et al., Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For a South Asian Muslim example, see Pernau, Margrit, “Asghari’s Piety,” in Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57–73. In this volume the terms “emotion,” “sentiment,” and “feeling” are used interchangeably.

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theless systematically investigate the groups and trace the ways they change over time. The majority of the chapters in this volume focus on Hindu and Buddhistbased emotional practices and India at large, with one contribution each to China and Japan. This choice is fortuitous, owing to our academic networks and the availability (or lack) of South and East Asian scholars working on emotional practices that in one way or another involve emotionally coded things and show an explicit emphasis on moments of change across time and space. The focus on historicizing group-based emotional practice involving emotionally coded objects is, however, a conscious decision.49 All of the emotional groups presented here (and there can be many in any given time period), imply, of course, a certain selection and evaluation on the part of the volume’s contributors. The collection brings together scholars from Indian studies and, to a lesser extent, Chinese and Japanese studies. Their case studies span from pre-common era to the modern times, with an emphasis on the pre-modern period. Some of the essays explore the past in long-term or middle-term perspective (Colas, Einicke, Monius, Glushkova, Okita, McGuire), while others examine just one or a few decades in modern times (Maitland, Blair). Yet others deal with cultures embedded in multiple temporalities at once (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleich­zeitigen),50 in the form of archaic traditions that continue to exist today in parallel with contemporary practices (Schuler). Essays on both religious and non-religious spheres are included.51 There are examples of religious 49 50

51

The decision has its roots in the panel I organized at the 2015 IAHR International Association for the History of Religions in Erfurt. This term was coined by Koselleck, Reinhart, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschicht­ licher Zeiten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, [1979] 1989), 132. [Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and introd. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 95]. A dichotomization of religious and non-religious emotions, or, equally, of authentic emotions and those that are merely staged or purposely evoked is not used in this volume. For arguments against the dichotomization of authentic emotions, which arise spontaneously, and those that are faked or purposely evoked, see Pernau, Margrit, “Love and Compassion for the Community: Emotions and Practices Among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 54.1 (2017): 40. For a premodern, China-related discussion of the sincerity and insincerity of emotions, and the notion of the sincerity (of emotion) shown by its adherence to the formulaic, see Kutcher, “The Skein of Chinese Emotions History,” 69f.; see also Harbsmeier, Christoph, “Weeping and Wailing in Ancient China,” in Minds and Mentalities in Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Halvor Eifring (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999), 317–422, in which a subtle distinction between the emotion words ku (which Harbsmeier translates as “wail-

Introduction

19

groups, but also political, educational, and kindergarten children groups. In some essays, emotions of awe, frustration, and joy (Monius) or fear of loss/ affection (Maitland) come to the fore, while others detect emotions of painful yearning and fury (Glushkova), fear and shame (McGuire, Einicke), or loneliness and sadness (Blair). The chapters are arranged according to geographical regions and, within these, from the present to the past. The first and last chapters in the collection mark a circle that begins and ends in the present. While the volume deals with emotional practices, including emotionally coded things, and the essays present the cultural specificity of the emotional interpretation of the objects, the book does not address the notion of “materiality” in a Western sense.52 Correspondingly, although emotions are related to the body, the bodily aspect of emotions is rarely addressed in the individual chapters,53 without, of course, denying it. Padma Maitland sets the stage for India with his analysis of emotional shifts in connection to an edifice—Birla House—and shows how two letter writers

52

53

ing”) and qi (translated as “weeping”) comes to light, the first (wailing) being reserved for emotion staged publicly. For Sanskrit literary theories of true aestheticized emotion (rasa) and the semblance of such emotions (rasābhāsa), the latter a “literary promulgation of an immoral order” and “necessary component of narrative complexity,” see Pollock, Sheldon, “The Social Aesthetic and Sanskrit Literary Theory,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 29 (2001): 214f. The term rasābhāsa is first used in the work of the early ninthcentury thinker Udbhaṭa (ibid., 212). The Western materiality-approach—not applied here, as it is not the format of this volume—would shift attention to the way in which concrete entities (human/material world: territories, things, or bodies) interact with each other. Such an approach would inquire as to how bodies would be sensually affected by material textures and how material structures would affect emotional experiences. The materiality-approach expanded when the biography model, the idea of material objects having social lives and careers, emerged in the mid-1980s (see Kopytoff, Igor, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai [Cambridge, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 64–91). For an alternative institution model that considers the object’s change of use and meaning over time, see McHugh, James, “The Camphor Flame in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Sacred Matters: Material Religion in South Asian Traditions, ed. Tracy Pintchman and Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 135–51; see also Davis, Richard, The Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Kieschnick, John, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Exceptions are Glushkova (bodily expressions), and Colas and McGuire (the senses), in this volume. For a recent work on the senses in India, and particularly Indian theories of the senses, see Michaels, Axel, and Christoph Wulf, eds, Exploring the Senses (London: Routledge, 2014).

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(an industrialist/donor and a politician) experience the building in radically different ways, depending on situation (assassination of Mahatma Gandhi), historical period (independent India), and status, the last traditionally connected to emotions about material things. The author unfolds the emotion talk between the two letter writers and shows the way the house escapes its biographical fixation, as the owner’s emotions change in the course of the exchange of correspondence. Barbara Schuler empirically investigates two social groups in today’s Tamilspeaking South India, their emotion rules, expectations, and emotion-as- material practices in regard to one and the same goddess. She focuses on what happens to the deity when its diet system changes from non-vegetarian to vegetarian and reveals local knowledge about emotion, work on emotions, self-design, and modes of demeanor. She points to the notion of internal quality (guṇa) of materiality (here, food), shows the effects of the material to emotions, and concludes that social groups very consciously work on emotions by means of material objects,54 albeit with different strategies (seductive-cognitive and bodily-regulating) that are intimately tied to the practices of the groups out of which they grow. Hereby it is assumed that in local emotion knowledge the work on emotions is not an internal matter, but one that progresses from the outside in. Studying devotional bhakti contexts in the Marathi-speaking region of western India, Irina Glushkova explores both textually and empirically the Marathi bhakti periods reaching from the creative phase of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries up to contemporary times. The chapter shows the shift from religious to political emotions and detects the aggressive/angry turn in the modern emotional community of Vārkarīs (the devotees of the god Viṭṭhal/ Viṭhobā/Pāṇḍuraṅg physically alive in Pandharpur). The author supports her analysis by looking at the frequencies and the predominant meanings of specific emotion terms, bodily expressions, and “emotives” for the Vārkarīs over time, and concludes that both the painful yearning and the angry talk are normative and learned.55

54

55

For other material objects, see Schuler, Barbara, “Transfer of Ritual in a Local Tradition: Some Observations,” in Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in Practice, ed. Christiana Brosius and Ute Hüsken (London: Routledge, 2010), 177ff. Interestingly, although bhakti rejects fierce (Sanskrit ugra) features, contemporary Viṭhobā adherents perform precisely in this way. It is very likely that for contemporary Vārkarīs ugra implies “powerful,” “mighty,” “strong.” For this alternative interpretation of ugra, see Sontheimer, “Hinduism,” 198.

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21

In his contribution on the relationship between coloring materials and emotions, Kiyokazu Okita provides a unique insight into how rasa discourse spills over into major religious domains through a Bengali Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava, a sixteenth-century “innovator in theological aesthetics” and “leading theo­ retician” of Bengali bhakti.56 That Rūpa Gosvāmī has adopted aestheticized emotion conceptions from a fourteenth-century Sanskrit work written for connoisseurs of secular art and literature offers a good example of an Indian cultural practice of adopting, reworking and repurposing—in this case—emotional styles.57 Okita demonstrates how saffron, indigo, and madder root dyes were chosen to analyze passion, particularly using color references as a shorthand way of illustrating the theoretician’s concept of intensification, full development, and endurance of emotion. Anne Monius examines South Indian Tamil texts from the seventh to fourteenth centuries that promote new Hindu notions of emotional bhakti,58 looking penetratingly at the altering emotions practiced in conjunction with the phallic liṅga, the god Śiva’s “mark,” within the Tamil bhakti communities of court/temple poets and humble Śaiva devotees. The chapter describes the transitional periods through which Tamil Śaiva’s emotional practice was wending its way throughout history in an effort to find efficacious solutions to a god who enters the poet but slips again away. The chapter focuses on three historical stages of approaches to the divine taken by the charismatic poets. It guides the reader from the material locus of emotions of a fiery liṅga via a more material stone/metal liṅga to a liṅga being internalized.

56

57

58

I cite Pollock, Sheldon, “Rasa after Abhinava,” in Saṃskṛta-sādhutā: Goddess of Sanskrit. Studies in Honour of Professor Ashok Aklujkar, ed. Chikafumi Watanabe, Michele Desmarais and Yoshichika Honda (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld Ltd., 2012), 431. According to Pollock, “Rasa after Abhinava,” 432, Rūpa Gosvāmī defined rasa as “a stable emotion in the state of full development through the work of the various aesthetic elements,” while “the analytical focus of rasa remains [in] the [literary] character[/ protagonist].” In addition to the Śaiva bhakti corpus dealt with by Anne Monius, there is the major Vaiṣṇava Tamil bhakti corpus. To this day the most extensive textual study of the development of South Indian (Vaiṣṇava) Kṛṣṇa devotion in the first millennium is still Friedhelm Hardy’s Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). For a recent publication with a selection of Tamil bhakti poems translated into German and a comprehensive discussion of their textual precursors in Tamil classical literature, see Wilden, Eva, ed., trans. and annot., Lieder von Hingabe und Staunen: Gedichte der frühen tamilischen Bhakti [Lyrics of Devotion and Wonder: Poems of the Early Tamil Bhakti] (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, Insel Verlag: 2013).

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In a very different vein, Gérard Colas has read his Indian Sanskrit sources (from the pre-common era to the present day) to gain a general historical impression of the discourse practices that involve the conception of religious icons related to the question of their sentiency and emotionality. The key points he makes in his full-scale analysis of icons concerns two trajectories of discourse—scepticism/“iconophobia” and “iconophilia.” In the latter, the icon is situated in a more than two thousand-year discussion of whether the icon is the god (non-representational reading) or only the god’s home or some underlying presence of the deity (representational reading). The author introduces the “utopian space,” a bidirectional notion, in which both the icon and the devotee are seen as sentient, legal persons with their senses and emotions intimately focused on one another. He identifies a key period in the fourteenth to fifteenth century, when the discourse practice of both trajectories is overly strong, and suggests from the eighteenth century onward that the pendulum swung in the direction of iconphilia and a new “relictphilia,” that have brought guru body relicts to the fore. The India-related chapters conclude with the givers and recipients of gifts and donations. Katrin Einicke offers us a large-scale review of normative texts, stone inscriptions, and copper plates from pre-modern time periods up to the twelfth century and shows how norms about the very act of giving/donating and evaluation of motivation did not essentially change over time, although they were altered according to the respective giver’s wealth and the recipient’s religious affiliation. Whereas pure generosity and duty was emphasized as ideal, emotions such as fear and shame were less prestigious motivations. The author further points to the belief in the efficiency of material things and stresses the difference of gifts and donations with regard to the expected rewards. We shift now in terms of perspective and region. Beverley McGuire examines the seventeenth-century Chinese texts of a Buddhist monk. She describes the monk’s reflections (commentarial, ritualistic, philosophical) on divinatory practice and the significance that material objects (including the body) and emotions (i.e., shame, fear) have for spiritual transformation and the revelation of suchness or reality-as-it-is. She stresses the emotion’s and material object’s parallel roles in “reality stimuli” (weeping—a sign of vulnerability—is a stimulus for the bodhisattva’s pity and intervention; flowers and perfumes are stimuli that connect practitioners with the Buddha). The emotion-material object practice allows the practitioner to see purity and pollution as identical (toilets become fragrant halls; knives become flowers). With the last chapter we shift yet again. Heather Blair synchronically examines three children’s picturebooks published by Japanese authors and

Introduction

23

illustrators in the early twenty-first century and earlier twentieth century, seeking to position the picturebooks within emotional practices. While trying to detect Japanese norms and expectations with regard to loneliness and sadness, her finding is that all “right” emotions are good. This holds particularly true for loneliness, an emotion that is highly valued in picturebooks used in kindergarten and has been practiced as a prosocial emotion that motivates friendship and togetherness for more than three quarters of a century. 5

Concluding Remarks

What is novel about this book? It applies a well-known approach to a new terrain. The history of non-Western, community-bound emotional practice is largely undeveloped and underexplored. The attempt to understand histories as emotion histories and to make this perspective accessible through case studies is at the heart of this collection. The key theme of community or group-bound emotional practices is woven throughout the volume’s contributions. Taking this route into the history of emotions does not dismiss the significance of other elements, such as emotion concepts, emotion learning, emotion knowledge (understanding how emotions arise, whether and how they can be evoked or controlled), and how new knowledge about emotion can be produced. Rather, on the contrary, following emotional communities across time and space allows us to include questions pertaining to moments of change and newness, which may well go unnoticed otherwise. But moments of truly consequential innovation are important in historical terms. For this to happen, for a new twist to emerge, new emotional communities must emerge with new styles, challenging their predecessors. But not all innovations are born equal. Rarely, but most significantly, new paths open up in a way that produces novel paradigms (see Monius). This is the kind of emotional revolution without which no culture can sustain itself for a long time. Then there are secondary changes along the path, some of them highly original in their own right (see Okita, Schuler, McGuire). And there are also innovations that signify the end of a particular vein of creativity and lead no further (see Glushkova). What we hope to offer here is a series of pilot studies, sometimes the first contribution in its specific field of research, presented in diachronic and/or synchronic perspectives that highlight emotional newness or continuity in different periods and geographical areas. The sources we present (picturebooks, monk writings, divination rituals, letters, ethnography, theoretic treatises, poems, hagiographies, belles-lettres, narratives, stone inscriptions, copper-plates) tell us something of emotional

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communities or groups, emotionally coded things, and emotional practice in large. This volume places poems alongside letters, historicized discourses, and hagiographies, not worrying about the different genres,59 but taking these various “texts” as rich sources for an alternate reading of history through emotions. Furthermore, using emotional community as a key tool implies that many more other emotional communities have existed at any given time but were not textually transmitted and, thus, are invisible to us. William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein have already shown the enormous innovations and changes in emotional communities, emotional styles, and rules within the Western modern and medieval periods. This volume aims at the same, while providing a preliminary map and guide for future endeavors in Asian studies, most notably during the pre-modern periods. We hope to encourage more studies in this field as part of a broader project, including comparative studies that create a bridge to the research on the history of emotions in the West.60

References

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Without, of course, denying their limits due to the conventions of each genre. The comparative study of modern historian William M. Reddy (The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE [Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012]) awaits critical evaluation by Indologists. For a thorough critical inquiry into the part of the book related to medieval Europe, see German medieval philologist and historical emotion scholar, Schnell, Rüdiger, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?: Aporien einer History of Emotions, Teil 1 [Do Emotions Have a History?, Part 1] (Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2015), 536–587.

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[History of Emotions as History of the Body]. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009): 282–313. Frevert, Ute, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau. Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Frevert, Ute, Pascal Eitler, Stephanie Olsen, Uffa Jensen, Margrit Pernau, Daniel Brückenhaus, Magdalena Beljan, Benno Gammerl, Anja Laukötter, Bettina Hitzer, Jan Plamper, Juliane Brauer, and Joachim C. Häberlen. Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Foolen, Ad. “The Heart as a Source of Semiosis: The Case of Dutch.” In Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs Across Cultures and Languages, edited by F. Sharifian, R. Dirven, N. Yu and S. Niemeier, 373–394. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Gammerl, Benno. “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16.2 (2012): 161–175. Accessed March 30, 2017. doi: 10.1080/13642529.2012.681189. Gammerl, Benno, and Rainer Herrn. “Raumgefühle—Gefühlsräume: Perspektiven auf die Verschränkung von emotionalen Praktiken und Topografien der Moderne” [Spatial Feelings— Emotional Spaces]. Sub\urban 3.2 (2015): 7–22. Accessed March 30, 2017 . “Geschichte der Gefühle: Schwerpunkt Indien” [History of Feelings: Focus India]. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin (since 2008). Accessed March 30, 2017 . Giannoulis, Elena. “Iki: A Japanese Concept of Coolness.” In The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan, edited by Ulla Haselstein, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Catrin Gersdorf and Elena Giannoulis, 215–236. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Hara, Minoru. “Hindu Concepts of Anger: manyu and krodha.” In Le Parole e i Marmi. Studi in Onore di Raniero Gnoli nel suo 70 compleanno, edited by Raffaele Torella, 419–444. Roma: Instituto Italiano Per L’Africa e L’Oriente, 2001. Hara, Minoru. “Hindu Concept of Shame: Sanskrit lajjā, vrīḍā, hrī.” Indologica Taurinensia: Official Organ of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies 32 (2006): 141–195.

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Harbsmeier, Christoph. “Weeping and Wailing in Ancient China.” In Minds and Men­ talities in Traditional Chinese Literature, edited by Halvor Eifring, 317–422. Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999. Hardy, Friedhelm. Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Hitzer, Bettina. “Emotionsgeschichte—ein Anfang mit Folgen” [History of Emotions— A Beginning with Consequences]. In H-Soz-u-Kult 23.11.2011. Accessed March 30, 2017 . Jacobsen, Knut A., Mikael Aktor, and Kristina Myrvold. “Material Objects of Worship in the Lived Religions of South Asia.” In Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions: Forms, Practices, and Meanings, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, Mikael Aktor and Kristina Myrvold, 1–13. London: Routledge, 2015. Kieschnick, John. The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton, JY: Princeton University Press, 2003. Kieschnick, John. “Material Culture.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, edited by John Corrigan, 223–237. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Klien, Susanne, and Christoph Wulf, eds. Well-Being: Emotions, Rituals and Performances in Japan. In Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 22.1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2013. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Koselleck, Reinhart. Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, [1979] 1989. [Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated and introduced by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004]. Kutcher, Norman. “The Skein of Chinese Emotions History.” In Doing Emotions History, edited by Matt, Susan J. and Peter N. Stearns, 57–73. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Lee, Haiyan. “The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Vernacular Happiness.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. (forthcoming 2017). Lilie, Jonas, ed. A History of Emotions, 1200–1800. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Lutz, Catherine. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Malinar, Angelika. “Guṇa.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu, Angelika Malinar and Vasudha Narayanan. Accessed March 15, 2017 . First published online 2012.

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McHugh, James. “The Camphor Flame in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Sacred Matters: Material Religion in South Asian Traditions, edited by Tracy Pintchman and Corinne G. Dempsey, 135–151. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. Messner, Angelika C. “Aspects of Emotion in Late Imperial China: Editor’s Introduction to the Thematic Section.” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 66.4 (2013): 893–913. Messner, Angelika C. “Towards a History of the Corporeal Dimensions of Emotions: The Case of Pain.” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 66.4 (2013): 943–972. Messner, Angelika C. “Knowing and Doing Emotions in Times of Crisis and Radical Change.” Paru dans L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques. Revue électronique du C.R.H. (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) 16 (2016): 1–18. Messner, Angelika C. Zirkulierende Leidenschaft: Eine Geschichte der Gefühle im China des 17. Jahrhunderts [Circulating Passions: A History of Emotions in 17th Century China]. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2016. Michaels, Axel, and Christoph Wulf, eds. Exploring the Senses. London: Routledge, 2014. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pernau, Margrit. “The Indian Body and unani Medicine: Body History as Entangled History.” Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 18 (2009): 107–118. Accessed March 15, 2017. doi:10.1524/para.2009.0008. Pernau, Margrit. “Asghari’s Piety.” In Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970, edited by Ute Frevert et al., 57–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pernau, Margrit. “Space and Emotion: Building to Feel.” History Compass 12.7 (2014): 541–549. Accessed March 15, 2017. doi:10.1111/hic3.12170. Pernau, Margrit. “Mapping Emotions, Constructing Feelings: Delhi in the 1840s.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 634–667. Accessed March 15, 2017. doi:10.1163/15685209-12341386. Pernau, Margrit. “Introduction: Concepts of Emotions in Indian Languages.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 11.1 (2016): 24–37. Accessed March 30, 2017. doi:10.3167/ choc.2016.110102. Pernau, Margrit. “Feeling Communities: Introduction.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 54.1 (2017): 1–20. Accessed March 15, 2017. doi:10.1177/0019464616683477. Pernau, Margrit. “Love and Compassion for the Community: Emotions and Practices Among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 54.1 (2017): 21–42. Pernau, Margrit, and Imke Rajamani. “Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language.” History and Theory 55 (February 2016): 46–65. Accessed March 15, 2017. doi:10.1111/hith.10787. Plamper, Jan. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Pollock, Sheldon. “The Social Aesthetic and Sanskrit Literary Theory.“ Journal of Indian Philosophy 29 (2001): 197–229. Pollock, Sheldon. “Rasa after Abhinava.” In Saṃskṛta-sādhutā: Goddess of Sanskrit. Studies in Honour of Professor Ashok Aklujkar, edited by Chikafumi Watanabe, Michele Desmarais and Yoshichika Honda, 429–445. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld Ltd., 2012. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Affective Spaces: A Proxeological Outlook.” Rethinking History 16.2 (June 2012): 241–258. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Reddy, William M. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Rosenwein, Barbara, H. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” American Historical Review 107.3 (2002): 821–845. Rosenwein, Barbara, H. “Emotions and Material Culture: A ‘Site under Construction’.” In Emotions and Material Culture: International Round Table-Discussion Krems an der Donau, October 7 and 8, 2002, edited by Gerhard Jaritz, 165–172. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003. Rosenwein, Barbara, H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara, H. “Theories of Change in the History of Emotions.” In A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, edited by Jonas Liliequist, 7–20. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Rosenwein, Barbara, H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Rosenwein, Barbara H., and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming. Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt. “Emotion und Kultur: Einige Grundfragen.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 127 (2002): 147–162. Santangelo, Paolo. “Introduction.” In Love, Hatred, and Other Passions. Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization, edited by Paolo Santangelo, 1–34. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)?: A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 193–220. Schnell, Rüdiger. Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?: Aporien einer History of Emotions, Teil 1 [Do Emotions Have a History?, Part 1]. Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2015. Schuler, Barbara. “Transfer of Ritual in a Local Tradition: Some Observations.” In Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in Practice, edited by Christiana Brosius and Ute Hüsken, 172–198. London et al.: Routledge, 2010.

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Solomon, Robert C. True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sontheimer, Günther D. “Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities.” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, einschließlich der ethnologischen Rechtsforschung 67 (1965): 45–100. Sontheimer, Günther D. “Hinduism: The Five Components and Their Interaction.” In Hinduism Reconsidered, edited by Günther D. Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, 197–212. New Delhi: Manohar, 1989. Wilden, Eva, ed., trans. and annot., Lieder von Hingabe und Staunen: Gedichte der frühen tamilischen Bhakti [Lyrics of Devotion and Wonder: Poems of the Early Tamil Bhakti]. Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, Insel Verlag: 2013.

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31

Introduction

India

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A House for the Nation to Remember

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Chapter 1

A House for the Nation to Remember: A Correspondence of Emotions between Jawaharlal Nehru and G. D. Birla, 1948 Padma D. Maitland Bapu was your guest; and because of your contiguity with him, you have, in a way, become the host to the entire nation (Siyaram Sharan Gupta, Letter to G. D. Birla, December 28, 1948)

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Introduction

On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi walked for the last time from his room in the Birla Bhavan into the house’s expansive gardens. Assassinated during his morning peregrination, the path Gandhi took is marked today by a series of concrete footsteps leading from his light-filled chambers to the “Martyr’s Column” (figure 1.1). The home where Gandhi died was the Birla estate, the New Delhi residence of the great industrialist family that actively supported Gandhi and the nationalist movement. The house has since been converted into the Gandhi Smriti, a memorial for Gandhi’s life and legacy. The transformation of the Birla Bhavan into a memorial was not an easy affair. Its history embodies the complex processes of Indian nationalism after independence and the tensions between personal feelings and political obligations that accompanied the transfer of such spaces to the government. In a series of letters written in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and Ghanshyamdas Birla (G. D. Birla), one of India’s great industrialists and sponsors of the nationalist moment, discuss the conferral of the Birla Bhavan for use as a memorial. The set of letters are only a small selection of a correspondences spanning almost forty years, however, those concerning the Birla Bhavan are unusually steeped in emotion. “The matter,” Nehru begins, “is obviously a delicate one.” In the letters, the two figures discuss their “feelings” towards each other, Gandhi, and the house that was the Birla home. Through emotive language, the two pillars of Indian nationalism navigate the delicacies of their relationship and their new roles following independence. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352964_003

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Figure 1.1 Martyr’s Column, Birla Bhavan, Delhi. Photograph by author, November 2015

2

Birla Bhavan

The Birla Bhavan was built in 1928. For many years, it sat on Albuquerque Road, an impressive address in Lutyen’s New Delhi. The area is typified by large, treelined streets, white bungalows, government and ambassadors’ residences, fine

A House for the Nation to Remember

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Figure 1.2 Gandhi’s room at the Birla Bhavan, Birla Bhavan, Delhi. Photograph by author, November 2015

hotels, and cultural institutions. The National Defense College of India sits opposite the property and the mansions of other industrialist families are just down the road. After Gandhi’s assassination, the Bhavan’s address changed to 5 Tees January Marg—5, 30th January Street—an homage to the site’s vital role as a backdrop to the history of India. Even though Gandhi often stayed at the Harijan or Bhangi colonies in Delhi, he was a regular guest at the Birla Bhavan. He had stayed there on and off since 1932.1 However, the Mahatma had been a guest of G. D. Birla as early as 1926, staying in the numerous homes of the Birla family across India.2 During Gandhi’s visit to the Birla Bhavan in Delhi, the large private home was opened to the public and hundreds, even thousands, of visitors would crowd into the compound to see and meet the Mahatma daily. A room had been outfitted just for him. It was simple with clean white walls and only a few pieces of 1 Ramanujam, K. S., “A Seminal Correspondence: Letters between G. D. Birla & the Nehrus,” Bhavan’s Journal 32.18 (April 16–30, 1986): 25–35. 2 Juneja, Madan M., The Mahatma and the Millionaire: A Study in Gandhi-Birla Relations (New Delhi: Modern Publishers, 1993), 221.

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furniture—a bed, a small desk, a stove, and a spinning wheel. Each morning, Gandhi would walk through the large glass doors that lined his room, crossing the house’s patio to enter the gardens (figure 1.2). When Gandhi returned to Delhi on September 9, 1947, it was for the last time. India was wracked by partition and the city was in turmoil. For reasons of safety, and because the city was crowded with Muslim and Hindu refugees as the two populations shuttled across the border, Gandhi was ushered to the Birla Bhavan. The optimism of the new nation’s independence had been ravaged by the violence that ensued when the subcontinent was cleaved into Pakistan and India. Bloodshed erupted as people from both sides had to abandon their homes; Muslims fled from India to Pakistan and Hindus escaped from Pakistan to India. Refugee camps were set up in major cities to accommodate the sudden influx of families. Long established communities were suddenly upended along religious lines. Gandhi took it upon himself to help repair the divide between the two emerging countries and did all he could while staying at the Birla Bhavan to remedy the ensuing national discord. Despite the chaos of the city, Gandhi insisted on keeping the gates of the Birla Bhavan open to any and all who wanted to visit. Gandhi was morally opposed to partition. It went against the principles of unity he had struggled to promote over the years. In her detailed and moving account of the Mahatma’s final months at the Birla Bhavan Medha Kudaisya writes, [Gandhi] could not accept the argument that Muslims should leave India for Pakistan. He pleaded with the minorities to forget and forgive. He even told the Hindu refugees that one day they should return to their homes in Pakistan. He asked them not to eye the evacuee property vacated by the Muslims but to be content with the land on which they were with its “canopy of sky above their heads.”3 Gandhi’s appeals made little impact. The violence between Muslims and Hindus continued. Tensions seeped into Birla Bhavan as well. Birla and Gandhi often had opposing ideas on the best path forward for India. Those jealous of Birla’s close connection to Gandhi used the opportunity to spread rumors about the Mahatma’s host and to suggest discord between the two.4 3 Kudaisya, Medha, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla (London. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 263. 4 M. M. Juneja writes about the campaigns launched by different parties to arrest Gandhi’s stays in the Birla residences, citing a letter by G. D. Birla from 5 May 1948, in which Birla states,

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On January 13th, Gandhi took a firm stance against partition and the actions of the Indian government. He thought it was morally indefensible to go back on a commitment, and so Gandhi went on an indefinite fast, calling for the return of homes to Muslims, the restoration of mosques, and the payment of 550 million rupees that the government of India owed Pakistan, despite the violence in Kashmir.5 This move pitted him against members of congress and, to some degree, his host G. D. Birla.6 What a mood must have overtaken the Birla Bhavan during the tense days of Gandhi’s fast. At a moment when the country seemed to be redefining what it meant to be at home in one’s own country, Gandhi pushed to have the private residence where he was staying, the Birla Bhavan, open to all; a symbol of an inclusive India. Birla acquiesced to his guest, allowing the grounds of his family estate to remain accessible to those wishing to see Gandhi. While Gandhi fasted, some of the roles that Birla and Nehru were coming to occupy in the new nation became clearer: Birla, the intractable industrialist, was religious, quiet and removed, providing support and accommodations. His public works were largely obscured by his role as Gandhi’s patron and status as an industrialist leader.7 His objections to cultural and political issues were somewhat less public, made through personal discussions or requests voiced in the form of letters or individual counsels with his guests. Birla’s other important persona was host to the nation, not only to Gandhi, but to various other members of the congress party, including Nehru, who all met and stayed at the numerous Birla homes across India. Perhaps expectedly, Nehru emerged as a more public figure, working to mediate public sentiment in response to Gandhi’s political statements, now levied against their own government rather than a foreign colonial power. As the newly installed Prime Minister of India, Nehru had to navigate a delicate balance between personal relationships, political alliances, global and local pressures, and the millions of Indians he was charged with representing. In the face of Gandhi’s fast, Nehru had to especially temper his own feelings on the matter to help diffuse the increasingly precarious issue of Gandhi’s wellbeing. “About a week before Bapu was assassinated, somebody from amongst his entourage started a whispering campaign that I was getting tired of Bapur’s big party and his long stay.” (Juneja, The Mahatma and the Millionaire, 229.) 5 Ibid., 234. 6 Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla, 264. 7 In her analysis of G. D. Birla, Kudaisya points out that as the relationship between Birla and Nehru became increasingly strained, the industrialist would try and remake his image as public servant/philanthropist of the nation.

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What would it mean for the symbolic father of the new nation to die only a few months after the country gained independence? As the days went by following partition, Gandhi, who had just celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday, got weaker and weaker and the urgency of the government’s decision on its debt to Pakistan became increasingly pressing. Gandhi’s fast lasted six days, during which time raucous groups began marching the streets of Delhi towards the Birla Bhavan. At times the slogans of these mobs were supportive of Gandhi, at others, they were condemning: Convoys of trucks lined the streets of Albuquerque Road, some with banners declaring “Mahatmaji’s life is more precious than ours.” Chants of “Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai,” “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai” and prayers for his health filled the skies. Sometimes there were hostile cries of “Mahatma Gandhi murdabad,” “We want blood for blood,” “If he wants to die, let him die” and “Stab! Kill.” Many dramatic scenes were witnessed at the gates. One night Nehru, on hearing the hostile slogans, jumped out of his car and confronted the group by declaring that they would have to kill him before they repeated such a slogan. On another night, seeing the adoring crowds, Nehru climbed the top of the cement pillar by the gate to address them. Quite predictably, the Cabinet relented and agreed to make the payment to Pakistan.8 Gandhi’s fast ended when the government of India agreed to pay the remaining funds it owed to Pakistan. Some members of government and the public, though, were decidedly upset over the decision and Gandhi’s fast, which effectively forced the government’s hand. Rumors began of threats on Gandhi’s life. On January 20th, a bomb was detonated on the grounds of the Birla Bhavan. Unharmed, Gandhi continued his daily darshan, meeting with those who wished to see him, as well as leading public and private prayers. By this point in time, Gandhi had become a living symbol of India, and his strong stance of unity became a matter of contention for the competing sentiments in India towards the direction India should take, especially around partition, and the general sense of India as an inclusive rather than exclusive nation. But his theories of openness and forgiveness ultimately lead to his death, as growing resentment of his stance towards partition grew. Ten days after the bomb’s explosion in the Birla Bhavan, Gandhi was assassinated. He was killed at 5:07pm on January 30, 1948, only five months after 8 Ibid., 266.

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India’s independence. He was shot by Nathuram Godes. According to legend, the final word from the Mahatma’s lips was “Ram!” As news of Gandhi’s death spread, a crowd began to assemble outside the Birla Bhavan. Nehru once again stepped in to mediate the public, climbing a concrete pillar and addressing those assembled. G. D. Birla was out of town when Gandhi was killed. He learned of the Mahatma’s death by phone, flying back to Delhi the next day to pay his final respects.9 In descriptions of this moment, the grief of Birla is cast as a particularly personal and private moment of grief—the loss of a spiritual guide, but also a close confidant and friend. Nehru’s relationship to Gandhi was somewhat more ambiguous, and his loss was in many ways part of the public loss of Gandhi felt by all of India. Often coming to stand, quite literally, on the line between the private grounds of the residence where Gandhi died and the avenues of Delhi, Nehru stepped in as a public figure able to help mediate and channel the despair over the Mahatma’s death. The private grievances of those close to the Mahatma and the public outcry against his death soon gave way to political allegations.10 Charges over “who done it” played against the tensions of India as the turmoil of partition gave way to resignation over the current state of affairs and turned towards debates over the best way for the country to move forward. Efforts to reconcile the new condition of the country developed in conversation with competing ideas for the best ways to honor the memory of Gandhi and the struggle for freedom which he led. The death of Gandhi offered a poignant and, in many ways, premature opportunity to begin memorializing India’s independence movement as part efforts to modernize the nation. In descriptions of the days after Gandhi’s death, the word “atmosphere” comes up repeatedly. In many ways, the moral compass of the new nation had been killed, and the sentiments around his death sat heavy. The mood of the country was tense and sorrowful. Without Gandhi’s willful guidance India’s leaders scrambled to fill in the gaps left by his absence. They also grappled with how to reconcile the fact that the current condition of the country fell so far from Gandhi’s ideals. In thinking through the idea of an atmosphere, it is possible to see personal and collective feelings as one way of addressing the sometimes ambiguous and fraught issues around remembrance. For prominent figures like Birla and Nehru it meant that they had to walk a fine line between personal feelings and 9 10

Ibid., 268. Ibid.

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public sentiment, their own emotions often playing against their political and social obligations. Their different statuses—the industrialist millionaire and the Prime Minister—meant that their emotions also had to be indexed differently. The letters between the two men reflects a powerful moment when the division between the intimate and the public breaks down; when individual emotions become part of public policies around feeling and memory. How should their own personal feelings for Gandhi and the place of his passing influence public interests? Or alternatively, what is the importance of personal feelings when the memory of the country is at stake? In the case of Gandhi’s death, the pervasive sorrow of his passing would give way to efforts over how to carry his message forward and questions over the best way to maintain Gandhi’s vision of swaraj, or independence. Gandhi’s memory continues to be an important guide and presence in India. However, after Gandhi’s passing, the roles of Nehru and Birla suddenly took on new shades. Despite their differences, the two maintained a cordial correspondence, discussing both personal and public matters, from birthdays and bicycles, to foreign policy and taxes. Gandhi’s memory, and the ensuing debates over the Birla Bhavan, proved to be an important window into how they might navigate their personal relationship in light of changing social and political climates. While Birla never stopped being a supporter of India, his role as the main patron of the movement was replaced by a more cacophonous image of Indian politics and other, new, leading voices. It is within this context that the Birla Bhavan became contested ground. However, as the site of the Mahatma’s death, the discussions of what to do with the Birla Bhavan revolved around the best way to remember Gandhi and how to mediate the feelings around that site as a home and memorial. 3

The Letters

In a letter from May 7, 1948, just three months after Gandhi’s assassination, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Gyamshamdas Birla asking if part of the gardens of Birla Bhavan could be turned over to the government for use as a national memorial. Addressing Birla as “My dear Ghanshyamdasji,” Nehru explains, “that ever since Bapu’s death there has been a strong and persistent agitation about Birla House [Bhavan] in New Delhi.”11 While recognizing their personal 11

Letter from Nehru to Birla, May 7, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers, 1942–1964. Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. New Delhi.

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relationship and correspondences over the years, Nehru writes from his new position as the recently established representative of India’s government, articulating “a unanimous sense…that Birla House, because of the tragedy that occurred there, should belong to the nation.”12 While earlier letters between Nehru and Birla are polite and at times personal, the letters concerning the Birla Bhavan are atypically long and steeped in emotions, with numerous recourses to personal memories that belie the rather official nature of the issue. The first letter Nehru writes to broach the topic of the Birla Bhavan is framed in conciliatory terms. Navigating the feelings of the multiple constituents he represents and Birla’s inevitable personal feelings around his family home, Nehru’s proposal attempts to reach a practical compromise, one that will allow Birla to maintain his close connection to the house and individual ownership of it, while also creating a public space for remembrance within the compound. Rather than taking possession of the entire house, Nehru’s suggestion is to section off part of the house’s garden and convert it into a space for a public memorial—the proposal itself seems like an effort to appease multiple constituencies. Nehru repeatedly stresses how the sectioned off area of the grounds could be made accessible without sacrificing the privacy of the main spaces of the house. It could be walled off, or simply left open, whatever would be most agreeable to Birla. While presenting a practical solution, Nehru clearly seems torn on the best way to approach Birla and the conversion of at least part of the house for use as a memorial. As he writes, The matter is obviously a delicate one and I can quite appreciate your feelings about it. I realize also that Bapu would not have liked you to be inconvenienced in any way. Nevertheless it is true that there is very strong feeling in this matter and that feeling does not pay too much attention to personal considerations. I appreciate that feeling myself and can understand that. But for my part I would not like that feeling to induce us to take any action contrary to your wishes in the matter.13 There are several layers of “feeling” in this short section of Nehru’s letter. There are the imagined sentiments of Gandhi (Bapu), who would not have wanted to trouble a longtime supporter of India’s nationalist movement. There are also 12 13

Ibid. Ibid.

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the presumed feelings of an Assembly pressuring Nehru to handle the hand over the house, the supporters of Birla who may be opposed to it, and even a sense of public sentiment which yearns for a place for remembrance. The invocation of Gandhi brings with it a multitude of other relationships and imagined sentiments around the site: The value of the home for the nation, the interests of multiple political fractions, and even Nehru himself, who had his own complex, yet productive, partnership with the Mahatma.14 The more interesting point of the letter to Birla is the argument that the “pervading feelings” that prompted Nehru to write in the first place, “[do] not pay too much attention to personal considerations.”15 It is here that Nehru draws the greatest equivalence between his own experiences and those of Birla: In their public roles, there is not much room for personal feelings, they must give way to political interests and public sentiment. Throughout the letters between Birla and Nehru, certain correspondences are made: Between the two men, their position, their status, and obligations to the country—Nehru specifically references the unfortunate fact that men of their positions must put personal feelings aside in order to meet the needs of the masses. He also draws equivalences between Gandhi’s memory, past and present, and the ways in which, through honoring public sentiments or feelings, Birla can continue in his role as national benefactor by providing a space for public memory. In drawing such equivalences, Nehru appeals to Birla’s sense of duty as a “servant of the nation.” While in ready communication, Birla and Nehru had never been intimate. In terms of policy, their ideas often differed on the best way forward. In broad strokes, Nehru’s vision of government and development was typified by a strong socialist leaning, while Birla is generally understood as a conservative capitalist. In the years following Gandhi’s death, G. D. Birla would become increasingly enmeshed in fraught debates over Nehru’s economic policies, forcing him to reconsider his role in the new nation.16 While Birla never stopped being a supporter of India, and he continued to offer advice and funds to Nehru and his family for years to come, Birla’s singular role as the patron of India was in jeopardy following independence and Gandhi’s untimely death. The allusion to “feelings” Birla includes in his letters concerning Birla Bhavan 14

15 16

Nehru, Jawaharlal, Nehru on Gandhi (New York: J. Day Company, 1948); Patil, V. T., Gandhi, Nehru, and the Quit India Movement: A Study in the Dynamics of a Mass Movement (Delhi: BR Publishing Corporation, 1984). Letter from Nehru to Birla, May 7, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Chandra, Bipan, “Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936,” Economic and Political Weekly (1975): 1307–24.

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foreshadow later questions that would arise over the industrialist’s enduring legacy in India. Nehru’s letters to Birla concerning the handover of the Birla Bhavan clearly come at a sensitive moment. Emotions in India were high. And yet, something needed to be done. “It is clear,” Nehru writes, “that the feelings [around the Birla Bhavan] will continue and will be a constant source of embarrassment to all of us.”17 The disjuncture between the “general feelings” Nehru conveys in his letter, his personal discomfort in writing, and Birla’s own feelings around the site are quite telling. They complicate Nehru’s own sense of his role in this moment: much in the way he is asking Birla to put aside his own personal feelings for the greater cause, Nehru seems to be trying to find some balance between his own feelings and what is required of him at that moment. The letters insinuate, through a recourse to emotions, that Birla should choose to hand over part of the house to the government, thus reaffirming Birla’s status as a public figure and relieving Nehru of the difficult task of formally possessing the home or breaking it up. G. D. Birla’s response from May 12th reflects an equally complex set of emotional correspondences: “I am entirely at your or his disposal,” Birla writes, “… give the word and you will not find me hesitant to comply despite my undoubted and deep sentimental attachment to the House.” This “deep sentimental attachment” gives Birla pause, spurring him to reflect on the value of the house he is reticent to relinquish. His show of emotions seems to be almost in-spite of himself: “How can a CAPATALIST have any SENTIMENTS?”18 he writes. And yet, as Birla continues, “…I should not be human, if I did not have an emotional approach to the question.” In his letters over the conferral of Birla Bhavan, Birla refers to sentiments and feeling in a way that complicates any sense of duty or obligation over what to do with the property. Why should capitalism be anathema to sentimentality? In their study of emotional practices in consumer culture, Peter and Carol Stearns discuss how, following the industrial revolution, people were educated in how to handle and suppress emotions. Emotions were violent and sudden. They needed to be handled by the intellect and reason.19 However, as the Stearns continue, emotions are in fact reflexive of the time and place they are felt. They are not wild 17 18 19

Letter from Nehru to Birla, May 7, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Emphasis added by Juneja, The Mahatma and the Millionaire, 246. Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review 90.4 (1985): 813–36; Plamper, Jan, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49.2 (2010): 237–65.

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and unbridled, but always informed by historical circumstances. Birla’s status as a great industrialist links him to the culture of global consumerism which similarly devalued emotional intelligence, and so his letters point to a deep uncertainty or unease around changing circumstances. He even admits in his letter that he had originally intended to give his house to the government, except at some point the emotional value of the house simply became too great. Birla’s understanding of himself as an industrialist leader of India is vital to a discussion of how feelings might emerge as a way to express uncertainty in light of changing circumstances. However, the call to turn the Birla Bhavan into a museum, and Birla’s emotional response to it, is more than sentimental, it is also political, motivated and reflexive of Birla’s precarious status after India’s independence. We might understand his emphasis on emotions as a call to rally support, or understand similar “emotional communities,” to use a term coined by Barbara Rosenwein, as a way of understanding his position visà-vis Gandhi’s contributions to Indian culture and political thought. Returning to his emotions is one way that Birla is able to establish a deep and infallible link between himself and the memory of Gandhi. It is, perhaps, also a way of reconciling his own social and public mission with the memory of the great Mahatma. This is not to say that the feelings Birla expresses in his letters are not genuine. Rather, like all emotions, they are bounded by the time and context in which they are felt. His “emotives” are embedded in his letters, reflecting a sense of himself as situated within cultural, historical, and personal realities. What is so interesting about his letters is how those emotions become attached to and embedded in the Birla Bhavan itself. In his discussion of the events following independence, Alan Ross reflects that it might not have been the idea of giving the Birla Bhavan to the government that irked Birla, so much as Nehru’s suggestion that some compensation might have been required.20 More than monetary value or even political value, Birla’s letters reflect the incredible emotional worth of the Birla Bhavan. The greater emphasis Birla puts on emotions in his letter, points to a conflict regarding what we might understand as the commodification of his house: the idea that memory, and particularly Birla’s personal engagements with his home and Gandhi, might be in some ways commutable. As Igor Kapytoff writes in his essay “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” the commodification of materials, in this case the Birla Bhavan, reflects the shift20

Ross, Alan, The Emissary: GD Birla, Gandhi and Independence (London: Collin Harvill, 1986), 190.

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ing values associated with an object in changing social and cultural contexts. Sanctification of a place or object, in particular, challenges notions of commodification, creating a “singularity” of an object that heightens its value— often making them invaluable—and offering the opportunity to challenge notions of exchange.21 The letters between Nehru and Birla reflect a form of “commodification” in which the emotional value of the home is being assessed—can the public sentiment overpower the personal feelings around the home? Not only is the house being commodified, the emotions around it are also at stake: What is the worth of one man’s feeling compared to those of the public or the government? It is not a matter of debate that the house holds a unique place in the history of India, rather what is at stake is the nature of the unique emotions and feelings around it, what Kapytoff discusses as the “singularity” of the place. In thinking through the value of the house, Birla stresses the need to consider his deep feelings around it, feelings that “the man in the street may not appreciate.”22 Any consideration of Gandhi’s feelings on the matter only further complicates the issue. As Vallabhbhai Patel, a leading member of India’s Congress party, writes in a letter responding to Birla’s letter to Nehru, “It would be a strange way of doing things, if we base a memorial to a great soul on something which would displease that soul most grievously and affect it most painfully.”23 Emotions stand in the way of any effort to commodify the house. To go against Birla’s attachment to his home would be a “violence of the worst kind to the feelings of both Ghanshyamdas and Bapu.”24 If Nehru’s original letter attempts to suggest that Birla should try to sublimate his personal feelings to the greater sentiments around the house, Birla’s response is to challenge the notion that such equivalences are even possible. The value of the house is simply too great. Its emotional weight is beyond measure. Kapytoff further suggests that people tend to resist the commodification of object when those objects index a person’s status or biography.25 Invoking emotions is one way to resist commodification. Feelings are an index of change which gets written into the value of an object for a particular person or group 21

22 23 24 25

Kapytoff, Igor, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 73. Letter from Birla to Nehru, May 12, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Letter from Vallabhbhai Patel to Nehru, May 13, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Ibid. Kapytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 83.

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of people. In this case, the possibility of “merchandizing” the Birla Bhavan is called into question by Birla. Emotions are used as proof of the inability to reduce the house to parts which might be separated off—it is the structure and its entirety which is important for him, its singularity—far outweighing any possible economic or political weight that might be given to the structure as a simple house. Consider the following line from Birla’s letter to Nehru, Indeed some of them [asking for the transfer of Birla Bhavan], among whom I can count some legislators and some who profess to be my friends, went to such extremes as to suggest compulsory acquisitioning of the House. And with compensation if necessary! They little seemed to make any allowance for the nobility of human nature which would shun and spurn any idea of reducing this matter into an ordinary market transaction or to give even a moment’s thought to the fact that thereby they were making the memory of a great Soul cheap and trash. And coming to the personal aspect of it, I do not think they could have heaped a greater insult on, and done a more grievous wrong to, one who, to the best of his lights, served the Great Master for 32 years than to suggest that its value to him could be measured in terms of filthy lucre.26 For Birla, his emotional connections to the house he grew up in, and which Gandhi died in, are more than “personal.” His feelings encompass “those valuable contacts and memories of public life which have become a part of [his] being and the divorce from which would certainly mean a wrench too terrible to contemplate.”27 At this moment in the letters, the house becomes a symbol of Birla’s own engagement with public discourse, or at the very least, the history of the nation. This is a personal history that is tethered to a national one, a biographical and emotional valuation which far outstrips any financial interests. As his letters make clear, such a connection can only be measured in feelings. To give up the house would be to separate his own image of himself from the role the house has played in India’s history, and to further disrupt the narrative around it. Perhaps that is why fractions of the government sought to remove the house from his control. It is not just the house that is important to Birla, it is the grounds too. “Every tree in the house is planted and nursed under my care. I have seen the trees growing, blossoming and giving fruits. I know the individual history of each 26 27

Letter from Birla to Nehru, May 12, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Ibid.

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tree. The garden, the rose-beds and the flower-beds were designed and laid by me which naturally became a part of my limb.”28 The house and the person have grown and matured together—his identity and memories of his self are wrapped up in it. Just as, in some ways, are memories of the nation. Birla’s letters draw several correspondences between his own maturation and India’s becoming. The home can be read as a metaphor for the union of the nation and Birla’s own personal and public engagements with it. In light of the house’s national history, the memories of that small plot of land are linked to the much larger history of the nation. Framed such, Birla’s comments and feelings take on a much broader significance, embracing his memories of Gandhi and, related to them, a sense of his relationship to the nation and independence. Birla’s understanding of the value of the Birla Bhavan for India is corroborated by his declaration in another letter that he had originally intended to donate the house for use as the residence of the Prime Minister. As Birla writes in a letter from June 1, 1948, I feel rather embarrassed that the question [of what to do with this house] should have been left to me for a decision. As I pointed out to you, on account of the political and historical importance of the house, sometime about 1942 I had made a mental resolve that after we got freedom, I would donate this house to the Government for the purpose of the residence of the Prime Minister. Subsequently, however, due to my increased attachment with the house, my resolve completely relaxed and I began to feel a wrench even at the thought of having to leave the place.29 Nehru politely declined the use of the house as the Prime Minister’s residence, citing a number of reasons “both personal and public.”30 In the end, Nehru chose to reside in Teen Murti Bhavan, formerly the residence of the Com­ mander-in-Chief of the British Army, a much more imposing property designed 28 29 30

Ibid. Letter from Birla to Nehru, June 1, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Letter of Nehru to G. D. Birla, June 3, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. Quoting a letter from Nehru’s youngest sister, Mrs Krishna Hutheesing, M. M. Juneja suggests another reason why Nehru may not have wanted the house to become the residence of the Prime Minister: “Gandhji was staying in the enormous but tasteless Birla House in the wing which G. D. Birla always kept for him, bleak and bare of furniture except for a cooking stove, mattresses and woven mats on the floor.” (The Mahatma and the Millionaire, 224); Hutheesing, Krishna Nehru, We Nehrus (Delhi: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 211.

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as part of Lutyen’s Dehli, and thus removed from the more residential, albeit still grand, area of New Delhi where the Birla Bhavan stood. In some respects, the suggestion that the Birla Bhavan could have been considered as the Prime Minister’s residence is curious. It does not quite account for the embedded hierarchies of the capital’s planning, and the ways in which symbols of colonial power were re-appropriated for use by the new government. It implies a prominence to the home which far outstrips its physical presence—perhaps on account of its sentimental value—one which proposes an alternative model for rebuilding India, not through an occupation of colonialism’s old structures, but through an embracing of the successes of its nationalist leaders—industrialists and otherwise—after colonialism. As expressed in his letters, the main value of the Birla Bhavan for G. D. Birla is the house’s connection to the emotions and memories related to it. The associations of the house with Gandhi are certainly the basis for the home’s place in the nation’s history, but it is Birla’s own much longer and personal memories that make him reticent to hand the property over to the government. As he writes, The house has thus become for me a store-house of memories and recollections which constitute for me a book into which I can delve deep to recall, with pride, with deep emotion, with a sense of glory and with profound sentiment, a past that has gone to build up every fiber of my frail body and every tissue of my mind .…31 Even though his memories and sentiments are grounded in his personal relationship with the Birla Bhavan, Birla’s emotional attachment to his house is the personal writ large against the backdrop of India’s freedom struggles for independence. They include the great meetings that took place in the salons and chambers of his home, but also the private scenes of his personal life. Perhaps this is part of why Birla resisted turning only part of the home into a memorial, as if that might do an injustice to the multiple memories of his home, as if his own personal remembrances might be cut off from the more public ones. After laying out his sentimental attachments to the Birla Bhavan, Birla reverts back to Gandhi’s memory to ask what the Mahatma’s feelings might have been towards the “violence” to his emotional attachment to the Birla Bhavan:

31

Letter from Birla to Nehru, June 1, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers.

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I hope I have said enough to open out my heart to you on this subject. It is for you to assess the various factors involved. You have also referred to Bapu’s feelings. It is for you and the Nation to judge whether a fitting memorial could be raised to him by doing violence to these feelings. I am quite prepared to subordinate my own sentiments and attachments to your commands and if you feel that the interests of the Nation demand that I should leave the house and the premises, believe me, I would not waste a moment in complying with your wish. How could it be otherwise, for I have throughout believed that I belong to the Nation?32 It is hard not to sense in these lines an echo of the tensions and debates over the violence of Partition. Gandhi’s refrain was unity. Birla equates his own sense of belonging to that of the nation: his home is the nation’s, much as the nation is imagined to be his home. To divorce those, would, in some ways, be to do violence to sentiments he has for India, but also his own recollections of his involvement in constructing it. While Birla may be willing to ignore some of his sentimental attachment to his home, he is unwilling, at first, to accept a division of the house as if such a cut would do harm to the nature of the memories and experiences there. Other public figures at the time also recognized the potential conflict in associating Gandhi’s death with Birla’s home. Some of them advocated that a memorial should instead be made in spaces like the Harijan Colony that Gandhi constructed in the city. In an article for Harijan from 1948, K. G. Mashurawala comments on how “accidental” it was that Gandhi died at the Birla Bhavan, and thus it should not be made the center of national remembrance. The place of Gandhi’s remembrance should be more intentional.33 In reading histories about the controversies over the Birla Bhavan, it quickly becomes clear that there were many opinions floating around at the time. Some clearly sought to do harm to the industrialist by stripping him of his home. Others, like Nehru, wanted simply to afford a public forum at the spot where Gandhi was killed, a place where people could come and pay their respects. Whatever the motivation, in debating what course of action to take with regards to Birla Bhavan, the general concern was over the best way of remembering Gandhi for the nation. 32 33

Ibid. As he writes, “The place, where he died, had nothing special about it. That accident should not be made a ground for coercing its owner to part with it.” (Juneja, The Mahatma and the Millionaire, 238).

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Birla was extremely dedicated to finding ways of memorializing Gandhi. After the Mahatama’s assassination, he led several campaigns around memorializing the Mahatma, including the establishment of trusts for Gandhi’s family and raising funds that would help remember his causes.34 These included memorials and museums, and the publication of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. G. D. Birla was also eager to help memorialize his own relationship to Gandhi, publishing several works about his time with the Mahatma, including, In the Shadow of the Mahatma.35 The reluctance to hand over the Birla Bhavan reflects a moment in G. D. Birla’s life and career when his role as a prominent advisor to Gandhi and the nationalist movement was in flux. Rather than some complex reading of the self and history, his emotional reticence to give up the home might best be understood as a question of establishing limits for the nation in relationship to the personal, and the sentimental layers of India’s new nationalism after independence. In a letter from June 3, 1948, Nehru seems at pains to clarify some of his earlier remarks. His letter is written “in haste and briefly,” addressing some of Birla’s comments from his letter of June 1st. Their correspondences from June mark a kind of accord between the two men over the best, temporary, solution for the house. Unable to make Birla Bhavan the new residence of India’s Prime Minister, Birla agrees to place a pathway down the side of his home for public visitors. After expressing his gratitude to Nehru for “the consideration shown by you to my own feelings in this matter,” Birla changes topics to draw attention to another Birla home, this time up in Mussoorie, some four hours by train from Delhi. Referring to his estate in Mussoorie, Birla ends his letter by stating, “This house is yours whenever you or your family desire to come to Mussoorie for the holiday.”36 Once again, Birla takes on the role of host and magnanimous patron of the nation. For years, a pathway was set up in the garden of Birla Bhavan so that people could visit, and the house was left in the control of the Birla family. It was only in 1971 that the Government of India acquired the property for use as an official memorial. Given a new name, it opened as the Gandhi Smriti on August 15, 1973.37

34 35 36 37

Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla, 271. Birla, Ghanshyam Das, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1953).  Letter from Birla to Nehru, June 1, 1948. G. D. Birla Papers. The Gandhi Smriti and Dharshan Smrit website, accessed October 18, 2016 .

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Other Homes and Other Memories

The Birla Bhavan in Delhi was not the only Birla estate that was important to India’s nationalism, nor the only one to be gifted to the government for use as a museum. Their home in Kolkata similarly provided an important salon for meetings, and a place for Gandhi to stay during his visits to the city. In 1956, the Birla family gifted their family home in Kolkata to the government for use as a museum of Industry and Technology. A few letters between Nehru and Birla address the handover of the property in Kolkata to the government. Compared to their exchanges from eight years earlier regarding the transference of the Birla Bhavan in Delhi, these letters are noticeably lacking in the same kind of emotional sentiment. It might simply be that a number of years had passed, or that the Birla property in Kolkata was a less emotive space than the Birla Bhavan in Delhi. And yet, it is worth exploring the correspondences of Birla and Nehru around the transference of the house in Kolkata, in order to see what it might reveal about the lingering sentiments over the Birla Bhavan in Delhi. The first marked difference is that the donation of the Birla home in Kolkata was instigated by the Birla family. As G. D. Birla writes to Nehru in a letter from January 29, 1956, I would like to take this opportunity of thanking you personally for accepting this gift. My family and I have been living in this house for nearly 35 years. During this period we have seen India marching from dependence to independence. Many important deliberations of the Con­ gress have been held in the house. Bapu sanctified it by staying there from time to time. We had also the honor of receiving you on a few occasions. Naturally, therefore, we have developed strong emotional ties with the house.  With the changing times it was but appropriate that we should go out to live in smaller and more modest houses and the younger generation of my family has already done this. But with the emotional background it would have been highly repugnant to us to think of using this house for any purpose other than for the service of the country. We had to think hard to find out the best use of the house. By accepting the gift of the place for an Industrial Museum, you have, therefore put us under a deep debt of gratitude and I am deeply indebted to you for allowing us to participate in this small service to the country.38 38

Letter from Birla to Nehru, January 29, 1956. G. D. Birla Papers.

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There is still some “emotional background” to the house, but clearly the mood had changed. The home does not reflect any current unease in India, and the family’s own stake and status in India seems more resolved. The Birla’s generosity to India can therefore take new and different forms. It is also important to note that the gifted property was not to be used as a memorial, as Birla Bhavan was, but rather as a museum dedicated to technology and industry. This too explains, in part, why the emotions around the place are different. Nehru’s letter regarding the gifting of the Birla home is Kolkata is also more confident than his earlier exchanges with G. D. Birla. It acknowledges the gift, Nehru’s own memories of the place, and then the house’s role in the nationalist movement. As Nehru writes on February 6, 1956, I must congratulate you and thank you for this generous gift. I am happy also at the use that you have suggested for this house. I think an Industrial Museum will serve a very useful purpose. As Dr B. C. Roy is the Chairman of the Industrial Museum Committee, I have no doubt that this museum will grow and become one of the special institutions of Calcutta.  As you point out in your letter, your house has been connected in the past with many important events and thus has a certain emotional significance. I remember going there so many times to see Gandhiji and to attend meetings of committees.39 Since its opening, the National Museum of Industry and Technology has grown to include over six hundred satellite museums across India. While administered by the Indian government, it maintains a strong connection to the Birla family, who maintain a house on a plot of land separated off from the original family home, just off to the side. A visit to Pillani, the ancestral town of the Birla family, quickly reveals how memory and technology work together in many of the Birla’s public projects. On the campus of the Birla Institute of Technology, Pillani, one of the premier institutions of higher education in India, there are a series of museums dedicated to the memory of the Birla family. Standing much like large citadels or mausoleums, each memorial museum houses a robust exhibit documenting the lives and contributions of the great Birla patriarchs. The exhibits highlight each family member’s personal and public lives, and the role the Birla family had in Indian politics and history.

39

Letter from Nehru to Birla, February 6, 1956. G. D. Birla Papers.

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Entering the memorial museums of each Birla is often a discombobulating experience. The displays emphasize technology, utilizing dazzling methods to delight visitors with their ingenuity and sentimentality, highlighting key emotional moments in the lives of the Birla family. In the midst of the row of memorial museums dedicated to the various heads of the Birla family, is another museum—the Birla Science Museum. Established in 1954, it reflects an impressive array of exhibitions geared towards introducing Indians to new developments in science and technology. Outside the museum sits other major hallmarks of the Birla’s contributions to India— the first car they produced, the airplane that G. D. Birla flew in, and, of course, the main hall of the Birla Institute of Technology. At each of these sites, technology and sentiment, memory and mechanics, merge in an unusual synthesis. Science, it seems, can be a way to remember, and perhaps memory can be a guide for the future. The same technological approaches to memory have also been applied to exhibits that honor Gandhi’s life in Delhi. Today, the Birla Bhavan in Delhi is known as the Gandhi Smriti. It is one of two structures in the city dedicated to the memory of Gandhi. The imposing structure of the Birla Bhavan has been white washed and stripped of any indication of its use as a family residence. Instead the bottom level has been converted into a museum documenting Gandhi’s life, the hallways filled with tableaus, photographs, statues, and books. The focus of the lower floor is arguably Gandhi’s room. On its wall is a display case of artifacts from Gandhi’s life—his glasses and a few other, small, personal possessions (figure 1.3). Most visitors retreat to the garden, perhaps avoiding the house altogether, to wander slowly towards the pillar marking the spot where Gandhi died. A covered path has been made that outlines important moments in the life of Gandhi and the nation of India. In the rest of the grounds around the house, various installations reflect Gandhi’s vision of a unified India and religious harmony. But there is another level to the Bhavan turned Smriti, itself reflexive of the disjointed ways the site and the Mahatma are remembered. Barely labelled, and perhaps often missed by visitors, the second floor of the Gandhi Smriti is reached by entering the side of the building on the opposite side of the structure from Gandhi’s room. Visitors climb a grand staircase to arrive at a museum inside the memorial. This museum is run by the Birla family and dedicated to finding ways of remembering Gandhi through the use of technology. The exhibit, titled “Eternal Gandhi,” was designed by the same firm that planned and oversaw the memorials for the Birla patriarchs in Pillani:

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Figure 1.3 The few possessions of Gandhi, Birla Bhavan, Delhi. Photograph by author, November 2015

Sacred World.40 In a write-up on the exhibit, one newspaper wrote, “The highly interactive museum at the site where Gandhiji was martyred in 1948 uses futuristic interface technology involving physical tactile media and digital documents.”41 In the same newspaper the exhibit’s director is quoted as celebrating how this exhibit, what he calls “a digital archive of Gandhi,” could be installed anywhere. What a curious thought to think that the memory of Gandhi is no longer tethered to any one place, to the Birla Bhavan or even India itself, but rather can be broadcasted anywhere. The use of technology for remembering a man who made himself famous by rejecting the advances of colonial industry—choosing to spin his own cotton rather than machine spun fabric—itself feels rather iconoclastic. This is commodification of another sort: memory transformed into affect, distributable and placeless. What is palpably present throughout the spaces of the upstairs halls, is how sentimental 40 41

Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum, “Introduction,” accessed November 25, 2016 .  Duttagupta, Ishani, “e-Gandhi: The Soul Digitized,” Salon Signs (Ahmadabad, January 2007), accessed April 19, 2017 .

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such uses of technology can be: They evoke, not so much a sense of Gandhi’s life, but rather the feelings that have accumulated around his memory. Perhaps there can be a trade in emotions after all. It seems only fitting that those feelings and their modern expressions should be expressed in the Birla Bhavan, at 5 Tees January Marg, Delhi.

References

Birla, Ghanshyam Das. In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir. Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1953.  Chandra, Bipan. “Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936.” Economic and Political Weekly (1975): 1307–1324. Duttagupta, Ishani. “e-Gandhi: The Soul Digitized.” Salon Signs. Ahmadabad, January 2007. Accessed April 19, 2017 . Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum. “Introduction.” Accessed November 25, 2016 .  G. D. Birla Papers, 1942–1964. Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. New Delhi. Hutheesing, Krishna Nehru. We Nehrus. Delhi: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Juneja, Madan M., The Mahatma and the Millionaire: A Study in Gandhi-Birla Relations. New Delhi: Modern Publishers, 1993. Kapytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kudaisya, Medha, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla. London. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Nehru, Jawaharlal, Nehru on Gandhi. New York: J. Day Company, 1948. Patil, V. T. Gandhi, Nehru, and the Quit India Movement: A Study in the Dynamics of a Mass Movement. Delhi: BR Publishing Corporation, 1984.  Plamper, Jan. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49.2 (2010): 237–265. Ramanujam, K. S. “A Seminal Correspondence: Letters between G. D. Birla & the Nehrus,” Bhavan’s Journal 32.18 (April 16–30, 1986): 25–35. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Worrying About Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107.3 (2002): 821–845. Ross, Alan. The Emissary: GD Birla, Gandhi and Independence. London: Collin Harvill, 1986.

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Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” The American Historical Review 90.4 (1985): 813–836. The Gandhi Smriti and Dharshan Smrit website. Accessed October 18, 2016 .

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Chapter 2

Food and Emotion: Can Emotions Be Worked On and Altered in Material Ways?—A Short Research Note on South India* Barbara Schuler 1

Introduction

The study of food in relation to emotions ought to enjoy a privileged status in religious emotion studies. The subject combines religious food customs, practiced emotion models, and religious non-conformities; it addresses moral and political needs, as well as ritualistic needs; and it provides a perspective on cultural differentiations made on the basis of food and the strict consumption requirements of the divine. Even so, it is difficult to find far-reaching discussions on the topic. Certainly the connections between food, religion, and Indian culture have been discussed.1 But none of the literature has approached the subject from the perspective of emotions.2 We are agreed that food is a constituent of social relations and social inclusion and exclusion. We also agree that it conveys social and ritual meaning and serves as a channel for communication.3 Equally, few would object to current emotion research showing that emotions are both biological and socially

* A version of this paper was first presented at the Corpus Christi Conference Food and Ritual: Ancient Practices, Modern Approaches, University of Oxford, on March 24, 2014. 1 See Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella Eichinger, “Food for the Gods in South India,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 103.1/2 (1978): 86–108; Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella Eichinger, “Ritual as Language: The Case of South Indian Food Offerings,” Current Anthropology 18.3 (1977): 507–14; Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella Eichinger, “The Logic of South Indian Food Offerings,” Anthropos 72.3/4 (1977): 529–56; Löwdin, Per, “Food, Ritual and Society Among the Newars,” Uppsala Research Reports in Cultural Anthropology 4 (1985). 2 A preliminary study on objects and emotions, though not particularly on food and India, is offered by Kieschnick, John, “Material Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223–37. The author looks at four types of objects that trigger emotions: icons, relics, architecture, and clothing. 3 See Douglas, Mary, and Jonathan Gross, “Food and Culture: Measuring the Intricacy of Rule Systems,” Social Science Information 20.1 (1981): 12f.; Löwdin, “Food, Ritual and Society.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352964_004

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constructed, and include judgements and values.4 Hence there would be little point in devoting this paper to these topics. It is more rewarding to focus on the paradigm of current sociological emotion research: the understanding that emotions can be worked on and changed and, further, are plastic and can be actively created.5 Starting from this point of view this paper attempts to reveal potential models of “emotion work”6 in traditional local social groups in India and to consider 4

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Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt, and Hans J. Markowitsch, eds, Emotions as Bio-Cultural Processes (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2009); Ekman, Paul, “Facial Expressions,” in The Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. Tim Dalgleish and Mick Power (New York, NY: Wiley & Sons, 1999), 301–20; Lynch, Owen M., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1990); Rosenwein, Barbara H., Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–3; Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In this paper I am joining three theoretical currents: the notion of “emotion work” of Arlie Russell Hochschild (“Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 85.3 (November 1979): 551–75), which examines “the type of work it takes to cope with feeling rules” (551); the notion of “emotional communities” of Barbara Rosenwein (Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages [New York: Cornell University Press, 2006]), which studies “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions” (2); and the notion of emotion rules or “feeling rules” of Hochschild (“Emotion Work”), which reflects upon “the social guidelines that direct how we want to try to feel” (563) and what we “should ideally feel” (564). I cannot do justice here to the general question of what emotion is. Just one remark: India’s oldest extant treatise on “emotions” (bhāvas, √bhū, to become, come into being), Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra of the Sanskrit tradition (focused on the work of art), speaks of three varieties of emotions. They are namely the 8 “primary or stable emotions” (sthāyibhāvas) such as anger (krodha), fear (bhaya) or disgust (jugupsā), the 33 “transitory emotions” (vyabhicāribhāvas) such as shame (vrīḍā), pride (garva), recollection (smṛti), or dreaming (suptam), and the 8 bodily “emotional expressions” (sāttvikabhāvas) such as sweating (sveda) or trembling (vepathu). These 49 emotions are related to stimulants or “causal factors” (vibhāva) and “reactions” (anubhāva), such as verbal abuse, respectively upturned eyes. See, The Nāṭyaśāstra, vol. 1 (chap. 1–27), ed. Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta: Granthalaya Private Ltd., 1967), chap. 7.4–6, 7.15, 7.22–3, 7.26, 7.54, 7.58–9, 7.67, 7.75, 7.94–6; for a translation, see The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta: The Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950). The sophisticated thought building on emotion borrowed from Sanskrit can also be found in the emotions chapter “Meyppāṭṭiyal,” the poetic part of the oldest extant Tamil grammar Tolkāppiyam Poruḷatikāram. For the Sanskrit term bhāva, see also the discussion in Pollock, Sheldon, trans. and ed., A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xvi. Hereafter, I use Hochschild’s term interchangeably with “emotion management,” which is understood as actively trying to evoke or shape the emotions of oneself or others and

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the models’ implementation in religious activity. Is there an intra-group understanding of how to handle emotions? Can we determine a shared notion of what triggers particular emotions? Are emotions adoptable like clothing styles? Or adjustable, if the social environment and social expectations so require? Finally, can emotions be altered in material ways? And, if this so, is food the appropriate object and trigger for doing so? The intent of this study is explicitly comparative. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, I will compare the food consumption of the same deity in two Tamilspeaking social groups, recognizing different subcultures over the same period of time. I am especially concerned to note how food customs respond to cues from the social environment and the deity’s emotional realities. If we are able to suggest some law concerning the external change of emotions through material culture, it would be extremely interesting for comparative emotion management. 2

The Emotions of Food

Indian Brahmanic ideology has laid down detailed instructions about how to achieve the highest qualities of character through the guided consumption of food. The emotional effect of food is used to distinguish among three fundamental qualities (guṇas)7: sattva, rajas, tamas.8 These are the basic properties and constituents of primal matter and all material things and entities. The three fundamental qualities correlate with three colors—white, red, and black—and they each stand for a basic attitude, by means of which a person and his actions can be identified and classified. It is clear that this classification simultaneously entails a value judgement.9

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atune them to emotion rules. I understand emotion rules or norms, in accordance with Hochschild, to vary from social group to social group. This concept is well known from Indian Sāṃkhya philosophy. For more on this classical Indian philosophy, see Tuske, Joerg, “The Concept of Emotion in Classical Indian Phi­ losophy (Chap. 3),” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (March, 2011), last modified July 26, 2016, accessed October 15, 2016