Love and compassion for the community: Emotions and practices among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930

Margrit Pernau
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Margrit Pernau: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2017, vol. 54, issue 1, 21-42

Abstract: This article investigates how philosophical and ethical reflections, rhetorical strategies, and emotional practices intersect. In the first section, it lays out the traditional emotion knowledge found in Persian and Indo-Persian texts on moral philosophy written in the Aristotelian tradition, which still held an important place in the education of people writing in and reading journals like Aligarh’s TahzÄ«bu-l AkhlÄ q. The second section looks at the transformation of this knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides a close reading of texts that address education and self-education issues while simultaneously exhorting readers to feel more compassionate (and often to prove their compassion through specific actions). The last section, finally, uses the Punjabi traders of Delhi as a case study to show how practices of philanthropy contributed to community building. Compassion, the article argues, is a social emotion, but not necessarily an unequivocally benign emotion. It serves to construct a community and to negotiate its boundaries, but it is also a tool of exclusion and helps fortifying the communities’ internal hierarchies. The perception of the pain of others is as unequally distributed as the practices for its alleviation.

Keywords: History of emotions; compassion; sympathy; community building; TahzÄ«bu-l AkhlÄ q; Panjabi traders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:54:y:2017:i:1:p:21-42

DOI: 10.1177/0019464616683480

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