Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia

Abstract

The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is that emotions matter in shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be, dhoti s and sari s.