Towards a history of courtly emotions in early medieval India, c. 300–700 CE

Bibliographic Data

ID12985377
AuthorsDaud Ali (0009-0004-8566-8890, Philadelphia University, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume12
Issue2-3
Pages129-145
Publication date2021-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Asian History and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1947-2498 • E-ISSN: 1947-2501
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/19472498.2021.1889797
OpenAlexW3143275238
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

The birth of courtly emotions in early India was intimately linked to the proliferation of royal households across the subcontinent between the fourth and seventh centuries CE. Though earlier political formations saw the consolidation of monarchy, the rise of imperial ideology, and the evolution of royal functionaries, sources neither shed light upon, nor stress, the affective world of individuals around the king and his court until the first centuries of the Common Era. A convergence of sources from the end of the third century—including inscriptional encomia, manuals on polity, and didactic poetry—all point to the steady emergence of a constellation of openly articulated emotions that were deemed to constitute the relations between men of birth and standing who attended the lordly households of the era. These emotions, often obliquely perceived through the modern lens of a ‘classical’ literary culture’ are here situated in the political context of the fourth to seventh centuries and through an analysis across genres, with the hope of moving beyond current assumptions about the relations between aesthetically defined emotions (bhāva and rasa) and the social world that produced them. In particular, the essay explores different types of bonds of love and affection and their various inflections that were thought to arise between courtly actors. It further argues that knowledge about these emotions contributed to a kind of ‘science of emotional interpretation’ that helped men and women express and interpret emotions at court and negotiate the complex relationships that were cast in their idiom

Art · Context (archaeology · Ideology · Literature · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law

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