Feeling Modern: The History of the Emotions in South Asia

A special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, co-edited by Megan Robb with Elizabeth Chatterjee (Queen Mary, London) and Sneha Krishnan (Oxford).

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, dhotis and saris.