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

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 Tahzību-l Akhlāq. 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.