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Abstract

The emotion of vātsalyam is perceived as central to the construction of love in the Indian cultural context. Usually understood as the love of the parents for their children, it is not confined to parental love alone. The article examines the historicity of the concept of vātsalyam as well as its contemporary expression. It combines enquiry from three domains—Indian philosophical thought, literature and folk psychology. The first section of the article provides the theoretical framework within which the concept is situated in Indian psychology. Drawing from the rasa theory, we explicate how experiencing of worldly emotions can simultaneously be the means of transformation. In the second section, we attempt to bring out the centrality of the emotion of vātsalyam in Indian psyche and its pan-Indian expression by drawing from the literatures in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. The third section of the article uses a short qualitative enquiry to examine contemporary understanding of vātsalyam based on responses of lay persons and artists relating to nature of vātsalyam, their modes of expression of this emotion, its manifestation in various relationships, and their views on the uniqueness of this emotion, or otherwise, to the Indian cultural context

Keywords

rasa emotion parental love culture folk theories Indian philosophical thought literary expressions Indian psychology transformative emotions indigenous psychology

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Exploring Vātsalyam : The Emotion of Love for the Child

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