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Purushottama Bilimoria and Aleksandra Wenta (eds): Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems . x, 287 pp. New Delhi : Routledge , 2015. ISBN 978 1 138 85935 7 .
Reviews: South Asia
Emotions have a history in South Asia, if hardly anything like an adequate historiography. The editors of this book agree: "much more work ... needs to be done to improve our understanding of emotions in India, especially with regard to historical development of emotional experience and the methods of its conceptualization" (p. 1). Any such history will have to be twinned with the history of what we, not always helpfully, call religions, tracked in this book as species of a genus the editors call "Indian thought-systems" in the title, and "pre-modern Indian traditions of knowledge" in the preface (p. ix). The vast South Asian corpus of theoretical literature affords us one of the best sources for the contested descriptions under which emotions can be seen to come into view and change. To that end, this book represents what the editors call "a modest step" (p. 1). Along with love - surely the best-studied emotion in South Asia - the book includes desire, fear, heroism, awe, anger, disgust and "modern" despair. Severally, the papers address many traditions, in not a few languages, periods and places. The step may be modest but the stride is wide.
The path from conference to publication risks a book uneven in focus and unevenly successful. A collection of nine essays stemming from a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Shimla in 2012, this...