Emotions, Mobilisations and South Asian Politics

Amélie Blom is part of Adjunct Faculty in Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), Paris, France. Her research addresses the politicisation of Islam in Pakistan, particularly in Punjab. Her publications include The Enigma of Islamist Violence (2007, co-edited with L. Bucaille and L. Martinez) and ‘Emotions and the Micro-foundations of Religious Activism: The Bitter-Sweet Experiences of "Born-Again" Muslims in Pakistan’ in Indian Economic and Social History Review (2017). Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Research Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), Paris, France. She studies political representation, local democracy and urban governance in India. Her publications include Democratization in Progress: Women and Local Politics in Urban India (with Archana Ghosh, 2005) and Governing India’s Metropolises (co-edited with Joël Ruet, 2009).

• 1. Contentious Emotions: An Introduction PART I: Bringing Emotions Back into South Asian Political Mobilisations: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives 2. The Processes and Contexts of Emotional Involvement 3. Participatory and Adversarial Politics: Representing Speech Action, Collective Action and Emotion 4. Remembering and Accessing the ‘Emotion of Things’: A Methodological Journey with a Jihadist Militant in Pakistan PART II: Major Historical Shifts in the Public Expression of Emotions 5. Anger, Hurt and Enthusiasm: Mobilising for Violence, 1870–1920 6. From Court to Public Sphere: How Urdu Poetry’s Language of Romance Shaped the Language of Protest PART III: Subverting and Cementing Power Relations with Emotions 7. Emotions as Fuel: The Passage of Anti-Sexual Harassment Legislation in Pakistan 8. It’s Effective Because It’s Affective: The Dynamics and Significance of Emotions in a Delhi Jan Sunwai 9. The Deployment of Resentment in Counterinsurgency: The Case of Chhattisgarh PART IV: Directing Affects Across the Elusive Boundaries of the Political 10. Mobilising Anger in Andhra Pradesh: The Emotional Politics of the Angry Young Man and Popular Telugu Cinema 11. Hope and Nostalgia in Bengal: The Longing for Netaji in a Contemporary Millennial Movement 12. Dialectics of (De)Mobilisation: Humour in Islamic Sermons of Contemporary Bangladesh PART V: The Emotional Dynamics of Public Controversies 13. Hurt and Censorship in India Today: On Communities of Sentiments, Competing Vulnerabilities and Cultural Wars 14. Death, Despair, and Democracy in Bangladesh. Glossary. Index

‘This remarkable volume brings together the best recent developments in the humanistic social sciences on affect, embodiment and politics. In addition, its authors provide brilliant ethnographies of a wide range of movements which exemplify the centrality of the emotions to mobilisation of every type in South Asia.’Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA‘This collection of essays offers a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the role of emotion in South Asian politics and its methodological ramifications. Case studies and theoretical chapters explain the power of emotions in the making of collective action as well as individual trajectories on the basis of psychological and sociological considerations, which are neither culturalist, nor divorced from culture. This is one of the finest attempts at understanding one of the most complex objects of social sciences.’Christophe Jaffrelot, CNRS Senior Researcher, CERI-Sciences Po, Paris, France ‘What moves social movements? When and how do movements move us? In offering us a beautifully curated set of reflections on emotion in South Asian public life, Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal at the same time enrich our understanding of democracy as a global project.’William Mazarella, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, University of Chicago, USA