Cultivating emotion and the rise of the vernacular: the role of affect in ‘early Hindi-Urdu’ song

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of emotion in relation to the medium of expression. Starting with an investigation as to what feelings are named and foregrounded, the paper looks for shifts in affect as the medium changes from cosmopolitan to vernacular. It studies scenarios of evoking and cultivating emotions to determine to what end they are mobilized and how this stimulates the formation of new emotional communities through songs of ecstasy. This broader frame is approached through case studies of songs in ‘Early Hindi-Urdu’ with earliest evidence datable from the 15th and 16th century. The first section provides analysis of ‘yogi songs’ that feature the affect of satire and spiritual awakening (śānti), exemplified by the fifteenth-century Kabīr. The second section revisits the question of why the vernacular is used for Sufi songs, foregrounding the rhetorical device of familiarization. The example here is Abdul Quddus Gangohī, whose Early Hindi-Urdu poems are sometimes interpreted as translations from Persian. Next follows an analysis of transcreations of Sanskrit scripture in the Braj devotional milieus of the first half of the sixteenth century, foregrounding synaesthetics. Examples here are the songs of intimacy of Harirām Vyās. Songs by that same author also provide evidence for the next section on devotional community formation, complemented with the hagiographical literature of the eighteenth-century Nāgarīdās. The final section analyzes sentiments that run the range from embarrassment and complaint to shameless surrender in adaptations of folk genres (focusing on the theme of ‘the woman at the well’) in diverse Hindu and Sufi contexts.