The language of shame: a study of emotion in an early-twentieth century Urdu children’s periodical (Phūl)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the vocabulary used for shame in a children’s periodical from Lahore, in colonial North India. Following decades of reconfigurations of norms of behaviour and of akhlaq (moral, ethical) literature, Phūl (‘Flower’) was one of the first periodicals for children, and one with the longest run. Using emotions, it aimed to entertain as much as to educate the young Urdu-reading public. Thanks to a careful examination of every weekly number through the year 1910 – the first full year of publication –, the objective is to highlight the various meanings and uses of shame in early twentieth-century Urdu children’s literature. In Phūl, shame was consistently expressed by the term sharm, with only rare exceptions. This conspicuously contrasts with the resort to diverse terms for contemporary representations of community shame and dishonour in the male public sphere since the late nineteenth century. Through typical animal stories, moral tales and illustrations, this article highlights how contributors used shame to monitor children’s emotions and behaviour. Despite its striking homogeneity of vocabulary, however, sharm involved a full palette of nuances, from the isolating emotion elicited by transgression (the ‘blackness’ of shame) to the very condition of respect, without which social cohesion was impossible. I argue that, crucial for the enculturation of morality, good manners, and gendered expectations, sharm was more semantically capacious than what we label as shame in English, notably by encompassing aspects which some, in Ruth Benedict’s and Eric R. Dodds’ steps, have associated to a different and sometimes opposite concept: guilt.