Towards a history of courtly emotions in early medieval India, c. 300–700 CE

Abstract

ABSTRACT The birth of courtly emotions in early India was intimately linked to the proliferation of royal households across the subcontinent between the fourth and seventh centuries CE. Though earlier political formations saw the consolidation of monarchy, the rise of imperial ideology, and the evolution of royal functionaries, sources neither shed light upon, nor stress, the affective world of individuals around the king and his court until the first centuries of the Common Era. A convergence of sources from the end of the third century—including inscriptional encomia, manuals on polity, and didactic poetry—all point to the steady emergence of a constellation of openly articulated emotions that were deemed to constitute the relations between men of birth and standing who attended the lordly households of the era. These emotions, often obliquely perceived through the modern lens of a ‘classical’ literary culture’ are here situated in the political context of the fourth to seventh centuries and through an analysis across genres, with the hope of moving beyond current assumptions about the relations between aesthetically defined emotions (bhāva and rasa) and the social world that produced them. In particular, the essay explores different types of bonds of love and affection and their various inflections that were thought to arise between courtly actors. It further argues that knowledge about these emotions contributed to a kind of ‘science of emotional interpretation’ that helped men and women express and interpret emotions at court and negotiate the complex relationships that were cast in their idiom.