Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as 'mushāʿira' in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as 'waʿz mahfil ' in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners' experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers' narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across 'religious', 'political', and 'poetic' realms-and
thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.Keywords: Emotion, performance, Islam, South Asia, music, public, musha 'ira, wa'z mahfil
/ Carla PetieviCh and Max StilleThe Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54, 1 (2017): 67-102
Introduction 1Sympathy, compassion, hamdardī, sahānubhūti-all these words testify to a basic interpersonal process in which one person feels with another person. This interpersonal nature of emotions, inextricably intertwined with communication, has long been part of theoretical discussion in poetics and rhetoric. The dramatic arts have proved to be particularly fruitful for developing models that seek to describe how emotions are transmitted from one party (say, a performer) to another (an audience). The Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the formulation of rasa theory-commonly traced back to Bharata's Nātyashāstra-have been fundamental to discussions of aesthetics in Europe and South Asia for the past two millennia. Considerations of emotional response in antiquity differentiated the field of rhetoric from philosophy and created overlaps between rhetoric and stylistics (how emotions are evoked) as well as psychology (how emotions can be classified).
2Recent research into the evocation of emotions has confirmed and extended many ancient assumptions, for instance, that emotions constitute expressive communication and are not just interior states; that both the imagination and the body are of central importance in e...