Emotions in performance: Poetry and preaching

Abstract

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...

An Invitation into the Mehfil: Muslim Women's Interregional Intellectual Networks

“…Depicting the exhibitory publicness of mushairas , Isaac Sequeira points out how these symposia at which Urdu poets regale one another, as well as large gatherings of enthusiasts of Urdu poetry, often make use of public address systems and are broadcast via radio and television (2, 8). Carla Petievich and Max Stille, in fact, assert that mushairas are a “performance spectacle ( tamasha )” (Petievich and Stille 2017, 73). Drawing on this performative aspect, Ali Khan Mahmudabad posits the mushaira as an archive that captured the spaces and manners of belonging of Muslim religious and political selves in the subcontinent at a time when such identity formations emerged as matters of public deliberation and contestation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Mahmudabad 2020).…”

Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion: The Case of Sermons

“…68 While the emphasis put on bodily and imaginative processes might vary, the importance of both for a comprehensive analysis has to be acknowledged. 69 This relates to scale: different versions ranging from large-scale sermon festivals to exclusive sermons whose more intimate communication with the divine would not be possible in a larger group can be investigated. And while the audience was often learned, in the sense of having wide knowledge of the themes of the religious subject and in the sense of knowing how to behave and react within an audience, we do not mean to take it for granted that historical listeners are at all points absorbed or enthusiastic participants in the ritual act nor consider lack of interest as analytically uninteresting.…”