The author of this book deploys and enriches methodologies from the history of emotions, particularly deep literary analysis, to explore how and why elite north Indian Muslims evoked grief and related concepts during the British Raj (1858–1947). In her largely chronological exposition, Tignol extensively translates and analyzes Urdu-language poetry, sometimes with prose commentary, published in partisan newspapers and journals of that period. She also considers printed Urdu romanticized memoirs and also some unpublished letters and other manuscripts written by leading elite and middle-class Muslim men and women. The author highlights the Arabic and Urdu “polysemic term” gham, which holds multiple connotations, including collective grief, restorative or resigned nostalgia, lament for lost and unrecoverable past glory, aspiration for redemption or restitution, and physical or emotional pain, among other “semantic nets” (80, 211).
Analyzing emotive poetic and other evocations can prove innovatively fruitful, as it does in this volume, but...