Shame and the Body: A History of Blushing in colonial North India
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Eve Tignol
- Host
- Asian Studies Centre (St Antony's)
- Series
- Abraham Murad
- Location
- St Antony's College - Pavilion Room, Pavilion Room, St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX2 6JF, United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
Drawing on Urdu poetry, dictionaries, periodical advertisements, and medical essays from late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century North India, I examine how vernacular notions of sharm (shame) intersected – and clashed – with contemporary Western concepts of blushing. By tracing the entanglements between the layered meanings of blushing and the embodied imagination of sharm, I argue that the reddening of the skin gradually emerged as a legible site for morality, virtue, and health in colonial South Asia. As makeup practices popularised disciplined expressions of the blush, the involuntary physiological response to shame – central to Western frameworks – paradoxically faded. Interrogating the body, this talk explores how emotions were integral to Urdu intellectual understandings of class identities and “progress”. Eve Tignol is a historian of colonial South Asia and a permanent researcher at the CNRS, based at the Centre for South Asian and Himalayan Studies (UMR8077), EHESS, Paris. Her research explores the cultural, political, and emotional histories of Muslim societies, with a focus on Urdu print culture. She is the author of numerous articles and the monograph Grief and the Shaping of Muslim Communities in North India, 1857-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
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