Honour Matters:Social Group-based Narratives as Sources for the Study of Situated Honour Practices and Their Sets of Emotions in Early Modern Tamil-speaking South India
What do we know about honour-based emotional practices of the various social groups in early modern Tamil-speaking south India? And which emotions were involved in honour practice? This case study applies a well-known approach in emo-tion history studies to this new terrain, a terrain that is largely uncharted and de-serves to be explored. By examining two honour-sensitive social groups and their respective key narratives—on one hand, a lower status group, on the other, an elite and privileged group—it will be shown what kinds of practices were highlighted or evoked in conflict settings, and how honour-bound emotional practices came to the fore. Against the backdrop of a pre-modern Tamil culture, where practices were shaped by traditional normative social attributions and demarcated group bounda-ries, this study offers ample details of the fluid boundaries in the new literary genres of the time, where gender-specific emotions compete strongly with the clear bound-aries for emotions in normative orders. The study will further show that an investi-gation of pre-modern Tamil emotion treatises, lexicons/glossaries (nikaṇṭu), moral canons, and proverbs counter the Western tendency of considering honour an emo-tion. Examining community-specific situated honour practices and the sets of emo-tions surrounding them not only gives us insight into the self-understanding, emo-tional life and needs of these groups. It also provides insight into questions pertain-ing to new political facts, internal literary dynamics, and social expectations. These insights are also relevant to questions about honour concepts and practices in India today.