ABSTRACT
The interpretation of crowd behaviour as driven by rational interest has restored its political character to violence, but done little to question the dichotomy between rationality and emotions and/or their non-political character. Historicising emotions allows one to ask more detailed questions, referring to the ‘emotional crowd’. Which emotions were at play? At what stage of the riot? For which actors? How were they communicated? How did they relate to a contested ethics of emotions, claiming certain feelings as essential for the humanity of a person and calling for other feelings to be controlled?
The chapter starts with the transformation of actors’ emotion knowledge from traditional notions of balance to the reception of crowd psychology immediately before the First World War. It then focuses on the development of a pattern for communal riots in North India, culminating in large-scale violence when Muharram and Dasehra fell on the same day in 1886. Looking at the riots in Kanpur in 1913, the chapter reads these as driven less by anger than by fervour and enthusiasm. Finally, it asks whether and how this emotionalisation was affected by Gandhi’s call for political action based on ascetic self-control.
