From Deconstructing Love To Exploring Emotions: Politics Of Feelings Set Our Tracks For 2023

While our journey in 2022 started with the different shades of love, we begin 2023 with the politics of feelings and emotions that shape our everyday narratives and discourses. We don’t know whether that unnamed woman in Smita Nair’s story found the vial of Surma that her ex-lover gave her. Nor we know how Shweta and Arnav are leading their lives after transcending the normative boundaries of legality that limits the love and chose to have a ‘live-in partnership’ beyond the compulsions of marriage. But we realised love along with other feelings like pain, agony, melancholy, rejoice, anger, hate or repentance, to name a few, determine how we negotiate our lives- how we navigate through the discrete charms that we encounter every now and then.

In the introduction of The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed says, “Emotions work to shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies.” To identify, how the emotions work, this issue explores our senses that weave the political realities. In the words of our editor Chinki Sinha, “Our personal, social and political lives are dictated by how we feel or unfeel.” We walk through the trajectories of loneliness, melancholy and beauty to unpack our existence that is nothing but amalgamation of different emotions.

Roohi Dixit’s shopkeeper who finds a friend in the old television set to avoid the solitude takes us to Aradhana Seth’s flower that spreads beauty through its wrinkled petals beyond the normative dues of ageism. Abhishek Anicca shares with us the meaning of vulnerability and mums us with an innocent query that has its nuances embedded within: “And there is no hope when there is no acknowledgement of sadness. What is a happy person supposed to be hopeful about?”

At a time, when the lives of immigrants and refugees are shaped by everyday alienation, Jey Sushil tells us how does it feel to be ‘alien’ in a foreign land? Margrit Pernau gives us a historical tour to early twentieth century colonial India where mass passion and aggression were getting archived in the popular literature and revenge and its masculine sparks were seeking legitimization among a population that believed to have been emasculated during consecutive, what they call, ‘foreign invasions’.

Through all these articles and many more, our issue on Politics of Feelings deconstructs, rather collapses the intellect-emotion binary and the prevalent hierarchy that puts emotions, as Sara Ahmed says, “beneath the faculties of thought and reason.” It instead looks at how the emotion has always been a constitutive part of the politics, not a derivative.

The cover image of the issue that shows a handwritten poem by the great writer Vikram Seth precisely sums up the emotions that lead to the production of the issue- we may be divided spatially and temporally but similar emotions connect us through different mediums- sometimes through arts and in other times through the essence of existence- through the belief, to reframe the famous words of Rene Descartes, “I feel, therefore I am.”