With some 20 per cent of the world's current population, South Asia's rapidly-expanding urban centres are playing an increasingly important role in the lives of a significant proportion of the world's population. South Asia's urban population grew by 130 million between 2001 and 2013, and according to recent World Bank estimates it is forecast to grow by a further 250 million by 2030. In this context, policy makers are exercised not just about how the region's cities can be transformed to drive economic growth and poverty reduction, but also how they might become “better places” in which to live. Indeed, it is precisely “the often severe stresses brought about by growing urban populations on infrastructure, basic city services, land use, housing, and the environment” and “the inability to adequately address these stresses” that provide “the root cause of messy and hidden urbanisation”. Equally, it is “these same congestion forces that are constraining the region's ability to realize the vision of prosperous and livable [sic] cities”.

The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is that emotions matter in shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be, dhotis and saris.

After the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre of shahr āshob to recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speaking ashrāf in the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled ‘The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī)’ (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with the shahr āshob tradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previous shahr āshobs. Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of ‘The Lament for Delhi’ both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speaking ashrāf and on the cultural and social history of colonial India.

The educated woman and the college girl were, for the great part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India, subjects of immense anxiety. In this article, I examine the gossipy narratives that a missionary educator in South India, Eleanor McDougall, wrote biannually for readers in America and Britain, whilst she was Principal of Women's Christian College (WCC) in erstwhile Madras, along with the book on her experience that she eventually published. In doing so, I locate the circulation of gossip in transnational circuits as a site where colonial anxieties about young Indian women as subjects of uplift came to be produced. For women like McDougall, the expression of urgent anxiety about young women's moral and social conditions served as a means to secure legitimacy for the work they did, and position themselves as important participants in a new discourse of philanthropically mediated development that emerged in the early twentieth century with the influx of American charitable capital into countries like India. At the same time, I show, in responding to her writing about them, that the Indian staff and students at WCC did not concur with colonial authority marks a site of refusal: suggesting the anxious boundaries of colonial knowledge production at a time when the surety of discourses of racial difference was beginning to unravel. In its study of McDougall's gossipy writing, this article therefore contributes to a complicated and non-linear understanding of emotions as a site of power and hierarchy.

In the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.

When Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1926) set sail for England to ensure the Eton College-bound son of Viqar-ul Omrah (Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad, 1894–1901) received an Indo-Islamic education, it was Sharar's first foray outside of India. Like many previous Indian travelers he found his experiences to be eye opening. Inspired by his sojourns in England, Italy, France, and Spain, he serially published his travelogues upon his return to India in 1896. Providing examples of the failures and successes of industrialization, such accounts were evocative in their detail. They provided middle class Indians with global and historical perspectives of the changes brought by colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization in European and Indian cities. Drawing from Sharar's and other travelers’ accounts of the period, this essay examines the use of literature to humanize Lucknow's urban landscape, not only to transform the city, but also the relationship between the city and its inhabitants into one of sympathy and affection.

This article begins with the premise that nostalgia haunts histories of Indian Muslim cultural and social life but remains curiously underspecified with relation to Muslim political life. By looking at the figure of Mohamed Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) and a constellation of transnational initiatives around the year 1913 in particular, it suggests ways in which we might redeploy nostalgia in order to look for temporal and spatial ambivalence in historical moments. In turn, that ambivalence points to the limitations of understanding nostalgia as purely a longing for another place and a past time.

While scholarship on pardah nashīn or veiled women in South Asia has emphasized the links between women's ritual and urban landscape, what has received less attention is the ways that domestic spaces, affective work performed in those spaces, and material culture of the home were instrumental in mapping the South Asian city during the late colonial period. Aesthetic decisions, gift-giving, and performative critiques of the public rituals of marriage acted as loci for the self-fashioning of both the colonial-era city and women's modern selves. Through close reading of an account of the customs of Delhi by a pardah nashīn woman S. Begum Dehlavi, this article shows that veiled women mapped the city through their consumption and exchange of goods, as well as through the construction and affirmation of a complex web of families in the city.

Throughout the history of movement between country and city in the Nepali-speaking areas of the Indian subcontinent, musical links between cities and the rural hills have integrated emotional associations with rural hill life into the fabric of city life. Songs in the thematic genre of viraha – longing and the pain of separation – articulate lyrical and musical tropes that have come to characterise the experience of moving between hill villages, cities, and back again. This article explores over a century of Nepali-language viraha songs related to labour migration, arguing that as these songs take root in translocal publics crossing urban-rural divides, they contribute to an ruralisation of social and emotional life in the cities.