ABSTRACT

This article explores the vocabulary used for shame in a children’s periodical from Lahore, in colonial North India. Following decades of reconfigurations of norms of behaviour and of akhlaq (moral, ethical) literature, Phūl (‘Flower’) was one of the first periodicals for children, and one with the longest run. Using emotions, it aimed to entertain as much as to educate the young Urdu-reading public. Thanks to a careful examination of every weekly number through the year 1910 – the first full year of publication –, the objective is to highlight the various meanings and uses of shame in early twentieth-century Urdu children’s literature. In Phūl, shame was consistently expressed by the term sharm, with only rare exceptions. This conspicuously contrasts with the resort to diverse terms for contemporary representations of community shame and dishonour in the male public sphere since the late nineteenth century. Through typical animal stories, moral tales and illustrations, this article highlights how contributors used shame to monitor children’s emotions and behaviour. Despite its striking homogeneity of vocabulary, however, sharm involved a full palette of nuances, from the isolating emotion elicited by transgression (the ‘blackness’ of shame) to the very condition of respect, without which social cohesion was impossible. I argue that, crucial for the enculturation of morality, good manners, and gendered expectations, sharm was more semantically capacious than what we label as shame in English, notably by encompassing aspects which some, in Ruth Benedict’s and Eric R. Dodds’ steps, have associated to a different and sometimes opposite concept: guilt.

摘要

本文探讨了印度北部殖民地拉合尔的儿童期刊中用于羞辱的词汇。经过数十年对行为规范和akhlaq（道德，伦理）文学的重新配置，Phūl（“花”）是第一批针对儿童的期刊，并且出版时间最长。它旨在通过情感来娱乐和教育年轻的读乌尔都语的公众。得益于对直到1910年（出版的第一个完整年份）的每周数字的仔细检查，目的是突出二十世纪初乌尔都族儿童文学中羞辱的各种含义和用法。在Phūl，耻辱是一贯用术语表达沙姆沙伊赫，只有极少数的例外。这与自十九世纪末以来在男性公共领域中对社区耻辱和羞辱的当代表现形式诉诸各种术语形成鲜明对比。通过典型的动物故事，道德故事和插图，本文重点介绍了贡献者如何使用羞耻感来监控儿童的情绪和行为。尽管其词汇具有惊人的同质性，但从涉及过错引起的孤立情感（羞耻的“黑色”）到尊敬的非常条件下，sharm包含了完整的细微差别，没有它们，社会凝聚力是不可能的。我认为，对于道德，礼貌，对社会文化适应的关键和性别的期望，沙姆沙伊赫 比我们标记为英语的羞耻更具有语义上的宽容，特别是通过包含某些方面，在露丝·本尼迪克特（Ruth Benedict）和埃里克·多德斯（Eric R. Dodds）的步骤中，这些方面与一个不同的，有时是相反的概念相关：内。