This presentation draws on chapters from my first monograph (Grief and the Shaping of Muslim Communities in North India, c. 1857–1940s, Cambridge University Press: 2023), which explores gham (grief) in shaping Muslim identities in colonial North India. I examine how emotions were cultivated and debated among Indian Muslims from the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising to the 1940s. Drawing from a diverse range of Urdu sources—including newspapers, colonial records, letters, essays, and poetry—I analyze key historical moments as vignettes, revealing the multiplicity of emotional communities and memory practices at play. City elegists, Aligarh reformists, and anti-colonial leaders each engaged with grief in distinct ways.

Far from being passive responses to loss, gham actively structured relationships, shaped political consciousness and aesthetics, and acted as a powerful catalyst for solidarity as much as for demarcating community boundaries. Through emblematic examples and debates on public expressions of emotions, I trace the evolving semantic networks surrounding gham and the transformation of literary genres like the shahr ashob into sites of mobilisation and contestation. By foregrounding the emotional landscape of colonial North India, I argue that gham did not merely reflect historical change but implemented it. Considering emotions as significant historical agents in their own right, I engage with the expanding field of emotion studies in the South Asian context and beyond.