This collection of essays—rich, readable and informative—is introduced beautifully by Francesca Orsini. Its aims and scope are ambitious. I begin with my single serious complaint, however, one that is perennial: how can we continue to talk about “South Asia” as though it were comprised only of Hindustan and Bengal? That said, I applaud the book that is, rather than lament unduly that which it is not.

Fourteen chapters are organized into five roughly chronological sections that South Asian culture through Sanskrit kavya, Indo-Persian poetry and poetic treatises, Punjabi romance, Parsi theatre, Tagore's novels and songs, 20^th century Hindi and Urdu novels, Hindi films, love letters, Rajasthani performance and practices in urban love-marriage. Understandably slanted toward the textual, the volume also addresses the production of emotion through visual and oral performance (stage, screen and “real life”). Almost every essay offers useful insight into how the contemporary “lovescape” available to north Indians and Pakistanis has come to be shaped over time and how contemporary behaviors can reflect ancient models.

Many essays treat the problem of how love and political power complicate one another. In his study of Gupta-period (4^th – 7^th C. C. E.) kavya “palace romances,” Daud Ali explains that love happens to the already powerful; in normative Islamicate literature, by contrast, the lover's social and political circumstances are made irrelevant (as when Christopher Shackle reports (p. 88) that “divine love…bec[a]me the core organizing principle of the universe.”)

Kavya reflects a sociology of courtly love, argues Ali, and these palace dramas sought to reconcile love and the exigencies of power—which could not be separated in real aristocratic life—by creating distinct experiential spheres for them. Katherine Butler Brown similarly demonstrates the escape offered by artistic realms while discussing the Mughal courtly mehfil, another intermediary space between aesthetic surrender and socio-political demands. The mehfil enabled noble men to surrender themselves to desire without compromising their socially constructed masculinity. Erotic surrender (to the will of a ma'shuq, or beloved) was safe, especially to a beloved idealized as god; sexual surrender to another human, especially another male, was effeminizing and therefore compromising to the nobles’ social status. Brown's essay draws upon and contributes to contemporary debates concerning the social dynamics of same-sex love in the Islamicate, and offers an important example of how consonant were Sanskritic and early Indo-Muslim paradigms of the erotic. Alam and Subrahmanyam's discussion of the Indo-Persian Nal-Daman represents the heterosexual side of this problem, as does Kumkum Sangari's typically impenetrable treatment of the diversity of love in Qurratulain Hyder's epic novel, Aag ka Darya (River of Fire).

The compatibility of the Indic and Indo-Islamic notwithstanding, there are problems: kavya's pre-modern, idealized love is entirely secular, while religion can hardly be removed from the complex of love in early modern and later Indo-Islamic discourses. Shackle, in his elegant essay, “The Shifting Sands of Love” traces a history of changing understandings of love through critical readings on the work of 19^th century Punjabi poet Khwaja Ghulam Farid in secondary literature. He discusses the increased aversion, over time, to acknowledging sexuality as connected with the erotic in much Indo-Muslim culture, arguing that the familiar opposition of ‘phenomenal’ and ‘real’ love (‘ishq-i majazi vs. ‘ishq-i haqiqi) is a formulaic attempt to “bring sexuality into full alignment with spirituality” (p. 88). This conceptual sanitization has been remarkably attractive to Siraiki cultural nationalists in particular and contemporary Pakistani society in general.

Yet an unsanitized understanding of sexuality and women as the emodiment of family honor often inform folk tradition. Jeevan Deol reminds us that, notwithstanding its characteristic celebration of transgressive social behavior, transgressive love in Punjabi romance is ultimately neutralized by the more compelling demands of kinship. The Mirza-Sahiban cycle and other Punjabi romances, having eluded the mediating treatments of kavya or Indo-Persian courtly romance, tell of tragedy, not resolution. Indeed,when this secular literature is infused with religious overtones, the underlying love story is fundamentally changed (p. 151). I urge the reader to turn from Deol to Perveez Mody's ethnographic treatment of love-marriage and abduction in contemporary Delhi: the two form a fascinating and perhaps unexpected pair. The past is present, the rural dwells in the urban…

Sudipto Kaviraj draws upon Tagore to show how paradigms of the erotic are re-worked, after the mid-19^th century, from srngara into a modern, individualized, colonial non-erotic formulation of prem. In this literature the author instructs modern individuals in how to “practice emotional intimacy,” preferably in the context of conjugal marriage (p. 179) while acting out a “new ethics of individualism” that is quintessentially “modern” and based in language.

In Hindi novels, too, the notion of “romantic love” is heavily interrogated, with a clear preference for accommodation to marriage as the appropriate site for the erotic. Vasudha Dalmia discusses a Krishna Sobti novel, Dil-o Danish (Heart and Mind, 1993) the Urdu of whose title is surely deliberate. Dalmia explains how Sobti takes an early modern love story and delivers it to a modern audience through the vehicle of the pre-modern love genre of the barahmasa (lit. “twelve months”). This is an interesting concept. Barahmasa, traditionally composed in verse, is arguably a crypto-narrative form, describing the narrator-lover's state(s) through a yearlong cycle, and showing how love is inflected by the seasons. As Dalmia observes, there is a modern twist insofar as the suffering lover is individualized and can now be either male or female. And in the fraught, communalized atmosphere of the 1990s, the blurring of Hindi and Urdu offers its own didactics.

Visual performance clearly complicates the rendering of aesthetic effect. Ann Gold and Rachel Dwyer look at how love is conceptualized, both aurally and visually, in Rajashtani performance and Hindi film. Various utterances of the word ‘prem’ frame Gold's sensitive study of Ghatiyali's locally performed language of love, with its own semantic constructions. Dwyer explores the tension between competing codes—verbal registers and visual images—that comprise Hindi films’ idioms of love. By contrast, Anuradha Kapur eschews language almost entirely, describing how Parsi theatre's modern technologies visually produced their melodramatic “aesthetic of excess” or extravagance, managing erotic experience visually with the stage as their “space of desire.” Courtly forms like kavya and ghazal gradually build up a layering of emotional effect through lexical manipulation; Parsi theatre, writes Kapur, rendered love through pictorialization and “employed velocity for emotional effects” (p. 227).

Letters are another kind of performance, one that represents an entire complex of emotional testimony, argues Orsini in her own essay. Tracing a history of letter-writing manuals from Indo-Persian adab literature to contemporary footpath booklets on how to compose letters, this rich essay refers to and resonates with nearly every other piece collected here.

A short review cannot do justice to this collection. Two or three chapters presented familiar work, but one salutes Orsini for bringing together this group of scholars under this theme. Those interested in demonstrating to students some of the ways in which ‘continuous tradition’ works—how it seeps generically ‘upward’ while percolating ‘down’ and stretching across time—will recognize this volume as an important contribution.