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Between the Numinous and the Melodramatic: Poetics of Heightened Feelings in Bengali Islamic Sermons
Abstract This chapter analyses a rhetorical technique that is decisive for the aesthetic experience of Islamic sermons in contemporary Bangladesh. I show how the performance of narratives in sermons relies on musical-bodily as well as imaginative expectations and expertise to evoke heightened emotions. I furthermore sketch a historical trajectory that demonstrates that the chanting in the sermons is part of the history of Bengali literature—from epics performed at regional courts to folk ballads—and of the history of South-Asian melodrama. This trajectory interlinks “secular” and “religious” aesthetics and has repercussions for the analytical terms we use to describe rhetorical phenomena. For this conceptual discussion, I take up the often pejoratively used term “melodrama.” Rather than cast it as a low variant of excessive emotions juxtaposed with the sublime, I argue that the concept can be useful for historicizing and contextualizing the evocation of religious feelings.
