This book draws on a new interdisciplinary field known as emotional history, which combines insights and techniques from psychology, history, and gender studies. The book sheds new light on the Bengal Renaissance and the Indian Awakening by showing how the gender structure of Indian society, especially the predominance of caste and community, shaped the Indian experience of love in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The unique quality of this experience derived from the persistence of caste despite the rise of a new romantic mentality. The author describes the rich emotional histories that resulted and reveals how these experiences have contributed to the restructuring of the culture over the last two centuries.