Bhāva and feeling

About this essay: This essay grew out of a conversation between ChatGPT and me. ChatGPT wrote it as a summary of our discussion, and the text has been lightly edited for this page. It is an exploration of the questions we discussed. The proposed connections between language, emotion, and disbelief should be read as hypotheses rather than established conclusions.

On emotion, embodied thought, linguistic inheritance, and the difficulty of disbelief.

What does it mean to have a feeling?

In English, we feel happiness, sadness, anxiety, affection, and anger. Feelings arise within us, sometimes unexpectedly, and we attempt to understand, express, suppress, or manage them. In Hindi, we might translate feeling as bhāvanā (भावना). The translation is familiar enough that we seldom stop to question it.

Yet the histories of these words suggest different starting points. English feel descends from Old English fēlan, associated with touch and sensory perception. Over time, its meaning expanded from physical sensation to emotional experience, intuition, and opinion.

Bhāvanā belongs to a Sanskrit family derived from bhū (भू), meaning to be or become. Related words include bhāva (भाव), a state or mode of being, and bhāvanā, historically associated with cultivation, contemplation, conception, and bringing something into being. One word approaches experience through sensing; the other emerges from a vocabulary of being and becoming.

These etymologies do not prove that English speakers experience emotions physically while Hindi speakers understand them mentally. They reveal different historical associations through which inner experience came to be described. How much of what we consider our private inner life is shaped by the language we inherit?

The trouble with translation

Translation encourages us to imagine that languages contain equivalent concepts expressed through different sounds. But words rarely divide the world in precisely the same way.

Consider seva-bhāvanā (सेवा भावना), the disposition or spirit of service. Translating it as a "feeling of service" captures something of its meaning while losing its implication of attitude or orientation. Similarly, sadbhāvanā (सद्भावना) conveys goodwill rather than merely a passing pleasant feeling.

English has words for these concepts: disposition, intention, sentiment, goodwill, and compassion. Different languages distribute overlapping meanings across different words. Anna Wierzbicka's work on emotion semantics examines why apparently universal emotional categories cannot always be treated as straightforward translation equivalents. Words inherit distinctions particular to the languages and cultures in which they develop.¹

The question is whether differences in the semantic histories of bhāvanā and feeling reveal different habits of conceptualizing experience. Investigating it requires looking beyond Hindi and English.

Before English: India's many vocabularies of emotion

India has never had a single, uniform language of inner experience. Its linguistic traditions developed through centuries of contact, borrowing, philosophical debate, and literary experimentation.

Tamil uṇarvu (உணர்வு) encompasses sensation, awareness, consciousness, understanding, and feeling. Its semantic range crosses boundaries that contemporary English sometimes draws between knowing and experiencing. Kannada anisike (ಅನಿಸಿಕೆ) can refer to a feeling, impression, sentiment, or opinion. The expression nanage hāge anisuttade can communicate either "I feel that way" or "I think so," depending on context.

Malayalam vikāram (വികാരം), derived from Sanskrit, connects emotion with alteration or change of state. Meanwhile, thonnal conveys an impression or something that seems to be the case. These words do not contain exclusive cultural theories, and their usage varies across registers and communities. Their semantic ranges do, however, suggest different relationships among sensing, knowing, changing, and judging.

The Tolkāppiyam, an early Tamil grammatical and literary treatise whose precise dating remains disputed, discusses meyppāṭu (மெய்ப்பாடு), the outward manifestations of emotional states through the body. Within this tradition, emotional experience is closely connected to physical expression. Long before modern English became influential in India, Tamil intellectual traditions had developed accounts of embodied emotion.

That history undermines a simple division between a supposedly mental Indian understanding of emotion and a physiological Western one. There were multiple conceptual systems, developing independently in some respects while influencing one another in others.

Barbara Schuler's Theorising Emotions, a study of premodern Tamil treatises, examines this complexity. Tamil literary thinkers worked with historically situated classifications, frequently in conversation with Sanskrit aesthetic theory. A modern English word can be convenient for comparison without being a perfect description of an older concept.²

Religion and the cultivation of inner life

In Buddhist traditions, bhāvanā developed technical meanings associated with mental cultivation. Mettā-bhāvanā, for example, refers to cultivating loving-kindness. Compassion is both an emotion that can arise and a disposition that can be developed through intentional practice. Jain traditions likewise emphasized structured reflection and disciplines intended to transform conduct and mental orientation. These approaches treat aspects of emotional life as trainable.

Other religious movements placed different emphases on emotional experience. Between approximately the sixth and ninth centuries CE, Tamil Bhakti poetry gave love, longing, grief, separation, and devotion a prominent place in religious expression. The Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs expressed relationships with the divine through emotional language. Tears, song, bodily responses, and longing could become meaningful expressions of devotion.

Where some contemplative practices seek to observe and transform emotional states, devotional traditions may embrace intense emotional experience as part of religious life. This is not a rigid opposition: Bhakti traditions also cultivate devotion, while contemplative traditions recognize the importance of feeling. Indian intellectual history contained multiple approaches to emotion as something to examine, cultivate, express, transcend, or surrender to. The vocabulary of inner life developed within these competing and overlapping traditions.

When religion began speaking in regional languages

Religious movements also changed which languages could carry complex spiritual and emotional ideas. In twelfth-century Karnataka, Vachana poets such as Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi, and Allama Prabhu composed in Kannada, connecting personal devotion with ethical conduct, work, social relationships, and everyday experience. Their poetry often challenged the distance between religious authority and ordinary life.

In Kerala, Malayalam literary traditions developed through sustained interaction between regional Dravidian speech and Sanskrit. The Maṇipravāḷam tradition deliberately combined linguistic elements. Later devotional writers such as Ezhuthachan contributed to Malayalam literature through the retelling and reinterpretation of inherited religious narratives. Tamil devotional literature similarly established regional language as a vehicle for theological and emotional expression.

Religious practices generated new contexts for using words. Poetry introduced metaphors, commentaries formalized distinctions, and rituals repeatedly associated particular expressions with particular experiences. Over centuries, those expressions became part of ordinary speech.

Before English became an influential educational and administrative language, the subcontinent had already experienced numerous periods of linguistic and conceptual exchange. Modern Hinglish is one episode in a much longer history.

When languages meet, meanings move

The expansion of English education under colonial rule, followed by modern bilingualism, introduced another period of linguistic contact. Terms such as feeling, emotion, mind, sentiment, and consciousness became familiar translation equivalents for Indian words whose histories were different.

Repeated translation may influence how speakers understand existing vocabulary. A bilingual Hindi speaker might use feelings in contexts where another speaker might choose bhāvanā, ehsaas, or jazbaat. Over generations, such choices could affect both which words are preferred and which meanings are associated with them.

Gatha Sharma's research examines English code-mixing and lexical substitution in spoken Hindi in Greater Noida.³ The specific hypothesis that English feeling has changed the meaning of bhāvanā, however, remains unproven.

Borrowing can narrow semantic distinctions, but it can also create new ones. Bilingual speakers may acquire additional expressive resources rather than lose their inherited conceptual vocabulary. To establish what happened to bhāvanā, we would need historical corpora, contemporary speech data, and comparisons among speakers with different linguistic backgrounds. Meanings evolve through repeated acts of communication, translation, and interpretation; the direction of that change needs evidence.

Are thoughts purely mental?

What is the relationship between thought, emotion, and bodily experience? Is an emotion a state of the mind, a physical sensation, or something involving both? Linguistics alone cannot settle these questions.

Research on embodied cognition challenges strict divisions between mental and bodily processes. Lawrence Barsalou's theory of grounded cognition suggests that conceptual thought draws upon systems involved in perception, movement, and bodily experience.⁴ Other researchers, including Bradford Mahon and Alfonso Caramazza, caution that the involvement of sensory systems does not demonstrate that all concepts require bodily simulation.⁵

This debate also exposes a limit of our linguistic comparison. The historical association of bhāva with being does not imply that Sanskrit speakers regarded emotion as disembodied. Nor does the sensory history of feeling establish that English speakers understand emotions primarily as physiological events. Both linguistic traditions have expressions connecting emotions to the body, the mind, perception, and action.

Languages may differ in how they distribute these relationships across their vocabulary. Some words foreground states, others sensations, and others dispositions, transformations, intentions, or judgments. These distinctions may influence how speakers describe experience without determining the underlying nature of thought.

The difficulty of disbelief

If religious traditions have influenced the vocabulary through which people describe emotion, morality, intention, and personal experience, what happens when someone rejects religious belief?

Atheistic and non-theistic ideas are not foreign to Indian intellectual history. Cārvāka and Lokāyata traditions developed materialist critiques of supernatural claims. Classical Sāṃkhya did not require a creator deity. Certain Mīmāṃsā positions defended Vedic ritual without depending on a creator God. Buddhist and Jain traditions rejected a creator deity while maintaining their own accounts of karma, liberation, and ethical life.

These positions differ significantly, and not all amount to atheism in the modern naturalistic sense. Their existence nevertheless shows that Indian philosophical traditions had substantial conceptual resources for questioning divine creation and religious authority. Why, then, can atheism still be difficult to articulate as a social identity?

One possible explanation lies in the relationship between religion and everyday culture. Religious practices frequently organize family life, festivals, ceremonies, moral vocabulary, and community membership. A person may reject the existence of a deity while continuing to celebrate Diwali, participate in family rituals, use religiously inherited expressions, or describe actions through concepts such as karma and dharma. None of these necessarily implies theological belief.

Anthropologist Renny Thomas's research on atheism among Indian scientists documents how disbelief and participation in culturally religious practices can coexist.⁶ Stefan Binder's work on atheism and secularism in India likewise examines why nonbelief can occupy an uneasy position within social frameworks that presume some form of religious identity.⁷

There is a distinction between atheism as a philosophical proposition and atheism as a way of living within a particular society. Someone may find it intellectually straightforward to reject the existence of gods while discovering that familiar aspects of language and social life remain associated with religious traditions.

Can language make disbelief difficult?

Suppose a person understands morality through inherited terms such as dharma, emotional dispositions through bhāvanā, and consequences through karma. Does using these concepts make atheistic thinking more difficult?

Words do not carry theological commitments automatically. An English-speaking atheist can say "goodbye," an expression historically associated with "God be with ye," without believing in God. Likewise, a Hindi speaker can say Bhagwan jaane without intending a literal claim about divine knowledge. Inherited language can outlive the beliefs historically associated with it. Dharma, karma, and bhāvanā also have philosophical uses that are not reducible to belief in a creator deity.

Repeatedly available expressions may still influence which interpretations of experience feel familiar or natural. Religious narratives provide metaphors for suffering, responsibility, gratitude, uncertainty, and moral obligation. Those metaphors may remain culturally meaningful for speakers who reject their supernatural interpretations.

Conceptual possibility and habitual expression are different questions. Indian intellectual history repeatedly demonstrates that Indian languages make atheistic thought possible. Whether inherited religious vocabulary makes particular secular interpretations less immediately available is a separate empirical question.

Language also needs to be distinguished from social pressure. If someone hesitates to declare themselves an atheist because of family or community expectations, that cannot automatically be attributed to their vocabulary. Linguistic habits, social norms, institutions, and personal beliefs interact, but they are not the same thing.

A question worth investigating is how people reinterpret religiously inherited concepts when they no longer accept the beliefs historically associated with them. The proposed connection between vocabulary and the experience of disbelief is a hypothesis arising from this discussion, not a demonstrated consequence of the linguistic research.

Language as a record of human attention

A word's history cannot reveal the worldview of an entire civilization. Civilizations contain conflicting ideas, competing traditions, shifting institutions, and centuries of contact with other societies. Language preserves traces of those histories: philosophical debates introduce distinctions, poetry changes how experiences are described, and translation creates new associations. Everyday conversation can detach expressions from their original contexts.

The distinction between bhāva and feeling invites investigation of different conceptual histories. One word directs attention toward states of being, another toward sensing. Other words connect emotion to awareness, transformation, judgment, bodily expression, or intentional cultivation. These approaches overlap, and speakers can move among them.

The language we inherit supplies much of the vocabulary through which we first learn to describe ourselves. Linguistic change may make some distinctions less visible and others more familiar, without preventing particular thoughts. Religious inheritance may work similarly: we can reject a belief while retaining concepts, metaphors, practices, and emotional associations that developed around it.

We are not confined to the worldviews preserved in our languages. But neither do we begin thinking from outside them. Translating bhāvanā as feeling gives us a starting point for asking how language, religion, philosophy, and culture shape our descriptions of human experience. Even the categories through which we understand our own minds have histories.

Notes and further reading

The conversation also suggested the following reading. These entries have not been independently verified for this page:

• Jackson, Joshua Conrad, et al. "Emotion Semantics Show Both Cultural Variation and Universal Structure." Science, 2019.
• Shulman, David. "The Yogi's Human Self: Tāyumāṉavar in the Tamil Mystical Tradition." 1991.
• Bagchi, Tanima. "Body Representation in Linguistic Expressions of Emotions in Bangla." Conference abstract, 2023.