Singer Kishori Amonkar. Photo: Indian Express.
SALC 260751/SIGN 26075
Tue/Thu 2:40 – 4:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-6)
Please note that the instructor may make minor changes to the syllabus prior to the first day of classes on March 29, 2021.
Week 1: Making sense of senses
Session 01: What is a sense? What is a sensorium?
In our first meeting we will begin with a deceptively simple question: what is a ‘sense’? Is it simply an organ? A neurological phenomenon? A cognitive event? An intellectual construction? Building on these questions, we will explore the elements that constitute a ‘sensorium,’ a concept defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “centre within the brain in which sensations are united” but that includes embodied and behavioral practices as that possesses social and cultural dimensions. We will also briefly discuss two questions that frame the material of the course: to what extent are the senses historically and culturally constructed?
Exercise: During class we will we will conduct several experiments to ascertain 1) whether we can actually isolate individual sensory perceptions, 2) whether we all ‘perceive’ the same object with our senses, and 3) whether our senses convey more than cognitive information (e.g. emotional or psychological impressions). We will do so using ‘objects’ from South Asia including images, sounds, smells, and foods.
Readings:
Rotter, Andrew Jon. Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Introduction and Chapter 1: The Senses and Civilization.
Session 02: Orders of sense and sensory regimes.
In this session we will ask why we privilege certain senses over others, either epistemologically or aesthetically. In other words, why do we say ‘believe what you see, not what you hear’ or that ‘she has a taste for good music’? Our focus will be on the linguistic construction of sense and the conceptual logics underlying the way that cultures ‘order’ the senses. We will also find out why taste has historically been the most privileged sense in South Asian philosophy and art.
Readings:
King, Richard. “Chapter 7. Perception: Do We See Things as They Are?” Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999. 147-165.
Week 2: Taste
Session 03: What is taste?
We begin our journey through the senses with the most celebrated sense in South Asia: taste! What is ‘taste’? Does it lie in the object that we eat or drink, or does it lie in our subjective experience of that object? How many tastes are there? What does it mean to have ‘good taste’?
Exercise: We will taste several types of South Asian cuisine to determine whether we can identify the different flavors that tend to be distinguished in South Asian languages. We will also discuss what relationships these various flavors (and their combination) have to pleasure.
Key concepts: rasa, lazzat (lazza), gustatory
Readings:
Keune, Jon. “Chapter 4: The Complications of Eating Together.” Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. pp 103-127.
Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis. “On the political use of disgust in Gujarat.” South Asian History and Culture, 1 (no. 4), 557-576.
Session 04: Refining taste
In this session we will investigate classical works of literary and dramatic theory as well as philosophy and religion in order to understand how peoples of South Asia have used gustatory concepts to understand our experience of art, literature, performance, and God. We will reflect on what it means to ‘train’ one’s tongue, to appreciate complexity, and to have ‘refined’ taste.
Readings:
Jamal Elias. “Chapter Five: Beauty, Goodness, and Wonder.” Aisha’s Cushion.
Pollock, Sheldon. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. “1.1. The Basis of Rasa Theory in Drama.” pp. 47-55.
Week 3: Smell
Session 05: What and where is smell?
In this session we will chase after the most elusive of the senses: smell. What is a ‘smell’? What makes it good or bad? How does one describe a smell? And how does smell activate memory so effectively? We will survey how philosophers and litterateurs have conceptualized smell in South Asia from antiquity to the present and discuss what is ‘at stake’ with smell.
Exercise: In class we will smell several substances used in perfumery in South Asia and discuss whether it is possible to distinguish and qualify their characteristics.
Readings:
McHugh, James. “Chapter Two: Earth, wind, foul and fragrant: the theory of smelling and odors in medieval South Asia.” Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Session 06: The smell-scape
Without us realizing it, smell orients us within our physical and social world. In this session we will explore how peoples in South Asia have used smell to make distinctions of caste and class, to characterize immaterial objects, and to engineer their social and spatial worlds.
Readings:
Flatt, Emma. “Social Stimulants: Perfuming Practices in Sultanate India.” In Kavita Singh (ed.) Scent Upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan. Mumbai: Marg, 2018.
Lee, Joel. “Odor and Order: How Caste Is Inscribed in Space and Sensoria.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 37, no. 3 (December 2017): 470–90.
Week 4: Sound
Session 07: What is sound, actually?
What is ‘sound’? What makes a sound pleasant or unpleasant? How does sound carry meaning? In the absence of sound—for example, for someone who is deaf or hearing impaired—what does sound ‘mean’ conceptually, socially, aesthetically? How does one navigate the ‘soundscape’?
Readings:
Wilke, Annette, and Oliver Moebus. Sound and Communication : An Aesthetic Cultural History of Sanskrit Hinduism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Introduction, pp. 1-11.
Rowell, Lewis Eugene. “Chapter Three: Theory of Sound.” Music and Musical Thought in Early India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Doniger, Wendy. The Rig Veda: An Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Hymn 10.71, The Origins of Sacred Speech, pp 61-2.
Friedner, Michele and Benjamin Tausig. “The Spoiled and the Salvaged: Modulations of Auditory Value in Bangalore and Bangok.” Remapping Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Session 08: Hearing and listening
What is the difference between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’? What does it mean to ‘have an ear’ for something? Can one ‘refine’ their ear like they do their ‘taste’?
Exercise: in this class session we will listen to several works of ‘classical’ and ‘folk’ music from South Asia and make observations about how they produce or evoke thoughts, images, and emotions.
Readings:
Abū al-Fa̤zl ibn Mubārak. The Ain-i Akbari. Translated by H. Blochmann. Calcutta: Rouse, 1873. “The Imperial Musicians.” pp. 611-13.
Kabir, Namdev. Lyrics.
Śārṅgadeva, Saṅgīta-Ratnākara of Śārṅgadeva: Sanskrit Text and English Translation with Comments and Notes. Translated and edited by R. K. Shringy and Prem Lata Sharma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978. pp 2-13.
Beck, Guy L. [Part II. or Part III?] Sonic Theology. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Schofield, Katherine Butler. “Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika.” In Orsini, Francesca, and Katherine Butler Schofield. Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015. 407-421.
Week 5: Sight
Session 09: What does it mean ‘to see’?
How does sight work? Is it possible to see without being seen? Is there a realm of visuality or imagery that does not require the physical organ of the eyes? In this session we will map the conceptual terrain of occularity and imagery.
Readings:
Antal, and Archana Venkatesan. The Secret Garland: Aṇṭāl’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoli. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 22. Aṅkaṇmā Ñālattu, 23. Māri Maḻai Muḻañcil, pp 72-73.
Eck, Diana L. Darśan, Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Chapter One: Seeing the Sacred, pp. 3-22.
Hawley, John Stratton. “Why Did Surdas Go Blind?” Three Bhakti Voices, 248-263.
Session 10: What do images ‘do’?
How do visual images (be they two-dimensional or three-dimensional, representative or abstract) convey meaning? Can images sometimes do something more than convey meaning, such as compel us to perform certain acts? What is the difference between visual and aural language? We will explore these questions by closely studying a number of different objects from South Asia—including paintings, carvings, statues, and graffiti—in the context of primary and secondary readings on the nature of sight and visual perception.
Exercise: We will visit the Smart Museum Study Room for some ‘hands-on’ exercises with objects from South Asia in its collection.
Readings:
Minissale, Gregory. Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. “Chapter 4: Reading Reflexivity.” pp 204-58.
Graif, Peter. “Language as a thing seen,” Being and Hearing: Making Intelligible Worlds in Deaf Kathmandu. 85-96.
Week 6: Touch
Session 11: The haptic
What does it meant to know something through touch? And is our experience of ‘images’ only through sight, or do we use other senses and means to perceive, comprehend, and interact with them? In many South Asian traditions of thought, the visual and the haptic (the sense of touch) are closely intertwined and both play a role in an individual’s perception of space and their position within it (proprioception).
Readings:
Guru, Gopal. “Aesthetic of Touch and the Skin: An Essay in Contemporary Indian Political Phenomenology.” In Arindam Chakrabarti (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Pinney, Christopher. “Piercing the Skin of the Idol.” In Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (ed.), Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Session 12: Touch, transformation, and transubstantiation
Is it possible to touch without being touched? What does it mean to ‘share in the substance’ of something? In this session we will explore these questions in the context of religion, caste, and philosophy.
Kakar, Sudhir. “Radhasoami: The Healing Offer.” In J.S. Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan, The Life of Hinduism.
Jaaware, Aniket. “Chapter Six: (Un)touchability of Things and People.” Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 149-168.
Week 7: Synesthesia
Session 13: Sensory cross-over
Can you hear colors? Can you see tastes? At this point in the course we have seen multiple cases in which one sense is intimately linked to another or in which one sense ‘stands in for’ another. In this session we will explore how artists and thinkers have deliberately explored these ‘sensory cross-overs.’
Masselos, Jim, Jackie Menzies, Pratapaditya Pal, and Flora Reis Wenger. Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997.
Singh, Kavita. “Scent upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan.” In Scent upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan. Mumbai: Marg, 2018. 8-23.
Session 14: Engineering a synaesthetic experience
In this session we undertake a combined examination of raga mala texts, music, visual art, along with olafactory substances and ask whether synaesthetic experience is ‘natural’ or can be deliberately crafted.
Abuali, Eyad. “Words Clothed in Light: Dhikr (Recollection), Colour and Synaesthesia in Early Kubrawi Sufism.” Iran (2019): 1-14.
Khera, Dipti. The Place of Many Moods. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Chapter Three: Worlds of Pleasure and Politics of Connoisseurship. pp 89-115.
Week 8: Shaping the world and self through the senses
Session 15: Neuroplasticity and sensory training
In this session we will explore how individuals and communities have shaped their senses to specific ends and ask whether it is possible to ‘replace’ one sense with another. We will also see how sensory training and refinement have been part of cultural and political projects, including the project of modernity.
Readings:
Mehta, Ved. “Surmas and School,” in Face to Face. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. 15-27.
Vatsyayana, Mallanaga. Kāmasūtra. Translated and annotated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Books One and Two, pp 3-74.
Chattopadhyaya, Bankimachandra. “Aesthetic Faculties.” Dharmatattva or Anusilan (Translated as Essentials of Dharma). Translated by Manmohan Ghosh. Calcutta: Sribhumi, 1977. 170-178.
Session 16: Fashioning a sensible world
In this session we will see how some communities have attempted to create deliberately crafted sensory worlds through manipulation of the natural, built, and social environments.
Readings:
Adamjee, Qamar. “Seeing in a Sacred Manner the Shape of Things in the Spirit: Power and Wonder in Devotional Art.” In Qamar Adamjee, Jeffrey Durham, and Karin G. Oen, Divine Bodies: Sacred Imagery in Asian Art. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2018. pp. 1-9.
Husain, Ali Akbar. Perfume and Pleasure in 17th-Century Deccan. In Kavita Singh (ed.) Scent Upon a Southern Breeze: the Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan. Mumbai: Marg, 2018.
Week 9: Thinking through and with the senses
Session 17: Which comes first—sense or thought?
Ramanujan, A. K. “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Varela, Francisco, and Natalie Depraz. “Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation.” In Buddhism and Science : Breaking New Ground, edited by B. Allan Wallace, 195–230. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: University of California, 2009.