Tibetan censer, 15th-16th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accn. No. 1987.416.2.
Vocabulary
| olfaction | gandha |
| bū |
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.
Lab/Discussion:
In this week’s section we will smell different spices and fragrances, using what we have learned from this week’s and the previous week’s readings to build a vocabulary for expressing the olfactory and gustatory.