24 – Rethinking the Archive of the Urban: Sensory Histories of Modern South Asia

October 2, 2025
4:30 pm
H15
Recent years have seen a burgeoning of important scholarship on sensory history that argues for the importance of understanding the senses not as a physiological phenomenon alone, but as shaped by historical, cultural and political contexts. As the anthropologist of the senses, Constance Classen has pointed out, sensory perception is a cultural as well as a physical act. In particular, these scholars argue against an understanding of vision as hegemonic in modern life, and argue that modernity is a multi-sensory phenomenon. As hubs of the modern, scholars have found that cities are particularly fruitful sites to explore the complex relationship between the senses and the urban experience. While much of this literature has largely focused on North America and Europe there have been recent important interventions like Ziad Fahmy on Egypt that have provided us insights into the sensory histories of the urban spaces in the non-western world. This panel will consider the challenges and possibilities of using “sensory archives” to explore the social histories of cities in South Asia. We invite scholars who are interested in exploring histories of cities in colonial and post-colonial India through material that highlights the senses, either individually or collectively. We particularly welcome papers that make creative use of a variety of source materials in their research, either in terms of re-reading familiar archives or finding new materials for their research.

Convenor

Dr Aparna Balachandran

Presentations

Cement, Rayon, Stainless Steel, and Rubber: Toward a Sensory Microhistory of Twentieth Century India
Mitchell Lisa - Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Cultivating taste: Narratives of biscuits in colonial western India
Isaka Riho - Department of Area Studies, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
“Calcutta streets calling … I don’t see anything, I listen”: Semiotics of Urban Noise and Postcolonial Bengali Poetry as an Aural Archive of Urbanism
Das Sagar - Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Rupnagar, Punjab, India
Ray Dibyakusum - Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Rupnagar, Punjab, India
From Commentary to Comics: A Sensory Exploration of Football in Post-Colonial Calcutta
Biswas Anik - Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India
Listening to the City: The Protestant soundscape of Early Colonial Madras
Balachandran Aparna - Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi, India