59 – Sensing the Past: New Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern South Asia

October 3, 2025
8:30 am
H01
While sensory history is a rapidly growing field, scholars of South Asia have only recently begun to incorporate the sensate into their historical analyses. This panel seeks new avenues for the study of early modern and modern South Asia (16th to 20th centuries) by approaching the subcontinent’s past via the history of the senses. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of sensory history, it facilitates discussions across multiple fields, including history, art history, ethnomusicology, literature, religion, gender, and material culture studies. Inspired by a ‘sensory turn’ in the humanities, this panel investigates how people situated in various social, political, religious, and linguistic contexts made meaning of their everyday sensory experiences. It highlights ways in which embodied sensory experiences and ideas about the sensorium were entangled with questions of caste, class, gender and sexuality, aesthetics, affect, religious rituals, kingship, and the state. How does sensory history help us understand the continuities and changes that accompanied the onset of modernity in South Asia and the transition from pre-colonial to colonial regimes and sensibilities? In what ways did protocols of the senses engender and articulate difference, thereby complicating cross-cultural encounters? How did elites and non-elites, different religious communities, and European travelers and colonizers theorize the sensorium? We welcome papers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds that explore the above-outlined themes. This could entail longue durée and trans-regional approaches to sensory history or case studies and microhistories focusing on a particular community and a specific sense (sight, smell, hearing, touch, or taste).

Convenors

Gianni Sievers
Neha Vermani

Presentations

Sensing Wonder in Munīr Lāhorī’s “Manifestation of the Rose”
Pishbin Shaahin - The Queen's College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Sultans of Delight: The Politics of Pleasure at the Mandu Sultanate
Vermani Neha - Independent, Independent, New Delhi, India
Sounds of Revolt, Echoes of Defeat: Delhi’s Soundscape and the Uprising of 1857
Sievers Gianni - Utrecht University, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Arabic Echoes and Persian Refrains: Devotional Poetry and Intersonicality in Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century North India
Leese Simon - Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The loss of taste: memory, the senses and everyday eating in Delhi
Lambert-Hurley Siobhan - University of Sheffield, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Spiritual Markets and Sensory Regimes: Gift Exchange and Early Hindi Song in the Construction of Sufi Authority
Hofmann William - Institute of Ismaili Studies, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, United Kingdom
‘To make a homeland in the heart’: Iranian listeners of Indian music in Mughal South Asia
High Zoë - University of Chicago, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
Sensing the landscape: Colonial transformations of smell- and soundscapes in the Nilgiri Mountains, South India
De Simone Daniela - Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Trinco Letizia - Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium