59 – SENSING THE PAST: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY MODERN AND MODERN SOUTH ASIA

October 3, 2025, 8:30 am, Room 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).

Conveners

Gianni Sievers
Neha Vermani

Presentations

Spiritual Markets and Sensory Regimes: Gift Exchange and Early Hindi Song in the Construction of Sufi Authority

William Hofmann – Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, United Kingdom

Sultans of Delight: The Politics of Pleasure at the Mandu Sultanate

Neha Vermani – Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom

Sensing Wonder in Munīr Lāhorī’s “Manifestation of the Rose”

Shaahin Pishbin – The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

‘To Make a Homeland in the Heart’: Iranian Listeners of Indian Music in Mughal South Asia

Zoë High – University of Chicago, Chicago, United States

Arabic Echoes and Persian Refrains: Devotional Poetry and Intersonicality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North India

Simon Leese – University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Sounds of Revolt, Echoes of Defeat: Delhi’s Soundscape and the Uprising of 1857

Gianni Sievers – Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

Sensing the Landscape: Colonial Transformations of Smell- and Soundscapes in the Nilgiri Mountains, South India

Daniela De Simone – Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Letizia Trinco – Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

The Loss of Taste: Memory, the Senses and Everyday Eating in Delhi

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley – University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom