The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India

David Shulman*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

In one of the most famous, and most poignant, verses in classical Sanskrit literature, Kalidasa's amnesiac hero, Dusyanta, gives voice to the strange disquiet that arises in him as he overhears a beautiful song: Seeing rare beauty, hearing lovely sounds, even a happy man becomes strangely uneasy… perhaps he remembers, without knowing why, loves of another life buried deep in his being. (Abhijnanasakuntala 5.2 in Miller 1984:134) The verse sets the scene for a dramatic and evocative enactment of the themes of human memory and forgetting; the royal hero is about to repudiate his recent bride, Śuntalā, whom he fails to recognize when she reappears in his court—for his memory of their recent nuptials and passionate love has been completely erased by an irascible sage's curse. But the verse just cited, which adumbrates this unhappy encounter, focuses rather on the sudden recovery, through aesthetic experience, of earlier memories that have been "lost" to consciousness. The unease and sense of longing that a person feels upon encountering beauty are here attributed to the sudden reemergence of buried, karmic memories from earlier births. The verse presents us with two examples, visual and auditory, of the aesthetic trigger capable of producing this type of response; sight and sound are, perhaps, the most obvious vehicles for conventional aesthetic perception (etymologies aside). But the Hindu tradition in fact refers to the phenomenon of karmic memory generally by another term, drawn from the realm of smell. Such a buried, unconscious memory carried over from a person's former lives is known as vāsanā—literally, an odor. Each one of us bears a nearly endless number of such odors within his mind without being aware of their presence; but these scent-memories are activated by the conjunction of formerly familiar circumstances, by experiencing again a specific context, and, as we have seen, by coming into contact with beauty (see O'Flaherty 1984: 220-30). The notion of vāsanā is the conventional Hindu explanation for the universal sense of deja vu: the reawakened "odor" presents us with a real, although intangible, memory from our distant past, from beyond the boundary of this particular present experience of birth and growth; if we think that we have been in this place before, seen this sight, heard this music, it is because we indeed have-perhaps more than once, perhaps a great many times-even though we cannot recall the precise circumstances of those former occasions. The subtle, revivified "scent" is the bearer of this powerful but ambiguous knowledge, whose content is rarely explicit and defined. Note that the emotion that habitually accompanies this process is one of wonder and amazement, and at the same time of disquiet and uneasy longing. Vasana makes the past present again, but at the same time, as with any memory, it establishes a gap, a distance, a sense of loss.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Smell Culture Reader
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages411-426
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781040290446
ISBN (Print)9781845202132
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Jim Drobnick 2006.

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