Sense and Sensuality in Indian Religious Literature
The Omnipresence of Smell: Love, Eroticism, and Power
The sense of smell is a powerful and provocative sense particularly adept at evoking subtle nostalgia, lustful emotion, and peaceful memories. The range of feelings brought about by the sense of smell is nearly unlimited and can be quite complex, especially if differing and contrasting feelings are elicited by the same smell and perhaps even within the same person. A particular poem, “Verse 1126” taken from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara’s “Treasury”, emphasizes the lustful emotions and romantic experiences that accompany the south winds as well as the significance of a particular sense object that holds an extremely valuable place in Indian religious culture – sandalwood. The strange inclusion of the sense of smell and the sense object of sandalwood in this poem, which deals nearly exclusively with the sense of touch, raises a variety of questions pertaining to the significance of this inclusion and the relationship between the senses of touch and smell as well as the senses in general. Meanwhile, upon examination of the Kama sutra the sense of smell and the scents of objects comes into play in a context of Indian literature associated not with aesthetic poetry but with a much more technical and instructive guidebook. In this case, the sense of smell is used to convey not simply emotion but allows the reader to make a wide range of inferences about characters, the text, and the values of the time period. Ultimately, despite stemming from the same sense of smell, the usage of this sense can differ widely between different genres of texts and even within a single genre conveying a multitude of emotions, facts that, though seemingly follow a trend, are in fact unique to the text.
The aforementioned poem from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara’s “Treasury” expresses romantic and mysterious undertones through metaphors and the establishment of a particular mood or rasa. This entire poem uses a complex and extended
The sense of smell is a powerful and provocative sense particularly adept at evoking subtle nostalgia, lustful emotion, and peaceful memories. The range of feelings brought about by the sense of smell is nearly unlimited and can be quite complex, especially if differing and contrasting feelings are elicited by the same smell and perhaps even within the same person. A particular poem, “Verse 1126” taken from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara’s “Treasury”, emphasizes the lustful emotions and romantic experiences that accompany the south winds as well as the significance of a particular sense object that holds an extremely valuable place in Indian religious culture – sandalwood. The strange inclusion of the sense of smell and the sense object of sandalwood in this poem, which deals nearly exclusively with the sense of touch, raises a variety of questions pertaining to the significance of this inclusion and the relationship between the senses of touch and smell as well as the senses in general. Meanwhile, upon examination of the Kama sutra the sense of smell and the scents of objects comes into play in a context of Indian literature associated not with aesthetic poetry but with a much more technical and instructive guidebook. In this case, the sense of smell is used to convey not simply emotion but allows the reader to make a wide range of inferences about characters, the text, and the values of the time period. Ultimately, despite stemming from the same sense of smell, the usage of this sense can differ widely between different genres of texts and even within a single genre conveying a multitude of emotions, facts that, though seemingly follow a trend, are in fact unique to the text.
The aforementioned poem from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara’s “Treasury” expresses romantic and mysterious undertones through metaphors and the establishment of a particular mood or rasa. This entire poem uses a complex and extended
Cited: Vatsyayana. (2003). Kamasutra. Oxford University Press. Vidyakara, & Ingalls, D. (2000). Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara 's "Treasury". Belknap Press of Harvard University.