Smell and memory

I've never read Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, but I've certainly heard about the famous madeleine episode in which the narrator's experience of seeing, smelling, and tasting a madeleine leads to a flood of past memories (and a voluminous novel!). This is perhaps the best-known contemporary account of the incredible power of the sense of smell, and its profound connection to our deepest emotions. The smell of a favorite dish, of a lover's cologne, of petrichor after summer rains, of a flower: all of these smells can immediately and instantaneously transport us to a different time and place and emotional state.

It is perhaps for this reason that smell plays an extremely important role in Indic culture. David Shulman has written a fascinating article called "The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India" (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 123–133) in which he explores some of the connections among smells, memories, emotions, and aesthetics. 



The power of odor in evoking memory goes so deep that the word used for karmic traces, the remnants of countless past lives that are present in our present, is vāsanā, which means "perfume" or "odor". Shulman notes that

Each 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, but experiencing again a specific context, and … by coming into contact with beauty. (p. 123)

It is a strange fact that while we can conjure up a mental image of something or someone we've seen, or replay an auditory experience in our heads, we cannot remember the smell or the taste of something, only our attitudes towards that experience. Smell (and taste) requires an immediacy, a direct sort of contact with the source, in order to produce its effect. This is why Shulman says that "to smell is to remember, and thus to become aware of separation" (p. 124). It is this simultaneous presence and absence, this concrete, proximate source of the smell and the abstract memory of the absent beloved who is nevertheless here in memory, which gives to smell (and, I suspect, to taste as well) a tartness absent in the other senses. Again Shulman sums it up, noting that "the notions of smell are deeply bound up with one another as well as with the closely related notion of traumatic separation, the concomitant emotions of unsatisfied longing and desire, and the consciousness of distance and loss. How are we to understand this relation?" (p. 125)

How, indeed? For Shulman, the answer may be found in Śaiva metaphysics, in "a congruence between odors and the Hindu concept of an ultimate but hidden reality, often described as sūkṣma—subtle, delicate, invisible, seemingly immaterial, but actually constituting an essential level of being that is far more pervasive and more significant than everyday, perceived phenomena" (p. 125). In a beautiful long passage from which I will only cite selectively, he writes that

an odor constitutes a specific, undeniable, but still invisible presence. Intangibility here is an argument for reality, for a force representing a more essential form of existence … Vāsanā is the karmic trace itself, the subtle stuff of remembering, an intangible, evocative, ambiguuous, yet highly specific presence latent in the mind. We are dealing not with an indeterminate fantasy but with an unknown or only partly known reality … [W]hereas the symbol (especially the linguistic symbol) is a gross and partial representation of the partly absent signified, the scent is itself [my emphasis] the elusive essence given to manifestation in other, cruder forms. (p. 126)

The entire paper is worth reading closely for his fine analysis of the motif of smells in an astonishing variety of texts, in Sanskrit (the Abhijñānasākuntalam of Kālidāsa, the Kāvyaprakāśa of Mammaṭa, the Caurapañcāśikā of Bilhaṇa, the Gītagovinda of Jayadeva) and in Tamil (the Paripāṭal, the Kalittŏkai, the Kuruntŏkai, the Irāmāvatāram of Kampan, and the Tēvāram of Cuntarar). To his long list I can add one more example, this time from a Vaiṣṇava source: the Nācciyār Tirumŏli of Āṇṭāḷ. The verse reads:

கருப்பூரம் நாறுமோ கமலப்பூ நாறுமோ
திருப் பவளச் செவ்வாய் தான் தித்தித்திருக்குமோ
மருப்பொசித்த் மாதவன் தன் வாய்ச் சுவையும் நாற்றமும்
விருப்புற்றுக் கேட்கின்றேன் சொல்லாழி வெண் சங்கே!

karuppūram nārumō kamalappū nārumō
tirup pavaḷac cĕvvāy tān tittit tirukkumō
maruppŏcitta Mātavan tan vāyc cuvaiyum nārramum
viruppurruk kēṭkinrēn coll āli vĕṇ caṅkē!

As translated by Vidya Dehejia:

Do they smell of camphor
or of the lotus bloom?
Do they taste sweet
his sacred lips of coral hue?
O white conch
from the fathomless sea,
I long to know,
tell me the taste,
the fragrance
of the lips of Mādhavan
who broke the elephant's tusk.
(p. 99, Āṇṭāḷ and Her Path of Love: Poems of a Woman Saint from South India)