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. 

A Sanskrit benediction

The great sixteenth-century intellectual Appayya Dīkṣita opens his introductory treatise on Sanskrit poetics, the Kuvalayānanda or the "Joy of the Water-Lily", with three beautiful benedictions, or maṅgalācaraṇas, dedicated to the Devī, to Śiva and Pārvatī, and to Kṛṣṇa / Mukunda. I'm trying to read this work right now along with my friends BW and MS, and we worked out rough-ish translations for these verses. The opening verse, in particular, is beautifully structured both in terms of its aural effect and in terms of its coherence of meaning.

amarī-kabarī-bhāra-bhramarī-mukharī-kṛtam |

dūrīkarotu duritaṁ Gaurī-caraṇa-paṅkajam || 1 ||

|| 1 || 

May the lotuses that are the feet of Gaurī,

        resonant with the buzzing bees that are the dense, braided locks of goddesses,

dispel impurity!

As befits a work that attempts to (re)define the hugely complex world of Sanskrit formalist literary theory, this opening verse is worthy of deeper analysis, in order to figure out precisely how it depicst a fully coherent poetic image. In particular, Nirañjan Miśrā's twentieth-century Hindi commentary on the Kuvalayānanda sheds some useful light on the poetic images here. 

Bhavabhūti on language

The Sanskrit dramatist Bhavabhūti is reckoned second only to Kālidāsa in his command over the Sanskrit language, his exquisite depiction of the emotions, and his mastery over the art and the science of literary composition. His Uttararāmacarita is a fascinating and powerful retelling of the seventh chapter of the Rāmāyaṇa, the Uttara Kāṇḍa. This powerful, even tragic, chapter is in fact not included in many versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, in particular Kampan's Irāmāvatāram (also known as the Kamba-ramayanam).

One of the things that makes Bhavabhūti so fascinating is his self-conscious reflection on the power of language and art. While Sanskrit literature in general abounds in such reflection—indeed, there is a Ṛgvedic verse on speech uttered in the voice of Speech personified, which promises to bestow speech upon those Speech favors—Bhavabhūti seems to take it to a whole new level in his work. One verse in particular struck me, because of its self-contained meaning, its particular signification in the immediate context of the play, and its more general meaning in the context of literary works as a whole.

laukikānāṃ hi sādhūnām arthān vāg anuvartate |
ṛṣīṇāṃ punar ādyānāṃ vācam artho 'nuvartate ||

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Given the eagerness with which it is quoted and re-quoted (often without attribution), there surely must be some truth to Benjamin Disraeli's complaint against that body of knowledge which takes as its subject the analysis of aggregates of information. (Perhaps this can be proven statistically!) 

Now I have no problems with the actual content of the discipline; on the contrary, I am deeply fascinated by the complexity and the power of statistics, even given how little I know, and am always interested in learning more about the field. Nevertheless, it seems true that human beings are simply not hard-wired to intuit probability and statistics; we would much rather deal in hard certainties than in fuzzy likelihoods. (Think about how easy it is to catch a ball, and about how complicated the actual physical model has to be to explain it!) This is perhaps why there is such blatant abuse of statistics everywhere, from tabloids to otherwise-respectable economic journals. Were this field of knowledge a living creature, tender-hearted defenders would have undoubtedly established numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Statistics throughout the world by now.