Scent upon a Southern Breeze: Synaesthesia and the Arts of the Deccan

For decades, art historical studies of Deccani art were few and far between. Only in recent years has scholarly interest grown, resulting in major advances in our knowledge of the region’s cultural achievements. The 2015 exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York was a stimulus for further research.To honour this exhibition and the scholarship it embodied, The Aesthetics Project arranged a symposium Nauras: The Many Arts of the Deccan in January 2015 and co-sponsored an exhibition of the National Museum’s Deccani artefacts.The proposed volume brings together contributions from the symposium, the exhibition and beyond, to give a sense of emergent research in the arts of the Deccani sultanates. An important feature of the essays is the emphasis on synaesthesia: where a history of art encompasses experiences that are beautiful not just to the eye, but to the ear and the nose. The book will give readers new information about cultural manifestations and insights into new interdisciplinarities within the field of art history.