Bengaluru: Artist Indu Antony began her lecture on the smells of Bengaluru by breaking some hearts. She transported the audience to the entrance of Garuda Mall on Brigade Road and asked if they could recall the smell of freshly baked cookies from the Cookie Man stall. And as the audience sniffed that imaginary smell with smiles on their faces, she shattered the illusion.
“It’s a perfume. There are no ovens in the store,” she said as the packed house at Fandom at Gilly’s Redefined, Koramangala, collectively gasped.
Antony’s lecture centred around her project Vāsané, a smell archive of Bengaluru. It was part of Pint of View, a lecture series, being held in pubs and bars across the country.
Vāsané was envisioned as a counterpoint to the visual overload of the IT capital. A break from the screens that dominate the city and an opportunity to use and understand an often-overlooked sense—smell.
Antony also pointed out that Bengaluru’s landlocked nature meant that the distinct saltiness associated with coastal cities is missing. It’s what made her go in search of an olfactory identity for the city.
“I tried my best to think about it as one particular smell—what does a perfume called Bangalore smell like? But I immediately let go of that idea,” she said.
Instead, Antony spoke to around 300 people across the city about smell.
“A lot of people said, ‘It’s full garbage ma’, others asked if we were part of the ‘garbage industry’ or BBMP,” she laughed.
Sambar, cigarettes & cut grass
Antony created the Vāsané map with the 137 smells that emerged from the survey. The map identifies which smell is most associated with which Bengaluru neighbourhood.
She’s narrowed down the top 12 and distilled them into scents.
They are, in no particular order, sambar, filter coffee, Iyengar Bakery sponge cake, Cubbon Park freshly cut grass, Mysore Sandal Soap, Bellandur Lake, Church Street cigarette, garbage, Spice Market, flower market, beer and Karaga Festival.
She shared the story of the Church Street cigarette with the audience. During her research, someone told her Church Street reminds them of their breakup.
“She said she was standing at that corner near Empire (an eatery in the neighbourhood). A lot of people were smoking cigarettes, and there were a lot of cigarette butts in the rainwater. She can distinctly remember that smell.”
Antony said a lot of people spoke about that particular corner, which led her to include it in the final 12. “Distilling it wasn’t an easy process. We were giving plastic dabbas to different pubs, saying please fill it with all the butts people are smoking,” she laughed.
Sifting through the cigarettes doubled up as a consumer survey. “We realised a lot of people are smoking Ice Burst these days. But we moved that aside and kept Gold Flake, because that had that tobacco smell. Gudang Garam was an absolute no-no,” she said as the audience laughed.
Antony published the 12 smells along with a book and the smell map in 2022, after three and a half years of research.
“It was not just about preserving scents. The vials act as a memory portal, turning the book into a portable museum of Bengaluru’s emotional geography. It archives lived memory rather than official heritage,” said Antony.
Antony was also approached by many to sponsor the book. But their money came with conditions.
“They said I should remove the smell of garbage or the smell of Bellandur Lake, or burnt cigarettes. I was then thinking about [the choice between] integrity and ethics of doing a book like this, and a lot of money. I went ahead with ethics and self-published it,” said Antony.
The tedious process of distilling and self-publishing means only 200 copies exist. But she invites people to come smell her creations at her studio, Kāṇike, in Cooke Town.
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Archive of vulnerability & memory
Vāsané exists at the intersection of Antony’s fascination with smell and her commitment to public art.
Antony is the founder of the self-publishing initiative Mazhi Books. She’s also founded Cecilia’ed, a project to reclaim the streets of Bengaluru, and Namma Katte, a place where women can gather in public to do nothing.
“I work within my surroundings. It’s my material and my method,” Antony said.
Her first project that explored smell was titled Vincent Uncle. Born and raised in Dubai, Antony grew up around the familiar presence of attar. But this wasn’t the smell that lingered in her memory. She spoke about how smell becomes a fragile archive of vulnerability, carrying what often remains unspeakable.
Then she punctured the heavy air with the hilarious reveal of this indescribable smell—“It’s basically just sweat.”
She collected it from a lot of people in Kerala. “I was collecting it to try and understand what that meant to me,” she said.
When asked by an audience member how one goes about collecting sweat, she laughed and clarified that it was collected from people she knew and not strangers.
“I’d say work out a little bit more. I’ll give you some bottles, just collect it [sweat]. And in Kerala, it’s not so hard to sweat, you’re having a bath and sweating at the same time,” she said.
Smell is the first sense to evolve. Which is why, for Antony, returning to it challenges the visual dominance around us.
Seen as a very negative sense, she’s been asked multiple times why she wants to work with smell—it’s difficult to capture and even more difficult to display. But this abstractedness is precisely what drew her in.
“Smell was sidelined because it was too complex and hard to control,” Antony said. On a more personal note, her sister, Chindu, lost her sense of smell during the pandemic. It showed Antony how vital the nose was to daily life.
Apart from Vincent Uncle and Vāsané, Antony has worked on two other archives of smell.
Whispers of Pastoral Scents, exhibited at the Serendipty Arts Festival last year, is an olfactory exploration of the pastoral communities of the Deccan Plateau. Smells she captured include smoke from household fires, rain on dry soil, dung used as fuel, and the aroma of stored fodder.
The Earth That Waits brought the smells of petrichor to the deserts of the Gulf.
The one-hour lecture ended with Antony opening up the floor for questions and inviting the audience to explore the five scents she had brought with her—Iyengar Bakery sponge cake, Cubbon Park grass, cigarettes from Church Street, sambar, Karaga festival, and of course, garbage.
The question-answer session lasted as long as the lecture did, with the audience treating Antony as their smell doctor.
Questions ranged from “Do you know a smell that can repel humans?” to “Why does my mother have such a sensitive nose, and does it have anything to do with the shape of it?”
A common thread that ran through the second hour was how to train your nose to identify distinct smells. To that, Antony had a simple answer, delivered in a delightful Bangalorean accent, “Just smell ya.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)