Sense and scents: Kulsum’s smell-world and Khwabnama as an affective assemblage

Published in 1996, Khwabnama is a novel which details the end of the British colonial era and the creation of Pakistan. Throughout the novel, the author Akhtaruzzaman Elias provides his readers, who are presumably of the educated class, an alternative/subaltern narrative of Bangladesh’s political past. Yet the narrative does not unfold in a linear fashion but rather militates against the boundaries between dreams and reality and between the living and the dead. As I read Khwabnama it becomes a journey that entangles my subjectivity with the nation’s history and intimately connects my memories and senses with the novel’s characters. While all the characters in Elias’s novel are integral to the creation of this narrative that entangles its readers in a myriad of ways, it is Kulsum and her smell-world that exerts the strongest hold on me as a reader, forging a continuum of an affective atmosphere between Kulsum and myself. This paper will elaborate on this embodied and smelly reading of Khwabnama, contributing to the anthropology of sense and smell and a decolonial feminist path.