Urban scents: olfaction, memory, and the mediation of religious identity in India

This paper examines how olfactory experience mediates religious identity in contemporary urban India. Drawing on mixed-methods research conducted in three cities, i.e. Varanasi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. The study explores how religious smells such as incense, ritual smoke, floral offerings, and food prepared for worship function as sensory markers of sacred presence and belonging. Rather than treating smell as a cultural backdrop, the analysis shows that olfaction plays an active role in making religious spaces recognisable and ritual practices experientially complete. The findings demonstrate that urbanisation does not uniformly diminish religious smellscapes but reshapes the conditions under which they are encountered. Across urban contexts, religious identity persists not through sensory stability alone but through olfactory memory, which enables continuity even when ritual environments are altered by infrastructural change or sensory intrusion. Demographic factors and everyday practices shape access to religious smellscapes but do not constitute independent explanations for religious identity. By foregrounding smell as a mediating mechanism between ritual practice, memory, and urban transformation, the paper contributes to sensory anthropology and the study of lived religion, offering a framework for understanding how religious belonging is sustained in rapidly urbanising societies.