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In Sensorium examines how fragrance has been used to demarcate who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned. At the heart of this work is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste, rape culture, patriarchy, war, and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a verdant land constantly denuded and extracted, a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonization, capitalism, and climate change. At once memoir and reckoning, In Sensorium interlaces memories of childhood in the South, Midwest and New York with a universe of memories and scent-a sensorium-while offering a critical, alternate history of South Asia from a Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. “I am interested in non-fiction that pushes form, language and ways of moving in fiction that pulses with resistance,” they declare.From the critically acclaimed author of Bright Lines comes a brilliant and expansive collection of meditations on the history of South Asia through the lens of our most primordial yet sense: scent. Tanaïs’s writing style is in itself a form of dissent-they consciously embrace purple prose in a culture that loves a bare, spare sentence. The book covers expansive territory, drawing connections between the nation of Islam, Black resistance and Muslims in America, invisibilised Native American histories, non-monogamy across caste lines, and dark-skinned, subaltern goddesses such as Shyamala Devi, whose offerings include menstrual rags. “The narrative of sustainability invisibilises the labour of femmes of colour in Bangladesh who make fast fashion,” they note, referencing the Rana Plaza fire in Dhaka in 2013. Even now, they are a firm devotee of the coexistence of the high-low in fashion and luxury.

Tanaïs writes of a childhood in the American South: learning how to dress from Black and Latina femmes who subverted ideas of sexuality and propriety, and taking notes from a tenacious mother who embodied an aesthetic of defiance that mixed precious gold jewellery with drugstore lipstick. To read In Sensorium is to be keenly alive to the need for beauty and joy as essential-as armour, particularly for those who are simultaneously invisibilised and hypervisible.

Perfume is political, particularly for dark-skinned Dalit and Muslim femmes, who have been depicted by great Indian epics as “smelly, filthy and destructive”.