#ECSAS 2025 participants, have you heard back from organisers abt the invitation letter for visa application? In my experience, this is the worst organising team. @unihd-sai.bsky.social

I am co-convenor of a panel. organisers aren’t responded to my emails requesting visa invitation letter + other information needed to complete the application. I have paid the registration fee & have the visa appointment on 20th July in Delhi. There are no other available slots till oct after this.

Hi! Anyone out here researching at BnF in Paris these days? Need a favor. Thanks.
@labnf.bsky.social

Reminder that you can still submit an abstract for the panel “Sensing the Past: New Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern South Asia” I am putting together with @nehavermani.bsky.social for this year’s ECSAS in Heidelberg.

Deadline: January 30, 2025.

ecsas2025.com/call-for-pan...

Amanda Herbert & @nehavermani.bsky.social explore global culinary translation, examining how European colonisers controlled spice routes & clashed with local practices of bodily autonomy. Using European and South Asian records they explore the use of spices & differing views of authenticity.

Considering such details with a focus on breeding lean yet powerful falcons are repeated in all the manuals, the second painting almost seems satirical for the man examining the falcon’s crop to ascertain its health, is himself quite stout and outsized.

The latter meant a diet mixed with sugar and or salt, croton seeds (jamalghota), poppy seeds, cinnamon, barley grain-sized musk pellets, asafetida (hing) resin, yellow myrobalan (amala), and cloves mixed with human milk.

This health checkup not only allowed the falconer to fix the next feeding schedule but also figure if purgatives were to be administered.

Falconers keep an eye on the weight of the birds by placing their fingers on its crop, a part of the gut system, located right under the throat. It was done to check the amount of food and water stored in said organ, as excess could disrupt digestion and produce lethargy.

Early modern 🦅 have been living rent-free in my head for the past many weeks as I chase a writing deadline. Pictured here are Mughal men inspecting their falcons. However, their act becomes more legible when read with falconry manuals produced at court. They
advise 🧵

The Perfumed Palate: Olfactory Practices of Food Consumption at the Mughal Court This article considers the centrality of smells, both fragrant and fetid, to food practices at the Mughal court. Mughal-era manuscripts and paintings frequently reference the smells of spices, frui...

Plugging in my open access article of food and smell at Mughal court here

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I miss going to trade fair. Brings back memories from my childhood!

Johnson’s baby powder advert from 1951 targeting Indian mothers not using their magical product for baby’s delicate skin that promised to soothe restlessness. Other claims: some fathers use it too (!), it works wonders for clearing out heat induced pimples, and great for the kids and adults.

The Indocentric Road Taken An ode to a “forgotten” India which needs to be given its rightful place in a Euro-American-centric globe ends up replacing one form of cultural supremacy with another. The obsession with an original ...

William Dalrymple knows zilch abt methodology & critical thinking.

“Historians will no doubt cringe at the reduction of the majestic diversity of the subcontinent’s religions, philosophies and sciences, as well as languages, into a singular “Sanskritic” sun”.

www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews...

Pineapple pizza haters, what are your sentiments about this 17th century Mughal meaty pineapple pulao recipe? 🍍

Since we are doing introductions here, I work on early modern South Asia history, particularly food practices, plant-animal interactions, & intersection between the histories of material cultures, science, emotion, and senses. For published work, check sheffield.academia.edu/nehavermani

This exchange is also interesting because we almost never hear about the use of paan/betel in non South or Southeast Asian contexts.

❤️ tender exchanges between powerful early modern men. In a letter to the Mughal Aurangzeb, the Safavid Shah expressed his pleasure at the continuous supply of betel leaves wrapped in bar-jama-i lahauri (a muslin cloth from Lahore) which kept the stuff fresh & green🍃🎁.