“Tracing the Everyday Sensory Heritage of Kolkata Streets”—“Sohorer Songbedon”: A museological review

Abstract

We do carry an impression of the places where we grow up or the places we touch in our daily life—somehow it gets mapped in our minds. That is how we create a sensory bonding with the place via our perception; how it smells, how it tastes, or what kind of a phonic place it is. But somehow, with the rapid pace of urbanization and mechanization of age-old occupations, these senses are being lost to the citizens in an urban area which we get to hear from our fore generations. “Tracing the everyday Sensory Heritage of Kolkata Streets”—“Sohorer Songbedon” is an attempt in a form of an exhibition from a group of enthusiastic geographers for the city of Kolkata (Calcutta) to bring back some iconic hereditary sounds and smells of the city to the mass. While visiting the exhibition, we interacted with the organizers and a group of visitors through some semi-structured interviews, and simultaneously some observations were also made. The purpose of the visit lied in experiencing how our city and its various pockets can emerge through its sensory scape without one being physically present there and also let the people know about such an initiative which was staged for the first time in the city. The aim was also to witness if these sensory components from the city perceptible could evoke any repercussions among the visitors or not. In museology, with the gaining importance of intangible expressions of heritage objects and interpretation of the visitors of the flowing information in the event, this one could have been used as a profound example of such kind in the future.