Lessons from <i>Dawakhana</i>

This essay stems from a collaborative art installation titled Dawakhana, which was part of a solo show by Seema Kohli titled Khula Aasman held in Delhi from January 18, to February 18, 2025. Etymologically, dawakhana is a Persian word meaning house of medicine and used to describe a clinic or pharmacy. The art installation was a tribute to Seema’s grandfather Hakim Chunni Lal Kohli’s clinical practice in Pind Dadan Khan in pre-Partition India. Kohli received training in the iconic Tibbia College in Karol Bagh, Delhi, which was the citadel of training ayurvedic and Unani (two systems of medical knowledge in addition to allopathy) practitioners. His practice was embedded in a worldview in which nutritional well-being went hand-in-hand with medicalized well-being. In this essay, we take you through Hakim Chunni Lal Kohli’s archives and the cross-disciplinary collaboration between Seema Kohli, the artist, and Ishita Dey, a sensory ethnographer, to ask how we work with sense memory in food studies. As part of the art installation, we recreated rose and fruit preserves critical to the idea of nutritional well-being. Through discussing the politics involved in the sensory recreation of the exhibit and the need for cross-disciplinary languages, this study makes it clear that senses are not reduced to descriptive markers for food. This essay examines the challenges of representing the politics of erasure through recreating smells that were left behind by the Kohli family.