A The World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for air quality include recommended maximum levels for particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. The main threat within the Delhi smog is a form of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. This material can permeate the lungs and enter the bloodstream, circulating throughout the body and poses risks for new and preexisting cardiovascular and respiratory issues (WHO 2021). One day in mid-November, the 24 hour PM2.5 reading hit an annual record of 493 µg/m3 on the AQI, more than 30 times the WHO maximum of 15 µg/m3 (Al Jazeera, “Delhi air”). With the air quality plummeting and as a precaution for children, all primary schools in New Delhi were ordered to close. Classes were moved online in much the same way as they were during the Covid-19 pandemic – another airborne threat to health still fresh in people’s memory (Al Jazeera, “India’s capital New Delhi shuts all primary schools”, November 14th, 2024). The effects of extremely toxic air can pose problems not only for physical health but also for mental health. Air pollution can cause hypopnea and apnea, leading to feelings of anxiety and lethargy (Alrahbeni et al. 2024), and in New Delhi, some psychiatrists are investigating links between elevated pollution levels and a variety of mental health conditions, including developmental issues in children, anxiety and depression, and cognitive decline in the elderly (Umar 2024).

Many factors contribute to the pollution in Delhi and across the northern Gangetic plains. Vehicular emissions from an increasingly car-centric society, coal combustion for electricity, and dust from the urban cycles of demolition and construction all contribute to diminished air quality year-round. However, in the late fall and early winter months, when agricultural fields are burned following harvest and the air becomes cool and dense, the pollution and particulate matter remains trapped for longer (Yadav 2024). Heavy metals and other chemicals released by fireworks set off for Diwali and the wedding season that follows also contribute (Ghertner 2020). There also exists a diurnal cycle pollution in addition to the seasonal one. Each day, until the sun heats up the ground and convection currents begin to circulate the wind, the first few hours on either side of dawn remain the most hazardous for human activity. Doctors caution against exercising during these times, as the increased oxygen demands of the body draw particulate matter deeper into the lungs and increase the hazards of exposure (Gandhiok 2024). The suggestion that exercise – an activity usually touted as salubrious – could be hazardous to health is one of the many contradictions exposed by living with pollution.

Another implied contradiction is that, in the face of discourses surrounding toxicity, choking, illness, and premature death, life persists. My own experience of waking up, riddled with anxiety and inflammation led me to consider the ways in which the sensorial and experiential dimensions are represented in literature pertaining to conditions of urban smog. This intervention recognizes two related “technoscientific epistemic habits” noted by Michelle Murphy (2009, 495-96). These habits include the discussion of toxicity in terms of technical, scientific models of molecular compositions, parts per million, and abstract models on one side, and on the other, the collection of data with respect to effects on the human body. At worst, this “damage-based research” enables discourses that situate India as dirty or backwards on the international stage and, within a country that itself already steeped in politics of purity of various forms, can lead to the surveillance and pathologization of “already dispossessed communities” (Murphy 2009, 496), such as agricultural workers or construction labourers, for example.

For some people in New Delhi, the abstract ideas of AQI and epidemiological statistics may be less relevant than other perspectives that account for how “bad air” can be an “intimate” experience of precarity (Negi and Srigyan 2023, 15). Ghertner (2020), invoking Ato Quayson’s (2007) concept of “aesthetic nervousness,” suggests that the Delhi smog is disorienting for residents and represents “a particular intensification of the perspectival sensorium in which the very medium of life is made strange” (2020, 134). Therefore, in the rest of this paper, I attempt to sense through the smog and observe ways in which sensorial re-orientation may illuminate some experiential dimensions of living in toxicity. Some of the observations that follow are made using the framework of my own body. As Sarah Pink suggests, the “experiencing, knowing body is central to the idea of sensory ethnography” (Pink 2015, 28). However, my own body is new to this city, having only arrived three days earlier. It is also a body that has had the privilege of living for most of its life in places that do not experience such extreme cycles of environmental pollution. Therefore, I cannot and do not claim to speak for others who live in the city, and my observations of other peoples’ activities are meant to be read as observations of life activities amidst the smog, not necessarily in response or reaction to it.

I decide to conduct my observations at The Garden of Five Senses, a 20-acre park in Saidul Ajaib village, an area of South Delhi. Working from Dara Culhane’s (2017) exercises for sensory ethnography, I am particularly interested in the exercise regarding epistemology (2017, 62), and how engaging in multisensory ethnography may challenge some of the technocratic framings discussed above. Though I use photos to anchor some of the significant moments of this jaunt, I go to the garden with the intention of engaging each of the classical five senses, observing garden-goers who also do, and keep an open mind regarding other kinds of sensory formations might be relevant to the exercise. I overcome the ambiguous anxiety I feel, leave my apartment, and walk to the corner where a motorcycle taxi is waiting. He gives me a questioning look when I put on my N-95 mask – a form of material and technological mediation gestured to by Pink (2024) above – but then smiles and hands me a helmet (see fig. 3). The low visibility is disorienting prompting some drivers to slow down, much like during blizzards in northern climates (see fig. 4).