Smell Without Scent: Olfactory Evocation in Indian Children’s Picture books and India’s Foundational-Stage Curriculum

Priyanka Sharma

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.89666

Smell Without Scent: Olfactory Evocation in Indian Children’s Picture books and India’s Foundational-Stage Curriculum

Author(s)	Priyanka Sharma
Country	India
Abstract	India’s National Education Policy 2020 promotes storytelling-based pedagogy and, in the same document, the digital delivery of learning materials, while its curriculum frameworks ask children in the foundational stage to differentiate smells and tastes. This article examines how these commitments bear on stories about smell. It reads three openly licensed picture books published by Pratham Books and circulated in print, digital and audio editions through Story Weaver: Peacocks and Pakodas!, Singing in the Rain and The Nose of All Noses. In these ordinary text-and-image editions, odour is not physically transmitted, so their olfactory meaning depends on the interaction of words, images and the reader’s prior sensory associations. Distinguishing the transmission of an odour from its representation and its evocation, the study combines comparative close reading of text-image relations with qualitative analysis of NEP 2020, NCF-FS 2022 and NCF-SE 2023. Where the frameworks operationalise smell primarily through sensory discrimination, the selected stories give it additional narrative and mnemonic functions. The illustrations depict the act of smelling, its visible sources and, through two recurring conventions (closed eyes and a drawn trail of scent), the passage of odour itself; verbal narration specifies which odour is meant and connects it to particular experiences, memories and places. The Nose of All Noses offers a culturally specific instance of olfaction functioning as a narrative hinge between geographical settings, historical time and familial memory, a function that existing typologies do not identify as a principal category. The findings concern what the texts make possible, not what children experience. As a pedagogical implication, the article proposes the adult’s question about what a smell recalls as a point where curricular and literary approaches to smell can meet.
Keywords	olfaction; children’s picture books; sensory literacy; NEP 2020; NCF-FS 2022; digital reading; text-image relations; Indian children's literature
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-10-13
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.89666

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Smell Without Scent: Olfactory Evocation in Indian Children’s Picture books and India’s Foundational-Stage Curriculum

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