"A strange smell wafting from her body flooded his senses all night — a smell at once pleasant and nauseating. It flowed from every part of her body: under her arms, around her breasts, her hair, her belly, and it permeated every breath he took. (...) Even though he was familiar with the smell radiating from every pore of the girl’s body, he couldn’t quite describe what it was. (...) It was something primal and timeless — like the relationship between man and woman."

The scent of a woman's body plays a central role in 'Boo' (Odour), a short story by the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Through the way the woman — described only as a 'ghatan', a young woman from the hills, and 'she' in the story — smells, Manto locates her as an object of desire, the spoil of the protagonist Randhir's sexual exploits on a monsoon day, and also as someone of lower social standing than Randhir, presumably along the intersecting axes of caste and class. The "strange" smell of the peasant woman's body is "at once pleasant and nauseating" to Randhir. It is an indicator, at once, of her sexual appeal and her identity.

'Boo' is not a unique example of how writers use smell as a narrative device to write about the many-layered ways smell — the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates — shapes our societies. In November 2024, Dr Amelia "Ally" Louks — an English scholar currently teaching at Cambridge University — went viral for a photograph she posted on X, formerly Twitter. It showed Dr Louks holding a physical copy of her doctoral thesis titled, 'Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose'.

The post amassed over 250000 likes and 120 million views, and triggered an intense online debate about how the politics of smell is all-pervasive in the literature we consume and the world at large. And it is still ongoing. Recently, Dr Louks commented on how smell is often weaponised against Indians in the West, and her comment re-ignited the discourse over how prejudicial perceptions of smell or odour create and perpetuate racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes like "ethnic food smells" or "Indians stink".

"We tend to think that our desire to avoid bad smells is an instinctual, protective mechanism, but evidence suggests that we are taught which smells to find disgusting, since, the disgust response is almost entirely lacking in children under the age of two," Dr Louks wrote in The Conversation in December 2016. "The sense of smell, then, is shaped by society and is influenced by the prejudices that pervade it."

In India, the caste system and its obsessions with spiritual purity and cleanliness play into our olfactory anxieties and add another dimension to the politics of smell. Stereotypes about the smell of meat and how it is an affront to the sattvik sensibilities of savarna vegetarian Hindus dominate social media discourses and primetime debates about meat-eating in a country where more than 90% of the population consumes some form of animal-based protein (fish, meat, or eggs) daily, weekly, or occasionally.

The visceral emotional and physical reactions produced by certain smells and odours — like the smells of shutki maachh, or dried fish, and axone, or fermented soy-bean paste — is often weaponised against marginalised communities like the Bengali refugees who migrated from present-day Bangladesh to India and the students and workers from India's north-eastern states who move to the mainland in search of better opportunities.

Axone, a 2019 film directed by Nicholas Kharkongor, revolves around the racist microaggressions faced by a group of young Northeast Indians living in New Delhi when they try to make axone, a pungent ingredient widely used in regional north-eastern cuisines.

Often, discrimination based on racialised notions of smell go beyond the politics of pungent food. In Assam, the perceived body odour of the Bengali-speaking Muslim minority Miya community is used to marginalise them as "foul-smelling" and ghettoise them to the fringes of Assamese society. On the other hand, the pleasant scent of ittr or perfume used by the community to resist the racist trope of the "foul-smelling Miya", too, is politicised as an attempt of masking their identity.

This kind of olfactory oppression cuts across pre-existing caste, class, religion, and gender prejudices deeply entrenched in Indian societies. It is used by the majority against Muslims, Dalits, Bahujans, and Adivasis. It is used by vegetarians against meat-eaters. It is used by mainlanders against those at the peripheries of the Indian nation state and forms olfactory imaginations of what is an acceptable smell — the smell of ghee, cow-dung and urine, for example — and what is not.

The sense of smell is one of the main ways we perceive the world and engage with it. But it is also one of the main ways we put up social barriers and exclude others.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

The Politics Of Pungent Food: Bengal's Love-Hate Relationship With Shutki Maachh

Janice Pariat Unpacks Netflix’s Axone–A Film About The Unexplored North Eastern Identity In Delhi

Olfactory Euphoria: The Origins, Cultural Legacy, & Modern Resurgence Of Indian Perfume