Chapter 6

Words That Smell

Caste and Odors in Hindi Dalit Autobiographies

Shivani Kapoor

Caste, Writing, and Senses

In the opening paragraphs of Dr. Tulsi Ram’s autobiography, Murdahiya,

we encounter a sentence which starts “My grandfather, who was called
Joothan. . . .”1 Joothan, a Hindi word, refers to leftover or half-eaten food.2
It also refers to the practice, followed across India, of giving away leftover
food to people from lower-caste communities. This practice derives from the
discriminating and humiliating principles of caste, which bind people in a
“graded hierarchy” according to the caste group into which they were born.3
Tulsi Ram’s autobiography, Murdahiya, introduces us to his grandfather
Joothan, who belonged to the Chamar caste in eastern Uttar Pradesh and used
to work as a bonded laborer in the fields of Brahmin landlords—an occupa-
tion that was passed on to Tulsi Ram’s father as well.4 The name “Joothan,”
 Words That Smell 135

possibly a metonym given to the grandfather by the upper-castes, signifies

his lowly and degraded status, much like half-eaten food. It also signifies the
caste-marked feudal relationship between those who throw away food and
those forced to consume it. The name also draws our attention to the ways
in which the organization of the senses and sensory experience are crucial
in the practice and structuring of the caste system. Leftover food, or half-
eaten food, invokes a strong sense of disgust. It assails the visual, olfactory,
and gustatory senses by signifying something that was discarded or could be
rotten or putrefying. Further, leftover food carries with it the strong asso-
ciation of being contaminated with another’s saliva.5 Joothan’s name thus
reiterates his permanently polluted state at every utterance. It is significant
that another Dalit6 writer, Om Prakash Valmiki, also agrees to name his auto-
biography Joothan at the suggestion of a fellow writer and editor.7
The caste system, with its fundamental reliance on maintaining norms
of purity and pollution, is an exercise in careful negotiation of sensory
perception and experience. Caste produces a discourse where names and
their spellings, clothes (their material, their color, and their absence), the
odors and taste of food and of bodies, the dialects and intonation of language,
the height of the home’s boundary wall, and the nature of life rituals are
indicative of caste status. The “graded hierarchies” of the caste system thus
produce performative selves expected to arrange their sensoria, bodies, and
environments according to their position in the caste hierarchy.
In caste-stratified societies, Gopal Guru argues, due to the “compulsions”
of modernity, untouchability as “a practice and as consciousness” may no
longer appear on the “surface of social interaction” and has been forced to
“slide” to the “bottom of the hierarchical mind.” Hence, to understand how
caste functions, Guru argues one needs to use “archaeology as a method.”8 I
take forward this suggestion to argue in this chapter that one way to under-
stand the deep layers of caste would be to take in its odors. The politics of
smell constitutes, in a significant manner, the politics of caste. The practice and
experience of caste is smeared with the odors of bodies, spaces, and objects,
which, when breathed in, reveal the intricate ways in which the powers of
caste operate. Surajpal Chauhan, in his autobiography Tiraskrit, writes about
the dexterity that his caste community has in dealing with pigs. Chauhan
recalls one such instance when his uncle Gulfan, who possessed great skills
in slaughtering, was working on recently caught pig to distribute the meat
within the community. As Gulfan was dismembering the pig, he flung its
urinary bladder at a group of children nearby, secretly signaling Chauhan
136 Making Sensory Boundaries

to catch it. As Chauhan caught the coveted bladder, the urine within it fell
all over his body. Later, his mother cleaned the bladder, and for the next few
days, Chauhan played with the bladder as a balloon. Later, he converted it
into a small drum. Chauhan writes, “The bladder would stink when I would
bring it close to my mouth to fill it with air. But I was not disgusted by that
stench. However, the thing is that poverty forced us to have such a destiny.”9
Chauhan’s narrative and the stench of the pig’s bladder that it conveys is
deeply indicative of the ways in which practices of caste force certain commu-
nities into the margins of sociality, dignity, and resources. This narrative also
provides an insight into how caste structures and produces sensorial expe-
rience for the person experiencing them firsthand as well as for the reader.
It also provides crucial clues about how Dalit communities have negotiated
this sensorial experience, especially in the case of disgust and humiliation.
The sensory nature of the language of literature in general and autobi-
ographies in particular, I thus argue, presents a vast archive of the odors of
caste. Dalit autobiographical literature is a “rich sociological text” that “opens
up an intellectual and emotional corridor into the social reality of dalits.”10
These texts are thus more than simply self-writing (as autobiographies are
often characterized) or “testimonios” to the social injustice and humiliation
inflicted upon Dalits.11 These texts, I argue, are intensely political forms of
writing that argue for creating a space for hitherto marginalized voices in the
public sphere and in history. These texts in fact announce “the emergence of
a Dalit personhood as a figure of suffering” and demanding due recognition
and resignification for this self.12 Because these are texts of protest and resig-
nification, most Dalit autobiographical literature also adopts distinct literary
and aesthetic tropes, often in direct confrontation with Brahmanical ideas
of language and propriety.13 As such, these texts are often written on more
affective registers compared to upper-caste texts, showing the humiliation,
injustice, and disgust that Dalit selves have been subjected to. Complicat-
ing this argument, however, works of scholars such as Laura Brueck and
Sarah Beth also show how Dalit autobiographical narratives often fall into
conventional modes of dealing with issues of class and gender, similar to the
upper-caste narratives.14
Reading has primarily been thought of as an audiovisual process.
However, I argue that reading needs to be thought of as an affective and
sensorial act, a synesthetic activity that conjoins, however momentarily,
the worlds of the reader and the writer. Smells also have a synesthetic qual-
ity that allows them to merge with other senses. Within the caste discourse,
 Words That Smell 137

the sense of smell is often thought of as a “contact sense” much like touch.15
If smells indeed touch us, then it can be argued that odors fundamentally
alter our internal states. Reading a Dalit text then effectively means inhaling
the odors of the Dalit world and immersing oneself into the sensuousness
presented by the author. This could then also mean that Dalit texts have the
potential to pollute, modify, and resignify the selves and bodies of the reader.
This is where the most subversive potential of the odors of Dalit text lies.
Foregrounding sensory registers of caste, this chapter asks two questions:
First, what do the odors of caste, conveyed through writing, mean for our
understanding of caste? Second, what does it mean to smell caste through
these writings? The chapter begins by examining how odors constitute caste
and how they are represented in writings on caste. The discussion then moves
to the reproduction of this olfactory sensorium in autobiographical literature
and the consumption of these smells by the reader. The stench of blood, raw
meat, tanned skins, and fecal matter is translated into words and becomes a
part of the reader’s ontology, invoking repulsion, disgust, embarrassment,
and sometimes guilt. The chapter thus examines the relationship between
caste and odors by locating these in the act of writing and consumption of
Dalit literature. In doing so, the chapter asks what the political significance
of a sensory reading of Dalit literature is. Does it affect the way in which we
understand caste and Dalit politics?
Dalit autobiographical literature is a significant moment of assertion in
Dalit movement and politics. This moment is defined not just by the act of
writing but also by the fact that this writing is meant for the society at large
to take cognizance of the historical and social injustices faced by the Dalit
community and their demands for redress. Dalit autobiographical literature
is thus a discursive act. Senses, which are not just our windows to the world
but also produce and categorize the experience of this world for us, reiter-
ate the discursive connections between the readers’ and the writer’s worlds.
The self, as Waskul, Vannini, and Wilson have argued, “is not only a know-
ing subject and the object of symbolic (and largely linguistic) knowledge
but also and more precisely a feeling and sensing subject and the object of
somatic experience.”16 A sensory overlay on this reading and writing seeks
to understand this sensing subject of caste. This discussion returns the debate
on caste to the terrain of the body and not just that of the Dalit autobiog-
rapher, but since these are circulatory texts, the bodies of everyone who
comes in contact with or who constitute these texts is involved in a discur-
sive performance and production of sensations. In effect, the chapter draws
138 Making Sensory Boundaries

attention to the discursive nature of not just writing and reading but also of
caste, sense of smell, and odors.
One way to examine the sensory nature of Dalit writing is by descrip-
tion, using these accounts to enter the complex web of caste interactions and
to map various kinds of odors, their meanings, and their boundaries. The
second method, which will be preferred here, is to use odors as an analyt-
ical category. This means to not just focus on the physical odors and their
descriptions but also to examine the nonodorous through the lens of smell—
for instance, do words smell?

Writing Life: Memory, Senses, and Politics

In an evocative moment in Valmiki’s autobiography, he narrates an inci-

dent from 1984 when a Brahmin schoolteacher asked students to tear out
the pages of a lesson on B. R. Ambedkar from their books.17 Valmiki, deeply
influenced by this event, became a part of the protests that followed and
subsequently wrote a poem, “Vidrup Chehra” (“Crooked Face”) on the inci-
dent. In Valmiki’s words, “At that moment I experienced my belonging to the
Dalit movement intensely.”18 This incident brings to focus two related issues.
First, under caste rules, the lower castes are not allowed to gain knowledge
of religious texts such as the Vedas. This resulted in Dalits’s exclusion from
formal education in many parts of the country by the discrimination prac-
ticed by upper-caste teachers and administration. Even though these actions
have been declared illegal by the Indian Constitution and the Scheduled Caste
and Scheduled Tribes Act (Prevention of Atrocities) of 1989, ongoing denial
of education and other basic rights has continued to occur. Valmiki himself
writes about his experience in the government school in the 1950s: “Although
the doors of the government schools had begun to open for untouchables,
the mentality of the ordinary people had not changed much. I had to sit
away from the others in the class. . . . I was not allowed to sit on a chair or
a bench. I had to sit on the bare floor; I was not allowed even to sit on the
mat. Sometimes I would have to sit way behind everybody, right near the
door. From there, the letters on the board seemed faded.”19
Guru rightly points out that in educational institutions the “stigmatized
other” is produced through “social boycott.”20 The exclusion of Ambedkar’s
anticaste ideas from the classroom and the discrimination faced by Valmiki
because of their caste status are examples of this “social boycott,” aimed
at erasure of memory and history, and perpetuated by the upper-caste and
 Words That Smell 139

Brahminical establishment on society. Ambedkar and his ideas represent the

odor of caste that may be quite intolerable for some upper-castes. Second,
Valmiki’s autobiographical writing brings these ideas into the public and illu-
minates the disgust, repulsion, and oppression caused by this erasure. This
kind of writing also forces the reader to reckon with the struggle involved
in forging the Dalit self through writing and reading in the face of blatant
denial of knowledge to Dalits by the caste discourse.
Writers like Valmiki compare autobiographical writing to wrenching out
parts of one’s life, reliving pain and disgust to present an account of oneself.21
Others write about the perils of implicating the whole community through
writing about an individual life.22 Perhaps one of the strongest statements on
writing of this kind about life has been that it is like digging oneself out of a
burial ground, where memories of caste and its oppression have been buried
for a long time, alongside those who suffered it.23 The following section will
build upon the acts of tearing and digging to examine the debates and the
contestations involved in writing about life in the Dalit world. This section
will also examine the role of senses in writing and reading Dalit writing.
Autobiographical writing in Hindi grew as a genre from around the 1990s,
influenced by the growth and circulation of Dalit literature in Marathi.24
The first well-known autobiography in Hindi seems to be Mohandas Naim-
ishraya’s Apne Apne Pinjare, published in 1995. Valmiki’s autobiography,
Jhoothan, came out in 1997, after being first published as an autobiograph-
ical narrative Ek Dalit ke Aatmakatha in 1995 in the book Harijan se Dalit.
These two texts are largely regarded as the first in the field of Hindi Dalit
autobiographies, and they generated a great deal of discussion on the form,
content, and language of Dalit writing in Hindi. They also inaugurated a
wave of Dalit autobiographies throughout the next two decades.
By writing and circulating Dalit texts, individuals and communities
make an assertive claim to Dalit identity in a context when the discussion
on the humiliation and injustice of caste in the public sphere is limited at
best. Anupama Rao suggests that caste subalterns transform key political
categories, including rights, equality, and citizenship, through recourse to
constitutionalism and the use of the universal adult franchise.25 Similarly,
one could propose that caste subalterns also transform the genre of writ-
ing, literature, and autobiography by their acts of “digging out.” Their acts
of writing immediately implicate others, and, therefore, these are not just
instances of the subaltern speaking, or speaking differently, but also a forced
transformation on society. Sharmila Rege has rightly argued that Dalit life
140 Making Sensory Boundaries

narratives cannot be accused of bringing an undesired past into the present,

for they are one of the most direct and accessible ways by which the silences
and misrepresentation of Dalits has been countered.26 This is why Dalit writ-
ing is a political act.
The act of choosing, and consequently forgetting, parts of one’s life and
memories to write as a public text is an exercise in politics. Recalling and
reproducing one’s life in the public sphere or choosing not to reveal these
details are ways in which people “understand the past and make claims about
their versions of the past.”27 This is complicated by the fact that “memory
is an inescapably intersubjective act” and “acts of personal remembering
are fundamentally social and collective.”28 Writing about one’s life always
implicates the “other” and often also one’s own community.29 This can be
compared to the intersubjective and discursive act of smelling and inter-
preting odors. Senses, particularly smell, have an intrinsic relationship with
memory. “Sensory memory is a form of storage,” argues Nadia Seremetakis,
where “the memory of one sense is stored in the other.”30 Paul Stoller terms
smells as “the strongest catalyst of memories” that “cannot be silenced.”31
Classen, Howes, and Synnott have argued that “the perception of smell, thus,
consists not only of the sensation of the odors themselves, but of the expe-
riences and emotions associated with them.”32 The odors described in Dalit
autobiographies are equally important in terms of understanding the politics
of remembering and forgetting. Sensory perception is not merely a biological
process but instead is a social and political phenomenon that actively produces
the world around us. Odors are present all around us and have an influence
on how we inhabit space, create memories, evaluate people and places, and
interact with our environment. The carriers of smells—bodies and objects—
are political actors constructed through their location in power/knowledge.
The politics of odor derives from aesthetic, moral, and social power, which
inheres in their description and classification. The power or knowledge to
name an odor as good or bad, as disgusting or pleasant is ultimately an exer-
cise in politics (see also McClelland in this volume). Within the discourse of
caste, the power of pollution makes the issue of odors more urgent. Why do
certain odors pollute? Can an odor “pollute” one’s caste status?
Describing an instance of interpellation of odors and memories, Naimish-
raya writes in his autobiography about a meeting with a Muslim girl from his
neighborhood whom he was attracted to while she was making dung cakes.33
The girl, he writes, was often smeared in cow dung because of her household
duties, and Naimishraya recalls how he found the smell of dung mixed with
 Words That Smell 141

the odor of her body extremely desirous. In this instance, the odors are assigned
contextual meanings, especially through the trope of memory. While in the
popular discourse, cow dung is thought of as smelling bad, it has an import-
ant place in social life. Dried cow dung cakes are a commonly used household
fuel in many parts of India. Cow dung is considered as having purifying and
medicinal properties within the Hindu religious and caste discourse. In the
autobiography mentioned, however, cow dung becomes a signifier of desire and
memory between a Dalit-Muslim couple.34 Odors thus enable not just descrip-
tions of materials, spaces, and bodies, but their recollection and association in
memory and writing can also provide analytical tropes for understanding the
ways in which caste operates and is challenged.
Ultimately, one must return to the “sociological richness” of these texts,
which invokes sense memories sometimes even in the absence of material
triggers. M. S. S. Pandian thus rightly proposes that those narrative forms
such as autobiographies, which Guru characterizes as “raw empiricism” or
what social science theory describes as “emotional, descriptive-empirical and
polemical,” can in most instances produce “morally and politically enabling
knowledge(s) about Dalits and other subaltern groups.”35 Not bound by
evidentiary rules of social science, the privileged notions of teleological time
and claims to objectivity and authorial neutrality, these narrative forms
produce enabling redescriptions of lifeworlds and facilitate the reimagina-
tion of the political.
The next section exemplifies some of these writings in detail in order
to understand how the smells of caste are represented in writing and what
they mean for our understanding of caste. I will consider these texts along
four registers—public identities and spaces, occupational identities, naming,
and acts of resistance.

The Smells of Caste

Writing about smells challenges their “absence from history writing”36 and
further, “olfaction serves to construct the subject.”37 Yet it is notoriously
difficult to write about smells. Smells are often represented through other
sense words and concepts. There is also always the question of being able to
represent smells through words. “To write of smell,” writes Alison Booth,
“is like drawing a fruit-scented highlighter over the lines of representa-
tion.”38 Yet writing about smells is a revelatory exercise in spite of these
challenges. The subject constructed through olfactory descriptions represents
142 Making Sensory Boundaries

carefully composed sensory descriptions of memory, politics, and knowledge.

Danuta Fjellestad has argued that in literature, smell, taste, and touch may
not always be “sensorily available” and are always “linguistically mediated.”39
The nonolfactory and the multisensory nature of smells are thus an inter-
esting characteristic of these texts. In this section, I will examine the smells
of caste identified in Dalit autobiographical writing under four registers—
public spaces and identities, occupational identities, naming, and resistance.
Mohandas Naimishraya provides an olfactory mapping of the city of Meerut
in his autobiography Apne Apne Pinjare. He writes:

The Muslim neighbourhoods were rife with the fiery smell of kababs
[meat]. Mornings in the Hindu localities brought the odors of jalebi
[sweets] and kachori [savory], while the evenings would be filled
with the smells of balushyahi and imarti [sweets]. But our areas
would be naked . . . flattened of all sense of smells, maybe odorless
but then maybe a peculiar sense of malodor would hang over the
locality. Every house was filled with leather in various forms and
the heavy malodorous air would give away the fact that somewhere
nearby there exists a chamarwada.40

Naimishraya’s smell mapping of the city overlaps its caste and religious
boundaries. The passage also indicates ways in which the olfactory charac-
ter of spaces determine their caste status and how certain odors like that of
leather hides and tanning mark the lower-caste spaces, “as both a space apart
and a space to pollute.”41 This revelatory potential of odors when combined
with the signification that odors carry makes them powerful agents of clas-
sification and hierarchization.42 Hans Rindisbacher has argued that in the
European context, as public spaces became more sanitized, smells retreated
to passages in books, which became more sensuous than actual spaces.43 This
process was more complicated in the case of caste. Under the influence of
colonial modernity and the postcolonial developmental state, public space
was sought to be ridden of caste-based identities while, at the same time,
Brahmanical sensibilities were normalized as the default.
For instance, Valmiki writes about the behavior of the upper-castes in
his village:

If we ever went out wearing neat and clean clothes, we had to hear
their taunts that pierced deep inside, like poisoned arrows. If we
 Words That Smell 143

went to school in neat and clean clothes, our classmates said, “Abey,
Chuhre ka, he has come dressed in new clothes.”44 If we went wear-
ing old and shabby clothes, then they said, “Abey, Chuhre ke, get
away from me, you stink.”
This was our no-win situation. We were humiliated whichever
way we dressed.45

Similarly, Surajpal Chauhan, in another Dalit autobiography, writes about

coming back to his village from the city. On the way, he asked an old upper-
caste man for water. The man asks Chauhan who he is visiting in the village,
thereby eliciting his caste identity. On realizing that Chauhan belongs to
the “untouchable” family in the village, the older man says, “When those
born of Bhangis and Chamars come back from the cities wearing new clean
clothes, we cannot even identify whether they are Bhangi or not.”46
Both Valmiki and Chauhan challenge the myth of a “modern” nation-
state and an egalitarian public sphere by pointing out how bodies and spaces
were marked as “lowly” and “smelly.”
In postcolonial India, caste was viewed as the remnants of a rural feudal
order that still held some power and significance in village economies and
was studied in benign categories like the jajmani system. As a result, it was
understood that antimodern practices such as untouchability would simply
wither away from the impact of development. Simultaneously, legal and
policy measures created a public sphere devoid of untouchability, and this
was by default understood to be a public sphere without caste. The decades
following independence would, however, prove that the obituary of caste was
far from written, and in fact it would adapt itself to not just modernity and
democracy but to the nation-state itself. The “transcoding” of caste in urban
contexts only attempts to flatten the visual markers of caste.47 This chap-
ter argues that while urban and modern contexts may provide this visual
anonymity from the oppression of caste identities, other sensory markers,
such as odors of the body, flavors of food, and accent of speech, have contin-
ued to give away caste and cause the extenuation of oppressive environments.
Attempting to dispel the myth of the absence of caste in the modern
public sphere, Valmiki comments on the identification of caste through
uniforms issued to municipal sanitation workers. Lacking resources to buy
woolen clothes, Valmiki manages to procure a “khaki jersey from a munici-
pal employee.”48 Although the jersey he got is dyed green, his college mates
still call him a “sweeper.”49 Both Chauhan’s civil “city” clothes and Valmiki’s
144 Making Sensory Boundaries

“khaki jersey” do not conceal their caste identities, hinting at the larger
failure of the modern public space and the state to dispel caste hegemony.
Dalit literature and politics has simultaneously engaged with the emanci-
patory potential offered by modernity and the Indian nation-state while
also engaging in a deep critique of “triumphant nationalism,”50 “privileged
modernity,”51 and “civilizational claims of Indian nation-making.”52
The Brahmanical order, which came to stand in as the mainstream public
order, was certainly not deodorized, but while its smells were accepted in
the public sphere, other “undesirable” affects were pushed to the margins.
Naimishraya writes, “The crisp texture of the starched white dhoti-kurta
[traditional male garments] of the priest, the click-clack of his wooden slip-
pers, the sounds of chants coming from his mouth,” identified him as an
upper-caste member.53 Given the encoding of senses through caste, the sonic
and haptic effects of the priest’s body create the illusion of a body that does
smell good. In contrast to the Brahmanical odors, the chamarwada is thus
made to stand out as malodorous. Sanitization and deodorization of space
and language constitute each other, not just making a space of caste but also
a language of caste. In some measure, the Dalit literature used as a lens in
this chapter challenges the normalization of Brahmanical sensibilities by
writing about the repressed and elided odorous contexts.
However, as mentioned before, nonolfactory triggers can at times also
trigger a sense of smell. Aniket Jaaware54 and Sunder Sarrukai55 write about
the nonphysical nature of touch. In a slightly different but related formu-
lation, Laura Marks talks about haptic visuality—the ability of film images
to “touch” the viewer and to convey smell and taste. (See also Tang on
Hong Kong cinema in this volume.)56 Written words thus powerfully convey
sensory stimuli such as olfactory sensations, as is evident in the “Joothan”
or the sense of repulsion felt at seeing a “sweeper’s uniform.” Names, occu-
pations, and language themselves become important olfactory markers of
caste bodies.
The politics of caste and naming, including “Joothan,” is discussed at
length in these autobiographies. Chauhan writes about the names of his
family members, “However pleasant sounding our names might be, the
upper-castes in the village had made it a practice to distort them. Bhup Singh
became Bhopa, Swarup Singh was called Sarupa, Radha Devi as Radhiya
and Kiran became Kinno . . . my father Rohan Lal was called Rona. When
these upper-castes cannot even tolerate our names, how will they like us?”57
Disfiguring names forces an undesirable aspersion on the person. Being
 Words That Smell 145

interpellated with negative, demeaning names is a denial of coevalness and

of personhood.
Ambedkar, commenting on Gandhi’s efforts to engage with the question
of caste and untouchability, writes a scathing critique of the latter’s ideas.
Here we could imagine that the name “Untouchability” evokes a bad smell:
“Mr. Gandhi felt that an organization which will devote itself exclusively
to the problem of the Untouchables was necessary. Accordingly, there was
established . . . the All-India Anti-Untouchability League. The name, Gandhi
thought, did not smell well. Therefore . . . it was given a new name—The
Servants of the Untouchables Society. That name again was not as sweet
as Mr. Gandhi wished it to be. He changed and called it the Harjan Sevak
Sangh.”58
Ambedkar was probably referring to a metaphorical smell of “Untouch-
ability,” which did not bode as well for Gandhi’s ideas as did the smell of
“Harijan” (children of God). In changing the name from “Untouchable”
to “Harijan,” Gandhi removed the smell of untouchability from the public
sphere, but in the end, this made no difference to the social and political
position of the untouchables. Thus, Guru, in critiquing the idea of “Hari-
jan” writes, “It was artificially imposed on the untouchables by Gandhi and
those upper-caste people who could not genuinely integrate them within
their social consciousness despite its divine association. Overall, the cate-
gory of Harijan lacks a discursive capacity.”59 It is perhaps the restoration of
this discursive capacity and the production of resistance to the caste order
that Guru refers to when he writes about the Dalit resignification of joothan
as “poison bread” that denies “the tormentor a complete sense of domina-
tion.”60 Guru is referring to the many instances of Dalit resistance where
the threat of pollution has been exercised against the upper-castes.
Two short stories provide us further instances of these resistances. In
Sadhandh, Arjun Sawediya writes about a sensory relationship between two
Dalit communities—the Chamars and the Bhangis/Mehtars, who live next
to each other in tin ka nagla in Agra.61 The Bhangis occupy a mound in the
colony, marked by the stench of a leather tannery (see McClelland in this
volume). The Chamars, the more socially dominant Dalit caste among the
two, who work at the tannery, live a little further down the mound, away from
the sights and smells of hides. A religious occasion brings the two commu-
nities together inter-dining, and the situation explodes when the Bhangis
refuse to pick up leftover food and plates—work assigned to them under the
caste order—claiming that they are equal participants in the event. Several
146 Making Sensory Boundaries

days pass as the whole place begins to stink of rotten food. When Chamar
elders ask a young Mehtar woman to pick up the filth because it is impossi-
ble to live with the stench, she replies, “Who knows about smell better than
us, but now we will not do this work.”62 Her reference to the malodorous
work her community is forced to do and the stench of leather hides among
which they are forced to live, challenges the imposition of the caste norms by
the Chamar elders. The young woman juxtaposes two malodorous contexts
with each other to complicate caste norms.

Writing Smell, Reading Caste

“The most discriminating nose must admit all odors,” writes Booth while
writing about the smell of literary narratives. The important question within
my own research was to ask whether the readers of the autobiographies,
especially the upper-caste reader, smell caste when reading these narratives.
I argue that Dalit literature forces readers to alter their sense of self—from
an individualized atomized self to one that is porous, mixing with the self of
the text. What does this do to our notions of the self and the body? Aniket
Jaaware, in his writing on Dalit literature, states provocatively that one can
eat the Dalit—and consume Dalit literature.63 The consumption of such writ-
ing provides an inward gaze for Dalit readers, as it allows their assertion
of marginality and community formation. Non-Dalit readers, according
to Jaaware, are relieved of the burden of caste and touch, as literature is
consumed, celebrated as revolutionary, and thus digested and contained as
“Dalit literature.” Therefore, according to Jaaware, non-Dalits manage to eat
the Dalit without ever eating with the Dalit. It is only through this act of
“metonymy”—of substituting touch for words—Jaaware argues, that the
non-Dalits can bear to touch the Dalit through the Dalit’s words.64
Other formulations further complicate the idea of readership of Dalit
literature. Guru argues that the Dalit middle class may find these texts as
a source of embarrassment because they “summon an undesirable past.”65
On the other hand, Guru argues, these autobiographies may invoke “guilt
in the minds of the upper-castes by recording the social wrongs done to
Dalits by their ancestors.”66 Arun Prabha Mukherjee, the English transla-
tor of Valmiki’s autobiography writes, “Although I had been introduced to
Marathi Dalit literature in translation before I read Joothan, its impact was
much higher on the Richter scale of my consciousness because it was speak-
ing of my corner of India, in my first language, Hindi, in a way that no other
 Words That Smell 147

text had ever spoken to me.”67 The text fundamentally alters Mukherjee’s
sense of self and becomes a part of his knowledge system through a famil-
iar language and context.

Conclusion

The “scent of the narrative” is a powerful trope from which to unravel the
issues of power and hierarchy in any system of gradation.68 “To write of
smell is to couple the body with a history of discourse that has colonized
that sense,” argues Booth.69 Caste, with its location on the physical and the
social body, can be written and read through these scents, which often also
operate through synesthesia. While these odors do depend on the reader to
be decoded and understood, Dalit writing shows how the odors of caste speak
on their own very loud, defiant, and messy terms. They provide a resistance
to a neat and circumscribed “progressive emplotment” of Dalit worlds and
in doing so challenge the Brahminical hegemonic sensorium.70 Dalit texts
act as powerful narratives where sensuous knowledge and affects are used
in an embodied fashion to produce and resignify caste-marked selves. This
embodied and sensorial nature of writing draws the reader into the complex
histories, bodies, and memories of the Dalit world. More importantly, odors
transcend boundaries and may even at times threaten to alter the readers’
sense of their caste selves. This is an important outcome of the continuing
widespread circulation and discussion of Dalit literature and its odors.

Notes
1. Tulsi Ram, Murdahiya, 9. word was first used by B. R. Ambedkar in his
2. All translations from Hindi are my newspaper Bahishkruit Bharat. He defined
own, except for Om Prakash Valmiki’s auto- “Dalit-hood” as “a kind of life condition
biography, Joothan, where Arun Prabha which characterizes the exploitation, suppres-
Mukherjee’s translation has been used. sion and marginalization of Dalits by the
3. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 234. social, economic, cultural and political domi-
4. Chamars are a Dalit caste in Uttar nation of the upper caste Brahminical order.”
Pradesh and other parts of north India. Under The Dalit Panther movement in the 1970s
the caste system, they have been “associated popularised the use of “Dalit” as a “revolu-
with impure activities such as leatherwork tionary category” for its ability to signify
and the removing of dead animals.” Chamars oppression and “recover the emancipa-
also work as “landless agricultural and tory potential of the historical past of Dalit
manual labourers.” Ciotti, “Chamar,” 900. culture.” Guru, “Politics,” 15.
5. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 34. 7. Valmiki, Joothan, xiv.
6. Dalit, meaning “broken down” is 8. Guru and Sarrukai, Cracked Mirror,
a self-referential term adopted by large 203. Untouchability is one of the import-
sections of the former Untouchables. The ant practices of caste, where lower-caste
148 Making Sensory Boundaries

bodies are regarded as “polluting” for those 21. Valmiki, Jhootan, xiv.
higher than them. This manifests as phys- 22. Chauhan, Tiraskrit, 7.
ical and social distancing, prohibition on 23. Ram, Murdahiya, 9.
physical and social contact, inter-dining, 24. Beth, “Hindi Dalit Autobiography,”
and intercaste intimate relationships. There 547. Between 1952 and 1954, the serialized
have been extensive cases of violent punish- autobiography of Hazari had appeared in
ments and retributions for the lower caste on Hindustan with the caption “Ek Harijan Ki
the ostensible violation of these boundaries. Ram Kahani”; it was subsequently translated
There have been debates on the relation- in English under the heading “An Outcaste
ship between caste and untouchability. Most Indian.”
famously, M. K. Gandhi was in favor of abol- 25. Rao, Caste Question.
ishing untouchability but retaining the caste 26. Rege, Writing Caste / Writing Gender,
system as integral to the Hindu social fabric. 13.
In strong opposition to this position, B. R. 27. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiog-
Ambedkar argued for a complete annihilation raphy, 20.
of caste itself as the only way for emancipat- 28. Ibid., 20–21.
ing the untouchable groups. 29. On the collective nature of Dalit writ-
9. Chauhan, “Tiraskrit,” 26–27. ing, see Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and
10. Guru, “Review of Joothan.” the Collective”; Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku”;
11. Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku.” The term Satyanarayana, “Experience and Dalit
“testimonio,” as Ana Forcinitio describes, is Theory.”
“used in Latin American Cultural and Liter- 30. Seremetakis, “Memory of the Senses,”
ary Studies to refer to a narration marked 4.
by the urgency to make public a situation of 31. Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship, 85.
oppression or injustice and/or of resistance 32. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma.
against that same condition (and therefore 33. Naimishraya, Apne Apne Pinjare, 115.
a narrative that accounts for the construc- 34. Although Islam does not have caste in
tion of collective subjects and emphasizes its scriptural tradition, in South Asia due to
agency). It is also used to refer to a narration conversions and the assimilation of Islam
that reveals the urgency to bear witness to an in the wider society, Hindu caste norms and
event or series of events perpetrated with the practices have become adapted within parts of
aim of eliminating a community or a group.” the Muslim community.
As such, the term has also been used to refer 35. Pandian, “Writing Ordinary Lives,” 34.
to Dalit autobiographical writing, which also 36. Jenner, “Follow Your Nose?,” 337.
takes up the task of calling out injustices. 37. Booth, “Scent,” 3.
12. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the 38. Ibid, 3.
Collective,” 431. 39. Fjellestad, “Towards an Aesthetics of
13. See Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Smell,” 642.
Dalit Literature. 40. Naimishraya, Apne Apne, 11–12. A
14. Brueck, “Narrating Dalit Womanhood,” ‘chamarwada’ is the locality where Chamars,
25–37; Beth, “Hindi Dalit Autobiography.” an outcaste community that works with
15. McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion, 6. leather, live; for an example of a similar
16. Waskul, Vannini, and Wilson, “Aroma community in Japan, see McClelland in the
of Recollection,” 7. previous chapter.
17. B. R. Ambedkar was one of the fore- 41. Lee, “Odor and Order,” 475.
most anticaste thinkers and political leaders 42. For more on the relationship of odors,
of India. He was the chair of the Drafting caste, and hierarchical spaces, see Kapoor,
Committee of the Indian Constitution. For “Violence of Odors.”
more details, see Rodrigues, Essential Writ- 43. Rindisbacher, Smell of Books, 28.
ings of Ambedkar. 44. Meaning, “born of a Chuhra.” Chuhras,
18. Valmiki, Jhootan, 129. also called Bhangis and Mehtars, are a Dalit
19. Ibid., 3. caste in parts of north India, especially Uttar
20. Guru, “Tragic Exit.” Pradesh and Punjab. Under the caste system,
 Words That Smell 149

they have been forced to work as sweepers 55. Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of

and manual scavengers. Some sections of this Untouchability.”
caste have claimed the “Valmiki” identity, 56. Marks, Skin of the Film.
which seeks to resignify the humiliation and 57. Chauhan, Tiraskrit, 41.
discrimination carried in the term “Chuhra” 58. Ambedkar, Untouchables.
or “Bhangi.” 59. Guru, “Politics of Naming,” 16.
45. Valmiki, Joothan, 4. 60. Guru, “Review.”
46. Chauhan, Tiraskrit, 32. 61. Sawediya, “Sadhandh.”
47. I borrow the idea of “transcoding” from 62. Ibid., 75.
Pandian, “One Step Outside Modernity.” 63. Jaaware, “Eating.”
48. Valmiki, Joothan, 88. 64. Ibid., 281.
49. Ibid., 88. 65. Guru, “Review.”
50. Gajarawala, “Some Time,” 576. 66. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 576. 67. Valmiki, Joothan, x.
52. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the 68. Booth, “Scent,” 17.
Collective,” 431. 69. Ibid., 6.
53. Naimishraya, Apne Apne, 29. 70. Ibid.
54. Jaaware, Practicing Caste.

Bibliography
Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste: The Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Annotated Critical Edition. New Press, 1986.
Delhi: Navayana, 2014. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Anal-
———. The Untouchables. New Delhi: ysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Siddhartha Books, 2008. Taboo. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Beth, Sarah. “Hindi Dalit Autobiography: Fjlellestad, Danuta. “Towards an Aesthetics of
An Exploration of Identity.” Modern Smell, or, the Foul and the Fragrant in
Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (2007): 545–74. Contemporary Literature.” Cauce 24
Booth, Alison. “The Scent of a Narrative: (2001): 637–65.
Rank Discourse in ‘Flush’ and ‘Writ- Gajarawala, Toral Jatin. “Some Time Between
ten on the Body.’” Narrative 8, no. 1 Revisionist and Revolutionary:
(2000): 3–22. Unreading History in Dalit Liter-
Brueck, Laura. “Narrating Dalit Womanhood ature.” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011):
and the Aesthetics of Autobiography.” 575–91.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature Ganguly, Debjani. “Pain, Personhood and
54, no. 1 (2019): 25–37. the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives.”
Chauhan, Surajpal. Tiraskrit. Ghaziabad: Asian Studies Review 33, no. 4 (2009):
Anubhav Prakashan, 2002. 429–42.
Ciotti, Manuela. “‘In the Past We Were a Bit Guru, Gopal. “How Egalitarian Are the Social
“Chamar”’: Education as a Self-and Sciences in India?” Economic and
Community Engineering Process in Political Weekly 37, no. 50 (2002):
Northern India.” Journal of the Royal 5003–9.
Anthropological Institute 12, no. 4 ———. “The Politics of Naming.” Seminar
(2006): 899–916. 471 (1998): 14–18.
Classen, Constance, David Howes, and ———. “Review of Joothan: A Dalit’s Life.”
Anthony Synnott. Aroma: The Seminar 530 (2003).
Cultural History of Smell. London: ———. “A Tragic Exit from Social Death.”
Routledge, 1994. Outlook, February 1, 2016. https://​
Corbin, A. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor www​.outlookindia​.com​/magazine​/
and the French Social Imagination. story​/a​-tragic​-exit​-from​-social​-death​
/296480.
150 Making Sensory Boundaries

Guru, Guru, and Sundar Sarrukai. The Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits
Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on And the Politics of Modern India.
Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009.
Oxford University Press, 2012. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste / Writing
Jaaware, Aniket. “Eating, and Eating with, Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testi-
the Dalit: A Re-consideration Touch- monios. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006.
ing upon Marathi Poetry.” In Indian Rindisbacher, Hans J. The Smell of Books: A
Poetry: Modernism and After, edited Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory
by K. Satchidanandan, 262–93. New Perception in Literature. Ann Arbor:
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2001. University of Michigan Press, 1992.
———. Practicing Caste: On Touching and Rodrigues, Valerian. The Essential Writ-
Not Touching. New York: Fordham ings of B. R. Ambedkar. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2018. University Press, 2014.
Jenner, Mark S. R. “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Sarukkai, Sunder. “Phenomenology of
Smelling, and Their Histories.” Amer- Untouchability.” Economic and Politi-
ican Historical Review 116, no. 2 cal Weekly 44, no. 37 (2009): 39–48.
(2011): 335–51. Satyanarayana, K. “Experience and Dalit
Kapoor, Shivani. “The Violence of Odors: Theory.” Comparative Studies of
Sensory Politics of Caste in a Leather South Asia, Africa and the Middle
Tannery.” Senses and Society 16, no. 2 East 33, no. 3 (2013): 398–402.
(2021): 164–76. Sawediya, Arjun. “Sadhandh.” Dalit Asmita
Lee, Joel. “Odor and Order: How Caste Is 1, nos. 4–5 (July–December 2011):
Inscribed in Space and Sensoria.” 75–78.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Seremetakis, C. Nadia. “The Memory of
Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 3 the Senses: Historical Perception,
(2017): 470–90. Commensal Exchange and Moder-
Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic nity.” Visual Anthropology Review 9,
of Dalit Literature: History, Contro- no. 2 (1993): 2–18.
versies and Considerations. Translated Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading
by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad: Autobiography: A Guide for Inter-
Orient Longman, 2004. preting Life Narratives. Minneapolis:
Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercul- University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
tural Cinema, Embodiment and the Stoller, Paul. Sensuous Scholarship. Phila-
Senses. Durham: Duke University delphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2000. Press, 1997.
McHugh, James. Sandalwood and Carrion: Tulsi Ram. Murdhiya. New Delhi: Rajkamal
Smell in Indian Religion and Culture. Prakashan, 2010.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan: A Dalit’s Life.
2012. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukher-
Naimishraya, Mohandas. Apne Apne Pinjare: jee. New York: Columbia University
Part I. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, Press, 2003.
2009. Waskul, Dennis D., Phillip Vannini, and
Nayar, Pramod K. “Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Janelle Wilson. “The Aroma of Recol-
Autobiography as Testimonio.” Jour- lection: Olfaction, Nostalgia, and the
nal of Commonwealth Literature 41, Shaping of the Sensuous Self.” Senses
no. 2 (2006): 83–100. and Society 4, no. 1 (2009): 5–22.
Pandian, M. S. S. “Writing Ordinary Lives.”
Economic and Political Weekly,
September 20, 2008, 34–40.