The cultural politics of olfaction
Hi, I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a freelance writer and artist. If you enjoyed reading this issue or think shelf offering is great in general, you can buy me a cup of coffee // simply share the newsletter, and ask a friend or two (or three?!) to subscribe.
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Or how I learned that cities have smellscapes
My mornings in Chennai were punctuated by two important sounds: the high-pitched whistling of a grey pressure cooker that came from the kitchen, and the sound of a knife going ‘tak tak tak’ against a cutting board on the dining table where my grandfather used to chop vegetables for lunch. These sounds were my morning alarms for school; these were the sounds that I tried to shut out without any success. These two sounds gave way to others — mustard seeds popping and curry leaves crackling in ghee, the hiss of just-washed vegetables added to a hot cast iron இலுப்பச்சட்டி (pronounced: iluppachatti; a wok/kadai), the constant whirring of a red and white Sumeet mixie, and the dull clang of a slotted stainless steel ladle against another iluppachatti, my mother frying spices and building a base for what would become the sambar. It was 7 am and I knew I had to wake up and get ready for school. I would hear these sounds till I started and finished college and throughout my first job. It took years before I appreciated the cacophony of mornings that I grew up hating.
Unlike the sounds of my mornings, the smells were more satisfying. They were the kilogram of butter melted down every three weeks to produce golden nutty ghee; the extremely bright citrusy coriander leaves and stems, added as garnish to every dish; the freshly ground coffee that signalled my grandfather was back home after his long walk around the neighbourhood; the sweet sweet cardamom that told me amma was back from work and made herself some chai; the savoury fried fish at my neighbour’s, a smell that my Brahmin family refuses to accept (truly their loss); the burnt cake on a frying pan made by my friend’s mother for her birthday; the hot masala chicken puffs at a bakery near my tuition classes; the rotten sulphur of my chemistry lab; illicit petrol in a plastic bottle to fill up my scooter’s fuel tank; red roses woven into a garland for my grandfather’s 80th birthday; strong vodka and cigarettes at a classmate’s place in the afternoon after skipping college.
Smell as a marker of social identity or difference never struck me, unlike taste.
Taste, of course, finds an important place in memory and eating, in social stratification and hierarchies of food, in likes and dislikes, in cooking techniques and the materialisation of class and caste or (social) distinction as Bourdieu noted. Chefs and cookbooks tell you to “keep tasting as you go” when cooking, to adjust salt and spices “as per your taste” or to see if something just “tastes right”. How else do you get to know the dish you’re making or what flavours taste good to you, simply going from how is this supposed to taste to how do I want this to taste? ‘Taste’ is important. Taste has connotations. Taste has emotions. Taste experiences are powerful — they can bring long-buried memories into the forefront of consciousness.
Smells can bring forth similar reactions. It can, for example, take us back to our mother’s kitchens on a lazy Sunday, because of the “direct connections olfaction has with parts of the limbic system involved in generating emotion and memory” according to Barry Smith, in Proust, the Madeleine and Memory. In chapter 3 of his book, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, the anthropologist David Sutton looks at food memories from the perspective of the senses, i.e. why personal memories pertaining to food experiences can be sensory and social as well. He recalls a remark by a migrant from Greece who visited a PhD student (also from Greece) living in London who smelled the latter’s basil plant on the window sill and said (with longing), “that it really smells like Greece”. This came about, Sutton writes, because the smell of basil is a “part of the general kitchen ambiance” in the country. Here, the smell memory not only triggers the place that one has left behind, but it also conjures up an identity (both personal and national) and/or shifts an identity in a new context.
Food, one of the mundane reminders of national and cultural identity, can also remind one of a sensory overload, whether it is pleasing aromas in a domestic setting or the cultural politics of smell that is deemed to be ‘undesirable’. Martin Manalansan pursues the trope of the ‘smelly immigrant’ to understand how body politics and the sensory meaning [of food] operate within a global capitalist restructuring. His study of Asian American communities in New York City and their association with certain smells is a microcosm in knowing the world at large. I am not from New York City, nor have I visited. But pop culture and the vast repository that is the internet have informed me that NYC indeed stinks — it is a “diverse smellscape” according to Dr Kate McLean, an academic whose research focuses on mapping urban smellscapes. McLean’s research is fascinating, not only because cities are usually recognised by their skylines or their beaches or a mythical image of robustness, but because cities are generally defined to be odourless. When McLean conducted a smellwalk of the neighbourhood of Astor Place in NYC, she found that the layering of smells on the map rendered “the smellscape as a dynamic and contested airspace”.
The theory of a “contested airspace” is explored in part by Lisa Law in an essay on the experiences of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. She writes about how their creation of places emulates a sense of home through sights, sounds, taste, aromas. In the essay, Law recalls a letter to a Hong Kong newspaper which complained about a “filthy stench in the air late on Sunday evenings” and two other letters that talked about the “heavy gatherings of Filipino domestic helpers in the streets” that posed a problem for pedestrians because the streets were “not designed for people to gather socially and eat”, and how Filipino maids “practically monopolise all the open areas and roads” and so the government should “prohibit squatting, hawking and eating in public areas”. The desire that domestic workers be out of sight as well as be odourless is an aesthetic that pits the powerful against the powerless; an aesthetic that seeks control over something that is visceral. It is an idea that olfactory maps of cities or smellscapes should be pleasant. It’s also what Mary Douglas (in Purity and Danger) observed in the notions of cleanliness and uncleanliness which evolved “for their role in producing cultural meaning” and not in terms of hygiene.
The idea of a duality of smells in a city is further backed by Manalansan in Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City: how smell communicates between bodies and their identities, and in turn informs us about the [difficult] narrative of belonging. That “smell… is a code for class, racial and ethnic differences and antagonisms,” he writes. “The domestic struggles around food aromas in Asian American homes suggest the inflection of gender, class, race and ethnicity with sensory meanings.”
This struggle isn’t present in just homes of immigrants; this is a struggle that is present wherever there is a cultural construction of inequality, whether that’s class, caste, religion or gender. It’s a struggle that is very much present for those who have always found it difficult (or impossible) to rent a house in India, i.e. Dalits and Muslims. It’s a struggle that’s found in the food they cook, because the food they cook becomes the code through which they are identified. “Are you a vegetarian?” you’re asked, if you’re looking to rent a house in India. Because food smells can go from a celebration of a rich sensory experience and memory mapping to a medium that marks a person as unpleasant; as the “other”. This, I realised, stood for more than my struggle to wipe turmeric stains off the kitchen counter in my first house in London, because I was threatened with a no-return of my deposit. After all, I have never been discriminated against nor refused a house because of my identity, religion or the food I consumed.
This is also a struggle that is present in institutional eating — on 10 April 2014, a notice was issued in the canteen of The Hindu in Chennai (full disclosure: I worked there for three years), a national newspaper, asking employees not to bring “non-vegetarian food” into the office [canteens] as it “causes discomfort to the majority of the employees who are vegetarian”. The fact that lunch is politicised should not come as a surprise; the decision to impose dietary restrictions came about because of the smell. A vegetarian atmosphere (here) did not really indicate a love for animals. Rather it was code for Brahmin. Sensorial experiences and food memories can emerge as much as a source of exclusion and prejudice as inclusion and belonging of people and place. This duality of smell in urban cityscapes isn’t unfounded — it has been common across cultures, argues cultural historian Constance Classen in The Odor of the Other, “for the dominant class in society to characterize itself as pleasant-smelling, or inodorate, and the subordinate class as foul-smelling”.
But this distinction between good and bad (food) smells isn’t a sensory approach at all, rather it’s an olfactory mediation by the dominant class (and/or caste/religion/gender) who dictate what smells are allowed and what are not. Why is it that a smelly blue cheese is more valued than kimchi or stinky tofu? Why did the NYT certify certain Asian fruits as disappointing? This is because smell, like taste, is subjective. Smell, like taste, also follows a food hierarchy created by the dominant class — those who have the access and privilege to be able to classify food smells as being good or bad, enticing or disgusting. Smells can recreate ‘home’ by invoking memories associated with aromas, or they can disrupt a sense of place when connected to ideas and realities of power, labour, and migration. Smell, like taste and other senses, don’t just belong to our bodies; they are mediators of our immediate environments, and help conceptualise it, whether domestic or urban.
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A small announcement: this newsletter and its writer are taking break next month to sort out personal emergencies and meet other deadlines. So I’ll see you in October, or hopefully, at the end of September. Thank you for reading and for supporting. I’ll be on email if you want to get in touch.
Miscellaneous
- If you would like PDFs of the papers I have mentioned above, write to me and I’ll send them to you.
- I really enjoyed reading this piece about food music and nasi lemak at Mei Mei by Aaron Vallance.
- This week’s 80s Tamil song recommendation is this duet between SPB and Ilaiyaraaja, my two favourites. One day, I want to use this song as the focus for an essay on how heroines in Tamil cinema never get to enjoy this level of camaraderie and friendship through song. Examples are too few and they never get to drink.
- Which brings me to this essay I wrote on how Tamil cinema loves to prescribe alcohol as the solution to every hero’s grief.
I would love to hear from you — idea, shoutout, or just a chat about shelf offering. Or if you want me to write on food, culture, identity as well. Or Tamil movies. Reach me at seriouscheats@gmail.com.