In a short story titled, ‘Badboo’ (Foul Smell),¹ Punjabi writer, Mohan Lal Phillauriya makes a prescient comment on the sensory politics of caste through a conversation between the two protagonists – Garibdas, leatherworker and his unnamed lawyer. Both of them belong to the same leatherworking caste, which was once considered untouchable.² In the narrative, Garibdas’ small hide curing and bone-cutting workshop has been charged with spreading foul smell and pollution to a nearby residential colony and is thus to be shut down under orders from the state authorities.³ Garibdas, who has challenged this order in court, complains to his lawyer that the municipal authorities, the court, the ‘upper-caste’ judge, the colony residents, and even the lawyer from his own caste, think that he smells bad and thus does not even deserve a fair hearing.⁴ The connection made by Garibdas between the perception of smelling bad and denial of justice is an important claim. Odor has been thought of as indicative of ‘social order’⁵ and laden with cultural meanings and symbols of power.⁶ Hierarchical systems such as caste often also function as systems of sensorial ordering where norms of purity and pollution are manifested through strict sensorial regimes over the body, the objects, and materials it interacts with and its environment.⁷ It is also interesting to note how the smell of hides seems to map onto the body of Garibdas as well, thereby intimately linking the work process and the body of the worker — an inextricable component of the caste system which as B.R. Ambedkar has argued functions as a “division of labour and of labourers.”⁸

Garibdas’ story, however, does not end with this claim. As he grapples with his precarious legal and social position, the conversation is interrupted by state officials who inform the lawyer that his neighbours have filed a complaint against him for illegal use of residential property. Moreover, the officials confide in the lawyer that the neighbour’s actual grudge seems to be the nameplate outside the former’s house which carries the educational degrees of his family members along with their names. This display of knowledge and status by a lower-caste family threatens the upper-caste neighbours’ sense of identity and superiority. Garibdas, carefully listening to this interaction, turns to his lawyer, with some satisfaction, and says, “…I can now see that you are no better than us. There we smell of leather, but here you smell of your degrees.”⁹ Caste operates through not just a systemic denial of education and knowledge to the lower-castes, but caste norms have also regularly resulted in violent retribution towards those Dalits who manage to receive education and thus some status. However, as scholars such as Satish Deshpande have argued, education, while providing empowerment, has also been unable to challenge the ascribed nature of caste hierarchy.¹⁰ Thus, a lawyer who belongs to a leatherworking caste might always be thought of as a ‘leatherworker’ and thus polluted within the caste system — his degrees thus proverbially smell of leather.

Phillauriya’s short story is a complex representation of the relationship between leatherwork, odours and caste. In the Indian context, leather is a social and political object, constituted simultaneously through the material desire for the commodity and a sense of disgust deriving from its status as a polluted object in the Hindu caste discourse.¹¹ While the process of leather production is universally considered as an odoriferous process, in India under the caste discourse leather and leatherworking castes are regarded as ritually polluted and capable of spreading this pollution to the upper castes.¹² Because of its reliance on dead animal bodies, leatherwork is considered to be a polluting occupation in a society ordered by caste. The stench of the air in and around the leather tannery represents not only physical odours but also the possibility of pollution by coming in contact with this polluted air. The smell emanating from the leather tannery thus becomes emblematic of the ritual pollution of caste. The smell of leather tanneries, as Phillauriya’s story powerfully demonstrates, evokes one of the strongest emotions of disgust and repulsion in a society ordered by caste. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the smell of leather functions both at the physical and the perceptual level, as is evident from the ‘smell of the degrees’ of the lawyer, who apparently belongs to a leatherworking caste.

Across philosophical, literary, and historical discourses, it is largely agreed that odors, the act of smelling and air have an intrinsic relationship.¹³ Smells, unlike any other sense, require the intermediate medium of air to be carried to the nose. Air, in the form of wind or atmosphere, also acts as a medium for odor particles to be carried from the source of the smell to the smelling nose, much like the smell of Garibdas’ bone and hide mill was carried to the discerning noses of the nearby residential colony. It was thus not the sight of or proximity to raw hides which bothered the residents, it was their stench, which had travelled some distance with the air, declaring the physical and material presence of a tanning unit. This ‘polluted’ and stinky air becomes a marker of caste, and a reminder of the presence of a lower-caste body for the residents of the colony. Wind is an important component in understanding how caste pollution spreads and is to be contained. Under caste norms, lower-caste houses are to be located opposite to the direction of wind, usually on the outskirts of residential settlements so that the wind entering the settlement is not contaminated by passing through these houses.¹⁴

Gopal Guru counters this caste hegemonic logic by pointing out how caste itself violates the Hindu notion of the panchamabhute — the idea that all bodies are composed of five elements, air, fire, earth, water, and space. All these bodies thus have a similar capacity to pollute through sweat, excreta, urine, mucus, and gases. Caste, however, marks some bodies with an exceptional and permanent capacity to pollute, thus violating one of the basic principles of Hindu cosmology. Air, wind and atmosphere and the odours which they carry are thus important phenomenon for understanding how caste frames social reality. The following discussion unpacks the way in which air, in and around the tannery, and the odours that it carries constructs and sustains a spatial and bodily politics of caste in a leather tannery. This discussion derives from ethnographic research conducted between 2012-15 in tanneries in the cities of Kanpur and Unnao in the northern India state of Uttar Pradesh, which is the second largest producer of leather in India, after Tamil Nadu. Throughout India, the work of tanning is performed by ‘untouchable’ castes such as Madigas in Andhra Pradesh and Chakkliyans in Tamil Nadu. Tannery workers who work in the wet sections in the tanneries I studied in Uttar Pradesh, almost always come from the ‘untouchable’ castes such as Chamars or Jatavs. While there may be some differences in the way in which the leather industry is organised across different regions in India, the fact that the work of tanning is done by ‘untouchable’ castes remains constant.¹⁵

Leather tanneries largely operate on a similar structural and procedural pattern. Tanneries receive raw and salted hides from hide dealers and these hides are put through multiple chemical processes to convert them into finished leather which has the distinct texture and smell we find in finished products like shoes and handbags. Operations are divided into wet and dry stages and the tannery premises are also divided accordingly. The wet stage, as the name suggests, deals with the raw hide laden with organic matter such as hair, blood, and fat. These hides are washed, treated with lime, and then chemically processed to reduce the organic components to an extent that no further rot can take place. It is the wet stages of the tanning process which are considered to be the most smelly and filthy, given the nature of hides at this stage. “The air in the wet section smells rotten (sadi hui)”, said Ramesh Sharma, a dry section manager of a tannery in Unnao when I asked him about his experience of working in the tannery.¹⁶

Once the leather is processed into pale blue looking sheets, devoid of any sign of life or death, the resultant ‘wet-blue’ moves onto the dry sections, where it is processed into finished leather. There is a characteristic ‘chemical’ smell in the air in the dry sections, while some respondents in my research also described the presence of a distinct ‘burnt flesh’ smell which seems to emanate when ‘wet-blue’ is subject to certain chemicals. While most of the workers in the dry section still come from the lower castes, they belong to the castes higher than the workers of the wet section. Wet section workers almost never cross over to the dry section — neither can their skills be transferred, nor can they be physically relocated there. This is perhaps one of the caste-dictated unwritten principles of workspace organization inside the tannery. While there is no visible, physical boundary between the two sections, this distinction is constantly smelt, felt, and perceived.

Ramesh, who manages the dry sections, continued to describe the wet sections in our conversation. “It is difficult for us to even stand in that rotten air for even a few minutes, forget working there permanently. That rotten air enters our bodies, our hair, our pores. You can never get rid of that smell, no matter how much you bathe or clean. I never have and never will never take up an assignment in the wet section”, he says. Ramesh, a Brahmin by caste and practice, by his own admission, was insistent on the wet-dry separation in his career throughout our conversation. The dry section, in his opinion, is relatively cleaner since the organic matter of the skins has been washed off and treated properly. But his testimony about the porousness of the body and the permanence of the stink evidences the fact that air travels within the tannery and with it travels the stink.

What about the dry section smell, that burnt flesh sensation which some of my other respondents had described? Ramesh turned slightly pensive, quiet for a few moments. And then almost as if reaching a conclusion, said, “It is not as bad as the rotting flesh (sada hua chamda) smell, and one has to live with it if one needs to work”. In some Hindu religious and philosophical traditions, smelling has been considered akin to eating.¹⁷ Smelling the ‘rotten hides’ thus could potentially pollute Ramesh’s caste status through the consumption of the polluting odorants of rotting matter in that air. Yet due to demands of employment, he continues in this profession. However, being from a higher caste, Ramesh has some recourses. His careful categorisation of which smells are tolerable versus which are absolutely abhorrent is a rhetorical device made available through his upper-caste status.

Gopal Guru has argued that the permanent pollution imposed by caste on some castes converts them into “walking carrions.”¹⁸ The possibility of choosing between sensory states does not arise for the ‘untouchable’ who is always already thought off as smelling bad. I met Manoj, a wet section worker at a tannery in Kanpur, at his home. Manoj operates one of the tanning drums. His job involves picking up hides after they have been treated with lime and heaving them into large rotating drums for de-liming. He is also considered a ‘chemical expert’ in the tannery, because of his knowledge of the right proportion and timing of chemicals to be added to the drums. After years of handling lime covered hides which are alkaline in nature, Manoj’s hands and feet are permanently covered with sores and blisters. Chemicals such as calcium hydroxide and sodium sulphide, used in liming, have the same effect on animal and human skin — removal of hair and fat. Tanning thus leave permanent marks on the bodies of workers like Manoj.

However, it is the mark of odour that seemed to preoccupy him when we were sitting in his home. “Look around you. Do you see any dirt or filth?”, he asked me. “In fact, do you get the tannery smell (tannery ki badboo) here?”, he continued, slightly agitated. I take a deep breath in. The predominant odor which hit my nostrils was the mustard oil which Manoj was applying on his hands and feet. It brings some relief after a day of working with the chemicals, Manoj had earlier explained. Along with the pungent odor of mustard oil, in the background I could smell tea being made, with a warm and sharp smell of ginger boiling in the concoction. No tannery smell, I told him. Manoj smiled, and continued, “People in this locality claim that they can smell the hides on me all the time. Even my employer (maalik), who shares the same environment (maahaul) with me all day. But he thinks he smells great, while I constantly smell terrible (mujhse badboo aati hai). I carry the tannery air (hawa) with me because I am a from a lower-caste (neechi jati)”. Manoj’s narrative explains the complex nature of the caste system where lower castes are forced to occupy an undesirable sensorium physically and metaphorically not just by being forced to work in certain occupations but also by ‘carrying the tannery air’ with them. This burden of air, along with the odors which it carries, is particularly heavy in odoriferous industries like tanning where air in the tannery becomes a signifier of caste.

Through Manoj, I met Faraz Ahmad, who works with a local chemical manufacturer supplying chemicals to various tanneries.¹⁹ Faraz's work includes collecting orders and delivering the chemicals, especially to smaller tanneries. In a free-wheeling conversation about the industry, Faraz tells me that he is not technically connected to the tanning industry. Rather, he is in the chemical business. However, his acquaintances regularly tease him for working in a ‘dirty’ business because he spends his days in various tanneries. “‘You smell bad, you must have come from the tannery’, is what my friends regularly tell me when I meet them. I understand that they are saying it in jest (mazak) but I guess since I do spend so much time in the tannery, the air must have an effect on me (hawa ka asar)”, says Faraz, smiling. Faraz represents the ‘around’ of the tannery — people, environments and materials which are not ‘in’ the tannery like Ramesh and Manoj but surround the tannery. While they do not quite interact with the caste-laden air of the tannery in the same way as those on the inside, this air reaches them and marks them with malodor associated with the tannery.

Eva Horn has argued that “To socialize with someone means not only to breathe the same air but also to occupy the same atmosphere as they do.”²⁰ In this act of sharing an atmosphere, what is also shared is caste pollution in cases like that of Faraz visiting a ‘polluted’ space. This ‘around’ or even ‘outside’ the tannery becomes more critical to examine in cases like that of the lawyer in Phillauriya’s story which we began this essay with. Since caste is ascribed and performed intergenerationally, even those who may belong to leatherworking castes but have never worked with leather seem to be marked with its malodor. Complicating Horn’s argument, it may be useful to suggest here that the caste pollution of leather seems to be passed on in the absence of shared air and odorants as well.

Thus, it can be argued that in the context of the industrial production of leather, while visible pollution of objects such as hides, blood and fat were sought to be contained in the body of the untouchable workers, it was the air of the tannery laden with odours which escaped control and disciplining. We began this discussion with Phillauriya’s story where this unbridled odorous air marked two different kinds of contexts and bodies. First, it announced Garibdas’ caste to a supposedly odor-neutral public, which not only gets offended at the odors of the tannery, but also map a lower-caste status onto these malodors. This perceived odor neutrality of the predominantly upper-caste public makes Garibdas stand out not only as a lower-caste body but also as an exceptionally odorous body which is leaking into the public. This in-turn also means that the entire burden of having caste and thus smelling bad lies on Garibdas’ body and being, as against the ‘castelessness’ of those who complained against his workshop. This is also the burden that Manoj carries, being perceived by the public, solely through the malodour air which he supposedly always carries with him, which sticks to his body like something more tangible than air. Phillauriya’s story also introduces us to an even more sticky air – the one which follows the lawyer (and his degrees) despite having never done leatherwork. Ramesh, Faraz and Phillauriya’s lawyer, thus becomes the malodrous body via this intangible, sticky air of caste perceptions and biases. The odours of leather production, thus, even in their absence, pollute everyone in the industry, effectively converting everyone into a caste marked ‘leatherworker’ and overrides the caste-based distinctions of ‘doing’ and ‘being’. This conversion owes to the fact that the very object of leather was produced and more importantly maintained as an object of caste by the industry, society and by the state. With this the air of and around the tannery also gets categorised as an object of caste.