“The Air Smells Rotten”:
Caste and Senses in and around a Tannery
Shivani Kapoor
“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.”
Volume Two, Issue Two, “Senses,” Essay
Leather saddle with mother-of-pearl inlay, Indian, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source.
Composed of wood, mother-of-pearl, and leather, this nineteenth-century South Asian saddle might at first seem inconspicuous. However, questions of who utilizes the saddle—and perhaps more importantly, who constructed it—are essential to understanding the implications of this leatherbound equipment. As Shivani Kapoor cogently notes, acts of touching, contacting, and constructing materials with leather are inherently tied to notions of caste in large sections of Indian society, as the attached sensations and continued odors of leather signify lower caste as well as social conditions. As such it is through the medium of leatherwork that Kapoor explores the role of the human sensorium in constructing and maintaining these caste ideologies. Although all bodies, regardless of caste, hold the capacity to pollute and be polluted through odors like sweat and gases, Kapoor underlines that some bodies are considered to be marked “with an exceptional and permanent capacity to pollute.” Odor, as a sensation, thus highlights how caste frames social realities through complex systems of social differentiation, a concept here explored through both ethnographic and literary materials.
- The Editors
In a short story titled, ‘Badboo’ (Foul Smell),
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.”
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.
Across philosophical, literary, and historical discourses, it is largely agreed that odors, the act of smelling and air have an intrinsic relationship.
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.
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.
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.
Gopal Guru has argued that the permanent pollution imposed by caste on some castes converts them into “walking carrions.”
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.
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.”
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.
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Shivani Kapoor is Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University.
- All translations from Hindi to English, unless indicated otherwise, are mine. The short story has been published in a Hindi language magazine, ‘Dalit Asmita’, under the section ‘Punjabi Kahaani’ (Punjabi story). However, there is no mention of the story being translated from Punjabi into Hindi. Thus, for the purpose of this essay, I will consider that Phillauriya either wrote the story in Hindi or translated it himself.
- The name of the caste has not been mentioned in the story. At one point in the narrative Garibdas tells the lawyer that he has brought this case to him since the lawyer ‘is one of us’ (hamaare ‘apne’ aadmi ho). Garibdas goes on further to assert that since the lawyer’s own acquaintances are engaged in the same trade as the latter, the lawyer will understand the work conditions of a leather and bone mill.
- Interestingly Garibdas also mentions that this colony is being made for lower-class Dalits who have now begun complaining of the smell of leather and bone emanating from his workshop.
- Mohan Lal Phillauriya, “Badboo” in Dalit Asmita, Vol 1, Nos 4,5 (July-December 2011): 93-94.
- Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1986): 5.
- Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
- For more on the sensorial ordering of caste see Joel Lee, "Odor and order: How caste is inscribed in space and sensoria", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 3 (2017): 470-490 and Shivani Kapoor, "The violence of odors: sensory politics of caste in a leather tannery", The Senses and Society 16, no. 2 (2021): 164-176.
- B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (New Delhi: Navayana, 2014): 234.
- Phillauriya, ‘Badboo’, 96.
- Satish Deshpande, "Caste quotas and formal inclusion in Indian higher education 1." In Routledge Handbook of Education in India (India: Routledge, 2017): 228-249.
- In this essay, ‘leather’ refers to the processed leather which is made from raw hide in the tannery. It does not refer to manufactured goods made out of leather. While raw hides or semi-processed leather is considered to be more polluting under caste norms than the finished product, yet there are instances where even leather goods are considered to have a polluting nature.
- For leather production and stigma in Japan, see Joseph Hankins, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. (University of California Press, 2014).
- See Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant; Qian Hui Tan, “Smell in the City: Smoking and Olfactory Politics”, Urban Studies 50, no. 1 (2013): 55–71; Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, "Atmospheres of law: Senses, affects, lawscapes", Emotion, space and society 7 (2013): 35-44.
- Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarrukai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012): 209-10.
- See Shahana Bhattacharya. "Transforming skin, changing caste: Technical education in leather production in India, 1900–1950." The Indian Economic & Social History Review 55.3 (2018): 307-343 for a detailed account of the role of caste in leather production in Tamil Nadu.
- All names have been changed to protect identities.
- Astrid Zotter, “Scent of a Flower: Notes on Olfaction in Hindu Worship”, In Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (Eds.), Exploring the Senses (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014): 191-192.
- Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarrukai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012): 207.
- Faraz is a Muslim, and his caste status did not come up in the conversation we had. Islam has a complicated relationship with caste in the Indian sub-continent. While doctrinal Islam does not believe in caste, but because of the historical and social trajectory of Islam in India, in practice, caste has made its way into Muslim societies. For more on this see - Julien Levesque, “Debates on Muslim Caste in North India and Pakistan: from colonial ethnography to pasmanda mobilization”. CSH-IFP Working Papers (2020). HAL id: ffhal-02697381f.
- Eva Horn, “Airborne: Air as a Social Medium”, Venti: Atmosphere Vol I Issue I (Fall 2020): 21.
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