Scents and Sensibility
THe haunt PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
nonfiction by Anisha Pillarisetty
Fried onion/bus routes distort under embellished, hot plastic/tossing small talk/yeast breath/our friend/dodges customers carving into the crunch and turnover of stale racism/thrice-cooked in murky oil.
My sister and I are sitting at the back of a near-empty bus to Maroochydore. Inside, the sunshine smells sinister behind warm glass, crowding the pockets of tree cover in blinding concrete. In the lurch of public transport, I am suddenly and inexplicably frustrated that my sister has cracked open Mum’s egg curry. We argue over the curry, a seemingly innocuous accompaniment to a day trip to see an old friend—the tension spills over, seething and rampaging through the day, unanchored. I can’t seem to pinpoint why I’m upset. I end up crying on a mattress on the floor and my sister sits on weeping concrete, in rain that falls like home but escapes in tennis whites down unperturbed streets.
The egg curry incident wasn’t the first time a smell stalked me, turning uneasy. Potent wafts of Mysore Sandal Soap and senagapindi that curl up in the safety of home cling to me obtrusively in public spaces, their soft scents turning into grotesque souvenirs when jolted out of context. It still takes me by surprise when the captive hush of public transport sets the aroma of fried onion adrift, fractured from the multicultural whole. Outside of Sundays at Bunnings or having a kick in the park, the smell of charred onion—seeped into the spirit of the ‘Australian’ psyche—circles my sister and I, uncertain.
By demarcating smells ascribed to the non-white Other, nationhood can easily turn anything that threatens its edges into flotsam and jetsam. This process is all the more insidious because of the way smell can be covered up, but also how it can invoke, how it seeps, how it congeals, how it dissipates, and how it is devoured (metaphorically and also literally, through taste).
What did it smell like in the parliamentary chamber when Pauline Hanson gave her maiden return-to-politics speech, recycling key xenophobic tropes from her ‘swamped by Asians’ 1996 speech and tapping into anti-Muslim rhetoric? Did it smell like Trump’s victory in the US presidential campaign, occurring days after the egg curry incident and a few months after Hanson’s speech? What are these scents that we cannot pinpoint, that escape the ghouls conjured by smells like curry?
In The White Possessive, Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson notes:
Australia is less white than it used to be because of the global shift to decolonization and economic necessity. Multiculturalism was adopted as the charter for the nation in the 1970s by the Commonwealth government.
Along with the (official) abolition of the White Australia policy in 1972, multiculturalism marked the rebranding of the nation as ‘inclusive’, despite the continued dispossession of First Nations people and the illegal occupation of their land. Meanwhile, nationhood continues to assert itself along racialised lines (evident, as Prof. Moreton-Robinson suggests, in policies such as immigration restrictions), even as it wears ‘multiculturalism’ as a badge, in case anyone dares bring up racism.
Is nationalism then, as former prime minister Scott Morrison suggested in a speech at the 2018 Sydney Diwali event, the smell of garam masala—which, according to him, is a coalescing of differences to form a fragrant whole? Or could it be that the aroma of spices throws us off the scent of whiteness and thereby also the non-white migrant Others that legitimise it?
Morrison, in the same speech, says the spices used to make garam masala—‘the cloves, the black cardamom and all this’—are ‘rubbish’ on their own. ‘But when you blend them all together,’ he continues, guiding imaginary steam up to his nose with his hands, ‘Wow! That is the fragrance that comes from Australia’s multicultural society.’
The logical fallacies in the speech can be distracting, obfuscating how it further entrenches nationalistic mythmaking. But, if we were to put aside gravy and cinnamon buns, the foregrounding of a food analogy, whether witting or unwitting, alludes to how the former Prime Minister relates to South Asian (and other, non-white migrant) people—through consuming their culture. Morrison’s claim that so-called Australia is ‘the most successful multicultural country’ also erases the multiculturalism of these lands prior to invasion. His speech reveals how ‘Australia’’s multicultural policy doubly serves whiteness because, as Prof. Moreton-Robinson notes, welcoming the migrant Other into the mix demands an endorsement of capital logic and national values that reassert white possession and deny Indigenous sovereignty. In exchange for this endorsement, cultural commodification offers to acknowledge and even ‘welcome’ the migrant Other. Morrison’s eating (and tweeting about) ‘ScoMosas’––his version of the popular South Asian pastry––before his video call with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is his way of ‘welcoming’ the Other.
In her essay ‘Eating the Other’, bell hooks aptly calls this process ‘consumer cannibalism’—a result of the ‘commodification of difference’ disguised as a friendly, mutual exchange between whiteness and the non-white Other. Sure enough, less than a year after naming a South Asian snack after himself, Morrison’s government announced the controversial travel ban and fines for Australian citizens stranded in India, which was then followed by a significant budget cut to government support for new migrants while bolstering spending on immigration detention. It’s not surprising then, as fellow feminist scholar Sara Ahmed notes in Strange Encounters, that food is a pivotal part of ‘multiculturalism as a policy for managing difference’. The focus on the ‘blend’ of spices in Morrison’s speech signifies how multicultural policy is informed by the commodification of culture, which, as hooks notes, subsumes difference, displaces the Other, and erases context and history.
In this way, cultural commodification demands the Other takes on familiar, prescribed shapes (or in this case, smells); failing this, Ahmed’s figure of ‘the stranger’—which has thus far been ‘welcomed’—is rendered as being beyond ‘what can be incorporated’ into the multicultural whole. Outside of specific contexts like a restaurant or a culinary festival, the ‘fragrance’ of garam masala (no longer able to be controlled and consumed) is suddenly jarring. Through ‘ScoMosas’ (and various attempts at curry) Morrison highlights how, ultimately, smells belonging to Others are marked as needing to be ‘digested’ into the multicultural whole, whether or not they are literally consumed. Smells like gravy and cinnamon buns, however, waft undisturbed, seeping into the fabric of the nation-state.
Almost two years after Morrison’s Diwali speech, I was alerted by a social media acquaintance to a post on an online group where throwaways like ‘ethnic levy’ and ‘I love Indian food but …’ were sprinkled throughout a discussion between landlords on how to get the smell of ex-tenants’ presumed ‘homeland’ out of a kitchen. ‘Exotic’ spices linger, the group agreed. One of them was worried about a property they’d just leased to Indian tenants.
Although there is a lot to unpack here, what is striking in this case, particularly in terms of smell and commodification, is that the point of difference could not be consumed and absorbed into white nationhood. Now that curry has been rendered undesirable, it turns into something to lament about on a public forum.
Smell haunts the link foregrounded by Prof. Moreton-Robinson between possession of private property, belonging and nationhood. Once again, the displacement of the migrant Other in the process of commodification can obscure their point of (racial) difference, simultaneously problematising their relationship to Indigenous sovereignty and to their positionality in the power hierarchies of their ‘homeland’. This, in turn, acts as a smokescreen for the ways in which non-European countries such as India enact a violent, settler-colonial logic—similar to so-called Australia’s—to perpetuate and protect the myth of nationhood.
Malle puvulu/crushed/browning. Plastic/thin/greasy. Smell: sweet/heavy/stray/street corner wrapped up in oil-stained newspaper.
Fermenting waste crouches in the waterways in Hyderabad, the city that grew me up. It sours in the back of the throat—the same area where sadness catches—and lingers. Stagnant swathes of slime-green obscuring ripples in the Musi River, in open drains and by faded paddle boats, are a reminder of the divide; the sanitised non-scent of shopping malls curls into fists around me in the New City, which, much like whiteness, is never named. The (undelineated) New City can grow in any direction and does; it exists because of the borders of the Old City beyond the river, the spectre of which is carved into minarets of handmade kulfi by tourists who leave behind piles of empty clay pots, some in pieces from being flung. I am one such tourist from the New City, returning to the Old City to consume—the ‘combination of danger and pleasure’, in hooks’ words—entices me into alleyways lined with the sharp scent of copper curling softly around carts of neatly-stacked unwrapped KitKats.
Smells are simultaneously blurred and marked in Hyderabad. Sandalwood, which I wander through the Old City to find (on request of a friend back in so-called Australia), is associated both with Hindu cultures and Islam. The soft scent of haleem teeters on street corners during Ramazan. Scissors explode iron-pressed cotton into squatting air in mattress-floored hole-in-the-walls. Sweet almond flakes stumble over cardamom and rose, dissolving the traffic near Karachi Bakery. There is the marked smell of a burst of pigeons leaving the steps of a masjid, the distinct smell of damp bat faeces filtering the mosquito-bright sunset at Golconda Fort. But there is also a nauseating fervour that is unmarked—the smell of chanting choked with burning ghee; kum kum dragged across my forehead; and the retch of coconut water spooned into my palm by priests.
Hyderabad is often presented, like so-called Australia, as a harmonious, cultural milieu—a city whose artefacts reflect the demographics of Hindus being a little more than half of the population and Muslims being a little less than half. Of course, as in all regions across India, hundreds of other cultural groups coexist.
Petrol stations, service stations—servos now—petrol bunks growing up/often half-asleep as the family van is refuelled, the bouquet of fumes stringing through a crush of street lights/words wind up in the commonplace/smells that serve me turn to giddy ghosts when they leave my lips/buried in graveyard shifts wiping bright alcohol and vomit from sinks.
A year after the region’s independence from British rule, Hyderabad was the only southern princely state that hadn’t conceded to joining the newly formed nation. India, through military force, invaded and seized Hyderabad from the Nizams who had ruled the region for centuries after the Mughals. A state-sanctioned massacre of Muslim villagers followed, with tragic echoes in India’s decades-long (and continuing) violent military occupation of the only Muslim-majority region within Indian borders: Kashmir.
When we are taught Hyderabad’s history, we are also not told about how the city has been trembling on a cultural fault line since India’s independence from the British—much like other regions that, simply by existing, seem to threaten the myth of nationhood that upholds Brahmanism.
Brahmanism (or casteism), which privileges Brahmins and other upper-caste Hindus, was famously critiqued by Dalit scholar Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar for perpetuating and maintaining oppressive social hierarchies. Hinduism—often conflated with Indian culture—is the more familiar term for the religion, and came about as a move towards laying claim to land when India was demarcated as a nation post-British rule. The widespread use of the political term ‘Dalit’, another Ambedkar legacy, refers to so-called lower castes and ‘untouchables’ and falls under the umbrella term Bahujan—meaning ‘the majority of people’.
Via the Brahmanic institution of casteism, smell is used as a means of control by Hinduism to erase the diverse features of Bahujan—which includes Dalits, Shudra (or peasant) castes, Adivasis and various other indigenous groups. As outlined by Ashwaq Masoodi, Dalit cuisines were born from ‘economic necessity’, sometimes including meat that the upper castes rejected, such as blood, intestines, offal, pork and beef. By co-opting resources such as food and water, the segregationist upper caste logic that marks Dalits and other Bahujan as ‘dirty’ is reinforced.
In the same way that whiteness weaponises ‘other’ smells to maintain control, Brahmanical hierarchies incite violence against Dalits and other oppressed communities for culinary practices—like eating beef and pork—adopted out of necessity, or trades that they have been forced into, such as cleaning sewerage or tanning leather. Over the decades, these communities have faced brutal violence in various forms—often perpetrated by members of ‘upper’ castes— but a recent Amnesty report has shown a rise in hate crimes during the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s two consecutive terms.
The increasingly conspicuous violence of the Indian state is fuelled by the BJP and their ties to the notorious Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—a so-called cultural organisation espousing the far-right ideology of Hindutva—which has been banned three times by the Indian republic for their links to communal violence. When we are taught India’s history, we are not told why the BJP’s Narendra Modi went on to be the longest serving Chief Minister of Gujarat after being implicated in the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots, and why he is now serving his second term as the Prime Minister of India.
Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister in 2014—the same year the Hyderabad region (or Telangana) was reinstated after decades of unrest, after splitting from Andhra Pradesh. Although the incumbent Telangana Rashtra Samithi political party is riddled with issues of its own, the state’s chief minister has been less than welcoming to Modi, alleging that the BJP labels those who don’t agree with it ‘anti-national’.
When I look up the word for a tree scattered through my childhood, a whole paragraph of names bloom in and around India—a region whose countries marked their independence from colonial rule reeling from widespread massacres after being arbitrarily cut up into pieces overnight by the British. We are not told that these names do not even begin to cover the hundreds and hundreds of languages within the Indian nation-state alone. We are not told they cannot even begin to acknowledge the myriad cultural groups, the many ways their sovereign words have been dispossessed, their trees cleared, and their lands and waterways colonised.
In ‘Eating the Other’, hooks proposes a ‘mutual recognition of racism’ and ‘its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate’ as the ‘only standpoint’ which will allow for races to interact beyond ‘denial and fantasy’ within systemic racial hierarchies. In interrogating smell, the everyday spectres of nationalism become more salient, allowing the migrant non-white Other to extricate themselves from the multicultural whole and re-imagine a point of difference outside of cultural commodification. To uncover smell, then, is to challenge notions of belonging.
When I think of garam masala, kum kum or sandalwood I feel as if I’m bobbing, untethered, in the multicultural whole. A whole that problematises or erases certain smells: dusty cans of discounted baked beans from the army canteen, overcooked curry-flavoured two-minute noodles, fried onion staining the sanitised hush of public transport. These smells threaten to uncover divergent cultural hierarchies, the multiness of identity. In addressing these disparate scents, my ‘Indianness’ and ‘Australianness’ are complicated and challenged. Why do smells that anchor me in one identity, set me adrift in another? When the spectres of my Otherness haunt Indigenous sovereignty and dispossession as much as they conjure casteism and racism, is it possible that my responsibilities transgress borders? If the only way to banish the spirits of the nation-state is to unearth its scents, are smells like the smear of chanting, the curl of talcum powder, and the hollow rings of brass and stale beer enough to pinpoint settler-colonial ideology in its various forms? Or do I need to also interrogate other smells that simultaneously mark me and strategically absolve me of responsibility?
Burning toast punches the air, deli roast chicken wafts of lonely lunchrooms, sandwich bars julienne sadness into quiet crunches, at 5AM maccas turns bright.
The air is lighter, but the smell still lingers, slapping the sides of cars waiting to turn left or right. Someone gets pissed off that I’m riding straight ahead onto the bike path. The smell is cautious in daylight. It’s suddenly sliced in half, left behind, splattered in the middle of the road. The air is now mowed grass tumbling into hospital disinfectant. It took me a while to place the smell of disinfectant, which is odd because it was a mainstay of childhood. We used Dettol for everything. The one big glass jar of dark liquid seemed to last until we grew up, and until other brands started making better-looking disinfectants. Washing the floors, washing our bodies. Our cuts. No band-aids, though. Mum doesn't believe in them. Wounds heal when you air them, she’s always said.
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Anisha Pillarisetty lives, learns and writes on unceded Kaurna Yarta. Her work can be found across several platforms.
