Smelly Encounters: An Olfactory Reading of Indian English Fiction by Women

Abstract

George Orwell once described smell as the real secret of gender relations in the West: 'The female sex smells.' Gender connotation is writ large in almost every sociological/anthropological study of smell. Literature is also full of such references where women's sense of smell has been considered stronger than that of men's. Gaze being the masculine sense greater weightage has been given to it while smell has been deprecated as the feminine sense. Since smell has a deep cultural significance the literature of the Indian diaspora by women is replete with what may be termed 'olfactory analysis.' The smell of nostalgia, of memory and the past; the aroma of native food and all the native fragrances keep haunting; bringing much comfort to the aching heart. While Jhumpa Lahiri's characters are particularly nostalgic about the native food finding refuge in the gustatory, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni dedicated the space of one novel to spices where her protagonist is the 'Mistress of Spices' herself; Radhika Jha's Smell reminds one of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Replete with 'olfactory encounters', to borrow Janice Carlisle's expression, the novel is a buildungsroman of Leela Patel, the protagonist whose very being is apparently governed by her nose. I propose to read the olfactory representations in the novels of these women writers with a view to exploring the social, cultural and moral connotations of the olfactory/gustatory. Indians love its smell but the Australian girl had no such associations and completely disliked it. Smells have strong associative values; even a not-so-pleasant smell may be pleasing for some if it is associated with a pleasant memory. A friend of mine has an interesting story to tell about how smell helped her evade her mother's scolding as a naughty child. As a child she would keep a book open by her side when her brother and she would play cards in their study time. On smelling a baked-sweet smell both she and her brother would hide the cards and hold the open books in their hands pretending to be absorbed in reading it. Before the poor woman could barge in to see her children playing truant, it was the smell of her hair oil that would herald her entry.