Scents and Scentsibility: On Inderjit Badhwar

By Joshua Jones

Inderjit Badhwar’s first novel has seen at least three other instances in print, each with different names. A bildungsroman in part, while a meditation on family and heritage also, the novel spans some two-hundred-and-fifty pages. And each time the narrative has remained essentially the same. First, as the curiously titled Sniffing Papa, in 2002. Then, with the French publishing house Livre de Poche in-translation as the more sensually titled, La Chambre de Parfums, for which Badhwar won La Prix du meilleur livre étranger. That was in 2004. Following the preference for a name more appealing to the senses to its conclusion, the next English print of the novel was titled, The Chamber of Perfumes, also in 2004. Only last of all, and quite recently, was the novel amended, finished and given its new and final title: Hunter. It is yet to be published in this form.

Especially on those hot, dusty summer afternoons. Papa’s room was 

a haven from dust and choked nostrils. It was more than that. If we 

breathed deep enough we smelled Papa. Not Papa, but what we thought 

wafted from some chemical, perhaps spiritual pact he had made with 

the cosmos. Did souls have smells? Soul to us then was nothing but 

timeless Sanskrit words uttered by pundits over loudspeakers or at 

prayer gatherings – pujas – Atman, Brahman, Triyambakam.

The question—Did souls have smells?—is a bedevilling one, to put it lightly. Do they? Is the soul of a smell (be it Platonic or otherwise spiritual) the essence of its form, the idea of what it resembles, what it calls to mind? In this case and for Badhwar, what a smell can bring to mind is a certain room, and a certain person: Papa. Olfactory memory, the remembrance of things past caused not by sight, but by smell, is more powerful than expected. Harvard chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Venkatesh Murthy, has reported similar findings, if less novelistic. Odors, he arguedin The Harvard Gazette, February twenty-seventh, 2020, travel directly to the limbic system, to focal-points of recollection and feeling, the hippocampus and amygdala.

All of what you consider flavor is smell. When you are eating all the 

beautiful, complicated flavors … they are all smell.

The first and primary sense developed at the foetal stage in the womb is smell. This makes scents an unsurprising jumping-off point for Badhwar as a novelist in search of Proustian recollections and explorations of his family life in India. Badhwar, who was born in Uttar Pradesh in 1943, would spend some years of his life in America, at that time already married, where he studied as a post-graduate at Columbia University. It was during this time that he worked as a journalist and investigative reporter, often covering military topics, and later becoming the associate editor for the Federal Times. This stint in American journalism culminated in Badhwar’s 1975 nomination for the Pulitzer Prize, while writing as the senior associate for the Washington Merry-Go-Round column with Jack Anderson.

Suddenly I felt terribly sentimental about America. I knew I would 

ultimately return to Raipur. Jobless men without hope, inspired by 

Roosevelt, had built this place in a triumph of the human spirit. I could 

have walked here forever. I wanted to look in a mirror and see my face 

because I knew I was smiling like a madman, a smile I had smiled when 

the forests of Raipur had walked with me, a smile I had never actually 

seen. I wanted to climb to the top of the mountain and dance like 

Zorba the Greek.

His memories then, are not strictly of the family and of Indian life, though he would later return to the country of his birth, becoming the acting editor of India Today, and one of the most renowned journalists working in India. (Curiously, his father-in-law, once employed at The Times of India, was the first Indian man to visit the North Pole). Today, Inderjit Badhwar is the editor of India Legal. Like certain of his contemporaries, Arundhati Roy among them, Badhwar adopted a stance of opposition towards the increasingly jingoistic and islamophobic Indian government, a position that no less afforded him the ability to continue working as a journalist, though no doubt to some increased pressure. But his ventures as a published novelist began with Sniffing Papa. 

The novel is veined with cultural references, giving the reader enough fruit for pursuing their own ends as for following the path of the story. Before the third chapter, the plucky reader will have already been introduced fleetingly to such notable written personages as the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and Travyan’s Social History, the last of which rests dog-eared on his father’s bookshelf. These touchstones serve to define the cultural standing of the book. Though the novel doesn’t ostensibly set itself up to be an epic poem, it’s made clear that the game will be played on the home-ground of those who know enough of literature to recognise these names in passing, or know little enough of it to be impressed by their gravity. Between this, the book is ripe with description.

Drains clogged with mulch and shit and cowdung, the powerful

sulphuric acid and ammonia-like stench of the bodies of unwashed 

human weight-carriers. Lice-infested Raipur where, at 5 a.m. winter 

or summer, the residents sauntered out into the streets in their skirt-

like lungis sucking and chewing on neem twigs to disinfect their 

teeth in which stuck particles of lentils, leavened bread, spiced 

potatoes, raw onions, of their standard dinner.

The narrative is hinged on the pursuit of memory, but the material of the book is the miasma of the senses, the Agrippa’s mirror of the air: all things are diffused and reflected in that element, returning to the self as dreams. In a few words, the content is chaotic, diverse, and ultimately, overwhelming. It’s something like the experience of being overcrowded with scents and senses (good and gross), with impressions and just-noticed unsightly stains. Nice smells are offset with bad ones.

We left behind the smells of the New Jersey Turnpike, that acrid, 

pungent, skunk-like acid smell that enters your pores as you drive 

past Newark and the refineries and the flaring gas above the

smoke-stacks, and Mid-town Manhattan’s smells of steely 

fire-escapes and Christmas Day doggy-ick and brown paper bags 

with half-empty whisky pints and the stale grease of last night’s french 

fries, and the ladies who had perfumed their faces to walk their 

poodles without washing or brushing their teeth. Seneca smelled of 

the Potomac, not like it does when it flows under Key Bridge in 

Washington, but as it must have done hundreds of years ago when 

horses pulled barges right to the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay.

In 2017, Inderjit Badhwar visited the Prague Writers’ Festival to give a reading. What did he bring with him to the Czech Republic other than these memories? What Badhwar proves with the-novel-now-titled Hunter, what he has been hunting for all along (pardon the pun) is perhaps no more than the meaning of the recollections he carries with him, an objective largely achieved by following his nose. From the birth of his child, to his remembrances of America, the novel deals in the visual and the olfactory in equal measure. If Badhwar started out by Sniffing Papa, he continued as he had always intended to go on: in hunting, nose to the earth like a bloodhound, seeking out a method to give his memories form. If there’s any logic to the novelist, this must be the destination, and the place where those memories are found.