No, I have not arrived

Sailen Routray

 'The arrival of the leave train' (1918)
Oil painting by Bernard Meninsky (1891–1950)
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The other day, in passing, perhaps in good faith, you mentioned to another in front me, that "He has arrived." Or were you perhaps being sarcastic? 

But, no. I have not arrived. 

I am still in the train. The train rattles, shakes, but moves, albeit slowly. It is built of the teachings of my master. Rather of whatever I make of his teachings. For his teachings are correct, beneficial and robust, like that of any other master. So, I am abroad, on this train, which is made up of my master's words. 

My master is a robber. He has robbed me of vain curiousity, the need to know how the world works so that I can change the world. He has snatched away the veils I used to hide my true desires from myself. I now must look within and see what is there. And there is so much to change within. Everything that needs to be changed, accepted, lived with, and transcended, is within.

My master is a magician. He has revealed the tricks of the world and how it fools me to keep me entangled with it. How it promises pleasure but delivers pain. How it really has nothing up its sleeves.

 

My master is also a doctor. He heals souls, he heals bodies, he heals minds. He heals men, he heals women, he heals the poor, he heals the rich, he heals the whites, he heals the browns. He heals wounds, he heals vanities, he heals delusions. 

My master has also pulled into the train other folk like me, people with sorrow,  people with pain, people with delusions. Now they give me company, even when they are silent, especially so when they are silent. 

My journey, our journey, has a destination, for now. I have not chosen the terminus of this railway line. My master has. And when I reach there I may have to leave on another journey in another train built with his words.  

On this journey, I also see other people passing in other trains built with the teachings of other masters. On seeing them my heart gladdens, that they are also safe, that they are also protected. That one day their sorrow will end.

But, no. I have not arrived. 

I will perhaps never arrive. But I am glad where I am going. I am glad to be on this train. I am glad to be on this journey. And I am glad about this point of my journey. 

For each point of this journey is an arrival. 

But, no. I have not arrived. 

I am arriving, each moment, at a new station. And at each station I meet a new me. And when I meet this new me, I can only hug him and cry. Not with pain. But with love.   

Whose purpose is it anyway?

Sailen Routray 

(This essay reflects on the idea of purpose—whether it is shaped by the self, by society, or by circumstance. It explores how individuals navigate meaning and intention in everyday life.)

 A Japanese teapot made out of iron, viewed from above
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Agon S. Buchholz

From where I am sitting and writing right now I can see a wide expanse of fields extending till the horizon. The line where the earth and sky meet is hidden by the bodies of trees. In the middle distance I can see a large tree, perhaps a mahua, spread over a few hundred square feet. There are two smaller trees near this tree. The leaves of all the three are a shade of light green tinged with yellow.

The largest of the three trees has a thin foliage, but the ground underneath is always shaded. Right now it is eleven in the forenoon of a hot Baisakha day. I can see a bull standing absolutely still underneath. When I visited the tree last, on some other summer day, I saw a couple of dogs sprawled on the ground, near its trunk, panting as they are wont to do.

Is this tree’s purpose to provide shade to stray animals and people? Not really. It does provide shade and many other things besides, all of which are beneficial to some creature or the other. But is that the tree’s purpose? Perhaps the only purpose we can attribute to this tree is to live, which it does no matter what. It is perhaps safe to say that the tree does not have a purpose.

Do I have a purpose? I have spent a lot of time in my life with soul searching, explorations, and intense seeking to figure out my purpose. I have met and experienced some interesting people, ideas, books, places, heartburn, and happiness in the process. But have I found my purpose? No.

What if the differences I posit between the tree and me, with respect to this idea of having a purpose, are not tenable at all? What if I am like the tree. What if I do not have a purpose?

Then I am just free to do whatever I want to do from moment to moment, like the tree. But am I able to exercise that freedom? Alas, no! There is social conditioning that forces me to think that I must have a purpose. And then I become guilty about seeking purpose as a matter of habit, despite intellectually understanding that I do not need to have any purpose to earn the right to exist.

This has the possibility of turning into an infinite loop. There seems to be only one way out of it. It is this—to cognize that the purpose of human life is to realize that we don’t have any purpose and to strive to make that realization not a matter of intellectual understanding but of everyday living. Paradoxical? Welcome to real life!

Note: You may want to explore a poem that plays with the idea of meaning titled 'Some things I Have Been Meaning to Tell You Or The Bhubaneswar Love Song' and a reflective piece titled 'Manual for Making a Chariot' that shows how the magical is often embedded within ordinary memories. 

Tags: meaning of life essay, purpose in life reflection, philosophy of purpose, personal reflection essay, life and meaning writing

Keywords: purpose, life meaning, self and society, essay reflection on life

Why I am no longer ashamed of being called a blogger

Sailen Routray

Boy under waterfall in Phu Sang National Park, Thailand
https://commons.wikimedia.org/Khunkay

Six years back, sometime in April 2020, a friend started nagging me. He wanted me to start a blog. I was hesitant. I was in the middle of multiple life transitions. I was feeling absolutely no pep and had no energy to start anything new. So, I dillydallied. But he was persistent. According to him, he liked my writing. And he wanted me to break out of the academic straightjacket I had apparently put myself in, and write whatever caught my fancy.

I was not convinced. However, I realized that there was no harm in starting a blog. At least it would shut him off. So, I started 'Alukuchi Malukuchi'. As it says in the blog description, it "is an Odia word that refers to a collection of miscellaneous and rather useless objects". That was on the 6th of June, 2020. And here I am in April 2026, still blogging regularly.

I am something of a technophobe. Mechanical, and digital, things tend to hate me. At least they used to. I would touch a tape recorder, and it would conk off. Things are not so bad now. But I am still far away from being a technophile. So, when I started a blog I did some research and figured out that Blogger is the simplest platform. That was an easy choice. And in terms of design and interface I chose the most basic (and to many eyes, perhaps ungainly and infelicitous) design interface within Blogger itself.

I started with archiving my already published writings in Odia and English. That's how it has mostly been all these years. Since I started writing and publishing early in life, I am yet to run out of material for archiving. However, since over the last ten years most of my new writing has been in Odia, and I follow a rhythm of alternating between posts in Odia and English, I have started writing exclusively for the blog in English, mostly translations of poems and songs and book reviews. On an average, I have been posting four times in a month. That's probably not much. But for me that has worked out well in terms of frequency.

Around the time I started the blog (rather, I was made to start one), I got out of all social media platforms apart from LinkedIn. I deactivated my Facebook account and I have never logged back in. I was never on Instagram. I deleted my Twitter account after removing each twit one by one, as they did not allow then to delete them en masse. I deleted my Clubhouse account too. 

So, there was nowhere I could share the blog posts. I used to share the posts through WhatsApp with the friend whose persistence forced me to start the blog. When I was talking to a common friend, the topic of the blog came up and I started sharing with him as well. Over a period of time, this snowballed. I now share 'Alukuchi Malukuchi' with a large number of my contacts on WhatsApp. I try and share posts on my WhatsApp status as well everyday. 

Over the last six years, the blog has become my window to the world. In early 2023, I moved into Kamakhya Nagar, a tiny town of around 20,000 folks 100 kilometers up north from Bhubaneswar. I work from home. I know very few people in the town. Since I don't go out to work and the town has no public spaces such as theatres, film halls or functional libraries, I have no places to go to where I can meet people.

Updating the blog, and sharing it with people, has made me feel a part of a community, albeit a virtual one. A few friends and readers comment on the blog itself. Many more write back on WhatsApp with feedback. Some, very kindly, revert with their own work. It makes me feel less lonely, and more connected.

There was a time when I wanted to be a writer, rather an author. And being called a blogger would have made me feel bad, like an also ran. That authorial aspiration is not completely gone. However, there is now a distance between that want and me. By writing regularly without an eye on publication, I have slowly been figuring out things about what actually interests me. It has helped me find my voice, albeit a creaky and ungainly one.

Now I am content just writing. Getting into the habit of writing a little on most days, to be able to write what I want, and to know that if no one publishes it, I can just put it out on my blog has been liberating. I am happy being a blogger. I am also happy being seen and called a blogger. 

Blogging has helped me find my voice. It has given me the courage to start doing the writing I want to do. The blog has also provided me with a sense of community and a rope out of social isolation. What more could it do?

Where the Lord has his fill

Sailen Routray

Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Post of India

Mahaprasad or the food of the gods

Ritually cooked food that is offered to the deities presiding over the sanctum sanctorum of Puri’s Jagannath Temple becomes mahaprasad after its consecration. Many smriti shashtras and puranas such as Skanda Purana and Mahapurusha Vidya extoll the virtues of mahaprasad as a ritual offering of food to the gods. Some sources consider it as being equivalent to the deities themselves (Pratihari, 2012). 

According to historical sources, the tradition of mahaprasad was instituted in the Jagannath Temple by the Somavamshi kings of Odisha.  Groups of temple servitors called badusuara and mahasuara have the right and the duty of cooking the food at the temple. It is cooked in the rosaghara, or the temple kitchens, located in the southeast corner of the Jagannath temple. 

Mahaprasad is cooked over wooden/charcoal fires, in ochre coloured earthen pots, and on earthen stoves. It is essentially a slow cooking process and uses local ingredients with very limited use of spices. Vegetables are generally used whole without being peeled. Goddess Lakshmi herself is supposed to supervise the cooking process. (Pratihari, 2012)

However, the temple kitchen is completely forbidden to women. On ordinary days, the number of visitors at the Jagannath Temple swings between 15,000 to 35,000 people and a large number of these (10,000 on an average) partake the mahaprasad at the temple. Many of them also carry it home. It is a matter of belief among Hindus that consumption of mahaprasad decreases one’s bad karma (Züfle, 2017).

The temple kitchen is divided into two parts – the kotha bhaga ghara and the rosoi ghara. Kotha bhoga is the bhog that must be offered to the deities as a part of quotidian rituals by the Temple Administration, which also bears the cost of its preparation. Kotha bhoga is cooked in the eponymous kotha bhoga ghara. This bhog is ritually offered to the deities in the sanctum sanctorum, is distributed among the traditional temple servitors and is not meant for sale. 

The bhog that is cooked in the rosoi ghara is offered to the deities in the bhogamandapa hall in the temple and is meant for sale to the devotees. The right of entrance to the temple kitchen is granted only to those men who belong to the families of Jagannath’s cooks (Züfle, 2017). 

Mahaprasad as a living culinary tradition

Mahaprasad is offered to the deities on multiple occasions every day. During the morning, refreshments are offered during the gopala ballava bhoga. The morning meal is called sakaala dhopa. The food that is cooked for public offering is called bhogamandapa bhoga. The afternoon meal of the deities is known as madhyahna dhoopa, the evening meal as sandhya dhoopa and the last refreshments in the night are called as badasinghar dhoopa. 

The gopala ballava bhoga, or the morning refreshments, are prepared by non-Brahmins. It is not prepared in the rosaghara. The dishes of this bhog are prepared in an additional kitchen called the ballava rosoighara. It is located adjacent to the temple market (where mahaprasad is made available to the devotees in lieu of payment) known as Ananda Bazara (Züfle, 2017). 

Mahaprasad can also be termed as a living culinary archive. During the colonial period, many new crops were introduced from the New World, i.e., from the Americas, into India. Many food crops – grains, vegetables, spices and fruits - which we now consider as essential parts of Indian cuisine, started being cultivated and eaten in India only in the last few hundred years. These include vegetables like potato and tomato, condiments like chilly, cereals like corn, and fruits like pineapples, sapota and custard apple, and nuts like cashew. 

None of these arriviste crops are used in preparing mahaprasad. Therefore, if someone wants to gain an understanding of vegetarian dishes and cooking processes in Odisha before the colonial encounter, they have no better cuisine to study than the mahaprasad of Jagannath Puri. The everyday menu comprises of rice-based dishes (such as kanika and khechudi), dals (e.g., dalma), and dishes made with various vegetables (like besara and mahura). (Züfle, 2017).

Mahaprasad is principally of two types. One kind consists of those dishes cooked with water – these are called sankhudi bhoga. The other type consists of dishes fried in ghee. These are called sukhila/nisankhudi bhoga. The latter last for a long time, consist of both sweet and savory items, and allow mahaprasad to be carried by devotees over long distances and time periods for family, relatives and friends (Pratihari 2012). 

Apart from the bhog that is offered on a daily basis, several special dishes of mahaprasad are prepared on festive occasions. Perhaps the most famous among these is the podapitha bhog during Rath Yatra. The rathakora is also offered during this festival. Among mahaprasad dishes offered during other festivals, mention must be made of the keli and chhenamandua during Chandan Yatra, amalu and khiri during Jhulana Yatra, gaintha during Bakula Amavasya and Makara Chaurasi Bhoga during Makar Sankranti (Mishra 2022).

Mahaprasad and rasagola

A special mention must be mentioned here about the rasagola mahaprasad offered to the deities as a part of the Niladri Bije rituals that mark the end of the festivities of Rath Yatra. This will also throw some light on the geographical origins of rasogola as a sweet. 

The rashogulla of Bengal and the rasagola of Odisha, especially the variety that is cooked for the deities in Puri, are two different dishes in taste and texture. Although both use chhena (cottage cheese) as the primary ingredient, and are round in shape, these are two very different sweets. 

Some Sanskrit texts may proscribe the curdling of milk to produce cottage cheese. However, we cannot always see prescriptive texts as a guide to culinary practice. Given the fact that the culinary traditions of the Jagannath Temple in Puri do not seem to have changed much over the last five centuries at least, it is highly unlikely that the offering of rasagolas to the deities is a recent innovation. 

Therefore, the rashogulla might be an invention by a Bengali confectioner in 19th century Calcutta, the rasagola of Odisha seems to be a sweet dish of hoary antiquity. Apart from the fact that both are balls of cottage cheese dipped in a sweet syrup, there is very little in common between the two (Mohanty, 2017). 

Mahaprasad as a socio-cultural phenomenon

Mahaprasad is not only a matter of hoary culinary tradition, it also an important aspect of traditional and contemporary social life. Since mahaprasad can be partaken without the restrictions of caste coming into play, traditionally in the micro-region surrounding Puri, mahaprasad has been the first choice for serving in feasts. Because of the ease of transportation these days, it has become a part of many ritual feasts, especially those related to births, deaths, shraddha, upanayan feasts, etc. (ibid) in a wider region. Therefore, mahaprasad is an important part of everyday life of a large number of people from Odisha. 

In many parts of the state, and in some neighbouring regions, mahaprasad plays an important role in ritualized friendships between men. In Odia this process is called ‘mahaprasadia bandhu basiba.’ Two men (across the barriers of caste, class, status and age) can decide to ritualize their friendship, feed each other mahaprasad and become ‘mahaprasad’ for each other. This is a relationship for life that cannot be broken. They become each other’s fictive kin and have to be treated as the closest kin (Skoda, 2004). 

Engagements for marriages in Odisha are often solemnized with mahaprasad as the witness. People take a vow touching the mahaprasad. Breaking such a vow is considered a great sin (Dash, 2015). 

Dried anna (rice) mahaprasad is called nirmalya. It is sold in very typical red coloured pouches. It has high ritual significance. Many Odia Vaishnavs do not eat anything till they have bathed in the morning and have had a grain of the nirmalya. Similarly, it is considered liberating for someone to have it as the last thing in their mouth before they die. Many communities also believe in supernatural healing properties of nirmalya. People use it to rid their houses of ghosts and other supernatural presences (Pratihari 2012). 

Despite the importance of mahaprasad as an aspect of India’s culinary traditions, it has not been a topic of rigorous research and documentation. Especially the physical and material aspects of the cooking process of the mahaprasad have never been properly documented. It is high time this is undertaken with some sense of urgency.  

Bibliography

Dash, Surendranath. 2015. Srimandira Sabdokosha. Bhubaneswar: SriJagannath Research Institute.

Mishra, Bhaskar. 2020. Shree Jagannath Gyanakosha. Cuttack: A. K. Mishra. 

Mishra, Bhaskar. 2022. ShreeJagannathanka Rajabhoga. Bhubaneswar: Aama Odisha.

Mohanty, Asit. 2017. Shree Jagannathanka Rasagola. Bhubaneswar: Aama Odisha. 

Mohapatra, Siddheswar. 2004. “Bhoga, Chhapana Bhoga.” In Odishara Khadya Sanskruti, edited by Ganeswar Mishra. Bhubaneswar: ink odisha.  

Pratihari, Rabindranath. 2012. Sridarubramhanka Mahaprasad Rahasya. Cuttack: SB Publications. 

Skoda, U., 2004. Ritual friendship in a converging tribal and caste society. Journal of Social Sciences, 8 (2), pp.167-177.

Züfle, Lisa. 2017. “The two faces of Mahaprasad: ritual and business in the kitchen of Sri Jagannath.” In Approaching ritual economy: socio-cosmic fields in globalized contexts, edited by Roland Hardenberg. Universität Tübingen. 

Note: This essay first appeared in the book titled "Shree Jagannatha: Lord of the Universe" published by The Hindu Group. 

Research programmes for engaged social sciences

Rahul Mukhopadhyay, Sahana Udupa, Sailen Routray and Sowjanya Peddi

Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Hashtag ysp

Significant transformations of the Indian economy, polity and society over the last two decades raise one important question: Have the social sciences in India been able to understand and adequately interpret this change? Some of the superficial signs are not entirely encouraging. If the Nehruvian Second Plan strategy was built around the work of academics like Mahalanobis, the intellectual inspiration for the liberalisation process has largely come from within government. Indeed, there are even some signs that the gap between the social sciences and the demands society is making of them is being filled by those outside Indian academia.

The report of the fourth Indian Council for Social Science Research review committee looked at the books published by the top eight academic publishers in India. A third of these books were written by foreigners or non-resident Indians. More important, of the remaining, well over a fifth was accounted for by independent researchers.

The very real gap between social sciences in India and the demands society is making of them has caused some introspection among social scientists them- selves. But no matter how intellectually rigorous such an exercise is, it still reflects only one side of the picture. It raises, and answers, questions social scientists think are important. 

It is just possible though that these questions are not always the ones that are at the top of the mind of others in society who are looking to the social sciences for insights. It is important then to look at the issue not just from the point of view of social scientists but also from the perspective of those who engage with the social sciences, whether they are policymakers, industry, non-government organisations (NGOs), or anyone else. 

To this end the National Institute of Advanced Studies organised a consultation, ‘Towards Engaged Social Sciences’ in Bangalore on October 29 and 30, 2007, which brought together social scientists and those who en- gage in the social sciences. At the end of two days, the consultation came up with a number of recommendations that pointed to an alternative way forward.

Different voices

The road to these recommendations was not the usual one. As was only to be expected, the social scientists and representatives of NGOs, industry or government did not always speak the same language. On the question of corruption, in particular, the differences were quite striking. 

The social scientists tended to treat corruption as an externality, even if a debilitating one. Corruption for them was a major reason why effective policies could not be implemented. Those outside the social sciences, on the other hand, tended to place corruption at the centre of their analysis, repeatedly beginning their analysis with an attempt to understand this phenomenon.

The wide range of the issues covered and the sheer diversity of the views expressed made it quite futile to seek complete unanimity among the participants. At the same time any consistent ground that emerged from such a diverse set of views would clearly be well worth carrying forward. 

In the search for such common ground, the participants were requested, in the concluding session after listening to each other for two days, to come up with specific suggestions pointing to the way forward for social sciences in India. They then came up with a variety of suggestions which, despite all the diversity in opinions and backgrounds, appeared to have a degree of consistency. Indeed, the suggestions could fit quite easily into a consistent framework of recommendations.

Research programmes

The main thrust of these recommendations was that social science research should be organised in terms of research programmes that could be financed by the government, private sources or a combination of the two. This was based on the recognition that social science research is becoming increasingly dependent on project funding. These projects, whether they are from the government or industry, typically come with specific questions for which the social scientist is expected to provide the answers. 

These questions, more often than not, are focused on issues of immediate concern. Important as these issues are, the healthy growth of the social sciences as well as a meaningful understanding of society, requires us to also raise questions before they become matters of immediate concern. Social scientists thus also need to raise questions and develop theories which they might not always be able to do under conditions of project-based research alone. The way out would be to focus on broad research programmes built around specific issues. Such programmes would address not just matters of immediate concern but also theoretical and other related issues.

Each programme would have to be managed by a core group. Researchers from across the country would then be able to approach the programme for support for individual projects including theoretical ones. As long as the core group believes that the individual project is consistent with the overall aims of the programme it would be financed. 

Such programmes would thus be able to draw on research talent from institutions across the country, and can address broad issues in a more comprehensive manner. The knowledge generated by these programmes would be of use to all those who engage with the social sciences.

Policymakers, NGOs, industry and others will be able to find not just answers for questions on their minds, but also to questions that are important for their work but had not occurred to them. Since such programmes would benefit all those who engage with the social sciences, they are likely to find financial support from the government, private sources or public-private partnerships.

Strengthening institutions

The success of these programmes would depend on the talent they can draw from institutions across the country. Thus rather than programmes replacing institutions, the two would have to grow together. The programmes would thus have to be accompanied by measures to strengthen institutions. This would have to begin with measures to recognise successful social science institutions. This could be done by institutionalising the practice of providing substantial corpus funds to institutions with a proven track record. 

The government has given substantial grants to individual institutions that have gained reputations of their own. This process could be institutionalised by laying down predetermined criteria that will make institutions eligible for such corpus funding.

Institutions that meet a specified minimum standard can be eligible for a specific corpus funding; those that have established higher standards can be eligible for a larger corpus. Institutions that have demonstrated an ability to function on their own will then gain greater autonomy through a larger corpus. Such a mechanism could also be related to periodic reviews of the functioning of institutions so that they are aware of just how close they are to achieving the prescribed norms.

Better compensation

The problem with institutions is however not a matter of finances alone. There is also a need to put in place a system that generates high quality social science research professionals in the required numbers. Here again the first step could be in the form of recognition. This could be done by increasing the amounts paid to national professors and offering it to younger social scientists who have established research credentials. 

There is a need to encourage social scientists between the ages of 40 and 45 who have demonstrated an ability to do high quality research and could benefit by being given a free hand for a fixed period of time. The category of national professors could be used to provide them the resources needed to work on issues of their own choice for a period of, say, five years.

Beyond providing recognition, there is a need to improve the quality of researchers as well as their numbers. The quality of research in research institutions as well as teaching in universities today is negatively affected by, among other factors, the substantial and growing distinction on the ground between institutions that teach and those that do research. This sharp distinction ensures that the latest research findings are not known to teachers, and researchers do not have the benefit of having their ideas challenged by young minds.

This gap could be bridged by cross-deputation. Researchers could be deputed for fixed periods of time to teaching institutions in exchange for teachers being deputed to research institutions. Such cross-deputation should have the effect of improving teaching, or at least making it more in touch with the latest research. But this process alone would not be enough. There is a need to substantially alter the textbooks so that they reflect the latest developments in each field.

Bilingual research

The quality of research and teaching is also adversely affected by having a purely English-based social science while society functions in other languages. This directly affects the dissemination of the research to a wider audience. 

More importantly, there are insights to be gained by engaging with society through the local languages which are not always captured by a unilingual (English-dominated) research process. This difficulty has grown in recent years as in earlier decades there were social scientists who wrote in more than one language. There is thus a need to expand the scope of bilingual research and teaching.

In addition to providing the finances and the talent for research programmes, there is also a need to improve the quality and availability of data. A recurring theme during the consultation was the existence of a data crisis. 

Agricultural economists in particular were worried about the quality of the data that was being generated by surveys. With satellites now generating images with one metre resolution, it was felt that the use of satellite imagery for crop and land use data needs to be explored urgently. 

If satellite imagery can provide accurate data for smaller areas, it will also help crop insurance by providing at least a preliminary idea of the production on the land of individual farmers. There is thus an urgent need to explore the potential to use satellite imagery for data on agriculture.

Concerns about the availability of data were also raised in the health sector. While hospitals had a large amount of data, this was not available to social scientists, possibly because of concerns about the privacy of patients. If privacy is protected through effective guarantees of anonymity, it should be possible to provide this data to social scientists. There is thus a need to create a system where health records maintained by hospitals are used to generate data that could be used by social scientists with the guarantee of anonymity for patients.

There was also a concern expressed that the data that are currently being generated are not being utilised to their full potential as they are not made available to the larger fraternity of researchers. ICSSR institutions today generate a substantial amount of data through projects of their own. This data needs to be put into a sharable database so that it can be shared by a broader set of social scientists. 

There is thus a need to create a sharable database of information on research data across all ICSSR institutions. Such a database can also be tapped by those who engage with the social sciences from industry, government and NGOs.

An effective research programme that expects to attract research talent from institutions spread out across the country will also have to improve communications among social scientists themselves. To this end it becomes important to establish a Social Science Network. The consultation reflected the gaps in the awareness of the social scientists themselves of the research being done in different parts of the country. This was particularly true of research being carried out at the MPhil and PhD levels. 

It was felt that an online Social Science Network would help reduce this gap. The online nature of this network would also provide an effective link for researchers in the more remote parts of the country. This would help Indian social science as a whole engage with issues in remote areas in the country.

Online dissemination

Since one of the main objectives of the research programmes would be to make available high quality social science inputs to those who engage with the social sciences at least some of its success would depend on it being accessible to those outside the social sciences. This could be helped by establishing an online mechanism for the dissemination of research results to a wider audience. 

The lack of information and accessibility was highlighted as a key concern by all participants. Those who were not social scientists in particular emphasised how difficult it was for them to access research findings. It was felt that information about research findings should be provided to those who could use them whether they were in government, industry, NGOs or in any other field.

In short, the recommendations are: 

(i) Social science research should be organised in terms of research programmes that could be financed by the government, private sources or a combination of the two. 

(ii) Institutionalise the practice of providing substantial corpus funds to institutions with a proven track record. (iii) Increase the amounts paid to national professors and offer it to younger social scientists who have established research credentials. 

(iv) Depute researchers to teaching institutions in exchange for teachers being deputed to research institutions. 

(v) Substantially alter textbooks so that they reflect the latest developments in each field. (vi) Expand the scope of bilingual research and teaching. 

(vii) Explore the potential to use satellite imagery for data on agriculture. 

(viii) Create a system where health records maintained by hospitals are used to generate data that could be used by social scientists with the guarantee of anonymity for the patients. 

(ix) Create a sharable database of information on research data across all ICSSR institutions. (x) Establish a Social Science Network, and 

(xi) Establish an online mechanism for the dissemination of research results to a wider audience.

Note; This co-authored piece was first published in 2007 in Economic and Political Weekly 42 (49).

Communal Violence in Bhadrak, Odisha

Pramodini Pradhan and Sailen Routray

Bhadrak railway station
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Shanti.lataa1

Bhadrak town in the district of the same name in Odisha has a sizeable Muslim population constituting 39.56% of the total population of 1,21,338. Centuries of living together have led to the development of a shared culture and its expressions in many ways and forms in the day-to-day life of the people. 

However, this harmony has been disturbed periodically. The town experienced two major communal clashes—one in 1946 and the other in 1991—with a more recent one taking place in April. What is common is that all three clashes occurred against the backdrop of communal tension in the larger political scenario in the country and were triggered by petty local events.

The 1946 violence took place against the backdrop of the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state. In 1991, the political atmosphere of the country was communally charged, centred as it was on the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid issue. In that charged atmosphere, Ram Navami was celebrated for the first time in Bhadrak town, organised primarily by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

On the very day of the celebration, the town plunged into a major clash between the Hindus and the Muslims which led to the loss of many lives. It also spread to the nearby town of Soro and other rural areas.

This time too, the communal clash took place two days after the Ram Navami celebrations. The following is a brief account of how it all started and the role played by communal forces.

Unprecedented celebrations 

From the time it was first introduced, the observance of Ram Navami in Bhadrak has always been organised and monitored by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliate organisations. This year, the scale and grandeur of celebrations was unprecedented and continued for seven days, whereas earlier they lasted for three days. About one lakh people, nearly 10 times compared to the previous years, participated in the processions. Given that the population of the town is a little over a lakh, the participation of such huge numbers points to efforts to mobilise people from outside. Saffron flags were seen all over the town, including atop government office buildings throughout the week.

On the final day of the celebrations, about a hundred medhas (floats) participated, accompanied by about 80 music bands playing high decibel music. Processions which had earlier wound up by 12 pm, continued till 3 am. During the processions, religious chants such as Jai Sriram and politically-loaded slogans like Hindustan mein rehna hai to Ram naam kehna hai were also raised. 

In the words of the president of the Hindu Suraksha Samiti (HSS), “After the UP election results, our youth were very excited. Their enthusiasm was very high. And here in Odisha, we did well in the recently held panchayat elections. So this year’s celebration was a special one.”

No untoward incident took place on the day of the festival. The Muslim community even felicitated the leaders/medhas in the processions when these passed through their localities. But beneath the veneer of this normalcy, there was apprehension in the Muslim community that something untoward might happen. Volunteers engaged by the Chauda Mohalla Committee (an apex body of Muslim mohalla committees of Bhadrak) were carefully chosen—people who would not get provoked easily. Most shops owned by Muslims were closed on the day.

Added to the effects of aggressive celebrations during Ram Navami, tension was also simmering among a section of the Muslim youth for another reason. The Urs (death anniversary of a saint) celebrations of Nasim Sarkar, a spiritual leader revered by certain sections of the Muslim community, were planned for 16 April, and posters announcing this were put up in the town. 

During the period of the Ram Navami celebrations, some of these posters were found to be torn and defiled, allegedly by Hindu youth. Besides, around the same time, there were offensive postings on the social media about Islam, again, allegedly by some Hindu youth. But the matter was not brought to the notice of the police.

Trigger point

In such a tense atmosphere, on the day after Ram Navami, that is, on 5 April, certain remarks apparently insulting the Hindu deities Ram and Sita appeared on social media. It was alleged that a Hindu student had posted on his Facebook wall a picture of the Ram Navami celebrations with the accompanying text, “Jai Sriram” and some Muslims had posted derogatory comments on it. On 6 April, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) brought it to the notice of the police and demanded immediate arrest of the accused. 

Reportedly, two written complaints were lodged on the basis of which the police registered a first information report (FIR). One complainant, a Class 10 student, declared himself as an active member of the Bajrang Dal.

It was reported that the police took time to act upon the complaint since the matter involved a cybercrime but the complainants insisted on the immediate arrest of the accused. Moreover, an impression was created that the police were reluctant to take any action at the behest of the local member of legislative assembly (MLA) and his son, as one of the accused was the son of a ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) leader. 

By the time the FIR was registered, alongwith the students, the activists of the Bajrang Dal, VHP and HSS were also agitating outside the police station demanding action. Soon after the FIR was registered, a section of the agitating crowd went on to block the National Highway 45. This was followed by attacks on Muslim-owned shops near Bant Chhak. After this, the police declared Section 144 (the Code of Criminal Procedure) in the town and detained some of the rioters.

The next day, the district administration convened a meeting of the peace committee at the collectorate where the local MLA, chairperson of the Bhadrak municipality, the inspector general of police (IGP) and superintendent of police (SP) Bhadrak, additional district magistrate (ADM) and some community leaders were present. It was officially announced that 23 shops had been burnt down, and that the municipality would be arranging a vending zone for the affected shop owners.

By some accounts, many persons who were not members of the peace committee had entered the meeting hall and occupied the seats as a result of which, there was no room for some genuine members. While the “chaotic” peace committee meeting was held inside the meeting hall, many young men had gathered outside despite the prohibitory order. Some were onlookers while nearly 150 Muslim youth had also gathered to know whether their grievance regarding the defiling of the posters of Sarkar Baba was being addressed by their community leaders. When they came to know that this matter was not raised in the meeting, the young men got agitated and proceeded towards the Madina Maidan, located in the Puruna Bazaar (the place where community decisions are often taken) on their motorbikes, shouting slogans like “Bulu Pattnaik zindabad” (Pattnaik is a BJD youth leader and son of Jugal Kishore Pattnaik, the sitting MLA (BJD) of Bhadrak) and “Islam zindabad” and, by some accounts, “Pakistan zindabad, Hindustan murdabad.” 

It is important to note that all this happened when the local political leaders as well as the top brass of the police and district administration were present in the town. While the administration was conducting the peace meeting, leaders of the BJP and its affiliates were mobilising Hindu youth, through social media and mobile phones and to which the police failed to pay attention. Hindu youth began gathering on the streets shouting “jor se bolo Jay Shri Ram.” As on the previous day, the activists of the Bajrang Dal and VHP were also part of the demonstration.

Most of the shops owned by Muslims were already shut due to the Friday afternoon prayers. Around 5 pm, the crowd began attacking Muslim shops in the Kacheri Bazaar area. As this message reached the Muslim majority areas, groups of young men, many of whom were already on the streets, began attacking Hindu shops in Chandan Bazaar and nearby areas.

Thus, began a chain of looting and arson. The main affected areas were Kacheri Bazaar, Bant Chhak area, Chandan Bazaar, Laha Pati and Charampa/Station Bazaar where mostly roadside shops were attacked. The looting and arson did not spread to the residential areas. One mosque was attacked and partially damaged in Station Bazaar, and a temple was affected in Laha Pati though no human life was lost.

Response of the government

The local police and the district administration did not respond with the required seriousness, until the evening of 7 April. However, the state government swung into action once it became clear that the situation was going out of control. The same evening, the home secretary and the director general of police (DGP) rushed to Bhadrak and mobilised additional forces for the town. Curfew was imposed the same night. Order was issued for the immediate posting of a new district collector to take charge of the situation. 

It must be noted that the district administration was headless during the riot, since the collector had retired from service since 31 March, and no replacement had been posted. The SP and the inspector in charge of the Town Police Station and the ADM, who were on duty when the riot took place, were transferred.

Daytime curfew was in force for a few days, but nighttime curfew was in place for over a month following the violence and during this period, about 275 people were arrested including the state secretary of the Bajrang Dal, the district unit secretary of the BJP Yuva Morcha and a BJD councillor. There were allegations that many innocent people were also arrested. Apart from the anger felt by the concerned communities and family members of these innocents, the economic hardships faced by the families, particularly those of the poor, are a matter of serious concern.

Five days after the violence, on 12 April, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik visited the town and declared that the damage due to the riots would be assessed and adequate compensation would be provided. The compensation amount, it was announced, would range between a minimum of Rs. 20,000 and a maximum of Rs. 2,00,000 and was greeted with discontentment among all sections of the victims.

Dynamics of the riot

A noticeable feature of the riot this time was the active participation of the youth, including students, in the looting and arson. The general perception among both the communities is that the hold of traditional leadership has been breaking down and there is no alternative in place for the youth. There is also increasing unemployment. As a result, vote-seeking political parties are luring them with money to work as their foot soldiers.

The recent communal clash was also partly due to the local dynamics of electoral politics—intra- and inter-party rivalries. There are reportedly two factions in the local BJD, one led by Prafulla Samal and the other by Jugal Kishore Pattnaik. It is said that Samal is trying to contest the next election from Bhadrak while Pattnaik is trying to consolidate his Muslim vote bank. Each is trying to outsmart the other. 

Similarly, within the BJP, there are a number of aspirants for the Bhadrak assembly seat who are trying to get the voters on their side by whatever means that are available. Rumour-mongering played a part too. In Charampa area, a rumour that Muslims had destroyed three temples in the Puruna Bazaar area was deliberately fl oated by Hindu youth, while attacking a mosque and Muslim shops. It must be noted that no Hindus had been attacked in this area. In the Kacheri Bazaar vicinity, when Hindus began destroying Muslim shops, people talked about Pakistani bombs being deposited in the Puruna Bazaar area!

However, many ordinary citizens from both communities came forward to prevent the violence in their areas. The role of the residents of Puruna Bazaar, a Muslim-dominated area, in preventing violence was appreciated even by the president of the HSS. 

In his own words, “It is an admitted fact that the Muslim dominated Puruna Bazaar remained peaceful because Muslims took the lead and protected the area from unruly youth. Some Muslims actually threatened to beat up their own youth if they indulged in damaging the Hindu houses and shops of their locality. That is the bhaichara (brotherhood) of Bhadrak town.”

Conclusions

Unlike the riot of 1991, this time the violence did not spread throughout the town and could thus be curbed soon. This underlines the fact that the common people did not participate in it. Nevertheless, there are worrying trends as well. One is the use of students and unemployed youth as cannon fodder to further gains in electoral politics by cynically creating and manipulating communal sentiments. This will have dangerous consequences.

There are also signs that households living in areas dominated by the other community no longer feel safe and some families are thinking of shifting out. This will lead to ghettoisation that will damage the town’s social fabric. Moreover, as Hindutva and majoritarian politics deepen and expand nationally, one cannot rule out the danger to the locally rooted syncretic culture of the town.

Note: This essay was first published on July 15, 2017 in Economic and Political Weekly 52(28)  as a 'Comment' piece. It is is based on a report by People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Odisha, titled Weeping Salandi (June 2017).

Jayanta Mahapatra 

A master litterateur who created a language uniquely his own

Sailen Routray

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-2023)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/Suman Pokhrel

Poet Jayanta Mahapatra was cremated at the Khannagar crematorium of Cuttack, Odisha, on August 28. This in spite of him being a third-generation Christian, his grandfather having converted during the Orissa famine of 1866. The cremation was according to his own wishes, as recorded in his will, which also bequeathed a part of the ancestral property that he had inhabited for most of his adult life, to the family of Sarojini, his long-time caretaker.

Both these gestures are perhaps typical of the man who always occupied a tenuous space between the mainstream and the margins of literary circles in India and Odisha. Although a much-awarded poet, widespread recognition of his work came pretty late in his life. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009, when he was already 81 years old. Perhaps the most significant honour he received was in 2019 when he became a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. He was 91 then.

In his autobiography, Pahini Rati (The Night is Not Yet Over), Mahapatra mentions his studied marginalisation by the Odia literary establishment, where bureaucrats and professors of Odia and English literature have always found it easy to construct identities. Here he also discusses his experience of being a “mere teacher of physics” who starts writing poetry when posted in B.J.B. College in Bhubaneswar, apparently late, at the age of 38. 

He writes consistently from then on in terms of quality and quantity, managing to publish his poems in reputed literary periodicals across the world, such as The Times Literary Supplement, Critical Quarterly, Poetry—Chicago, and The Sewanee Review. He also publishes four volumes of poems within a decade of starting his writing practice.

Fleeting shadows

This was a late budding, but what an efflorescence it was. However, his poetic diction, which waywardly combines maps of his affective territories, personal snapshots of regional history, fleeting shadows of Odia language, and philosophical musings, was at odds with the canon of Indian English poetry that was being fashioned in Bombay in the first two decades after Independence.

The “Bombay School” (comprising the reigning tastemakers of Indian English literature at that time) was not a great fan of Mahapatra’s work. Nissim Ezekiel, in particular, was not excited by the first two of his poetry volumes when they came out in 1971. Ezekiel had published one of Mahapatra’s early poems, “Girl by the window”, in The Illustrated Weekly of India, which Ezekiel edited along with others. However, he wrote a review in the Weekly of Mahapatra’s collections, Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (Dialogue Publications, Kolkata), and Svayamvara and Other Poems (Writers Workshop, Kolkata), that was critical and expressed bafflement.

However, the acceptance of Mahapatra’s work across the globe by established journals meant that he had no reason to look back. He continued to write and publish regularly, not only poems but also translations of poetical works from Odia. His careers as a poet and as a translator fed into each other. 

The number of his poetry collections in English (apart from selections and edited/collected volumes) is more or less the same as that of his translations of Odia poetry into English. He also translated the Bengali poems of Sakti Chattopadhyay (his original award-winning collection, Jete Pari, Kintu Keno Jabo) into English in a volume published by Sahitya Akademi titled I Can, But Why Should I Go.

Translation is indeed a key trope through which we can engage with Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry. If there is one poet who always reminds me of Mahapatra, it is Agha Shahid Ali. When you read Shahid Ali and are stuck at a line or a stanza, you just have to translate it into Urdu/Hindustani in your mind for it to bloom into light. Similar is the case with Jayanta Mahapatra. When you are troubled by the movement of his lines or by some peculiar image, you render the lines into Odia and they make perfect sense.

Standing with the marginalised

So, for some time I used to think that Jayanta Mahapatra is that cliché, an Odia poet writing in English. But then I started engaging with his Odia poetry four years ago, before doing a longish interview with him, and my idea of Jayanta Mahapatra changed.

Although he is not a part of the Odia poetry canon and his contribution to Odia literature is yet to be seriously assessed (his autobiography Pahini Rati creates the texture of affective interiority in first-person narration in Odia for the first time, and reads more like a long prose poem), his Odia poems are remarkable. 

The forms of the lines are almost premodern, terse, and short. And yet the sensibility is high-modernist—socially engaged, politically conscious, resolutely standing with common people, the oppressed, the marginalised, long before it became fashionable in Odia poetry to do so. Here he is an English poet writing in Odia, English in tone, pitch, and the affective register, yet very Odia in the cadence and flow of the lines.

Perhaps this is the sign of a great poet, as opposed to a merely competent one? Jayanta Mahapatra wrote in English, he wrote in Odia, he also wrote from Odia into English through his translations. However, like all great poets, what he actually wrote in was perhaps a language completely of his own making (which sometimes sounded like Odia and sometimes like English), made up of the perceived absence of love from his mother, the ghosts of the trees that have disappeared from his beloved city of Cuttack, fragments of texts as diverse as Walden (by Henry David Thoreau), Rubaiyat (by Omar Khayyam) and Rudra Sudhanidhi (by Narayanananda Abadhuta Swami), and the play between darkness and light through which all of us who dabble with words, try to make sense.

That language, Jayanta Mahapatra’s language, will not die. 

Note: A slightly different version of this article was published in The Frontline magazine in 2023 as a tribute to the poet. 

Smell and the city: Bhubaneswar

Sailen Routray

"Sense of Smell" (1635; oil on panel)
Painted by Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685)
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Hermitage Museum 

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

A fart.

Farts produced by overeating fermented rice

have a de-hangovering smell,

like that of stale mint leaves.

The sound of a suppressed fart

borne by eating moong dal khichdi late in the night

has the consistency of claps induced by ghazals sung by Iqbal Bano.

Those brought into existence by eating lahmacun

have the flavour of tender onion shoots

marinated in wild honey for three days and four nights

during the waning gibbous moon.

When my childhood floated on the appliqué works of Pipili,

ghosts of farts populated the evening conversation.

Now Baba wants me to say ‘Excuse me’ when I fart.

Excuse me. There is someone clapping.

—Letter III, Room Number 5, Student’s Hostel, NIAS, Bangalore

~

Baba died in the room he shared at home with Ma in Bhubaneswar in 2014, when the year’s January had already shed its pretensions of coolness. The room in which he lay smelled slightly of bed sores, the water bed and the weight of words that he could no longer speak because of the malignant growth pressing against his vocal cords, the windows of the room shutting out the smell of areca nut blossoms flowering just behind, shutting out the world and giving the room a strong artificial smell—the stench of death.

When I try and remember Baba now, seven years after his death, I recall two smells immediately. One, of egg bhurji, of which he was an undisputed master in our extended family, and when he took to the kitchen for cooking it, the house smelled of complex, mixed odours of curry leaves, onions, mustard oil, a myriad ground spices and beaten eggs. And, two, of him dry roasting and then sautéing dried shrimps for his signature chingudi suhkhua chura. Both these dishes I do not eat now, although I was once addicted to them, having turned into a vegetarian culinary apostate in my traditionally non-vegetarian family.

But this is strange. I do not have a strong sense of smell. I suffered from tonsillitis grievously as a child, and it must have affected my nasal cavities. I also suffered from asthma in my childhood, and it came back with a bang in 2011 after beating a retreat in 1997. Any exposure to a strong smell is enough to start at least a minor attack; not having a good enough smelling apparatus offers no protection. Such is life.

But it is not as if all strong smells affect me equally. I am especially susceptible to room fresheners and strong deodorants and perfumes. Spending extended afternoons in the early 1990s bunking school and collecting jamuns in Janpath in Bhubaneswar did not affect me, despite the strong turpentine smell of the jamun blossoms, nor did the night-flowering jasmine peeking into the balcony at home.

Smell is often discussed as the sense organ par excellence, as it reputedly brings forth memories buried deep inside the psyche. Having a bad sense of smell has meant having a memory like a sieve with large holes, which keeps back nothing apart from the biggest recollections, and often loses even them. The most bizarre manifestation of this process is when I can consciously remember something visually and know that there is some smell associated with that ocular memory, but for the life of me cannot recall the exact smell.

Senses are supposed to be our windows to the world, but they often also have shutters, especially the sense of smell. One of my most persistent olfactory memories is about an absent one. I remember walking as a child on an evening in a narrow lane in Bhubaneswar’s Old Town. It was not summer, that much I am sure about, as it was cool. There was a roadside food stall frying stuff, under a huge peepul tree. I passed it. After a few seconds, a strange, strong smell hit my nostrils. It smelled like something fried in sesame oil. But as far as I know, there are no popular Odia snacks that are fried in this particular oil. I could have gone back to check. I did not. That smell still haunts me. I do not know till now what the smell was.

What is it about the olfactory sense that seems to hint at absences as much as presences? Why does one recollect so many peripheral details about ‘that particular smell’ but not quite the odour itself? Perhaps smell forms the base, the foundation, for our sensory memories, sending out tentacles into visions, hearings, giving them nourishment, yet ultimately laying hidden, subterranean. It is only when, for some reason, one does not use a particular sense organ that one gains faculties related to the others. This seems especially true for the sense of smell.

~

Shabdādibhih panchabhireva pancha

panchatvamāpuh svagunena badhdhāh |

kurangamātangapatangameena

bhringā narah panchabhiranchitah kim ||

The deer, the elephant, the moth, the fish and the black bee—these five have died, being entangled with one or other of the five senses. What then of humans who are attached to all the five?

—Verse 76, Vivekachudamani, Shankaracharya

Can the sense of smell be a source of knowledge? This question begs a larger one: can sensory perception provide us with valid knowledge? A large part of Western philosophical traditions constitutes various ways of answering this question. Certain Eastern traditions suggest that such a way of thinking about sense perception might be erroneous. According to Advaita Vedanta, for example, the path of knowledge for cognizing absolute reality lies through a mastery of the senses and turning them inwards.

What does such a view of the world and its relationship with the sensory apparatus tell us about the city that is not only seen but also heard, tasted, touched and smelled? What is the association of a specific sense of smell with a place, for instance, a street? When we prepare a map of a street or take its photograph, we are aware of the individual ocular elements that strike us. But at the same time, we also have a sense of how the street looks like a street, as different from being merely the sum of its elements. But of the same streetscape, if we were to recreate the olfactory experiences that it produces for us in its entirety, how do we go about doing it? How does the street as a whole smell when specific parts and nooks of it give out very different odours?

Even in a tradition like Vedanta, based on some idea of ‘total cognition’, why are sensory metaphors used to describe the errors of our perception, such as ‘seeing’ snakes in ropes? Why are these mistakes, as well as  their correction—to cognize the individual human soul as a reflection of the ultimate reality, in the manner of the moon being reflected in a multitude of water pots simultaneously—so overwhelmingly visual in nature?         

~

As a child, one of the strongest smells that I remember was a stink. A few years after a brief, ill-fated fling with schooling as a child, I rejoined the third standard of an Odia-medium municipality school when my family shifted to Bhubaneswar. The school was located near the southern walls of the Lingaraj Temple complex in Old Town. On many a summer day in March and April, we would have to close our windows in the classroom to avoid the stink that was blown from Bindu Sagar, a sacred tank located near the northern walls of the temple complex.

The terrain around the Lingaraj Temple complex has changed. Bindu Sagar itself is almost unrecognizable—it has smooth laterite stone banks now, with steps going in till the water, and a picture postcard garden of medicinal plants flanking its western side. From the locals to the tourists, many seem to like the demolitions that have happened around the Lingaraj Temple complex, especially on its northern side, that have been premised upon clearing a view of the spire of Lingaraj from the northern banks of Bindu Sagar.

Even when some of us nostalgia-minded folk remember the good old times and rue the wanton destruction of many heritage structures around the temple complex, including an eighteenth-century Maratha-era police outpost, what is missing in these accounts (mostly oral) is any mention of how the place actually smelled.

And the smell around the temple complex was not just about the stink from Bindu Sagar. What I miss from the malodourous past of Old Town also includes the smells of rotting vegetables in and around the Lingaraj haat; the rotting flowers and bel leaves near the temple, left behind by the pandas and the devotees; and the smell of mosquito fogging carried out by the then municipality (the city has a corporation now). Old Town had a distinct character in the way it smelled.

If someone were to restore the environs of Old Town to how it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there are visual references to aid in such an effort. A large number of them are ethnographic in nature, for example, the photographic documentation by the anthropologist James M. Freeman of the surroundings of the Kapileswar and Lingaraj temples. With the aid of photographs, one can perhaps attempt to undertake an act of ‘restoration’. But how would one recreate the smells of Old Town, especially those around its temples? What aids would we have for such an act of restoration? 

~

How do we recreate the visual? We paint, make a map, sketch, take a photograph or make a video. How do we recreate a soundscape? If it is musical in nature, then there is already a grammar of notes and their arrangements that helps in its recreation. If it is an ordinary human voice one wants to recreate, then one may try and capture it through mimicry or recording. How do we recreate a particular touch? We try and evoke a concoction of specific texture, temperature or adhesiveness by using material that mimics the desirable characteristics of the original surface. How do we reproduce certain tastes? By thinking about and finding out a specific set of ingredients that can then be made to react with each other through fixed chemical processes to produce that specific taste that we desire.

Experiences of sensory cognition through the sense of smell are perhaps not reproducible in the same way as objects of other senses are. But at the same time, scent artists like Sissel Tolaas are now using chemistry to explore and recreate specific smells through processes that are as much high science as the art of curating experiences. Smells can perhaps be recreated by putting together the things themselves, but the way things smell (or for that matter taste or feel) is always related to the immediate context of time, place and people.

~

Smell is the sense organ par excellence because it is the sense that is intimately tied to things in themselves and has a deep resistance to being reduced to a technological artefact. Because human sciences research primarily takes the shape of an explanation or a critique, perhaps it has found it difficult to deal with it as an object of study.

In anthropology, for example, the focus has largely been on the ‘visual’; therefore, the idea of ‘visual anthropology’ is a bit of misnomer, because as a discipline anthropology relies so much on ‘observing’. But this begs the question, does something akin to pure observation really exist? To ask in a similar vein, is there anything like ‘pure taste’ or ‘pure touch’ and, most dominantly, ‘pure vision’ possible that is unalloyed and uninfluenced by other senses such as that of smell?

~

After I shifted back to Bhubaneswar, soon after Baba’s death, I started working as a part of a collective of researchers and performers. As a part of our work, I started visiting a tribal hamlet of migrants from north Odisha in a village called Gadakana, which now forms part of the city. When I visited this basti for the first time, my first sensory impression of the place was the stench that pervaded everywhere. It came from a recently created garbage dump yard, one of the largest in the state. I found out later that this was a new feature of the geography of the place.

The people of the hamlet had fought hard to shift its location, after they had figured out the plans of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation to have this garbage dump in their backyard. They lobbied hard, held protest marches and even ended up having a pitched battle with the police forces, but all to no avail. By the time I started visiting the basti, the dump was up and running for good. The stench from the yard was like a blanket that enveloped me while I would be there. I could not imagine living in the locality because of the smell, but of course people lived their lives there, despite the foul odour that seeped into their bodies, houses and dreams persistently.

The process of deodorization of Bhubaneswar’s Old Town started soon after Gadakana got its garbage dump. What we smell and whether we have a choice in the matter then is linked to who we are—whether we are first-generation Santhali migrants living in a marginal urban hillock or a third-generation Gujarati entrepreneur with a heritage property on the banks of Bindu Sagar. But is the interface between the city and smells and smelling completely reducible to one’s social position, or is it possible to fashion ways of knowing the city through smell that creatively link the personal and the social, and the sensory and the rational?  

Note: This piece was first published in the blog Chiragh Dilli with the title "Smell and the City III" on April 28, 2021.

Auto-graphy

Sailen Routray

Sunday's street life in the temple district near the Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/G.-U. Tolkiehn

Touching

I am inside a traffic jam in Bhubaneswar. My first traffic jam in Bhubaneswar. Have there been other traffic jams in Bhubaneswar before this? May be. I do not know. This is my first one.

I have caught a shared auto going straight from the old bus stand to Damana Chhaka. The auto is supposed to travel further north all the way till Magnetic Square. When it reaches Acharya Vihar Chhaka, the traffic on the highway is as thick as Ma’s jau.

Everyone gets down. Apart from a young college student and me. A man who would have been more than sixty years old gets in. He is wearing blue jeans and a funky T-shirt. The college kid is sitting in the middle, the old man, at the other end.

The boy has straight, or perhaps straightened, hair falling till the shoulders. He is not particularly good looking, but he is attractive. I take him all in, in a fleeting glance. He notices, but looks away towards the footpath. What is there on the footpath? Nothing, as far as I can see.

The auto moves and stops, moves and then stops again. What looked like heavy traffic a few minutes back is now a roaring traffic jam.

‘What happened?’

‘Soumya Patnaik’s daughter is getting married.’

‘So?’

‘He has invited five thousand people and the reception is in Janata Maidan.’

‘Oh!’

‘So, the traffic has now started piling up even a mile away because of the lack of parking arrangements.’

I get a book out and start reading, ‘And then there were none.’ I had put the book in the bag thinking I had forgotten the plot. But I have not. I still want to read it though. But not here, not under the present circumstances. I keep it back in the bag and take out Bisada eka rutu (Dejection is a season), a collection of poems by Bhanuji Rao, a twentieth-century Odia poet who never got married. The poems are exactly what the doctor ordered. A few minutes pass. Or, is it a quarter of an hour? I do not feel like fishing my mobile phone out and checking the time.

I look up from Bhanuji Rao to see the boy staring at me, rather at my hair. ‘Is your hair really like this?’ ‘As in?’ ‘You haven’t permed it?’ ‘No.’ He looks at my face now and asks, ‘Can I touch it?’ I say, ‘Of course.’

He does not do anything for three seconds. For some reason, I start counting and count till six when he reaches out first with his left hand and then with the other hand and puts both his palms on the top of my mop. He bounces one of his palms a bit and says, ‘Cool’, and rubs a few strands of my hair in his fingers. As if on cue, the traffic starts to move, albeit very slowly, but it moves. 

We cross Janata Maidan in ten grueling minutes and Kalinga Hospital Chhaka in another five. After that the traffic is still heavy, but there is no jam. The boy and I do not say anything to each other. I get down at Damana Chhaka. He gets off to let me pass, so does the old man who has been playing some game on his mobile all this while. I hope the boy would reach out to touch my hair again. But he does not.   

Seeing

You cannot see through the auto’s back. That much is obvious. What you see from the backseat depends on how crowded it is. If there are four people squeezed on the backseat, with each alternative person leaning against the seat or pushed into the front with the knees touching the partition behind the driver’s seat, then it boils down to where you are. 

The best seat is the second one from behind the driver’s right if you are sitting pushed to the front. You are squeezed ahead with only your posterior resting on the seat. You can turn your head to the right and have a clear view through the gap. You can also look straight ahead, or to the left for that matter. You also have a good view of the mirror. You can check the driver out and occasionally check him checking you out. 

But the best seat of all is of course the one in the front to the right of the driver. You have a 180-degree view of the street.

The height from the ground is hardly 20 inches, perhaps a little lower than the driving seat of a scooter. You feel closer to the ground. From the middle of the backseat if you turn towards your right or left, the view is more or less a classic portrait one—a series of moving portraits congealing into a multimedia installation rather than a video. 

On the left, the view is of walls, government-approved and sanitized wall paintings, shops, houses, parked vehicles, decreasingly of trees. On the right, it is primarily of moving traffic and straggling plants on the slivers of soil on the divider. 

However, you perhaps do not look out of autos to see the city. You do that due to the very old human habit of looking out of windows. For the two sides of the backseat of an auto are that strange thing—doors that are also windows and windows that are also doors.

Stopping, not stopping

I am traveling to Cuttack by public transport after a while. Usually, I ride my scooter. But not today. I get down just before the Link Road intersection and loop back to the street going towards the High Court. There are no autos at the head of the road, where it branches off from Press Chhaka. 

I start walking. After three minutes or so, I see a shared auto moving towards me. It seems full. I hail a ride nonetheless. It stops. ‘High Court gadaa?’ I ask. He says, ‘Yes’, and requests a thin guy sitting to his right to move to the back. With some help, the passenger squeezes into the backseat, settling on the tiny wedge of space ceded by the three who are already seated.

I sit on the narrow ledge to the right of the driver. It is not comfortable. The driver, who would not be a day older than twenty-five, senses my discomfort and shifts a bit to his left. I move my posterior by a few inches. It is still not comfortable. But I have a firmer ass-hold now. The driver does not stop for any more passengers. Near the CDA intersection, the guy sitting to the left of the driver gets off. He gives a twenty-rupee note to the driver, who returns a tenner.

The passenger gives it back saying that it is a soiled and damaged note and no one would accept it. The driver takes it back without saying a single word, shuffles through the hamper hanging on the steering for change, figures out a crackling note that looks like it is hot off from the press and gives it to the man now standing on the footpath, saying, ‘Take and sow it’, and zooms off. There is a woman hailing a ride a little further down the road. The driver does not stop.

Listening 

What you generally do not listen inside an auto is the noise of the traffic outside. Wait, you are saying that is not true. Let me explain. You hear the noise of the traffic outside, but you are actually not listening to the honking and the silencers of the bullets. Because you are busy concentrating on your neighbours’ conversations on the mobile phone.

You may hear, for example, a sophisticated, obviously upper-middle-class-looking woman relating her woes of being regularly battered by her husband to her friend in a matter-of-fact manner in Odia. Or someone from Bhawanipatna calling up folks back home and describing the meal that he just had at a marriage reception in a four-star hotel in chaste Koshali. Or a Bengali college student calling her friend and explaining why she prefers Bhubaneswar over Calcutta. You also hear Kui, Santhali, Telugu, Hindi and English. 

The shared auto in Bhubaneswar is a self-evidently polyglot space than any other place in the city, with the possible exception of a general class railway compartment. You also hear stories, like that of the battering, that you would rarely hear elsewhere. What is it about the enclosed space of a shared auto rickshaw that invites this willingness to expose oneself? I do not know. 

But I do know this. Things do sound a little different when you are sitting in a shared auto. The sheer density of the weight of human bodies cramped together in a small space seems to muffle things a bit. So do the plastic dropdown sheets that most autos use to screen off the rains in the monsoon and the chilly winds during winter. 

When the plastic sheets are dropped down in the auto and latched to the poles with strings, the pitter-patter of the rains suddenly moves to a distance. The traffic sounds as if it is coming from a few metres away. It is not so much muffled, as tuned down. Is it this that invites the revelations in shared autos and its polyglossia? I do not know. Do you?

Note: This piece was first published in the blog "Chiragh Dilli" on  December 17, 2022.