Odor, Deodorization, and Reodorization: Reflections of Olfactory Discrimination in the Chars of Assam, India

The minority "Bengali Muslim" or Miya community of Assam, a northeastern Indian state, is marked as foul-smelling. Underlying this slandering and humiliation is a racialized notion of smell and bodies. This article examines how the racialization of perceived smell relates to Miya people's everyday struggles in Assam. The emphasis will be on the attempts made by the community to resist the trope of the "foul-smelling Miya." Data for the article are drawn from fieldwork conducted in a char (floodplain) of central Assam's Darrang district in 2016 and 2017. Fieldwork highlighted that the community has developed the idea of reodorization to counter the overarching narrative of a "foul-smelling Miya." The act of using deodorants otherwise understood to mask smell (deodorization), was reinstated to mean aestheticization of smell (reodorization). Reodorization enabled the community to disassociate itself from the racialized smell. My participants underlined that there is no racialized foul smell and that their bodies only carry their natural odortypes (unique body odors that vary from person to person). This conceptualization of reodorization is an act of agency. It takes us back to the wider debate of agency-how agency arises and thrives in the most complex and seemingly paradoxical ways. Public Significance Statement This article examines how the minority Miya community in India's northeastern state of Assam is racialized based on perceived foul smell. It highlights the community's experience of living with the trope of "foul smell" and the modes of resistance undertaken to dismantle the perception. Overall, the article builds a "from below" understanding of Miya people's everyday struggles in Assam.