Eau de City: What Do India’s Metropolises Smell Like?

“Mumbai is the sweet, sweaty smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It’s the smell of Gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay,” wrote Gregory David Roberts in his bestselling novel, Shantaram. 

He – like many others, through works of art, poetry, and film – has attempted to encapsulate the “smell” of the coastal metropolis. Terms like “metallic” and “salty”, are found repetitively, and come close to the sensory experience that is Mumbai. 

When I first arrived in the coastal city I, too, was overwhelmed by the onslaught of a stench so unique, so salty, one could almost taste it. Now, it smells of home.

As a child in Dehradun, the capital city of the northern state of Uttarakhand, then a sleepy hill town, home was the smell of fresh cookies wafting from street-side bakeries, hot oil and potatoes being prepped for bread rolls and samosas, and a hint of eucalyptus and geranium that grew abundantly.

Only a few have attempted to archive city smells. In 2015, a team of researchers produced the smellscapes of London and Barcelona, and published Smelly Maps: The Digital Life of Urban Smellscapes. One of its researchers, Kate McLean, leads smell walks and uses the data for smellscape mapping through Sensory Maps. 

Then there’s Smell Assembly, a collaborative project that brought together walks, and an exhibition with a collection of smells in the city of Delhi – from the neighbourhood of Majnu Ka Tila, fish markets of Chittaranjan Park, and ittr and spice markets of Old Delhi. 

Not long ago, Swiss artist Maeva Rosett and perfumer Giovanni Sammarco bottled the smells of the Indian cities of Bengaluru and Delhi through the city’s people through their project Un Perfume En Commun that translates to “perfume in common” from French. “I got people to sweat using a cycle and [then bottled their sweat]. I wanted to say let’s do something together, and live and accept each other,” said Rosett. “In French, when you don’t like someone, you say, ‘I cannot smell him or her’. Smelling each other is the first step in acceptance.” 

Besides archival and research work, luxury fragrance brands the world over have, for decades, attempted work inspired by cities. Mumbai’s Bombay Perfumery with their Chai Musk perfume is one such attempt.

But smell, a sense that has the power to reignite memories and transport you to familiar places, has often been ignored in archival reproductions. Texts and artefacts are visual or textured, invoking the senses of sight and touch. But smells stay in minds – fresh and vivid, in the form of stories, passed on through generations, in a landscape that is changing rapidly. 

In a constantly changing world then, we aim to document what Indian cities smell like at this point in history. 

When artist and photographer Indu Antony set out to document the smellscapes of Bengaluru, the capital city of the southern state of Karnataka, she realised it was hard to attribute a single distinct smell to the city. 

Antony’s eventual catalogue of city smells would include that of Mysore Sandal Soap, a popular soap that carries the distinctive fragrance of sandalwood oil – a smell, she recalls, is associated with grandparents from the 90s; the piquant smell of sambar – a preparation made with lentils, vegetables and spices typically eaten with rice or idlis (steamed savoury rice pancakes); as well as the somewhat cliché aroma of filter coffee which, Antony insists, is also laced with the smells of burnt milk and sugar in her distillation. 

There’s also the scent of freshly baked cakes from the Iyengar bakeries, the city’s oldest brand of bakeries that specialise in eggless baked goods; the unpleasant, but distinctive smell of the highly polluted Bellandur lake that caught fire in 2021 and spewed smoke for days after; and the pervasive stench of the open garbage dumps. 

“Vāsané is the Kannada word for ‘smell’ and is most often used for ‘bad smell,’” Antony told VICE, referring also to the name of her self-published book, launched in July, this year. “The sense of smell is one which we often completely overlook, in spite of its strong connection to memory and nostalgia. During COVID, people were connecting even less with smell.”

Vāsané is accompanied by a dozen vials of distilled smells pared down from the over 130 that the artist archived during her research. To help formulate the smells, Antony worked closely with Avinandan, a third-generation perfumer and wholesaler from Bengaluru-based Satyanarayana Perfumers. The book is also accompanied by a smell map of the city with notes on the research process, the city’s history, public memory, and olfactory art.

To arrive at these pockets of smells, Antony interviewed nearly  200 people. “When I asked people what Church Street (a popular hangout in the city) smells like, someone said ‘heartbreak’ and ‘of cigarettes stubbed in water’. We tried to recreate that.”

In her debut feature film, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2022), director Anamika Haksar, takes the viewer through the bylanes of Shahjahanabad in Old Delhi. The stark frames introduce us to the neighbourhood through its protagonists and make its many smells come alive. 

“People felt that the film conveyed the smell of sweat and of labour, of congestion and of pollution,” Haksar said, adding that if she had to paint a picture of the city through its smells, she’d include: “The smell of food, of the past and present; the smell of one’s village home and memory of children left behind; the smell of rotting corpses, and that of incense from temples, mosques, and shrines; of drains so filthy that one feels nauseated; of bodies living close together; the smells of hot tavas (flat frying pans) and rotis (flatbreads); the smell of congested working spaces and machine lubricants; the smell of history floating layer on layer.”

She added that other parts of the city smell different owing to topography, trade, even class and, often, seasons. Every quarter, the changing seasons bring to the historical metropolis a cocktail of smells. Winter is heralded by the saptaparni flowers (Indian Devil tree), with small green-white clusters that are at once sweet and earthy, with a hint of camphor and spice. However, the lead-up to Diwali, the annual Hindu festival of lights, is now shrouded by a thick envelope of smog with an acrid, synthetic odour much like slow-burning plastic.

On their trip to Delhi, artist Rosett and perfumer Sammarco made detailed smell notes that they shared with us. These included “synthetic musk”, “sewer backup”, “dog pissing on camphorated cinnamon”, “shamama attar (a heavy oil-based perfume with notes of spices and herbs).”

Ishita Dey, an assistant professor at the South Asian University in New Delhi, cautions against typifying the smells of cities, as they change with neighbourhood, caste, and class. “Stories of urbanisation are about sanitised spaces, ordering smells, and creating ghettos of smells. However, smells travel and in a sense resist ghettoisation,” she said, “For instance, Khari Baoli in Old Delhi with its spice market has a distinct smell of chilli, Hudson Lane (on the banks of the Najafgarh drain) in Delhi carries whiffs from the sewage, and certain stretches near Market 1 of C.R. Park (a predominantly Bengali neighbourhood, home to a freshwater fish market) have a fishy tinge.”

Mumbai’s stench, the mix of salty humid air with its distinct metallic flavour, owing to its large coastline, is almost a constant across the year. Its many suburbs and neighbourhoods have their own characteristic smells, too. A true Mumbaikar could close their eyes and sense the arrival of each station by its smell, while commuting on the local train, like the heavenly smell of biscuits before Vile Parle station and that of the fish at the Mahim Causeway. 

Photographer Gopal MS claims to have done the same long before his second photo book, Matsyagandha. A former resident of Bengaluru, Gopal said the cities couldn’t be more different in the way that they smell. “My first place here was in Evershine Nagar in Malad, with a window overlooking the creek and mangroves. It smelt of the salty sea and sewage, a smell that only people who live along the sea from the suburbs across Versova to Borivali know. Bangalore smelt of 2T oil used by two-wheelers in the early 2000s, and roasting coffee,” he said.

In the book, Gopal asks residents about the one smell that defines Mumbai, and the answers are variations of salt, sea, sweat, and fish. Then there is the occasional train, food, hot oil, and mould – ubiquitous in the rains, in indoor spaces, clothes, furnishings, and more. 

Gopal’s own interpretation and imagery goes on to include the smells of textiles, worship, swamp gas, and nostalgia 

Of the ones he couldn’t capture through photographs, he said, “Abstract smells like the glamour of the film industry or the affluence of the rich, and the smell of perfume that floats in from a five-star hotel, with the cool air-conditioned breeze when the doors open and close.”

The eastern metropolis of Kolkata is most easily associated with the smell of food – from its street-side stalls to its bakeries and sweet shops. 

Food writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee described her version of how the city smells, “The smell of roasted spices and tamarind water, while passing by the neighbourhood phuchkawalas (vendors selling phuchkas, a snack made with round and hollow deep-fried flatbreads) typically filled with spiced chickpeas or boiled potatoes, sweet and spicy chutneys, and flavoured water, or the hypnotic fragrance of kewra (extract of pandan leaves) and attar (fragrant oil), while passing biryani shops in the Park Circus area. The smell of fish – raw or fried – in the bazaars, or outside fish-fry stalls.”

 Unlike other coastal metropolises, Kolkata experiences variations in temperature and welcomes its fairly nippy winters, and Durga Puja with a heady scent. “The chhatim flowers (saptaparni) –  on the one hand they announce the arrival of Durga Puja and all things joyful and on the other, once pujas are gone, the same fragrance induces debilitating melancholy,” said Chatterjee.

Much like the other metropolitan cities, Kolkata has its pockets of distinct odours. Dey, who is conceptualising a collaborative work with a focus on lesser explored smells of Kolkata with Supurna Banerjee from Kolkata’s Institute of Development Studies, said, “The public memory of Tangra in Kolkata is that of leather and waste because of its long history of tanneries but Tangra for its residents is much more than that. The flower market near Howrah Station has a distinct whiff, and Dhapa before the sewage treatment plant smelled of garbage”.

There isn’t a city more prone to stereotyping than the southern Indian metropolis of Chennai. The name conjures up the smell of filter coffee and idlis dunked in piquant sambar. 

The salty breeze accompanied by the smells of sambrani (a unique benzoin resin that smells of musk, amber, camphor, and herbs, associated with the smell of temples) and frankincense (resin that is commonly smelled in churches and graveyard), depending on the area, remain constant too, as does the smell of detergent and cotton fabric. The perennial summers in the city ensure that cotton is the fabric of choice seen across the city in different colours and textures – sometimes starched and freshly washed and, at other times, it’s hard to miss the cotton-detergent-sweat triumvirate in public places. 

For Vijay Prabhat Kamalakara – founder and CEO of Storytrails, a company that organises heritage walks – the filter coffee association remains strong. “[If you] walk through the Kotwal Chavdi market in George Town, in the evenings, you are guaranteed a sensory assault,” he said. “There’s the strong whiff of spices and chewing tobacco. Then there are the temples on every street and the rows of flower shops outside. How can you not associate the fragrance of jasmine flowers and vibhuti (sacred ash) with this city?” 

Then comes the winter, and with it the famed December music season. While there is little respite from the heat, Kamalakara told us, the olfactory climate witnesses a change through the Sabha or makeshift canteens set up at the performance venues. Vying for your attention with piping hot crispy vadas (pounded and deep-fried lentil dumplings), kozhakattai (rice-flour dumplings stuffed with coconut and jaggery), and tangy sambar, they may well be worth a scorching December in Chennai. 

For some, this may be the smell of home – laced with camphor, coconut oil, and jasmine fresh off the city’s hawkers. For someone staying further north, it may be of cardamom, milk, biscuits, and geranium. 

Cities, neighbourhoods and homes, all come with their distinct smells that reflect lifestyles, occupations, and food inherent to the culture. But, it is through stories and memories that smell dwells in our lives – easy to forget but as easily rekindled by the slightest hint of a familiar fragrance. 

Follow VICE on Instagram.