I think about smell a lot. Especially in cities. Like how Bombay smells by 3 PM in the sun, like sewage mixed with sweat mixed with diesel, and it hits your throat like an insult. And I always wondered this one odd legal question Why don’t we have laws for smell? We have noise limits. We have an air quality index for “pollutants”. We have decibel levels for loudspeakers. But smell? The thing that can make you physically gag? Nothing specific. You have to get creative and squeeze it under “public nuisance”. This is wild. Because smell is the most intimate assault on your body. It enters you without your consent. It literally goes through your nose, into your mucosa, into your bloodstream. You cannot choose to “not hear”. You cannot choose to “not smell”. And yet. Law pretends smell does not exist. It only recognises what can be measured on a machine. like PM2.5, PM10. like decibels. But smell is not “measurable” in a machine that law respects. Which means smell is not harmful. Not in the eyes of the law. Even though your entire body knows otherwise.
I think this is also a class thing.
Because the worst smells always fall on the poorest neighbourhoods.
Waste dumps.
Drains.
Open sewage.
Tan bark factories.
Slaughterhouses.
Smell becomes a marker of where the invisibles live.
Wealth buys air fresheners and RO machines, and sealed windows. Poor people get a raw smell.
So smell also becomes evidence of caste and class spatial segregation.
The law pretends to be neutral,
But look where the smell concentrates.
Where the poor stay.
Where Dalit sanitation workers work.
Where manual scavenging still happens.
Living in smell is a social tax on the marginalised body.
Smell is evidence.
But it is also memory.
My body still remembers the smell of wards in NIMHANS.
The disinfectant mixed with sweat mixed with trauma.
My brain gets transported fully back to that time whenever I smell Dettol.
Smell is the most emotional sense.
If the law understood smell,
we could make a case that smell is a continuation of harm.
We could tell the court that trauma is not just a picture or a number.
Trauma has a smell.
I also wonder if the reason smell is legally inconvenient is because it is femininely coded in culture.
Cooking
cleaning
perfume
menstruation
body odour
All smells are connected to women and to bodies that are socially policed.
Anything that is body-based gets treated as “irrational”
and law hates emotions, hates the body, hates subjectivity.
Law wants evidence that prints out in numbers.
Smell refuses the cage of objectivity.
Smell is subjective.
And that is its crime.
So the law ignores it.
If tomorrow the drain near your house starts smelling like rotten fish
You cannot file a complaint under “bad smell”.
You can only file a complaint under Section 268 of IPC - 270 BNS
Public Nuisance,
which is the most vague catch-all section.
You basically tell the police,
“this is affecting the comfort of the public”.Comfort!
What a stupid word.
Comfort is so subjective that
comfort depends on who the public is.
And the police usually won’t take this seriously
unless there is death.
Or disease.
Or flooding.
Smell is not serious enough.
Until it becomes an illness.
We need a legal language for smell.
We need a scale
or a criterion that sees smell as sensory harm.
Maybe we need smell impact assessments in Environmental Clearance.
Why not?
If a factory is releasing a toxic byproduct smell
Why isn’t that measurable harm?
Because you can’t “see” it?
Because the machine can’t measure “ugh”?
Bodies measure ugh.
Noses measure ugh.
I also think smell is political because it is intimate.
It forces its way inside you.
You cannot turn your nose off.
So smell is the most cruel form of violence.
It enters.
It occupies.
It stays.
And yet the law treats smell like some aesthetic complaint
as if it is only “discomfort”.
No.
Bad smell is not an offence to taste.
Bad smell is the literal inhalation of decay.
We regulate everything.
Electricity.
Roads.
Land use.
Pollution.
Firecrackers.
But smell?
Ignored.
Just because science hasn’t standardised it neatly.
It’s not because smell is trivial.
It’s because law is allergic to the subjective body.
I imagine one day the law will catch up.
Maybe in the future
There will be smell monitors in every industrial area
like noise meters.
Maybe courts will say
Breathing foul smell is a violation of Article 21
right to life
Because the right to life includes the dignity of breath.
Because smell is proof that air is not neutral.
Smell is social.
Smell is a sensory caste marker.
Smell is an indicator of who is allowed to inhale decay as a routine.
