The Smell of Caste: Leatherwork and Scientific Knowledge in Colonial India

Abstract

Leather was an important commodity for the British empire in terms of industrial production and scientific innovation. From the mid nineteenth century in India, the British sought to convert leatherwork into a scientific industry. Leather, however, also has a life in caste. The profound stench inherent to the process of leather tanning marks leather workers as polluted. Examining archival material and contemporary ethnography from Uttar Pradesh, this paper examines how the scientific colonial intervention in leatherwork was made complicated due to the sensorial politics of caste. The leather chemist, trained to impart scientific knowledge to leather workers, often failed to negotiate the caste-based sensorial nature of leatherwork, thereby allowing caste to limit the reach of modern science in the industry. Understanding this interaction between colonial science and leatherwork has important consequences for our understanding of the politics of caste and scientific knowledge in India.

Keywords:

• Caste
• leather
• science
• senses
• smell
• Uttar Pradesh

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene for their ideas on this paper and for organising the ‘Empire and the Senses’ workshop at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in 2019, where this paper was first presented. The suggestions by the three anonymous South Asia peer reviewers were extremely relevant and thought-provoking. Generous and critical comments by Bhoomika Joshi, Praskanva Sinharay, Sushmita Pati and Tanvi Sirari have helped immensely in writing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Proposed appointment of Mr Allan Guthrie’, 10 October 1910, National Archives of India (henceforth, NAI), Home, 55–57.

2. Ibid.

3. ‘Application of Mr. B.M. Das for appointment to some post in India as a leather expert’, 20 June 1911, NAI, Education, 60.

4. ‘Appointment of Mr A. Guthrie as Leather Expert in Madras’, 25 August 1911, NAI, Education, 60.

5. Shahana Bhattacharya, ‘Caste, Class and Stigmatised Work in Leather Production in India: Some Reflections’, in Toshie Awaya et al. (eds), Examining Stigmatisation of Leather Industry: By Focusing on the Labour Forms of Dalit and Buraku (Tokyo: FINDAS Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2020), pp. 33–62 [40–1].

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. In this essay, leatherwork mostly refers to the process of tanning raw hides. ‘Leather’ has been used as a generic term for both the intermediate stages of leather like wet-blue and the finished product. Hides refer to the skin of the dead animal, which is used to make leather. The raw hide and the tanning process are considered to be the most polluting parts of leatherwork. Finished leather, being no longer organic, is supposed to be somewhat less polluting. It is for this reason that leather goods manufacturing is often regarded as a separate industry from tanning. Manufacturing also employs workers from many castes as compared to the relatively higher concentration of Chamar workers in the tanning industry.

9. See Joseph D. Hankins, ‘An Ecology of Sensibility: The Politics of Scents and Stigma in Japan’, in Anthropological Theory, Vol. 13, nos. 1–2 (2013), pp. 49–66.

10. The paper, while using the term ‘Chamar’ for the leatherworking castes of Uttar Pradesh, recognises the derogatory nature of the term and does not endorse the same. There are many individuals and groups who continue to refer to themselves as ‘Chamars’ in order to reclaim and resignify the term. They also take pride in knowledge of leatherwork and thus associate the term ‘Chamar’ (chrm, meaning skin) with their skill and history. Where the context demands, community-defined terms such as ‘Dalit’ and ‘Jatav’ will be used instead of ‘lower caste’ and ‘Chamar’, respectively.

11. Names have been changed to protect identities. Most fieldwork conversations happened in a mix of Hindi and English. Translation to English has been done by the author.

12. Owen Lynch’s work on the Agra shoe industry shows how the Jatav sub-caste of the Chamars could emerge as a dominant caste, socially and economically, on the basis of their success in the leather industry as workers, agents and owners: Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

13. Chaman Lal here used the word ‘modern’ in English and in its popularly accepted meaning as something new and progressive.

14. R.L. Sykes, ‘The British Leather Industry’, in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 120, no. 5189 (April 1972), pp. 285–97 [286].

15. Shahana Bhattacharya, ‘Transforming Skin, Changing Caste: Technical Education in Leather Production in India, 1900–1950’, in The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Vol. 55, no. 3 (2018), pp. 307–43.

16. Maren Bellwinkel-Schempp, ‘From Bhakti to Buddhism: Ravidas and Ambedkar’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 42, no. 23 (9–15 June 2007), pp. 2177–2183 [2177].

17. Sudha Pai, Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), p. 39.

18. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (New Delhi: Navayana, 2014), p. 234.

19. See E.R. Leach, Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 2–3; and G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2008), p. 46.

20. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, p. 234.

21. When I am writing about caste, I am referring to the idea of the ‘jati’ and not varna. There could thus be many jatis within each varna, which are ranked hierarchically in reference to each other, and also vis-à-vis other jatis in other varnas. For more on the differences between jati and varna, see Dipankar Gupta, ‘Hierarchy and Difference: An Introduction’, in Dipankar Gupta (ed.), Social Stratification (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21.

22. For a detailed analysis of this idea, see Shivani Kapoor, ‘The Violence of Odors: Sensory Politics of Caste in a Leather Tannery’, in The Senses and Society, Vol. 16, no. 2 (2021), pp. 164–76.

23. Sunder Sarrukai and Gopal Guru, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 164.

24. James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 6.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., p. 84.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., pp. 82–5.

30. Joel Lee’s account of smell-mapping across a village near Lucknow reveals how his Dalit respondents would find their way in the dark by following the distinct smells of the various ‘subordinate caste and untouchable tolas’: see Joel Lee, ‘Odor and Order: How Caste Is Inscribed in Space and Sensoria’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 37, no. 3 (2017), pp. 470–90 [471].

31. Bruce Curtis, ‘“I Can Tell by the Way You Smell”: Dietetics, Smell, Social Theory’, in The Senses and Society, Vol. 3, no. 1 (2008), pp. 5–22 [19].

32. There has been a shift in the qualifications expected of the leather expert from chemistry in the colonial period to engineering in the present. This shift has to do with the continued process of scientisation of the leather industry.

33. ‘Industrial Development and Technical Education in the United Provinces’, 7 September 1907, NAI, Home 785.

34. For more on this, see Renny Thomas, ‘Brahmins as Scientists and Science as Brahmins’ Calling: Caste in an Indian Scientific Research Institute’, in Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 29, no. 3 (2020), pp. 306–18; and Ajantha Subramanian, ‘Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 291–322.

35. Conversation between author and Sanjay Chaturvedi, Unnao, October 2014. For more on the debates on cows and Hinduism, see Cassie Adcock and Radhika Govindrajan, ‘Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law and Ethics’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1095–107.

36. A.N. Sen and R.J. Weston, quoted in Bhattacharya, ‘Caste, Class and Stigmatised Work in Leather Production in India’, p. 40.

37. Ibid.

38. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012), p. 43.

39. Ibid.

40. S.M. Stevens, ‘New World Contacts and the Trope of the Naked Savage’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press), pp. 125–140 [125].

41. Ibid.

42. Margaret Healy, ‘Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press), pp. 22–38 [22].

43. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (New York: Berg Publishers, 1986), p. 226.

44. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 6–7.

45. See Andrew J. Rotter, Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2001).

46. Rotter, Empires of the Senses, p. 61.

47. Constance Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 161.

48. Mark Smith, quoted in Rotter, Empires of the Senses, p. 1.

49. B.R. Ambedkar, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 255–6.

50. Mark Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 5–6.

51. Lissa Roberts, ‘Filling the Space of Possibilities: Eighteenth-Century Chemistry’s Transition from Art to Science’, in Science in Context, Vol. 6, no. 2 (1993), pp. 511–53 [512].

52. Ibid., p. 516.

53. Christy Spackman, ‘Perfumer, Chemist, Machine: Gas Chromatography and the Industrial Search to “Improve” Flavor’, in The Senses and Society, Vol. 13. no. 1 (2018), pp. 41–59 [44].

54. Roberts, ‘Filling the Space of Possibilities’, p. 516.

55. James Donnelly, ‘Consultants, Managers, Testing Slaves: Changing Roles for Chemists in the British Alkali Industry, 1850–1920’, in Technology and Culture, Vol. 35, no. 1 (Jan. 1994), pp. 100–28 [101].

56. Ibid., p. 102.

57. Ibid., p. 106.

58. James Donnelly, ‘Defining the Industrial Chemist in the United Kingdom, 1850–1921’, in Journal of Social History, Vol. 29, no. 4 (Summer 1996), pp. 779–96 [790].

59. R.A. Church, ‘The British Leather Industry and Foreign Competition, 1870–1914’, in The Economic History Review, Vol. 24, no. 4 (1971), pp. 543–70 [561].

60. Ibid., pp. 561–2.

61. While Knapp pioneered the process, it was only by 1877 that he was able to produce acceptable chrome-tanned leather. In 1880, the American chemist Christian Heinzerling patented a different mineral tanning process: Church, ‘The British Leather Industry and Foreign Competition, 1870–1914’, p. 561.

62. Church argues that this was largely due to the resistance of the old English gentlemanly tanners, who controlled the bulk of the trade, to adapt to new methods: Church, ‘The British Leather Industry and Foreign Competition, 1870–1914’, p. 564.

63. Ibid., p. 562.

64. Ibid., p. 564.

65. Lissa Roberts, ‘The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The “New” Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology’, in David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 106–27 [123].

66. Roberts, ‘The Death of the Sensuous Chemist’, p. 109.

67. David Roth Singerman, ‘The Limits of Chemical Control in the Caribbean Sugar Factory’, in Radical History Review, Vol. 2017, no. 127 (2017), pp. 39–61 [47].

68. Christopher Otter, ‘Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth‐Century London’, in Journal of British Studies, Vol. 43, no. 1 (2004), pp. 40–64.

69. Ibid.

70. Ramnarayan Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 109–16.

71. Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability, p. 37.

72. Ibid., pp. 35–9.

73. For the details of how this system was set up and the colonial debates involved in the process, see Shivani Kapoor, ‘The Search for “Tanner’s Blood”: Caste and Technical Education in Colonial Uttar Pradesh’, in Review of Development and Change, Vol. 23, no. 2 (2018), pp. 118–38.

74. ‘Industrial Development and Technical Education in the United Provinces’, April 1908, Home, NAI, 785.

75. Bhattacharya, ‘Transforming Skin, Changing Caste’, p. 325.

76. Letter from A.W. Pim, Secretary to Government of United Provinces, 29 August 1914, Education, NAI, 785.

77. ‘Industrial Development and Technical Education in the United Provinces’, April 1908, Home, NAI.

78. Bhattacharya, ‘Caste, Class and Stigmatised Work in Leather Production in India’, p. 44.

79. Letter from F.E. Taylor, secretary to Government, United Provinces to secretary to Government of India, Home Department, 7 September 1907, Home, NAI.

80. Bhattacharya, ‘Transforming Skin, Changing Caste’, p. 327.

81. ‘Industrial Development and Technical Education in the United Provinces’, April 1908, NAI, Home, 785.

82. Ibid.

83. Bhattacharya, ‘Transforming Skin, Changing Caste’, p. 325.

84. “Report of a Committee Appointed by the Secretary of State for India to Inquire into the System of State Technical Scholarships Established by the Government of India in 1904’, 1913, Industries, 322, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid.

87. M.S.S. Pandian, ‘One Step outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 37, no. 18 (4–10 May 2002), pp. 1735–41 [1735].

88. I refer only to the limited archives I have seen myself or read about in the works of other scholars. Reference to the odours of animal bodies and leatherwork are certainly present in archives relating to slaughterhouses, location of tanneries and bone mills in cities and documents around the public sale and consumption of meat.

89. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 6.

90. I borrow this idea from Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Parachemistries: Colonial Chemopolitics in a Zone of Contest’, in History of Science, Vol. 54, no. 4 (2016), pp. 362–82.

91. Dhruv Raina, ‘Reconfiguring the Centre: The Structure of Scientific Exchanges between Colonial India and Europe’, in Minerva, Vol. 34, no. 2 (1996), pp. 161–76 [163].

92. David Howes, ‘HYPERESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism’, in David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 281–303.