Pier Paolo Pasolini
L'odore dell'India

I believe that a pure perception of sight (and senses) does not exist. Every day we see (and perceive) an infinite number of things. However, only a few can be remembered or are memorable. Those that have sparked a thought, a mental phrase, in our brains.

The type, quality, and quantity of mental phrases generated is something that each of our brains responds to.

The good reporter is the one who possesses a brain capable of masterfully using his senses. Precisely for this reason, we do not all see in the same way.

Yet, in a passage of L’odore dell’India, a series of reports written for Italian newspapers by Pier Paolo Pasolini during a journey the Friulian writer took with Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, the Friulian writer aims to “simply say what I saw in those two steps like a camera.”

And he manages for a paragraph, maybe two, while, in the remaining 134 pages, he makes his senses “available, cheerful, curious as monkeys, with all the tools of intelligence ready to use, voracious, hedonistic and ruthless” and shows us “moment by moment /.../ a smell, a color, a sense that is India.”

India, which in 1961 is a country pervaded by a tremendous poverty, which does not leave, terribly, the eyes of the visitor. And yet, within this multitude of beggars, mutilated, homeless, sick and plagued, ragged and ruffians who invade the dirt, dusty and dirty streets that reach up to the malarial, murky and marshy waters, Pasolini always glimpses people, stories, characters of an Indian humanity, which is mild and kind, and extraordinary.

He encounters it on the first night in Bombay when, among a crowd dressed in towels, he discovers the sweetness of Sardar and Sundar, a Muslim and a Hindu lost, seeking fortune, in Bombay, a metropolis where they are alone, with no one; among the sick, he meets Revi, with a cheerful little face and fluttering rags, and takes care of him. He discovers a varied religiosity, Hindu (which has gone from philosophical to practical), Muslim, and not only; varied, but within its narrative, a candid rite of a family going to perform ablutions surrounded by filth. And then, Mother Teresa and Father Wilbert...

The monotony of the environment is broken by the first glimmers of modernity in the misery. They are the only signs of contemporary and remote India. The bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, and the men of Nehru, the president. There is room also for the amused smile when some joyfully welcome Moravia (the serious and verbose Moravia), who became famous through the Penguin Books, bestsellers, in this island of Indian “well-being”...

Finally, why is L’odore dell’India still necessary today?

For the revelations present between its lines, revelations of survival, religiosity, and culture, revelations of pure humanity.