O cheiro da Índia, de Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Scent of India, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, published by Longanesi in 1961, is a collection of notes written during Pasolini's trip to India that same year, accompanied by Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Pasolini was invited to participate in the tributes to Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Indian poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1913. At first, all the material was published in fragments in the Milanese magazine Il Giorno. In The Scent of India, Pasolini conveys the Indian experience through a uniquely heterogeneous visual framework. He reflects on the chaotic Indian universe while trying to sketch the gestures of the people he sees wandering or standing still in the streets, trying to understand the complex and ordinary behaviors that Indians have among themselves, as well as their attitudes toward the tourists they encounter. The poet has ambiguous feelings about life in India. He is deeply impressed and touched by the precarious living conditions of a large part of the Indian population, but he also emphasizes the affection, gentleness, and non-violence among them. In other words, Pasolini tries to find in his walks something that still survives the brutal processes of bourgeoisification of life forms, that is, the forces activated by the development strategies of increasingly globalized industrialization. Moreover, from this experience, Pasolini seeks to deconstruct interpretive projects about the Third World. The article addresses issues from his India stay, which appear in other projects, including Notes for a Poem on the Third World.