Shekhar Joshi’s short story ‘Badbū’ (Stench), a landmark of Hindi's Nayi Kahani movement, and Hari Bhatnagar’s later story of the same title offer two stark portraits of Indian society’s encounter with industrial modernity and urban decay. Both use the motif of stench not as mere sensory detail but as a profound symbol of human consciousness under pressure—resistance in one, moral rot in the other. Joshi’s narrative unfolds inside a factory where chemical smells threaten to erase the worker’s humanity; Bhatnagar’s exposes the inner filth of a frustrated middle-class home. Together they map the journey from collective working-class awakening in the early industrial era to individual middle-class alienation in post-liberalisation India.
In Joshi’s story the protagonist arrives at the factory on his first day and recoils from the soot, oil, and regimented discipline. His revulsion proves he is still alive. The elderly worker, bent by years of servitude, thanks “the man with the blue umbrella” for the job and warns the newcomer not to “walk behind a horse or in front of an officer.” Chief Sahab, hidden behind black sunglasses that symbolise one-way surveillance, pretends benevolence while transferring troublemakers to the caustic tank. Ghasi, the old sweeper, tells the tale of a sweeper’s daughter who gradually stops noticing the stench of her mother’s work. The story’s ideological core is this process of adaptation: when a person no longer smells his own misery, resistance dies.
The title itself evolves. At first ‘badbū’ is physical—kerosene on the hands. The protagonist repeatedly sniffs his palms and washes them with soap, a ritual of dignity. When the smell momentarily seems to vanish he panics; its return brings strange joy. As long as he can smell the system’s rot, he has not become its cog. Symbols reinforce the theme: the siren that dictates biological time, the caustic tank that “purifies” rebellious workers, empty tiffins that speak of poverty, and mud used for washing that threatens to turn the man himself into mud—insensitive and resigned.
Hari Bhatnagar’s ‘badbū’ shifts the lens to the financially strained urban middle class. The stench here emanates first from a dead puppy rotting under bricks in the lane. Yet the real badbū lies inside the protagonist’s damp, cobweb-filled home. He beats his mother and wife, slaps his son for no reason, and reduces his wife to a mechanical creature muttering about “tea and roti.” The sweeper’s son—modern in jeans and polished shoes—demands fifteen rupees for removing the carcass and refuses the old subservience of his father who still says “huzoor-huzoor.” Neighbours Tiwari and Sharma watch the protagonist’s humiliation from the rooftop, enjoying his discomfort. When he tries to withhold the boy’s money, his middle-class “honesty” collapses. The final line—“I was being crushed under a badbū bigger than badbū”—reveals that the external smell was only a pretext; the true stench is his own hypocrisy, false ego, and displaced violence.
The contrast is deliberate. Joshi’s badbū is external filth imposed by capitalism; awareness of it is proof of life. Bhatnagar’s badbū has seeped inward; awareness only exposes self-deception. In Joshi the protagonist fights adaptation; in Bhatnagar adaptation has already won inside the home. Joshi ends in quiet triumph of consciousness; Bhatnagar ends in self-loathing defeat.
Female characters underscore the theme of marginalisation. In Joshi the absent sweeper’s daughter, who learns to ignore her mother’s stench, becomes a metaphor for socialisation into oppression. In Bhatnagar the mother retreats into worship and the wife into snoring indifference; both have been objectified into silence. Their muteness is not peace but the spiritual death that follows total adaptation.
The two stories also mark an evolution in Hindi fiction. Joshi’s restrained, symbolic Nayi Kahani style reflects the 1960s hope that individual consciousness could resist the machine. Bhatnagar’s aggressive, grotesque realism captures post-1990s fragmentation where ideals have evaporated and frustration turns inward. Where Joshi builds atmosphere slowly through suggestion, Bhatnagar assaults the reader with raw images and abuses.
Theoretical readings enrich the comparison. Marxist analysis sees Joshi’s factory as classic alienation: the worker is estranged from labour, from his own body, from his comrades. Bhatnagar’s middle-class protagonist suffers “displaced aggression”—unable to confront the system, he vents on family and the sweeper’s boy. Psychoanalytically, the repeated sniffing in Joshi is a defence of the ego; in Bhatnagar the puppy’s corpse is projection of repressed inferiority. Eco-critically both depict metabolic rift: industry and urban neglect turn nature into poison, dulling sensory perception itself. Structuralism finds binary oppositions—pure/impure, internal/external—while deconstruction (Derrida) shows how ‘badbū’ slips from negative to positive in Joshi and from external to internal in Bhatnagar, deferring any fixed meaning.
Existentially the stench is Sartrean nausea. Joshi’s protagonist confronts the absurdity of mechanised existence and chooses to keep smelling it. Bhatnagar’s man, crushed by freedom’s burden, flees into bad faith and silence. Both recall Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich in ‘The Overcoat’, whose new coat briefly masks poverty only for the system to strip him bare again. The overcoat’s “stench” of old poverty parallels both badbūs: an external sign of an internal wound.
Sholokhov’s ‘The Birthmark’ adds another layer. The birthmark that reveals father and son only after the father kills the boy in civil war echoes the generational tragedy in these stories. Ghasi’s adaptation threatens to swallow Joshi’s young protagonist; Bhatnagar’s violent father dulls his own son’s sensibility. In each case the older generation’s failure to smell its own rot endangers the next.
The visual images—kerosene-stained hands, rotting puppy, blood-stained birthmark, torn overcoat—are psychological traumas that lodge permanently in the reader’s mind. They demand that literature engage not only intellect but senses. Their cinematic potential is obvious: monochrome factory close-ups for Joshi, suffocating hyper-realism for Bhatnagar, epic slow-motion for Sholokhov. Each film would force viewers to confront an imaginary stench that lingers after the credits.
Ultimately Joshi and Bhatnagar belong to a global tradition that treats filth as social revelation. Whether on a Russian battlefield, a tsarist clerk’s back, or an Indian factory floor and narrow lane, the mark or smell of degradation refuses to vanish. It remains the last evidence of humanity. Joshi’s protagonist keeps smelling to stay alive; Bhatnagar’s realises too late that he has already become the stench. In an age of corporate discipline and urban anonymity these stories retain urgency: the greatest test of civilisation is whether we still possess the courage to recognise the badbū we ourselves produce—and the will to refuse it.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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