Corpi estranei and Moving Stereotypes: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Trauma of the Other in L'odore dell'India

Naturalmente, quando si va a visitare un    paese nuovo,si hanno già dei progetti d'interpretazione. E    ogni scopertaè una lotta contro questi progetti, che piano    piano cadono,e vengono sostituiti da altri, quelli reali.    Perciò scoprireè sempre molto faticoso, in qualche modo    disgustoso.

—"Viaggio in Marocco"¹

In December 1960, joined by Alberto Moravia and later by Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini left for India. The pretext was an international conference on the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in Bombay, but the three writers took the time to visit other Indian sites: New Delhi, Agra, Benares, Calcutta, Tanjore and Cochin. On their way back to Europe, they stopped in Kenya and Zanzibar for several days. Pasolini recorded his impressions in articles written weekly for Il Giorno (published between February 26 and March 26, 1961), later the same year gathered in a book, L'odore dell'India (Milano: Longanesi, 1961). Moravia, too, wrote several chronicles of India, published in the Corriere della sera (beginning February 19, 1961), and then gathered in Un'idea dell'India in 1962.²

In this essay I examine Pasolini's first trip to India through the written traces he left of it in his published travelogue. I analyze L'odore dell'India in the light of Pasolini's growing interest in the "Third World." This journey, as it has been pointed out, represented his first venture into non-Western countries, and indeed it was not by chance that his stay in India was coupled with a short visit to other "underdeveloped" countries with which he would become more familiar in the following years.³

I. Introduction

There is a widespread agreement among Pasolini scholars on the "toni espressionistici—per non dire semplicistici" (Caminati 60) of L'odore dell'India, and, for many, of his entire tiermondiste production: Sam Rohdie, conflating Pasolini's experiences of the developing world in one gesture, writes that "Pasolini knew Africa, India, the Middle East, Calabria, the Rome borgate only poetically, not actually" (96) and argues that Pasolini was "fundamentally uninterested" in the Third World (252). Massimo Riva, in his analysis of Il padre selvaggio, the "neo-colonial" script written immediately after L'odore dell'India in 1962, describes this text in words that apply to L'odore as well: "Il testo di Pasolini si accende di toni e tonalità (stilemi) che, se non se ne sottolineasse l'ingenuità provocatoria, il calcolato candore, sarebbero forse (e sono) imbarazzanti, dal punto di vista di un'analisi in chiave 'postcoloniale'" (253). Specifically concerning L'odore dell'India, Patrick Rumble writes that Pasolini's representation of India is a "self-subverting, non-positive figuration of difference" (199), and Chris Bongie deems it a "banal piece of journalism" (242, n. 23).⁴

Conversely, attention has also been given to the cracks and changes occurring in Pasolini's tiersmondisme between 1961 and 1975: Alessia Ricciardi outlines the ideological "dissonanza controllata" (already identified by Robert Gordon in Pasolini's cinema at large) that constitutes the internal, formal critique in Appunti per un'Orestiade africana (1968). She also contrasts the ideological failure ("esotismo regressivo") of such works to that of the stage drama Pilade, which is "molto più maturo da un punto di vista critico-ideologico" (514). Sergio Parussa, in an article co-written with Massimo Riva, outlines the illuminating reflections on (and the pessimism about) the encounter between cultures elaborated by Pasolini in several fragments of Petrolio. Additionally, in his recent excellent analysis of Pasolini's Third World cinema, Luca Caminati has contrasted L'odore dell'India, in which "l'Oriente" is "combattuto da subito e mai completamente accettato" (23), with Pasolini's later work Appunti per un film sull'India (1968), in which the critic finds a "rinnovata tensione verso il reale" (59); that is, an effective commitment to "know" the other.⁵

A full consideration of all these encounters is beyond the scope of this essay: my aim is to problematize the understanding of L'odore dell'India by explaining its defensive techniques and by outlining its ideological dissonances...