Few writers in Malayalam literature have dared to make heaven smell. U. K. Shamsudheen deconstructs The Divine Dangudungu, a striking short story by Basheer, which stages questions of religion, the body, and language.
U. K. Shamsudheen
Few writers in Malayalam literature have dared to make heaven smell. In ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’ (The Divine Dangudungu, where the latter is a nonsensical word), a short story by the renowned Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, a son calmly announces he would prefer hell over heaven. His reasoning is disarmingly simple: heaven must smell. If heaven is inhabited by beings created in God’s image, then God, along with the saints, rishis, and avatars gathered around Him, must share the bodily realities of human life, including flatulence. Hell, on the other hand, might actually be the better place, for it is inhabited by demons not made in the divine image.
What lies behind this audacious irreverence that brings the sacred into the domain of the profane? Despite Basheer’s central place in Malayalam literature, ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’ has received relatively little scholarly attention compared to some of his better-known works. The story is a striking instance of how Basheer stages questions of religion, the body and language.
Critics have often noted Basheer’s willingness to enter domains that mainstream literature tends to avoid. Commenting on Basheer’s Shabdangal (Voices), writer and literary critic A. Balakrishnapillai (1994) notes how the story confronts readers with the wretched lives of those stricken with disease—particularly those suffering from gonorrhoea—and lauds Basheer’s readiness to depict homosexuality, a theme rarely addressed in Malayalam literature at the time. Social reformer and rationalist Sahodaran Ayyappan similarly observes that Shabdangal takes its readers to the deepest layers of society, presenting them with scenes that may evoke discomfort or even disgust.
These observations highlight an important tendency in Basheer: his refusal to keep literature insulated from harsher realities of social life. In ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’, however, this tendency takes a different form. Where Basheer elsewhere confronts social marginality—disease, sexuality, poverty—here he introduces the human body into the one domain that has often claimed to be beyond it: the sacred.
In the story, the son confesses to his mother that he has committed a grave sin: he has read forbidden books and gained new knowledge. Alarmed, his mother immediately prescribes a punishment drawn from a well-known moral code: molten lead must be poured into his ears. The son clarifies that he did not hear this knowledge but only read it, prompting the mother to change the punishment: the molten lead must now be poured into his mouth. When the son adds that he merely saw the words, she alters her verdict once again, insisting that both his eyes must be gouged out.
The conversation appears comic but follows a curious internal logic. It moves step by step across the body’s sensory openings. The ear receives sound, the mouth produces speech, and the eye reads text. The dialogue thus unfolds across what may be called the human sensorium—the network of senses through which the body encounters and interprets the world. The son’s response introduces the final and most disruptive sense into this sequence. He asks his mother directly: “Mother, how many times do you break wind in a day and night?” The mother is embarrassed, but the son insists that the question concerns religion itself. He argues that everyone born on earth, including saints, rishis, kings, emperors, presidents, and lovers alike, has broken wind in the past and continues to do so even at this very moment.
With this claim, the discussion arrives at the final register of the sensorium: smell. Unlike hearing or sight, smell cannot easily be regulated. Odour travels freely, ignoring the boundaries through which the sacred and the profane are usually kept apart. Imagining heaven through flatulence has ethical consequences: if the bodies of the saints and sinners alike are equally vulnerable, no one enjoys a permanently elevated moral position. Irreverence here becomes a levelling device, binding everyone together and preventing sacred authority from standing beyond critique.
The discomfort provoked by smell also points to a larger issue: the fragile boundary between purity and pollution. In Purity and Danger (1966), British social anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that dirt is not simply filth but ‘matter out of place’, something that unsettles the order that a society tries to maintain. The punishments proposed in Basheer’s story draw upon precisely such notions of social order. Forbidden knowledge is imagined as entering the body through its sensory openings, threatening the existing social order, and the effort to restore order focuses on regulating these points of entry—the ears, the mouth and the eyes. By introducing bodily odour into the imagined purity of heaven, the son exposes the fragile boundary that separates the sacred from the ordinary.
Basheer’s irreverence operates not only through the body but also through language. At one point, the son declares that religions are nothing more than divine “dangudungu,” a word invented by Basheer. Sculptors, carpenters, crazy poets, lunatics, and others, construct these dangudungus, and people quarrel endlessly over them. Politicians and religious leaders alike propagate their own versions of dangudungu: they deliver speeches, compose poems, and even wage wars in its name.
The word “dangudungu” departs not only from our familiar ways of understanding religion but also from the ordinary expectations of language itself. The son also describes the earth and humanity as a ‘pure iltakk thing’, a similar coinage. The son explains that it refers to something trivial or insignificant: compared to the vast expanse of the universe, both the earth and human beings amount to nothing more than an ‘iltakk thing’. By inserting nonsensical sounds into everyday conversation, Basheer makes familiar ideas appear suddenly strange. Religion, knowledge, and even humanity itself begin to appear less stable than they usually seem, implying that their authority rests largely on the language that sustains them.
According to M. N. Vijayan (1996), a prominent Malayalam literary critic, Basheer finds nothing inherently profound in literary language. His writing demonstrates that the languages of the card-sharpers, sex workers, and holy men articulate experience just as effectively as so-called literary language. Udaya Kumar (2005) similarly notes that Basheer’s later writings shift their attention to the everyday spaces of family, domestic life, and community, where meaning emerges through the performative rhythms of daily speech and gestures. In ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’, questions about religion, knowledge, and purity arise not in the form of formal theological debate but within the everyday language of a domestic conversation. Through carefully crafted neologisms, Basheer opens up a space that questions hierarchies, affirms the shared vulnerability of all human bodies, and legitimises the ordinary language through which common people make sense of their world.
The story ends with the mother’s unexpected concession. After listening to the son’s reasoning, the mother begins, to our surprise, reconsidering heaven. If heaven smells the way he describes, then, she remarks, hell might actually be preferable. What began as a firm defence of religious authority ends in a shared moment of recognition. What ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’ reveals is that Basheer’s irreverence is a literary method, not a moment of passing humour. Working through the body, the language of everyday conversation, and playful neologisms, the story unsettles ideas that otherwise pose as self-evident, opening a space within Malayalam literature where institutions such as religion can be approached with curiosity, scepticism, and laughter.
After all, heaven may smell.
Works Cited
- Ayyappan, Sahodaran. 1994. ‘Shabdangal’. Basheer: Varthamanathinte Bhavi, edited by M. K. Sanoo, 357-58. Ashayam Books.
- Balakrishnapillai, A. 1994. ‘Shabdangal’. Basheer: Varthamanathinte Bhavi, edited by M. K. Sanoo, 352-56. Ashayam Books.
- Basheer, Vaikom Muhammad. 2017. ‘Divyamaya Dangudungu’. Basheer Sampoorna Krithikal, no 2: 2299-2304. DC Books.
- Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge.
- Kumar, Udaya. 2005. ‘The Ethics of Witnessing: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and the Subject of Historical Narration’. Narrating India: The Novel in Search of the Nation, edited by E. V. Ramakrishnan, 305-28. Sahitya Akademi.
- Vijayan, M. N. 1996. ‘Introduction’. Basheer Fictions by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer: 17–25. Katha.
About the author: U. K. Shamsudheen holds a PhD in Literary Studies from IIT Bombay and was a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2019–20). His research interests include Narrative theory, Malayalam literature, and South Asian Studies, with a particular focus on forms that sit at the intersection of the literary and the religious, such as the parable.
