James Joyce claimed that to him ‘cuspidor’ was the most beautiful word in the English language. Cuspidor is the more decorative version of the homely word ‘spittoon’, and is still used to refer to a part of the paraphernalia of dentistry. But dentists’ chairs and hospital beds are hardly spaces where one is concerned about either the aesthetic or the private. It is rather the irresistible desire of perfectly healthy human beings, especially in India, to pour out before everyone’s eyes the contents in their mouths, usually in the form of varying degrees of fluidity, that is far more intriguing. Intriguing, because there are few acts as unattractive, aesthetically and sexually, than the act of spitting. Yet people on the streets of India do it all the time, especially the men. And they take particular pleasure in spitting far and spitting lots — perhaps an attenuated adult version of the “let’s see whose goes farthest” game they played as boys during another supposedly private act. In place of the equipment and force on display then, there is often, as substitute, an indescribable series of sounds leading up to the climactic act of spitting. The sounds may signify a single-minded devotion to the hygiene of the oesophagus, in effect they make the involuntary auditor’s stomach turn.

To be out on an Indian road is to be an unwilling spectator of continual and various kinds of voiding. Some of these, such as spitting, were once accepted as normal public acts. This is how beautifully shaped, carved, embossed or painted spittoons came into being. Both in the East and the West, using the spittoon at home and outside it was a delicate way of ridding oneself of things one could not, or should not, swallow. In the West, spittoons were placed in public spots to help tobacco chewers. In India, both tobacco and the betel leaf had to be chewed and spat out, and women used spittoons as much as men. By the late 19th and the very early 20th centuries, norms of public conduct in the West relegated spitting to the privacy of the home, or rather, the bathroom.

This notion of privacy is irrelevant to India. Too many people, radically different architectures, or no architecture at all — many people do their essential voiding in the morning in fields in the villages and by pavements in the cities — all add up to an inability to appreciate what is so revolting about spitting in public. And if breathtakingly beautiful spittoons can be displayed in museums or preserved in the rich man’s home, spitting is surely approved by tradition?

But does such a psychology have anything to do with our habitual spitter? The swagger and casualness with which men spit in urban India would suggest not. People spit because they want to, they like doing it. They spit if they get a bad smell, they spit if they see something dirty, they spit when they chew tobacco, they spit because it is a habit. Betel-leaf chewers love painting walls red with their spouted waste, women spit neatly from between their teeth before entering their homes. They can’t resist it. Some even feel that this is hygienic. We can only hope they don’t believe it is aesthetic as well.