In Vietnam, there exists a discriminatory discourse on the so-called “Indian smell” (mùi Ấn Độ). This paper deconstructs this discriminatory discourse, demonstrating its political, social, and historical contexts and engagements in modern Vietnamese history. This paper analyzes Vietnamese accounts, either orally rendered or written, about the Indian smell in modern Vietnam. The accounts examined for this research are largely collected from the author’s ethnographic, journalistic, and literary research in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City from 2012 to 2013. Analyzing the collected interdisciplinary sources, this paper indicates that the negative Vietnamese discourse about Indian food or the so-called “Indian smell” is less about the smell than the historical relations between Indian migrants and Vietnamese natives.