Bagh-e-Hind exhibition bring to life historic paintings through scent

Aesthetics of the South Asian culture are known to capture all the five senses, especially the Mughal-era. Among these the fragrance has played a key role, something that is depicted in the historical fiction from that era as well. Perfumer and historian, Bharti Lalwani in collaboration with literary scholar and historian, Nicolas Roth have produced a unique exhibition titled, Bagh-e-Hind. Roth, a specialist in Mughal-era horticultural writings, made deliberate selections of five paintings depicting garden scenes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for Lalwani to translate into fragrance and Edible Perfume™.

This is a first of its kind multidisciplinary exhibition conceptualised around the olfactory landscape of Mughal-era South Asia. It was presented as a multimedia exhibition with both online and office components. Its online components are still available as archives and accessible for the general public around the globe.

Highlights frm our Mehfil/exhibition launch on 10th Sept — the breakout star being @mkhanpasha who delighted us with a fragrant qissa/story! Oh! many breathless messages I received, not about #Baghehind but about how scintillating his story-telling andaaz was! @NicInTheGarden pic.twitter.com/HGMfInzIwu

- Bharti Lalwani (@Litrahb) September 11, 2021

As the official statement of the event highlighted:

“The select images illustrate the splendour of the time in painterly details of rose bushes as far as the eye can see, narcissus stems delicately held by courtly gentlemen, a stunning fireworks display, irises within a formal garden-scape, and a discreet lover’s spot decorated with a bed of flowers amid a lush forest. The selected paintings, while in the public domain of digitised collections belonging to institutions outside of South Asia, have not been shown together, much less contextualised with scent.

“A collaboration across continents, Lalwani and Roth dream of a world where fragrance is profoundly embedded in the way gardens are experienced, represented, and understood. Bagh-e-Hind invites audiences to take pleasure in the aesthetic constructions of each painting — to saturate their senses in order to reimagine new dimensions of love, abundance and pleasure.”

Nicolas Roth added, “Our recreations of olfactory moments as depicted in a series of historic paintings are informed by academic study — of art, history, literature, and botany — as well as a lifetime of practical gardening experience.”

Check out @Litrahb and my project Bagh-e Hind, which attempts translations in smell and taste of 17th- and 18th-century South Asian paintings, at https://t.co/Yu3UxkuJX9. pic.twitter.com/PaEz5vhmEo

- Nic (@NicInTheGarden) September 11, 2021

Mashable Pakistan got to talk to Bharti Lalwani over email about the conceptualization and preparation of Bagh-e-Hind. When did you develop an interest and decided to pursue this field of art?

My earliest childhood memory is one of me looking at a new set of paints and consciously deciding to be an artist — I might have been just 5 or 6 at the time. Apparently I never wavered from this decision.

I did my BA in Fine Art between 1999–2002 at Central Saint Martin’s (London) and later my MA 2008–2009 at The Sothebys Institute (Singapore). While I evolved into an art critic, I think it is through my recent perfumery practice that I feel as if my training as an artist and criticism make sense.

The aspect of fragrance though ingrained in the Mughal history has not really been explored a lot. What prompted you to get into it in such depth?

To me, it seemed obvious — so much scent is being communicated in the painterly details of folios from this period — take for instance the emphasis on floral motifs on garments worn by the central figures in these folios, the flowers tucked into their turbans, garlands worn, portraits holding a rose or narcissus while surrounded by a garden in full bloom…the folio then framed by an ornate floral border.

I had this idea for “Bagh-e Hind” back in 2018, the fact that scent translations were never considered or attempted in a serious manner in academic study, was puzzling to me. I thought about exploring this in depth after coming across the recent work of literary scholar Nicolas Roth — who has a lifetime of gardening experience. I interviewed him for my journal last summer (Litrahbperfumery.com/journal) — and this May 2021, I invited him to partner with me on this project to explore, refine and present these ideas in a cohesive manner.

How has been the experience been in combining the traditional format of exhibition with technology. What has been the response like?

I always intended to present Bagh-e Hind as a virtual “museum” exhibition. With traditional institution exhibitions, there is always the issue of access, gatekeeping and lack of funding. Additionally, I knew the concept was genius and wished to protect it from being pilfered. So I waited patiently for three years to find a discreet collaborator to build this beautiful project with.

After interviewing Roth in 2020, I tested the idea of “Synesthesia” between Fall 2020 — Spring 2021: Could the concepts of “Smoked Patchouli” or “Gul Ishaboor” be presented virtually to a global audience? The answer was a resounding yes. That one could sell artistic iterations of fragrance and flavour via evocative description and imagery online is itself unusual and ground breaking. I hence had the confidence to approach Roth with a proposal for such a unique project. The timing couldn’t be better, now that everyone is accustomed to working online, a virtual exhibition on scent can be easily accepted without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact that I fund this myself ensures that I have complete ownership of the concept and control over its design, presentation and evolution.

We went live on 10 September and the response from the public has been phenomenal. Between July and August, I rigorously tested the premise and the exhibition format by giving previews to certain academics and curators from the art world, who helped me strengthen the exhibition with their robust critique and direction. Even though Bagh-e Hind is mainly an online show on fragrance that cannot be inhaled in real time, Roth and I enriched the viewing experience by adding 18th century poetry, photographs of roses, irises and narcissus from Roth’s breathtaking garden, splendourous fragrance related historical objects from public and private collections, highly evocative scent descriptions and classical Hindustani music matched to each of the five main paintings so viewers can listen to and feel* the mood of these landscapes. I was determined to build a show that left the audience gasping with wonder and awe.

Additionally we have a curatorial catalogue on the site which will showcase several lead essays from writers across South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.

Is there a closing date of the exhibition?

We have decided not to have a closing date. Both Roth and I would like to keep building this project into an archive that exists on the intersection of South Asian art history, intellectual history, material culture, fragrance, flavour and gardening. This exhibition will also manifest in actual locations for public viewing over the next few years. I wish to see Roth’s brilliant mind at work by having him translate these garden paintings into actual garden pavilions at some point next year.

Offline features include:

* Global audiences can pre-order limited edition Synesthesia Boxes (glass incense holder and perfume flacon, extrait de Parfum 15ml, edible perfume: ‘Mitti’ chocolate + Perfume tea, perfume soap 120 gm, incense in various iterations and a vintage brass object) that emerge from this project.
* US based audiences could order Uzair Siddiqui’s flavour translations of the five paintings that are combined with a set of incense to offer what Lalwani calls a ‘compressed synesthesia experience’.
* Nicolas Roth’s list of seeds and bulbs, so anyone anywhere can recreate botanical elements from a formal Mughal garden.
* Garden recreations are planned for later in the year in different locations across the globe so audiences can experience the splendour of nature with scent and flavour elements designed by Lalwani.
* The co-curators are also putting together a reading list for the public.

Online features include:

* Bagh-e Hind will be available for online viewing from September 2021 onwards.
* Glimpse of the production process from hand drawn illustrations of perfume flacons by Lalwani and their matching creations made by a local glass workshop.
* Antique and vintage South Asian attar-daani and perfume bottles, incense burners and other exquisite scent related objects from private collections.
* Rare perfume raw material used since ancient times: lumps of ambergris, sandalwood and agarwood chunks and musk pods.
* For the virtual exhibition catalogue, Lalwani has commissioned essays by historian and literary scholar Nicolas Roth, artist-critic Parsa S Sajid (Bangladesh), scent collector and climate change activist Nimra A. Chohan (Pakistan), playwright and perfumer Alexander Helwani (France), and architect Uzair Sddiqui (US/ India)
* Classical Hindustani music selected by Siddiqui to further contextualise the mood of each painting
* A virtual symposium is planned for later in the year with a broad spectrum of speakers coming from academic as well as perfumery and distillation backgrounds.

Profiles of the collaborators:

Bharti Lalwani is a perfumer and art critic. She trained as an artist at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and later at The Sotheby’s Institute of Art in Singapore. Having spent over twenty years of her life in Lagos, Nigeria, Bharti has moved across several countries and career paths. After her move to India in 2013, she found herself as a pioneering independent perfumer in an otherwise male dominated, close-knit industry of distillers, aroma chemical traders and attar-wallahs. Upon further experimentation and research she found that her training as an art critic equipped her with sharp instincts and the ability to produce original work within an old, stagnant and Euro-centric field. She established Litrahb Perfumery in 2018.

Nicolas Roth received a BA in Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in South Asian Studies from Harvard University. His dissertation focuses on the garden culture and horticultural writings of Mughal India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, drawing on a range of textual genres in Sanskrit, Persian, and various forms of Urdu and Hindi as well as visual sources found in painting and other art forms. In addition to working on turning the dissertation into a book, he has recently written on the representation of architecture in Urdu poetry and is embarking on a new major project on Indo-Persian inshā or epistolary prose. As part of the latter, he is particularly interested in the functioning of inshā collections as a literary genre in its own right, and their representations of and relationship to various aspects of material culture.

Originally published at https://pk.mashable.com on October 11, 2021.