Saachi D’Souza spoke to art critic and perfumer Bharti Lalwani about her perfumes that weave in chemistry, memory and history to build a sensorial library of South Asian fragrances.

A detail from "Maharana Sangram Singh celebrating the spring festival with his nobles in the rose garden in Udaipur"
1715–20
Udaipur. Image courtesy Francesca Galloway, London

Scents evoke cultures through memories of food, places and interactions. Their careful gathering, documentation and distribution allows history to thrive in the present especially in the practice of perfumery.

In the COVID pandemic, the possibility of losing two vital senses - smell and taste - became a common fear. Art critic, perfumer and founder of Litrahb Perfumery, Bharti Lalwani, brings focus to how our senses are archives of the living. Through her perfumery, Bharti has built a practice that allows her to research and distribute fragrances from history, with a focus on the Mughal era. She not only develops scents that signify her culture, but her practice is also an extension of her academic work in the area. We spoke to Bharti to learn more about her practice that weaves in chemistry, memory and history to build a sensorial library of South Asian scents.

Can you trace your journey of researching scents as signifiers of culture? How did you arrive at establishing your art and practice under Litrahb Perfumery?

This is a great question to start with because I paid little attention to scents and smells. I have lifelong allergies so I never indulged in perfume either. Living in tropical Lagos and later, Singapore, made me very sensitive to heavy perfumes that just don’t perform well in a climate of heat and humidity.

Some years back I attended a pop-up event in Pune where a new Indian brand was showcasing its perfumes. The man waved a bottle at me, saying, “I’ve made masala chai perfume, come try it.” “Masala chai” prompts expectations of cardamom, cinnamon and a subtle sharpness of clove and ginger. Instead, I got what I can only describe as “metallic-rancid lemongrass”. I scoffed. If I had just half this man’s resources, I would take a risk. I would take an element familiar to every South Asian and present it in an unexpected form: I would make Green Chutney perfume! I then promptly forgot about this and moved on. I did not think about this encounter until a year later.

In 2017, I began reading everything about the application of scent to enhance flavour experiences which brought me back to how I had so cockily thought up a genius idea for a uniquely South Asian perfume. Now was the time to test it. Again, in the early days, there was virtually no information on the internet on how to learn perfumery, not enough books, and no obvious sources to purchase small quantities of raw materials from — no peers, no guidance.

Even within the field of contemporary art, scent was not considered a serious medium, so I truly began from ground zero. Once I formulated Green Chutney in perfume and Edible Perfume™ form, the path forward became obvious to me. As a critic, I was already well-trained to analyse what makes a work of art bad, good or extraordinary. I established Litrahb Perfumery in 2018 as a moniker under which I could expand my intellectual and artistic practice. There was new ground to stake and I was bound to leave stale masala clichés in the dust.

Tuberose perfume. Image courtesy: Bharti Lalwani

Through your work, what are some of the relationships/intimacies between scent and culture you have found?

I love the medium of scent because it has an effortless way of bringing out deeply rooted biases that can be interrogated with ease.

During my research between 2018-2020, I happened to interview a white French perfumer from a global fragrance and flavour conglomerate based in Paris. Over our phone call, she revealed that she was the formulator of the aforementioned chai perfume. Her visit to South India as a tourist over a decade ago had enriched her fantasy of smells and flavours of the East.

This revelation made me look closely at how orientalist the fragrance industry is. We live in a corporatised, white supremacist world, that dictates what economies thrive and where labour and resources can be continually extracted from. I began paying close attention to commercial fragrance brands that might be South Asian-owned but are designed by white chemists who may not be rooted in the local context of the sub-continent.

Context is everything. It determines how much more we are willing to pay for a European luxury product composed of ingredients that originated from South Asian soil — so I propose a thought experiment: two perfumes, the same, are presented to you. One has a French label and the other has a South Asian one. The former is presented in a crystal bottle, the latter in a regular attar vial. Which do you think will be perceived as superior – and why?

How would you place your project within larger cultural discourses?

There are two ways to answer this.

First, my recent project “Bagh-e Hind: Scent translations of Mughal and Rajput Garden Paintings” (2021 - ongoing) offers methodologies to illuminate new sensorial meanings embedded in seventeenth and eighteenth-century art and literature. While individual scholars have been translating perfumery texts and analysing the socio-political and architectural role of gardens through the centuries, none have simultaneously attempted approaches through which to excavate and map the olfactive landscape of Mughal India.

Through this project, I have openly shared my methods and processes. Perfumers can look at the ingredients I have listed, they can read the explanation of how to make scent and flavour translations and go with it their way to experience the atmosphere encoded in such history-paintings. Second, I don't think we adequately acknowledge the practical realities of our economic, cultural and infrastructural deficits. Under Bagh-e Hind, are questions for an audience to sit with, around the barriers to knowledge: who, in the first place, has enough funding to produce knowledge that determines how South-Asian material and intellectual culture, mainly held in institution-vaults of the West, are decoded? Who decides what format this knowledge is presented in? Who decides if that mode is legitimate; and who, ultimately, receives visibility, opportunities, and accolades for producing such intellectual labour?

In my experience, such complex historical material is either discussed within rigid academic spaces or on social media where their context can be diluted. I decided to invent ways in which this research can be absorbed and presented most creatively.

Can you comment on the importance of reviving memories through fragrances? Has enough been done on this front?

Smell is a fascinating sense that intrinsically connects to the part of the brain that stores the most obscure of memories. It possesses such potency, that, like flavour (i.e 97% smell), it can move you emotionally to a long-forgotten place in a fraction of a second.

However, this is not a medium that has been skilfully utilised in the cultural sphere. This means an artwork can have aspects of smell attached to it but if there is no underlying curatorial context that justifies its presence, then the element may be momentarily enjoyed as a novelty but it is not likely to propel the discourse in any new directions.

What can we learn from fragrances about history?

I will direct you to www.Baghehind.com to learn about the history of fragrance, flavour, sound, gardens, horticulture, art and literature of Mughal-era India. Here audiences can explore the result of my year-long collaboration with Dr Nicolas Roth. We have identified the botanical varieties and olfactory cues within five main Mughal and Rajput paintings and presented their synaesthesia translations along with photographs of the exact flower and plant varieties depicted in the paintings, and objects borrowed from digitised museum collections to reflect the richness of the period’s material culture (perfumery accoutrements, ornaments, paan boxes, etc.).

A virtual curatorial catalogue, accompanying this exhibition, contains new work on the history of incense-rituals in Bengal, on gustatory pleasures in eighteenth-century art and literature, and a close reading of the troupes illustrated performing for the kings’ pleasure across numerous Rajput paintings. There is also a Reading List on scents and gardens that Roth and I compiled together over the year.

What would you want your audience to take from your fragrances?

Pleasure.

Tracing history through fragrance