Nicolas Roth | Harvard University (original) (raw)
Conference Presentations by Nicolas Roth
Most accounts of Mughal gardens draw heavily on the observations on plants, horticulture, and lan... more Most accounts of Mughal gardens draw heavily on the observations on plants, horticulture, and landscape architecture recorded by the dynasty’s founder, Bābur (r. in India 1526-1530), in his autobiographic Bāburnāmah. Similarly, art historian Ebba Koch and others have discussed the scientific precision and aesthetic delight evident in the observations of flora and fauna included by the fourth Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605-1627) in his memoirs, the Jahāngīrnāmah or Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī. However, little attention has hitherto been paid to the significance of such personal botanical and horticultural anecdotes in the writings of later and less elite Mughal figures. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap by exploring the commentary on individual experiences of plants and horticulture in the works of eighteenth-century Mughal litterateurs of Indo-Persian such as Ānand Rām ‘Mukhliṣ’ (1699-1750), whose prose writings are replete with asides detailing his botanical observations and gardening activities. When ‘Mukhliṣ’ recounts in detail how he brought a cutting of a mālatī vine from the grove of an ascetic in Vrindavan to plant outside of the reception room of his mansion in Delhi and how he has tended to it and coaxed it into bloom, he is cultivating not only a flower but also a specific vision of himself as a traveler, a Hindu, a connoisseur, and a dedicated and skillful gardener. Through such anecdotes, he and other writers subtly assert their personal passions and display their worldliness and erudition, distinguishing themselves through the specificity of their interests and the heights of their sophistication, yet simultaneously affirming their participation in the aesthetic ideals of their society. Personal accounts of plants and gardening thus emerge as complex and productive sites for the fashioning of a public self, building on the example set by imperial autobiography yet moving confidently beyond it in form and content.
Among the works of the Urdu poet Shāh ‘Ḥātim’ (1699-1783) is a lengthy narrative poem written dur... more Among the works of the Urdu poet Shāh ‘Ḥātim’ (1699-1783) is a lengthy narrative poem written during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1719-1748) and detailing an outing of a group of friends from Delhi to a garden outside the city. Entitled Bazm-i ‘ishrat, or “Feast of Revelry,” this text constitutes an explicit and elaborate articulation of an idea that percolates through a significant portion of late Mughal literature – the notion, that is, that the fashionable garden excursion entails a conscious suspension or even rejection of society’s usual moral strictures, allowing for the individual’s pursuit of personal interests and transgressive pleasures. While the trope of the garden as a secluded paradise has a long pedigree in Persianate literatures, this celebration of garden tourism as an act of liberation and – mainly erotic – self-realization appears to be a specific concern of eighteenth-century Mughal literature, and especially of works in the then emerging medium of Urdu. Part of a larger cultural moment that delighted in this-worldly pleasures and the new and outré, and has hence often been discounted as a decadent period of decline, the valorization of the transgressive, individualistic garden outing moreover points to a distinctly modern interest in individual subjectivity and individual liberties. These implications, as well as the place of garden visits within the broader topic of late Mughal travel, are explored through a detailed analysis of the Bazm-i ‘ishrat in conjunction with other Urdu and Persian writings from the period and their local historical contexts.
In 1885, at the tender age of fifteen, one Pyāre La‘l, son of a landowner in the village of Baroṭ... more In 1885, at the tender age of fifteen, one Pyāre La‘l, son of a landowner in the village of Baroṭhā near Aligarh, published a textbook of mathematics. It met with little success, but this did not deter the young author; over the next two decades, Pyāre La‘l would write dozens of books about everything from gardening and agriculture to sex and the afterlife. The result is a veritable library of textbooks, technical manuals, and volumes of general knowledge in Urdu and various forms of Hindi. From this substantial but little-studied archive and its creator’s extensive ruminations on its purpose and intended audiences, much can be learned about the engagement of provincial elites with both Western learning and modern “scientific” information on the one hand and indigenous knowledge systems on the other. Rather than a mere project of translation, Pyāre La‘l’s work represents a sustained and sophisticated effort to render both foreign and indigenous elite discourses culturally and linguistically accessible to a local general public, a process driven by both an idealist’s vision of national uplift through the dissemination of knowledge and the practical need to find and cultivate a reading and book-buying audience. While a number of academic works have recently traced these aspects of the emerging Hindi and Urdu publishing industry, little attention has been paid to the particular case of technical literatures with their explicit mandate to instruct and educate; the voluminous corpus of Pyāre La‘l’s writings serves as a case study to begin to fill this gap.
In a punning couplet, the Urdu poet Najmuddīn Shāh Mubārak ‘Ābrū’ (1683-1733) quips that since ev... more In a punning couplet, the Urdu poet Najmuddīn Shāh Mubārak ‘Ābrū’ (1683-1733) quips that since every Indian ma‘shūq or male beloved is sabz – the Persian word for “green” but also, especially in poetic usage, “sprouting” or "with peach fuzz" – it makes sense that cucumbers be called bālam – a Hindi word meaning “beloved” that also serves as the name of a specific variety of cucumber. To comprehend and savor this verse thus requires familiarity with multiple registers of the vernacular and with Persianate literary convention, as well as rather detailed knowledge of the quotidian world of the vegetable market. Yet while these lines may stand out in their linguistic and botanic virtuosity, their intermingling of eroticism with the celebration of produce is far from an exception in early modern Urdu poetry. Fruits and vegetables appear in the works of many poets, from lengthy paeans to different melons and citrus fruit by Nazīr Akbarābādī (1735-1830) to the rapturous masnavī on the mango penned by Mirzā Ghālib (1797-1869). Erotic conceits are almost always built around these evocations of produce – and while the gender of the beloved is often ambiguous in Urdu poetry, where fruit or vegetables appear it is virtually always as explicit as in Ābrū’s aforementioned couplet, with particular types of produce consistently linked to either male or female objects of affection. This paper will trace these gendered associations of different fruits and vegetables in depictions of romance and eroticism in Urdu poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explore their significance in the context both of received Persianate and Indic literary symbolism as well as of interconnected ideals of elite masculinity, good taste, and refinement as communicated through material consumption. Consequently, it will further elucidate not only the poetry itself, but also the culture, intellectual as well as material, that shaped it.
From the sixteenth century onward, a veritable flood of hitherto unknown plant species from the A... more From the sixteenth century onward, a veritable flood of hitherto unknown plant species from the Americas, East Asia, and elsewhere poured into the Indian Subcontinent as part of the Columbian Exchange and the growth of colonial trade. Some of the new arrivals remained mere curiosities to their South Asian observers; others would fundamentally alter environment and culture by becoming integral elements of local farming and horticulture, dietary habits, and social and religious practice. Historiographic scholarship has so far paid little attention to these developments and even less to the indigenous responses to them. Yet the engagements of early-modern South Asian intellectuals and artists with novel flora are illuminating in both their emphases and their omissions. They shed light not only on local delight in novelty, beauty, and utility but also on aesthetic and cultural concerns linked to larger efforts to define individual and communal values and identities amidst the shifting social landscape of the Mughal Empire and its successor states. Drawing on Indo-Persian, Urdu, and Braj Bhasha textual sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as Mughal and Rajput paintings from the same period, this paper will explore how South Asians chose to acknowledge, celebrate, incorporate, or ignore the exotic plants then newly available to them in their literary and artistic endeavors. This analysis, in turn, will allow for a better understanding of the creation and circulation of knowledge in late-Mughal India on the one hand and the making of modern South Asian material culture on the other.
Journal Articles by Nicolas Roth
Marg, vol. 75, no. 2: Histories of Indian Perfume, 2023
This piece provides a brief overview of the history of roses in South Asia, focusing in particula... more This piece provides a brief overview of the history of roses in South Asia, focusing in particular on the damask roses that are the primary source of rose water and rose oil and which were the predominant garden roses in the region for centuries, as well as the more modern hybrids that eventually begun supplanting them in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it highlights “roses” as a somewhat shifting cultural category. In addition, it explores the incorporation of roses and rose products into South Asian fragrance culture, which despite being comparatively recent development in the long history of perfumery in the Indian Subcontinent, has come to define the regional olfactory landscape on a fundamental level.
Marg, vol. 75, no. 2: Histories of Indian Perfume, 2023
This essay traces the importance of the “original” champa or champak(a) (Magnolia champaca), a fr... more This essay traces the importance of the “original” champa or champak(a) (Magnolia champaca), a fragrant magnolia species native to South and Southeast Asia, in medieval and early modern Indian gardening, literature, and art. Drawing on visual and textual sources, including original translations of primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and Braj Bhasha, it argues that the champak came to be a quintessential element of elite gardens across the region, as well as a ubiquitous motif in painting and poetry. Moreover, it served as a widely recognized emblem of the botanic wealth of the Indian Subcontinent and the distinctive sensory pleasures offered by its material culture. The historic complexities wrought by the introduction of new plants and changing vernacular plant names are also explored.
Journal18, 2021
In the late eighteenth century, detailed descriptions of architecture begin to appear in Urdu poe... more In the late eighteenth century, detailed descriptions of architecture begin to appear in Urdu poetry, particularly in the masnavī form associated primarily with fictional tales of romance and adventure. These unusually precise accounts of buildings and their ornamentation mirror the historicizing and documentary turn in built Mughal architecture of the period and its drawn and painted representations. They record the profuse ornament associated with the new regional center of Avadh, where both architecture and Urdu poetry found new patronage as the power and wealth of the imperial center declined, and help codify an ideal, generic late Mughal and Avadhī architectural idiom.
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2019
Persian, Braj Bhāṣā, and Urdu literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal India evo... more Persian, Braj Bhāṣā, and Urdu literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal India evolved a common repertoire for the depiction of gardens. Drawing on earlier Persian and Sanskrit models but reflecting material developments of the time, including the influx of new American plants, this mode of writing gardens appeared primarily in a particular type of garden set piece in narrative or descriptive works, but also in references across genres. Apart from allowing for elaborate literary conceits, these conventions served to display knowledge and convey specific notions of material luxury and sensory pleasure.
Talks by Nicolas Roth
Scent & Society Lecture Series, Institute for Art and Olfaction, 2023
By the 18th century, elaborate descriptions of gardens, both real and fictional, had become a com... more By the 18th century, elaborate descriptions of gardens, both real and fictional, had become a common feature of literary works in several North Indian languages. Replete with botanical detail, these verbal celebrations of luxury and sophistication set out idealized scentscapes composed of culturally significant plants. This talk will discuss examples from several Urdu narrative poems, highlighting explicit and implicit references to fragrance and perfumery and a wealth of scented South Asian flora.
On Smellscapes, Chocolate and Gardens: Revisiting Olfactory landscapes in Mughal South Asia and colonial New Spain, part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University, 2022
San Diego Museum of Art South Asian Arts Council, 2022
The vast body of paintings produced under the Mughals and their various vassals, rivals, and succ... more The vast body of paintings produced under the Mughals and their various vassals, rivals, and successors over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is replete with floral ornament, garden scenes, and botanical studies. This wealth of painted plants is often discussed in relation to the Mughal adaptation of ornamental motifs gleaned from European prints. However, it is also a reflection of contemporary horticultural practice, the evolving garden flora of the Indian Subcontinent in a globalizing world, and a deeply rooted cultural conventions governing the aesthetic appreciation of plants. This talk will delve into this lush world to explore on the nuanced regimes of botanical knowledge and artistic choice that went into creating truly fascinating works.
Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series (VIAHSS), 2021
Recent scholarship by Chanchal Dadlani has highlighted the role of architectural drawings in eigh... more Recent scholarship by Chanchal Dadlani has highlighted the role of architectural drawings in eighteenth-century northern India in constituting and conserving Mughal architectural tradition and celebrating dynastic history against a backdrop of political upheaval and cultural change. At the same time, work by Paul Losensky, Farshid Emami, and others has explored modes of description of architectural spaces and urban topographies in Persian literature produced during the preceding two centuries. Building on both of these rich strands of inquiry, this research explores the elaborate descriptions of architecture found in two eighteenth-century Urdu masnavīs or verse romances. Produced as Urdu began to share the stage with Persian as a major language of elite literary expression in northern India, these texts are heir to Persian literary forms and conventions, and yet they are also distinctly novel, as much a product of their particular time and place as the ornate, self-consciously playful structures they chronicle. Like architectural drawings and depictions of buildings in painting, these verbal records serve to elaborate and codify a distinctive Mughal style. Despite elements of hyperbole and literary convention, a careful reading of these materials reveals a strong commitment to a particular kind of realism and technical detail that help construct and enforce a material cultural identity and a specific vision of the good life mediated by it. The architectural descriptions contained in these Urdu literary works, are thus both descriptive and prescriptive, both record and aspiration. Their study not only helps to elucidates the relationship between literary representation and material culture in general, but also promises specific insight into the conceptual choices and concerns that informed architectural design.
Centre for Islamic Studies (CIS), University of Cambridge, Deccan Heritage Foundation, and HH Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar Foundation (HHSNWF), 2021
Naturalistic vegetal motifs and flower studies in the arts of early modern South Asia have been e... more Naturalistic vegetal motifs and flower studies in the arts of early modern South Asia have been explained primarily in terms of Mughal interest in nature and the adaptation of imagery from printed European florilegia. However, the history of botanical representation in the Deccan complicates this picture considerably. From the Deccan Sultanates through Mughal rule and beyond, the region saw the cultivation of several different modes of depicting plants, including a register of great botanical precision distinct from Mughal “naturalism.” Moreover, these works capture a distinctive range of plant species and horticultural practices that correspond in part to larger literary developments across the subcontinent yet also serve to establish a distinctive regional visual-botanical vocabulary.
Bangalore International Centre, 2020
Beginning in the sixteenth century, a new garden typology appeared across much of northern and ce... more Beginning in the sixteenth century, a new garden typology appeared across much of northern and central India. Often referred to as Mughal or Islamic, the style, while partially rooted in Persian models, in fact transcended such narrow dynastic or sectarian affiliations. Nor was it defined solely by the architectural features – symmetry, waterworks, pavilions – that scholarship has mostly focused on. This talk will look instead at the plants and horticultural practices that characterized these gardens from their first emergence through the end of the eighteenth century, as well as their prominent role in the literature and arts of the period. In particular, we will delve into the rise of the formal flower bed. Now a sine qua non of most gardens, this humble feature once represented a momentous innovation, illuminating just how changeable and historically contingent the idea of the garden can be.
Most accounts of Mughal gardens draw heavily on the observations on plants, horticulture, and lan... more Most accounts of Mughal gardens draw heavily on the observations on plants, horticulture, and landscape architecture recorded by the dynasty’s founder, Bābur (r. in India 1526-1530), in his autobiographic Bāburnāmah. Similarly, art historian Ebba Koch and others have discussed the scientific precision and aesthetic delight evident in the observations of flora and fauna included by the fourth Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605-1627) in his memoirs, the Jahāngīrnāmah or Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī. However, little attention has hitherto been paid to the significance of such personal botanical and horticultural anecdotes in the writings of later and less elite Mughal figures. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap by exploring the commentary on individual experiences of plants and horticulture in the works of eighteenth-century Mughal litterateurs of Indo-Persian such as Ānand Rām ‘Mukhliṣ’ (1699-1750), whose prose writings are replete with asides detailing his botanical observations and gardening activities. When ‘Mukhliṣ’ recounts in detail how he brought a cutting of a mālatī vine from the grove of an ascetic in Vrindavan to plant outside of the reception room of his mansion in Delhi and how he has tended to it and coaxed it into bloom, he is cultivating not only a flower but also a specific vision of himself as a traveler, a Hindu, a connoisseur, and a dedicated and skillful gardener. Through such anecdotes, he and other writers subtly assert their personal passions and display their worldliness and erudition, distinguishing themselves through the specificity of their interests and the heights of their sophistication, yet simultaneously affirming their participation in the aesthetic ideals of their society. Personal accounts of plants and gardening thus emerge as complex and productive sites for the fashioning of a public self, building on the example set by imperial autobiography yet moving confidently beyond it in form and content.
Among the works of the Urdu poet Shāh ‘Ḥātim’ (1699-1783) is a lengthy narrative poem written dur... more Among the works of the Urdu poet Shāh ‘Ḥātim’ (1699-1783) is a lengthy narrative poem written during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1719-1748) and detailing an outing of a group of friends from Delhi to a garden outside the city. Entitled Bazm-i ‘ishrat, or “Feast of Revelry,” this text constitutes an explicit and elaborate articulation of an idea that percolates through a significant portion of late Mughal literature – the notion, that is, that the fashionable garden excursion entails a conscious suspension or even rejection of society’s usual moral strictures, allowing for the individual’s pursuit of personal interests and transgressive pleasures. While the trope of the garden as a secluded paradise has a long pedigree in Persianate literatures, this celebration of garden tourism as an act of liberation and – mainly erotic – self-realization appears to be a specific concern of eighteenth-century Mughal literature, and especially of works in the then emerging medium of Urdu. Part of a larger cultural moment that delighted in this-worldly pleasures and the new and outré, and has hence often been discounted as a decadent period of decline, the valorization of the transgressive, individualistic garden outing moreover points to a distinctly modern interest in individual subjectivity and individual liberties. These implications, as well as the place of garden visits within the broader topic of late Mughal travel, are explored through a detailed analysis of the Bazm-i ‘ishrat in conjunction with other Urdu and Persian writings from the period and their local historical contexts.
In 1885, at the tender age of fifteen, one Pyāre La‘l, son of a landowner in the village of Baroṭ... more In 1885, at the tender age of fifteen, one Pyāre La‘l, son of a landowner in the village of Baroṭhā near Aligarh, published a textbook of mathematics. It met with little success, but this did not deter the young author; over the next two decades, Pyāre La‘l would write dozens of books about everything from gardening and agriculture to sex and the afterlife. The result is a veritable library of textbooks, technical manuals, and volumes of general knowledge in Urdu and various forms of Hindi. From this substantial but little-studied archive and its creator’s extensive ruminations on its purpose and intended audiences, much can be learned about the engagement of provincial elites with both Western learning and modern “scientific” information on the one hand and indigenous knowledge systems on the other. Rather than a mere project of translation, Pyāre La‘l’s work represents a sustained and sophisticated effort to render both foreign and indigenous elite discourses culturally and linguistically accessible to a local general public, a process driven by both an idealist’s vision of national uplift through the dissemination of knowledge and the practical need to find and cultivate a reading and book-buying audience. While a number of academic works have recently traced these aspects of the emerging Hindi and Urdu publishing industry, little attention has been paid to the particular case of technical literatures with their explicit mandate to instruct and educate; the voluminous corpus of Pyāre La‘l’s writings serves as a case study to begin to fill this gap.
In a punning couplet, the Urdu poet Najmuddīn Shāh Mubārak ‘Ābrū’ (1683-1733) quips that since ev... more In a punning couplet, the Urdu poet Najmuddīn Shāh Mubārak ‘Ābrū’ (1683-1733) quips that since every Indian ma‘shūq or male beloved is sabz – the Persian word for “green” but also, especially in poetic usage, “sprouting” or "with peach fuzz" – it makes sense that cucumbers be called bālam – a Hindi word meaning “beloved” that also serves as the name of a specific variety of cucumber. To comprehend and savor this verse thus requires familiarity with multiple registers of the vernacular and with Persianate literary convention, as well as rather detailed knowledge of the quotidian world of the vegetable market. Yet while these lines may stand out in their linguistic and botanic virtuosity, their intermingling of eroticism with the celebration of produce is far from an exception in early modern Urdu poetry. Fruits and vegetables appear in the works of many poets, from lengthy paeans to different melons and citrus fruit by Nazīr Akbarābādī (1735-1830) to the rapturous masnavī on the mango penned by Mirzā Ghālib (1797-1869). Erotic conceits are almost always built around these evocations of produce – and while the gender of the beloved is often ambiguous in Urdu poetry, where fruit or vegetables appear it is virtually always as explicit as in Ābrū’s aforementioned couplet, with particular types of produce consistently linked to either male or female objects of affection. This paper will trace these gendered associations of different fruits and vegetables in depictions of romance and eroticism in Urdu poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explore their significance in the context both of received Persianate and Indic literary symbolism as well as of interconnected ideals of elite masculinity, good taste, and refinement as communicated through material consumption. Consequently, it will further elucidate not only the poetry itself, but also the culture, intellectual as well as material, that shaped it.
From the sixteenth century onward, a veritable flood of hitherto unknown plant species from the A... more From the sixteenth century onward, a veritable flood of hitherto unknown plant species from the Americas, East Asia, and elsewhere poured into the Indian Subcontinent as part of the Columbian Exchange and the growth of colonial trade. Some of the new arrivals remained mere curiosities to their South Asian observers; others would fundamentally alter environment and culture by becoming integral elements of local farming and horticulture, dietary habits, and social and religious practice. Historiographic scholarship has so far paid little attention to these developments and even less to the indigenous responses to them. Yet the engagements of early-modern South Asian intellectuals and artists with novel flora are illuminating in both their emphases and their omissions. They shed light not only on local delight in novelty, beauty, and utility but also on aesthetic and cultural concerns linked to larger efforts to define individual and communal values and identities amidst the shifting social landscape of the Mughal Empire and its successor states. Drawing on Indo-Persian, Urdu, and Braj Bhasha textual sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as Mughal and Rajput paintings from the same period, this paper will explore how South Asians chose to acknowledge, celebrate, incorporate, or ignore the exotic plants then newly available to them in their literary and artistic endeavors. This analysis, in turn, will allow for a better understanding of the creation and circulation of knowledge in late-Mughal India on the one hand and the making of modern South Asian material culture on the other.
Marg, vol. 75, no. 2: Histories of Indian Perfume, 2023
This piece provides a brief overview of the history of roses in South Asia, focusing in particula... more This piece provides a brief overview of the history of roses in South Asia, focusing in particular on the damask roses that are the primary source of rose water and rose oil and which were the predominant garden roses in the region for centuries, as well as the more modern hybrids that eventually begun supplanting them in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it highlights “roses” as a somewhat shifting cultural category. In addition, it explores the incorporation of roses and rose products into South Asian fragrance culture, which despite being comparatively recent development in the long history of perfumery in the Indian Subcontinent, has come to define the regional olfactory landscape on a fundamental level.
Marg, vol. 75, no. 2: Histories of Indian Perfume, 2023
This essay traces the importance of the “original” champa or champak(a) (Magnolia champaca), a fr... more This essay traces the importance of the “original” champa or champak(a) (Magnolia champaca), a fragrant magnolia species native to South and Southeast Asia, in medieval and early modern Indian gardening, literature, and art. Drawing on visual and textual sources, including original translations of primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and Braj Bhasha, it argues that the champak came to be a quintessential element of elite gardens across the region, as well as a ubiquitous motif in painting and poetry. Moreover, it served as a widely recognized emblem of the botanic wealth of the Indian Subcontinent and the distinctive sensory pleasures offered by its material culture. The historic complexities wrought by the introduction of new plants and changing vernacular plant names are also explored.
Journal18, 2021
In the late eighteenth century, detailed descriptions of architecture begin to appear in Urdu poe... more In the late eighteenth century, detailed descriptions of architecture begin to appear in Urdu poetry, particularly in the masnavī form associated primarily with fictional tales of romance and adventure. These unusually precise accounts of buildings and their ornamentation mirror the historicizing and documentary turn in built Mughal architecture of the period and its drawn and painted representations. They record the profuse ornament associated with the new regional center of Avadh, where both architecture and Urdu poetry found new patronage as the power and wealth of the imperial center declined, and help codify an ideal, generic late Mughal and Avadhī architectural idiom.
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2019
Persian, Braj Bhāṣā, and Urdu literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal India evo... more Persian, Braj Bhāṣā, and Urdu literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal India evolved a common repertoire for the depiction of gardens. Drawing on earlier Persian and Sanskrit models but reflecting material developments of the time, including the influx of new American plants, this mode of writing gardens appeared primarily in a particular type of garden set piece in narrative or descriptive works, but also in references across genres. Apart from allowing for elaborate literary conceits, these conventions served to display knowledge and convey specific notions of material luxury and sensory pleasure.
Scent & Society Lecture Series, Institute for Art and Olfaction, 2023
By the 18th century, elaborate descriptions of gardens, both real and fictional, had become a com... more By the 18th century, elaborate descriptions of gardens, both real and fictional, had become a common feature of literary works in several North Indian languages. Replete with botanical detail, these verbal celebrations of luxury and sophistication set out idealized scentscapes composed of culturally significant plants. This talk will discuss examples from several Urdu narrative poems, highlighting explicit and implicit references to fragrance and perfumery and a wealth of scented South Asian flora.
On Smellscapes, Chocolate and Gardens: Revisiting Olfactory landscapes in Mughal South Asia and colonial New Spain, part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University, 2022
San Diego Museum of Art South Asian Arts Council, 2022
The vast body of paintings produced under the Mughals and their various vassals, rivals, and succ... more The vast body of paintings produced under the Mughals and their various vassals, rivals, and successors over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is replete with floral ornament, garden scenes, and botanical studies. This wealth of painted plants is often discussed in relation to the Mughal adaptation of ornamental motifs gleaned from European prints. However, it is also a reflection of contemporary horticultural practice, the evolving garden flora of the Indian Subcontinent in a globalizing world, and a deeply rooted cultural conventions governing the aesthetic appreciation of plants. This talk will delve into this lush world to explore on the nuanced regimes of botanical knowledge and artistic choice that went into creating truly fascinating works.
Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series (VIAHSS), 2021
Recent scholarship by Chanchal Dadlani has highlighted the role of architectural drawings in eigh... more Recent scholarship by Chanchal Dadlani has highlighted the role of architectural drawings in eighteenth-century northern India in constituting and conserving Mughal architectural tradition and celebrating dynastic history against a backdrop of political upheaval and cultural change. At the same time, work by Paul Losensky, Farshid Emami, and others has explored modes of description of architectural spaces and urban topographies in Persian literature produced during the preceding two centuries. Building on both of these rich strands of inquiry, this research explores the elaborate descriptions of architecture found in two eighteenth-century Urdu masnavīs or verse romances. Produced as Urdu began to share the stage with Persian as a major language of elite literary expression in northern India, these texts are heir to Persian literary forms and conventions, and yet they are also distinctly novel, as much a product of their particular time and place as the ornate, self-consciously playful structures they chronicle. Like architectural drawings and depictions of buildings in painting, these verbal records serve to elaborate and codify a distinctive Mughal style. Despite elements of hyperbole and literary convention, a careful reading of these materials reveals a strong commitment to a particular kind of realism and technical detail that help construct and enforce a material cultural identity and a specific vision of the good life mediated by it. The architectural descriptions contained in these Urdu literary works, are thus both descriptive and prescriptive, both record and aspiration. Their study not only helps to elucidates the relationship between literary representation and material culture in general, but also promises specific insight into the conceptual choices and concerns that informed architectural design.
Centre for Islamic Studies (CIS), University of Cambridge, Deccan Heritage Foundation, and HH Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar Foundation (HHSNWF), 2021
Naturalistic vegetal motifs and flower studies in the arts of early modern South Asia have been e... more Naturalistic vegetal motifs and flower studies in the arts of early modern South Asia have been explained primarily in terms of Mughal interest in nature and the adaptation of imagery from printed European florilegia. However, the history of botanical representation in the Deccan complicates this picture considerably. From the Deccan Sultanates through Mughal rule and beyond, the region saw the cultivation of several different modes of depicting plants, including a register of great botanical precision distinct from Mughal “naturalism.” Moreover, these works capture a distinctive range of plant species and horticultural practices that correspond in part to larger literary developments across the subcontinent yet also serve to establish a distinctive regional visual-botanical vocabulary.
Bangalore International Centre, 2020
Beginning in the sixteenth century, a new garden typology appeared across much of northern and ce... more Beginning in the sixteenth century, a new garden typology appeared across much of northern and central India. Often referred to as Mughal or Islamic, the style, while partially rooted in Persian models, in fact transcended such narrow dynastic or sectarian affiliations. Nor was it defined solely by the architectural features – symmetry, waterworks, pavilions – that scholarship has mostly focused on. This talk will look instead at the plants and horticultural practices that characterized these gardens from their first emergence through the end of the eighteenth century, as well as their prominent role in the literature and arts of the period. In particular, we will delve into the rise of the formal flower bed. Now a sine qua non of most gardens, this humble feature once represented a momentous innovation, illuminating just how changeable and historically contingent the idea of the garden can be.