Bharti Lalwani
Bharti Lalwani is an art critic and perfumer. She trained as an artist at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design in London and later as a critic with a special focus on Southeast Asia at The Sotheby's Institute of Art in Singapore. Hailing from an enterprising family of migrants who saw their future outside feudal India, Bharti spent over twenty years of her childhood and professional life in Lagos, Nigeria, and has moved across several countries and career paths.
In 2017, she became a pioneering independent perfumer in an otherwise male dominated, close-knit inter-generational industry of distillers, aroma chemical traders and attar-wallahs in South Asia. Upon further experimentation and field research, she found that her training as a critic equipped her with sharp insights and ability to produce original work within an old, stagnant and mainly Euro-centric field. She established Litrahb Perfumery in 2018 as an extension of her criticism and artistic practice.
Doing what no museum or institution has or can, Bagh-e Hind, the exhibition, is conceptualised, designed, funded and produced independently by the art critic. She developed this multi disciplinary research project by inviting Dr. Nicolas Roth as an academic consultant between June 2021 - August 2022. Together, Bharti and Nicolas curated the first and so far only physical iteration of "Bagh-e Hind" at the Institute of Art and Olfaction, Los Angeles (USA) between July - August 2022.
Bharti is also the commissioning editor of the Catalogue of this exhibition-project that aims to present groundbreaking approaches on the sensorial history of South Asia through experimental writing. Operating outside the bounds of academia, she once again finds herself in a pioneering position. Ultimately, Bagh-e Hind is a public access project that she builds for deeply personal reasons. In August 2022, the NMG+GSUS micro grant awarded her INR 25,000 (USD 300) to support her endeavour.
Follow her practice via her Newsletters.
Nicolas Roth
As the academic consultant on this project, Nicolas Roth brought his expertise on Mughal era horticultural practices.
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.
Critic and curator of Bagh-e Hind, Bharti Lalwani, commissioned him to produce an original research essay for the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, titled: "Visual Nosegays: Plants and Scent in Early Modern South Asian Painting".
Perfumer and Historian bring to Life
Historic Paintings through Scent
"Bagh-e Hind" is an exhibition conceptualised around the olfactory landscape of Mughal-era South Asia. The first of its kind, this multidisciplinary exhibition is the result of a collaboration between art critic and perfumer Bharti Lalwani (India) and historian and literary scholar Nicolas Roth (USA). Roth, a specialist in Mughal-era horticultural writings, was invited to select five paintings depicting garden scenes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for Lalwani to translate into fragrance and Edible Perfume™ .
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 partnership across continents, Bharti and Nicolas 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.