"Bagh-e Hind offers an innovative and enjoyable tour through some hitherto neglected byways of South Asian art history."

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Fran Pritchett, Prof. Emerita
Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Columbia University

“Bagh-e Hind is a wonderful assemblage of perfume-evoking, flower-filled, and lively paintings and object-images that bring South Asia’s past into the present. A sense-arousing and sense-stealing exhibition.”

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Pasha M. Khan, Associate Professor

Chair in Urdu Language and Culture

McGill University

"A sophisticated yet accessible, multisensory resource for exploring the garden histories of Early Modern South Asia. Bagh-e Hind is a virtual garden itself, with stunning images of paintings, of the surviving paraphernalia of pleasure, along with expert, engaging commentaries.

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And readers can even indulge in the fragrant and edible creations curated to match the exhibits, all made with exquisite and authentic aromatics."

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James McHugh

Associate Professor of South Asian religions

University of Southern California, Author "Sandalwood and Carrion"

& "An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religion"

"This project's transdisciplinary character is very well thought out and can be brought in connection with the spirit of the curiosity cabinet. The selected objects along with the different strands of discourse in Bagh-e Hind can potentially lead to creative and new interpretations of South Asian art history."

 

 

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Dr. Simone Wille
University of Innsbruck
Project leader: South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Art Works between 1947 and 1989

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"What a fantastic idea to combine architecture, horticulture, painting, incense and perfume! This exhibition has made me think about scents that potentially underscore all the international art I work with. 

 

Bagh-e Hind deftly brings to the forefront aspects of “Gesamtkunstwerk” (synthesis of the arts)."

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Johannes Wieninger

Lecturer & former Curator of Asia Collection, MAK Wien

"The practitioner-intellectuals—perfumer-art critic Bharti Lalwani and historian-gardener Nicolas Roth—materialize the sensescapes of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Indian paintings in Bagh-i-Hind. Their creative collaboration enables us to experience the bhava (moods and emotions) and rasa (aesthetic taste) of these painted worlds in ways that scholars have hardly attempted thus far.

 

We feel the heady intensity of their "synesthesia, scent and flavor translations," on our tongue, nose, eyes, we can rub it on our skin, listen to evocative musical notes and poetic verses…they radically expand the approaches to excavate sensory histories and the making and consumption of these artworks!" 

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Dipti Khera

Associate Professor of Art History, NYU

Author "The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands

and India’s Eighteenth Century" (Princeton University Press)