This month began with two kind invitations to speak about Bagh-e Hind: Scent Translations of Mughal & Rajput Garden Paintings.
First, Dr. Manan Ahmed’s undergraduate students at Columbia University (New York, USA) were eager to engage with the memoirs of Babur, Gulbadan, Jahangir and so on, by way of our garden project in order to see and smell their way into the complex Mughal world. I have been giving a number of these “curatorial tours” since 2021 but this was the first time anyone had invited me to speak to their students.
Second, my co-curator Nicolas Roth and I made a formal presentation to the research team of MAP Academy, an independent extension of the Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore, India).
In both instances, the emphasis was laid on the foundational truth of this project: Bagh is not about perfume. Rather this self-funded initiative opens the gates to the rarefied world of art and history that is otherwise only accessible to those who hold special social or institution positions. In our contained way, my colleague and I made it possible to create an intermediary space between the institution and the public, wherein we distilled academic knowledge and presented it in a manner so creative and original, that the public can absorb this information with abundant pleasure. We accomplished this without pandering to institutions and by treating our Public as intelligent.
The feedback I received from Dr. Ahmed almost immediately after my talk was that his students considered me “brave”. Alot flattered and a little perplexed, I thought about it for a few days as I went about reformulating a perfume from 2022.
Marigold and Coriander is really one of the best perfumes I have ever made. Slightly sweet, astringent, green-bitter and tart, it is unlike anything in my broad repertoire. The most non-perfume perfume, perfect for welcoming the crisp scarlet leaves of autumn. I wish I could say more about this sublime composition of marigold, saffron and coriander extracts but everything went to hell that week.
“A Wandering Revolutionary”
Edward Said described his dear friend, academic, political scientist, Eqbal Ahmad, as “true to the ideals of revolution and truer yet to its unfulfilled promise”. Early in my career as an art critic, through a close reading of texts on anti-colonial resistance in Southeast Asia, and on how the Viet Cong brought a technologically advanced enemy to its knees, Eqbal’s name kept cropping up. I thought it was hilarious that a South Asian man was arrested as part of a group conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger in order to bring an end to the bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The whole joke was cooked up over drinks among friends but a CIA informant was on the adjoining table listening in. The group then popularly hailed as The Harrisburg 7 was arrested in 1971 and tried on trumped up conspiracy charges — and acquitted in ‘72.
Being a critic is isolating and alienating. As the default, one is meant to keep distance from those in power so as to be able to critique them with an unflinching gaze. In Eqbal, I found kinship. His career in academia should have taken an upward trajectory but he was a friend to the Palestinian people, so he remained on the margins.
Each time, I feel a fog of fear, each time I hear the words “be careful (or else)”, each time I am unsure of how to tread further, I return to Eqbal so I can relearn what the stakes are and how precisely my knives must be sharpened.
This is the reason I am never afraid to ask institution or museum representatives blunt questions. The stakes — even within art history — are high and an institutional refusal to engage reveals the full extent of their cowardice. (Refer to my discussion of this skirmish with an American museum in a recent interview here).
Over the last two weeks, we have all been privy to the cowardly stance of First World nations, their elected governments, their academic and museums luminaries, their prestigious gold star silence that allows for a holocaust to continue unabated. So on the 20th October, Friday, I joined the global call for a Strike to demand a ceasefire. Even as a small business, I thought I should participate. On the day, I abstained from any talk about perfumery or its sale. Instead I joined the sea of online protestors by presenting Eqbal’s keynote speech from a teach-in to protest the American War in Vietnam on November 4, 1975 at the University of Michigan, titled "Bicentennial Dilemma: Who's in Control?".
Watching this speech once more after many years, I was struck with some fresh insights:
Eqbal notes that during his time at Princeton as a student in the late 50s, the elite academic professors were training the new cohort of scholars to not deal with the broader questions of class and de-colonial movements.
These elite professors were so insulated that by the time the student protests began, they were thoroughly unprepared for how to deal with it.
“The doctrine of invisible wars” was not invisible to the Laosians or the Cambodians. They saw and felt those bombs drop on them. But once these war crimes became visible to the Americans, it became difficult to manipulate, control and manufacture consent from the tax paying public.
History has brought us to this threshold once again. With reports coming in on how university campuses in the UK and USA are clamping down on freedom of speech, with professors suspending their students for protesting peacefully or worse, doxing them and making them vulnerable to hate crimes, we can sense how this institutionally ensconced class has misjudged this moment. Eqbal’s prescription for precisely such scenarios is that where we are out-gunned, we must out-organise.
I marvelled at my friend, Naib Mian’s courage last week. As Editor of the Digital Content at the Metropolitan Museum, he penned an open letter in response to Director, Max Hollien’s tone deaf weak-sauce staff email expressing empathy for “Israel and everyone in that region”.
Shame on such cultural custodians — while they desperately clutch the art of an oppressed people, they prefer their extermination remain invisible.
To my critic friends, my perfumer friends, my academic friends, may I please encourage you to write the thing you want to write, say the thing you want to say, use the colours you want to use— Now is not the time to hem and haw.