Wet Fur, mud, lightning (perfume)
Newsletter 16.2023
“Wet fur, mud, rain and lightning” is an accord I crafted recently as part of an ongoing scent-translation project that I am working on together with Nicolas for a museum exhibition scheduled for late 2024. We made an unusual selection — among the Raagmala paintings rich with botanical and floral details, we picked one that illustrated all kinds of birds and animals roaming freely across a hilly monsoon drenched landscape.
This composition is wild and electric. At the centre is the striking figure of a dark hued Raagini wearing a garment fashioned from peacock feathers. One cobra coils itself around her shoulder while she holds on to the tail of another slithering away from her. The horizon crackles with lightning bolts over a vast ocean as the snow-capped mountain on which Shiva meditates, reverberates with the roar of lions and the harmonious notes the Ragini herself produces by strumming her rudra veena.
This accord I formulated is just one small facet of the main scent-translation but I decided this is what I wanted to smell like: “Thundering Possibility” in the face of dark despair. We should not be robbed of our joy, our potential to do great things, and most importantly, our power to imagine a better world. I consider perfume to be a potent antidote to mind numbing paralyses.
If you are a niche perfumer then here are the notes and ingredients to compose this scent: Cocoa absolute, choya nakh, jasmine sambac absolute, vetiver CO2, cardamom oleoresin, costus root, labdanum, benzoin, carrot seed, hedychium, cedarwood, sandalwood, oakmoss, civet, seaweed-mushroom-geosmin-calone-ambergris accord, and patchouli. Don’t be afraid if this accord smells charred.
Alternately you can hit reply to request this accord or choose “Saptaparni”, this winter season’s perfume comes close enough with an additional floral boom.
I thought I would recap the year through the several newsies I wrote but I changed my mind: From recounting that one time I met a British spook in Jan, to responding to bad public art by Shahzia Sikander in Feb, to dealing with Smithsonian’s PR-Karen in March, to offering “Reparation Soaps” to the public as my protest against white supremacist institutions that hoard our historical material, to publicly outing the Indian academic who regularly steals other scholars’ research infrastructure in order to present it as her own, to just sitting in peace to make silly paintings…this year has felt like everything and nothing. The months flew by but as I took stock, I decided I wanted to highlight the cutest, sweetest, prettiest newsletter of them all.
Mouthful of Roses
Our precious virtual garden, “Bagh-e Hind”, is expanding with rose bushes this season!
Dr. Deborah Schlein contributed a new essay "Mouthful of Roses: Wellness, Leisure and Refinement" that opens with a scene of feasting framed by the leitmotif of the Rose, its scent and flavour permeating the eyes, nose and tongue of those revelling within the composition, and those of us viewing it. Dr. Schlein is the Near Eastern Librarian at Princeton University. Her field of research concerns the history of Yunani medicine in Mughal and colonial India. Nicolas, in his usual flowery quirkiness, made this fun observation that the roses painted in the 20th century copy of the Safavid style Dihlavi painting seem "more akin to roses from a Victorian china pattern than the way roses are usually depicted in early modern Iranian or South Asian painting, with the tight rounded flowers spaced out so evenly along vine(or scroll)-like branches". Pictured is the cup shaped "Sidonie" in his Cambridge garden, that appears just like the blooms we see in the painting discussed by Deborah in her essay.
“Home-made products are not allowed”
There has always been some hiccup or other when it came to shipping perfume, incense, soap, tea, or any edible perfume (TM) that I craft but my trusted freight forwarder always found a work around. However, September onwards, it became impossible to ship incense in particular. Every package is checked thoroughly by courier agencies that work in tandem with the Indian Customs and they would like to see only mass-manufactured products in the parcel, ie, whatever the item, its packaging should have the following information printed: manufacture date, batch number, expiry date, the barcode and the marked price in Rupees.
NEWS: January onwards friends-as-stockists based in London and Vancouver can post incense to your address in the UK, EU and USA. This means you can still purchase your incense from me as per usual and they will post it to your address.
Since I make “home-made” items in single digit editions, this is an issue that has no possible work around. I am not interested in scaling up as that requires a mandate of an entirely different catalogue wherein “Litrahb Perfumery” may be available at every retail outlet but the product itself will be a pale shadow of my craft. Currently, I budget 99% for ingredients and materials, and 1% for packaging. Trust me, you don’t want this ratio flipped via a scaled up model.
I will break my one letter-writing rule and complain today. Everyone and their mom, dad, uncle, aunty who keep telling me to “scale up to make more money” do not understand my business. Simply put, my method makes it possible for me to work less for more money and more naps.
On the other side of this coin, consumers should spend their money wisely on small businesses. It makes no difference to corporations whether you spent $350 on their gold-plated perfume bottle or not. Beyoncé may have launched her new perfume this year, but she doesn’t give a damn. I am always horrified to note how much of these physical products become instant trash headed for a landfill in the Global South.
For a niche producer like me, a sale of $350 makes a huge impact! So the rules for you, my reader are:
Spend consciously, support artists and craftspeople
Do not haggle, do not ask for discounts
Respect cultural producers instead asking them to be grateful for crumbs!
Speaking of crumbs, recently, the director of an art institution in the UK, asked me to transfer back $350 from my presumably unspent budget for incense for their exhibition that left me stunned. While I politely explained that the money had already been spent, I had to wonder, far from offering opportunities, was this institution director also writing to other artists in the show to personally ask for money back?
The fact that there is always ample budget for publicity and champagne fuelled launch parties, artists are consistently informed that there is “no budget” to make a decent display of their work possible. I have since decided to refuse such tokenistic gestures of inclusion.
An unsanctioned coterie of pro-Israel quasi-lobbyists has descended on D.C.
Among those who have rushed to Israel’s defense is Ronald Lauder, the billionaire heir to the cosmetic empire Estée Lauder who is also president of the World Jewish Congress.
As I write this, a perfumer friend reminded me that the ecologically conscious brand, Haeckels, that we both admired so much, had diminished in grace once they let Estee Lauder acquire “a minority stake” in order to scale up their business in 2022. While many loyal customers at the time pointed out the fact that EL does not adhere to cruelty free practices, Haeckels, then a politically vociferous brand that wore its ethics on its sleeve, responded that they retain autonomy and control.
Well, like many who delude themselves into thinking that an alliance with capitalist-fascists can yield some good, the risk-reward equation is always greatly miscalculated and the result is always a compromise of personal values as one comes to see that they had no power, no control, no agency in the first place. I have seen these errors of judgement before in museum spaces. On the way in, one enters the Vampire’s Castle being reassured that they are valued partners, equals even, only to end up drained at the feat of The Master, their intellect, their emotions sucked out, their ethics mocked and effaced, all in the nourishment and service of the great Parasite.
Olayemi Olurin, a Bahaman Nigerian movement lawyer and political commentator, recently produced a great video-essay on the consequences of speaking up in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and the relationship between Black Americans and Jewish people, and global struggles:
Now, that I have broken all my newsletter writing rules for what is my final newsie of 2023, I will continue to watch this Hallmark-romance genre film in which the protagonist is a nice white lady-perfumer who finds love, thanks in part to her gay best friend. Everything works out just fine.
One last thing
Lily, my American academic friend in Pune, always counters my pessimism regarding this BORING tier 2 city in India. We're both foreigners here but she's more attuned to Maharashtrian ways than I am, she even speaks Marathi. And we always talk about "snax": What "maal" (goods) did she bring from her visit to America? What hyperlocal edible goods is she taking as gifts on her trips abroad? What primo foreign snacks did her husband bring back from his academic conference trip to Turin?
Recently, she contributed to the highly coveted Christmas Gift-Guide for Vittles magazine by crowning Pune as the snacks capital of the world. Her inclusions of all sorts of mouth watering, deep fried, sugar soaked goodness sparked some serious discussion and I committed myself to this journey of snack-discovery with her. "Snax and the City" was a silly title I came up with but she totally embraced this as her substack flagship! Please like and subscribe!
PS: Read her delicious essay "Glowing Embers: Sensorial Contexts of Smoke".
