Indo-Islamicate Perfumes in Early Modern India: Textualisation, Transmissions and Assimilations

Abstract

This article brings to focus the material life of early modern perfumes in the Indian subcontinent. It offers a ‘documentary archaeology’ by foregrounding texts that recorded perfumes in their stage of production and preparation. By studying this corpus, it presents perfumes as a locale where craft, technology and labour interacted with each other in blending scientific knowledge with the natural landscape. With a focus on textualised perfume recipes, listed aromatic ingredients and distillation methods, it examines the various shifts, transitions, cross-cultural material borrowings and finally the assimilations that occurred in the olfactory landscape of an Indo-Islamicate political empire, especially during the Mughal rule in India. A rich perfume-repository, where divergences and acculturations took place could be best understood by identifying the various methods and processes in which material practices and literary traditions were shaping each other. In understanding this, it goes beyond the ephemerality of perfumes and argues in favour of a craft that was labour-intensive, skill-based, technologically innovative and culturally adaptive. Finally, it explores the diversification of its forms, significance of receptacles and amplification of its production, both in texts and in practice, to highlight the pervasive materiality of Indo-Islamicate perfumes in early modern India.