How fragrance shaped power and pleasure

In the early Modern period, Mughal, Rajput and Deccan courtly lives played out in an atmosphere of calculated decadence. The lives of nobility and royalty were suffused with elaborate ornamentation, opulent textiles and pleasing fragrances.

All manner of scents, derived from flowers, woods, leaves, and animal parts, were crafted using formulae perfected and passed down through generations.

Given the power of perfumes, much care was taken with the ingredients that went into their making. Merchants often embarked on perilous journeys to acquire specific musks, aromatics and incense.

These substances were almost always too expensive for the masses and, as the preserve of the wealthy, were only meant for use in aristocratic spaces such as mansions, palaces, courts and temples.

The use of perfumes across Safavid Iran, Ottoman Turkey, the Indian Sultanates and the Mughal courts was deeply influenced by Persian aesthetics. Within this Persianate milieu, etiquette — or adab — shaped elite behaviour, and perfumery became a mark of refinement. Manuals and treatises of the time detail how to make and use perfume properly, as an indicator of status and moral character.

Indic traditions offer their own discourses on scent; some texts emphasise the use of perfumed ingredients in worship to purify the air, whilst others discuss perfumed ingredients in the context of intimacy and pleasure. Good smells were associated with auspiciousness and virtue, while bad smells were linked to decay and sin. These ideas were integrated into Persianate courtly structures — incense, scented water, scented wines, paan and other fragrant mouth fresheners became common in courtly etiquette.

Smaller regional courts — influenced by the Mughal courts — continued, and built on such scent traditions, integrating them with pre-existing practices of their regions. Court paintings show imagery of rulers holding flowers to their noses, lovers exchanging garlands, and women at their toilette applying perfume — visual tropes that capture how deeply fragrance shaped elite life.

Perfuming spaces was as important as perfuming bodies. The 15th-century Nimatnama-i-Nasiruddin-Shahi, a cookbook from Malwa, instructs how to scent palace walls with complex pastes of ambergris, sandalwood, basil, and turmeric leaves. Paintings from across the subcontinent show rooms filled with incense, gardens planted with fragrant blossoms, and romantic scenes staged in scented groves. Scent sets the tone of a space — whether to please a deity, seduce a lover, or soothe a ruler.

Mughal and Rajput rulers loved scented gardens, often hosting gatherings in these carefully cultivated spaces. Gardens featured fruit trees and water features designed to delight the senses. Even water was carefully managed — kept fresh to avoid the foul smells of stagnation. In these gardens, visual and olfactory performances were part of statecraft — perfume became a tool in royal ritual and political theatre.

Despite the yawning gap between today’s times and these courtly cultures, our relationship with scent remains strikingly similar. Perfume continues to signify refinement, class and taste. In many ways, we are not so far removed from these worlds as we continue to innovate ways to distil the fleeting beauty of the natural world into something lasting and exquisite.

Discover Indian Art is a monthly column that delves into fascinating stories on art from across the subcontinent, curated by the editors of the MAP Academy. Find them on Instagram as @map_academy