Of course, the purpose it was so costly solely made me need it extra. Oudh is an oleoresin, born out of a fungal assault upon the heartwood of a wonderfully peculiar slim-limbed tree, native to South and Southeast Asia, referred to as Aquilaria malaccensis. Undiseased, the tree is a mere evergreen. But as soon as the fungus has struck, regularly remodeling the weight of the tree in order that it may possibly now not float in water — “the Chinese identify for the materials is ch’en hsiang, ‘sinking perfume,’ the Japanese jinko,” wrote Edwin T. Morris in 1984’s “Fragrance: The Story of Perfume From Cleopatra to Chanel” — the valuable ooze, elixir of illness and decay, seems, turning the woody innards of the tree to liquid gold. The fungus solely strikes sure bushes, and one should wait as much as half a century for the highest high quality yield. That is why oudh is so costly, and why a few years would go by earlier than, because of the generosity of a household good friend, I’d purchase a number of meager ounces of the valuable resin — some oudh of 1’s personal.To develop up in India in the wake of colonization, as a toddler of the Eighties, was to study to steadiness a number of societies in a single’s thoughts, with out ever fairly reaching decision or overlap. “When you’ve gotten a double tradition,” Francis Kurkdjian, 52, a French perfumer with Armenian roots and the creator behind such evocative scents as Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male (1995), mentioned to me lately, “you might be extra open, as a result of as a toddler you expertise one thing on the aspect, which lets you have one other window on the world.”In phrases of perfume, what this meant for me was that I occupied two worlds that remained separate, unassimilable. There was conventional India, the world of the attarwallah, with all its smells: of the moist matting screens of vetiver in outdated homes in the summer season; of cool sandalwood paste, or chandan, in the temple, smeared on one’s brow after a ritual; or of the smoking brass vessel of frankincense, or luban, carried via the home in the evenings to purify the air. What I couldn’t have recognized, as an “oriental” boy rising up amongst oriental smells, was that, from the late Nineteen Seventies via the mid-Eighties, a motion was underway in Western perfumery, during which the scents of my childhood, recognized in perfume as the “orientals” — ambers and fragrant woods, vetiver, patchouli, musk and sandalwood — have been being repurposed. Their rise, culminating ultimately in the popularization of oudh in our century, spoke of profound societal modifications in the West, reminiscent of girls’s liberation, sexual freedom and the world dominance of the United States.Of these new robust scents that represented the arrival of the impartial lady, not not like my very own mom — who was amongst the first feminine journalists in India to cowl conflicts — none maybe was as distinctive as one belonging to a specific bottle that sat on her dressing desk. It had an odd burnt orange casing, formed (I now know) like an inro, one among the small Japanese containers, with tiny compartments containing medicinal herbs, seals, spices and opium, that the samurai wore on their belts. On the curvilinear face of the bottle, like that of a hip flask, was a glass oculus via which a wealthy, amber-colored liquid was seen. Dull gold letters on the entrance learn “Opium Parfum Yves Saint Laurent.” I keep in mind its heavy, intoxicating odor, all spice, patchouli and balsam. In its baroque suggestion of luxurious, it was of a chunk with the gold-bordered silk brocade saris my mom wore out on winter evenings in Delhi.In 1978, the 12 months after Opium was first launched, a French-Palestinian educational named Edward Said printed his seminal work, “Orientalism,” which posited the concept of a newly rapacious West, arising out of colonialism, taking possession of Eastern tradition and historical past as a method to have authority over it, to talk for it and, as a consequence, to higher management it. “Indeed, my actual argument,” Said wrote, “is that Orientalism is — and doesn’t merely symbolize — a substantial dimension of recent political-intellectual tradition, and as such has much less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” Said’s research involved itself largely with artwork, literature and historical past, however what was true of different features of tradition was true of fragrance, too: The rise of the orientals in the late Nineteen Seventies, of which Opium was emblematic, marked one among many moments when the West was talking via the East of issues that had extra to do with the West than with the East. There is one thing fascinating to me (although hardly ever benign) in the concept of one other, extra highly effective tradition, expressing itself via yours — cultivating, as Said writes, “one among its deepest and most recurring photos of the Other.” In this manner, the rise of the so-called orientals isn’t merely a narrative of a specific vogue inside perfumery; it’s the story of seduction, energy, historical past and legacy. Above all, it’s inextricably tied to the beginning of modernity in Europe.
