A Defining Pair: Jasmine and Roses in the Literature of the Early Modern Persianate World

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

In a melancholic couplet, the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Qalandar Bakhsh ‘Jur’at’ imagines that as autumn empties out a formal garden, all that remains is “talk on the tongue of roses and jasmine.” The image of seasonal change may be conventional – and not particularly accurate in the subtropical North Indian plains where Jur’at lived and wrote – but the metonymic use of jasmine and roses to represent the very idea of the garden is indicative of the cultural significance of these plants in his world. Paired together in this manner, jasmine and rose can be considered a hallmark of Persian and Persian-inflected literatures, material cultures, and gardening traditions, which predominated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in a region stretching from the Ottoman Empire in the west to Bengal in the east. At the same time, they encapsulate the entanglement of Mediterranean, Central Asian and (sub)tropical South Asian floristic elements in this larger Persianate sphere in general and in the Indian Subcontinent in particular. Working back from poetry and the visual arts to garden design and the practice of horticulture, this talk will trace the iconic combination of jasmine and rose across time and geography, highlighting the regional and historic shifts in the very understanding of “jasmine” and “rose.”

Nicolas Roth holds a PhD in South Asian Studies and currently serves as Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Art and Architecture at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of horticultural practices and their reflections in literature and the visual arts, and prior to taking on his present position he worked for a local garden design firm. In his free time, he can usually be found tending to his own plot, where he strives to cultivate many of the plants he comes across in his academic work, in stubborn defiance of space constraints and climatic limitations.