“Wherever you look, the flower is not far to find” writes Alka Pande in her seminal book, Flower Shower which traverses through the culture of flowers in India. The book is a treatise on the usage of flowers in India’s rich history, mythology, cultural, architectural and as aesthetic motifs. A historian, teacher and curator, she says that within the Indian context flowers are a part and parcel of our daily lives.
Conceding that it was an extremely challenging task to weave a story around the theme of flowers, she states, “In traditional Indian art be it visual or performing arts, from the myths to the Puranas, to the epics, from the Mahabharata, to the Ramayana, in Sanskrit poetry, be it Kalidasa or Bhartrihari, and the Bhakti poets as well, flowers are very much part of their artistic oeuvre. Their respective languages are replete either in visual representation or in the literary metaphor or allegory. So to develop a narrative in the language of the flora was indeed a daunting task.”
The Puranas and early Sanskrit poetry are full of stories about flowers. Alka digs out multiple stories about their presence in our paintings, in the temples of Konark and Khajuraho, or for the purposes of adornment as in the Kashmiri ritual of dressing the bride in phoolon ke gehney. India’s love affair with flowers was further nourished by the Mughal rulers and later on even by the British. “The Mughals carried the legacy of flowers through painting and architecture. The borders of their miniature paintings always had a floral vine and flowers were very much part of the architectural embellishment in the interiors of their buildings. The British took it to another level in the printing motifs of textiles, particularly in Rajasthani muslins or the south Indian palampores which they exported from India to the UK,” she explains.
