The Rosewater Sprinkler: Scent Poured Over a Room

A rosewater sprinkler is a bottle built to scatter rather than to pour: a round body, a long tapering neck, and a pierced rose or bud at the tip. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that such sprinklers have been used in the Indian subcontinent from the Mughal period to the present day.^[1]

Rose-water was a perfume and a courtesy at once, and the sprinkler is the object in which the two meet: scent applied not to one face at a mirror but to a whole room.

The emperor Jahangir records the custom as a festival. In the ninth year of his reign, in the summer of 1614, he notes the assembly of Gulab-pashi, the sprinkling of rose-water, known from former times as ab-pashi, water-sprinkling. In the tenth year the servants of the court amused themselves at the festival by sprinkling rose-water over each other, and in the eleventh the rites of the day were duly performed.^[2]

The same memoir records the discovery of rose oil at his court, credited to the mother of his wife Nur Jahan, who collected the scum that formed on dishes of hot rose-water.^[2] A court that kept an annual festival of rose-water was a court in which the vessels for it were worth making in gold.

Among the finest surviving examples, the museum records, is a seventeenth-century pair of enamelled gold set with precious stones, looted from the Mughal treasury in Delhi in 1738 by the Iranian ruler Nadir Shah and sent to Russia as ambassadorial gifts; they are now in the Hermitage.^[3] A gilt silver Mughal sprinkler in the museum's own collection, worked with flowers, birds and animals, carries on its foot the engraved arms of an English earl, and the heraldic opinion in its record dates the engraving to between 1675 and 1685.^[4] Within a few decades of being made, a Mughal courtesy was in an English earl's possession.

The form was made far beyond India. A sprinkler in blue-and-white porcelain was fired at Jingdezhen in China in the Kangxi period, late in the seventeenth century,^[5] and a partly gilt silver gulab pash of the late eighteenth century, probably from Lucknow, is in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of Islamic art.^[6]

Two sprinklers in the Victoria and Albert Museum carry the history of empire in their records. One, of partly gilt silver, was said when the museum bought it in 1878, for three pounds, to have been taken from the treasury of Tipu Sultan after his defeat at Seringapatam in 1799; the museum notes that it may have been seized in the plundering after the British victory or allotted to a soldier as a reward.^[7]

The other, of silver enamelled in the vivid translucent blues and greens of Lucknow, with birds and irises, was one of a small group of Lucknow enamels sent to the Great Exhibition of 1851, probably made for it, and bought for ten pounds.^[8] Between them the two objects show a vessel of welcome becoming, within a lifetime, first a trophy and then an exhibit.

How often any of these sprinklers was used, on which occasions, and by whom. A vessel of gilt silver or enamelled gold was a treasury object as much as a tool, and the records cited here describe makers, materials and owners rather than the gatherings the sprinklers were carried into.^[9]