The art and intimacy of collecting things

INHERITANCE WITHOUT INSTRUCTION

There was no language for it back then. No flatlays, no Pinterest boards, no Insta feed to curate. Just a child who didn’t throw things away. Objects were not kept for posterity or display. They were companions. They stayed because they mattered—often for reasons even she couldn’t name. Meaning wasn’t assigned. It revealed itself, quietly, over time.

This orientation hasn’t changed, even if the collection has. For the last 24 years, Indu has lived alone. The objects around her have accumulated, dispersed, returned. “At one point,” she says, “I had 37 chairs in my house. You couldn’t walk without bumping into one.”

They came from the street, from resale stores, from friends who left town and never asked for their furniture back. Some were cracked. Some didn’t sit right. Each one was named. James, for instance, had three identical legs and one that didn’t match. “I liked him for that,” she shrugs.

Eventually, the chairs had to go. But not before a farewell—documented, remembered, archived. She used the wet plate collodion process, a 19th-century photographic technique that creates rich, dreamlike images on glass or metal. It’s a laborious, unpredictable method—one that insists on slowness and imperfection. The final images, ghostly and amber-toned, felt less like records and more like moods. Portraits of things already half gone.

THE NOSE KNOWS

A few years ago, Indu went to the south of France to train in the olfactory arts—the chemistry, poetics, and memory of scent. It transformed her practice. Smell, unlike sight or sound, is volatile. It resists capture. It lingers, then vanishes. It is both intimate and unruly. And yet, she began to collect it.

Back in Bangalore, she started bottling smell—temple incense, rain on hot pavement, petrol at 2 p.m., cigarette butts crushed under feet, fresh dosa batter, Mysore sandal soap, saccharine filter coffee. These scents, ephemeral as they were, became her archive. A collection that could not be kept, only experienced.

This project culminated in Vāsané, a limited-edition book published by Maazhi books. It contains ten vials of smells that readers can inhale, each one part of an ethnographic and sensorial archive of the city. A new form of citizenship to a growing metropolis asserting its regional identity.