Kannauj, India — Gopal Kumar tore apart the bulb of a flower and pointed to the place where the roots of the petals had turned a little black inside. That’s when the marigolds smell their best and are ready to pick, he said. Next he picked a pink rose and sniffed it. “This smell is only in Kannauj,” he said.

Kumar has been growing flowers outside Kannauj – a sleepy town nestled in the fertile Ganges plains in northern India – for 50 years. Its flowers are used to make ittars, natural perfumes made by distilling flowers, herbs, plants or spices over a base oil that takes on the scent of the raw material.

Kannauj, once a highly developed kingdom in northern India, is famous for making ittars using an ancient method called Deg-Bhakpa. It is a slow, laborious process of hydrodistillation without any modern equipment that survives in hundreds of small distilleries in Kannauj and surrounding towns.

Despite the long tradition of scents and scents, economic liberalization in the late 1980s led to the decline of India’s ittar industry due to the introduction of cheap alcohol-based perfumes from the West. Until the 1990s, there were 700 distilleries in Kannauj, but by the mid-2000s the number fell to 150-200. To compete on price, some manufacturers began using alcohol as a base instead of the more expensive sandalwood oil, which increased the quality and purity of the products.

After liberalization, the vast majority of ittars and essential oils produced in India were not sold directly to consumers but were exported to other companies – either as input to the perfumery and cosmetics industries in the West or to the tobacco industry. Rose water is a component of chewing tobacco.

But in recent years, several young, predominantly female Indian entrepreneurs have identified a gap in the market between these homegrown artisanal skills and India’s thriving consumer culture, and a new range of homegrown brands have emerged.

A new wave of scents

Boond Fragrances is one such company, founded in May 2021 during the pandemic by a sister couple, Krati and Varun Tandon, to help preserve and raise awareness of Kannuaj’s perfume-making traditions and support local artisans.

“Our father was a perfume dealer and home perfumer,” explained Krati Tandon at her family home in Kannuaj. “We grew up around perfumers and perfumeries in Kannauj and you really absorb what is happening. But we have also seen over the years how some perfumeries have started to close and some are worried about their future.”

The duo wanted to make ittars accessible. “The idea was actually to make it available to customers — people like us who would appreciate it if we knew something like this existed,” Krati said.

Divrina Dhingra, author of The Perfume Project: Journeys Through Indian Fragrance, agrees. “Ittars actually have a marketing problem. In many ways they are stuck in the past,” she said. “But it is also a problem of awareness. I don’t know if many people know that this industry still exists, how it exists, what it does and what is actually available.”

The initial response to Boond, Krati said, has been overwhelming: more than 10,000 orders were shipped in the 12 months ending in October, a significant number for the young company.

Sales increase during winter, the Indian wedding season and the time when Christmas orders come in from abroad. The company said it expects revenue to double in the next two years, but declined to share its revenue figures.

“Recently, people have started to recognize what is synthetic perfume and what is real perfume,” Krati said. “Especially post-COVID, there has been a transformation back to reality.”

According to market research firm Technavio, the Indian perfumery industry will grow at around 15 percent annually over the next five years. While market trends are currently dominated by business-to-business trade, the number of Indian companies selling their own fragrances directly to consumers is increasing.

Indian beauty writer Aparna Gupta said there has been “a noticeable shift, a renaissance if you will, in the domestic market’s attitude towards these traditional scents” marketed predominantly on Instagram, and demand for them has “increased significantly Gained momentum.”

She credited brands like Boond, which focus on traditional, tried-and-tested Ittar fragrances, with playing “a crucial role” in this resurgence. “They don’t just sell ittars; They are reintroducing a forgotten art form to a generation eager to reconnect with their heritage,” she said.

Then there are other new brands like Kastoor and Naso Profumi that are aimed at “younger consumers by combining traditional elements with modern nuances” – for example Kastoor’s Mahal with its unique blend of patchouli and lotus, Gupta said.

A scent tradition

It is unclear how exactly ittars and essential oils – which are made by extracting the vapors of ingredients but no base oil is used – are produced in India using hydrodistillation. However, stills recently unearthed in the cities of the Indus Valley indicate a scent culture in some form dating back to about 3,000 B.C. BC.

Around Kannuaj, many locals attribute the discovery of Ittars to the Mughal queen Nur Jahan, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries AD. However, Sanskrit texts indicate that the area was a fragrance center even before the Mughal period. Historians believe that the practice was strengthened by new ingredients and distillation methods further developed by the Mughal court.

Production is highly seasonal and February is the damask rose season in Kannuaj. The warming winter sun was high in the sky when a motorbike with a jute sack on the back arrived at the Prem and Company distillery. Dinesh, the distiller, immediately weighed the dark pink flowers, examined them and emptied them into water in a large copper vat called a deg.

Within minutes, the edge of the deg was sealed with a metal lid and an airtight layer of water and clay, and a bamboo tube was connected from the deg to a second, smaller vessel, the bhakpa, which sits in a concrete basin of water.

Each degree is fixed over a wood or dung fired oven, and the distilled vapors pass through the pipes, collecting and condensing in the bhakpa. This bhakpa contains the base oil, which over time becomes infused with the scent of the distilled material.

Boond Fragrances uses local artisans like Dinesh to distill both new scents and more traditional favorites, including Mitti, the scent of fresh rain, and Khus, known for its cooling notes. Just one swab is enough, 6 ml (0.2 ounces) costs $20.

The modern Ittar

Kastoor founder Esha Tiwari wants to change existing perceptions. “Ittars are considered heavy,” she said. “In earlier times the Ittars were so distinct. They were used by kings and queens as a means of announcement. But I don’t want to drag you back to the 14th century. I will bring this art form into your 21st century.”

Kastoor was founded in 2021. During research and development, 30-year-old Tiwari, who has a background in marketing, led workshops to facilitate knowledge sharing between Ittar artisans and modern perfume experts. The result was a set of seven “modern ittars” that combine tried-and-true ingredients in new, unique proportions, with 8 ml (0.3 ounces) selling for $22 to $36. The target group is middle-class, urban consumers who are looking for a completely natural perfume.

The growth was rapid. Kastoor has another collection of ittars in the pipeline and the number of artisans employed there has increased from the original three to 12 to 15 families in Kannauj, Hyderabad and Uttarakhand.

Tiwari noted that the younger generations of artisan families were leaving the industry due to a lack of prospects. “They didn’t see the demand,” Tiwari said. “This is where we came into play. This is not a one-time increase that we are giving your company. It’s a constant change in their livelihoods.”

Tiwari said Kastoor’s revenue is expected to grow five to six times from $120,000 in the next two to three years.

Made in India

In addition to the domestic market, these new brands also export all over the world – to Europe, the USA, Japan, Australia and the Middle East. By abstaining from alcohol, Ittars are non-haram and suitable for religious purposes by both Hindus and Muslims.

The growing global interest in sustainability and organic products is also bringing these producers new customers.

“There’s a whole movement towards naturalness and locality in the beauty industry, and in that sense Ittars fit in really well,” said Dhingra.

International perfumer Yosh Han said there was an “increasing desire to decolonize scents” and an “interest in POC” worldwide [people of colour] Brands,” which is why some of these new Indian companies are attracting interest from abroad.

Back in Kannauj, generations of knowledge and experience ensure that the local artisans are perfectly positioned to exploit and adapt to these new trends while promoting Indian products.

The name Kastoor comes from the word kasturi, which is also known as musk, a scent of the navel of a deer. According to legend, the deer was enchanted by this scent and searched for it without understanding that it came from itself, Tiwari explained.

“So we used it as a metaphor,” she smiled. “We still look outward in desperation, not realizing that we are the creators of the world’s most generous scents.”