Smell that: The rise of India’s ittar industry

Natural perfumes are seeing a resurgence thanks to a handful of start-ups offering old and new fragrances.

Kannauj, India — Gopal Kumar pulled apart the bulb of a flower and pointed to where the roots of the petals had turned a little black inside. This is when the marigolds smell the best and are ready for picking, he said. He picked a pink rose next and sniffed. “You can only find this smell in Kannauj,” he said.

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

Once a sophisticated kingdom in northern India, Kannauj is famed for its production of ittars using an ancient method called deg-bhakpa. This is a slow, laborious process of hydrodistillation devoid of all modern equipment that has survived in hundreds of small-scale distilleries across Kannauj and in surrounding cities.

Despite a long heritage of fragrance and scent, economic liberalisation of the late 1980s led to a period of decline in India’s ittar industry as cheap, alcohol-based perfumes were introduced from the West. Until the 1990s, there were 700 distilleries in Kannauj, but their numbers dropped to 150 to 200 by the mid-2000s. Trying to compete on price, some manufacturers started using alcohol as the base rather than more expensive sandalwood oil, degrading the quality and purity of the products.

Post-liberalisation, rather than selling directly to consumers, the vast majority of ittars and essential oils produced in India were exported to other businesses – either as an input into perfumery and cosmetic industries in the West or to the tobacco industry. Rosewater is an ingredient in chewing tobacco.