GoKawiilThe alluring, musky fragrance of marigolds floats from a Hindu shrine, as a group of men laugh over ginger-infused milk teas served in clay cups called kulhads. In a nearby perfume distillery, a man turns his head towards the laughter as he crushes a batch of discarded kulhads. Here in Kannauj, a town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, generations of perfumers have used kulhads and other clay materials to capture an enticing scent known as mitti attar.
“It’s the smell of the baked, parched earth when the first rains arrive after a long drought,” says Rajat Mehrotra, co-owner of the family-run Meena Perfumery. Perfumers like Mehrotra, who runs the company with his brother, have been bottling the enigmatic fragrance for centuries.
At his office, some 500 feet away from Meena’s tin-roofed distillery, Mehothra carefully pours the thick mitti attar oil into a glass bottle. “You cannot get mitti attar anywhere else,” he says, resting his eyes on each precious drop—0.26 gallons sell for about 180,000 Indian rupees, around $2,178.
Attars, also spelled ittar, are scented oils made from natural ingredients. The scent profiles in attars vary widely, from fragrances derived from flowers such as Damsak roses and jasmine to heavy, warm scents made from agarwood. Mitti means “earth,” and mitti attar loosely translates to the smell of rain-soaked earth. The fragrance is made only here in Kannauj using a special, centuries-old technique.
This early 19th-century gouache painting shows a Muslim perfume seller (right) with his wife (left). Public Domain
Despite the scent’s long local history, little is known about mitti attar’s origins, says Giti Datt, a boutique perfume house owner and an anthropologist at the Australian National University who studies attar. Datt says nobody knows when attars were first made or why Kannauj is the epicenter. It’s believed that attar distillation is similar to a distillation method found in the Indus Valley Civilization between 3300 BC to 1300 BC. “If that’s true, the process has survived the fall of civilizations and empires and conquerors,” says Datt.
Ancient Indus people used aromatic waters and plant extracts to create different scents used in medicine and religious rituals; later Vedic Age people continued these practices, wrote historian Jyoti Marwah in the paper, Attars: The Fading Aromatic Cultures of India. The Sanskrit epic Mahabharata—compiled by the end of the 3rd century—also mentions the use of perfume in royal courts. This Indigenous Indian perfume practice later mingled with fragrance traditions of early Muslims who arrived in the subcontinent, says Datt. “So we ended up with a very unique, rich combination of Indo-Islamic perfume culture.”
In the 19th century, the British colonized India and wiped out many Indigenous art forms. “So we are trying to figure out what that meant for attar,” says Datt, who hasn’t found any Kannauj perfumery with pre-British origins. Mehrotra family’s business can only trace its roots to the 20th century. Although there’s little evidence, it’s possible that the British wanted to make attar into a commodity and set up the Kannauj perfume houses, says Datt.
Despite these murky origins, today mitti attar is well-known throughout the Indian subcontinent. Sacred Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita reference the earth’s aroma after rainfall. “One can assume that it could be part of the inspiration for why people started bottling this unique smell,” says Datt.
To make different scents, perfume distillers fill large copper vats with aromatics. When making mitti attar, they fill the vats with some 600 pounds of clay. SAJJAD HUSSAIN/ Stringer
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