Do You Know About the Perfume Capital of India?

Source: New Indian Express

Kannauj Perfume is a traditional Indian perfume, also known as Kannauj Ittar. Kannauj is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, where its perfume production is popular. 

Kannauj (pronounced kunh-nowj) has been producing oil-based botanical perfumes called attar in the Ganges belt of northeast India using the oldest known distillation techniques in the world for thousands of years.

 

The city is known as "the perfume capital of India" and "Kannauj is to India what Grasse is to France" because of the main role of perfume production in Kannauj.

 

The Brewed History

 

The ancient Egyptians were the first ones to produce the botanical perfumes we know today by crushing plants directly and infusing them into a base oil.

Although the first hydro-distillation of plants is credited to the Persian physician Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, primitive stills were discovered by archaeological excavations in the Indus Valley in the 10th century. 

This implied that simple perfume-making had evolved earlier. In the 16th century, the Mughals marched into India, taking a lusty olfactory appetite with them. 

The inextricable connection between fragrance and spiritual and sensual contentment was celebrated by the first Mughal emperor, Barbur, and this ethos percolated for the next two centuries in the halls of the Mughal courts.

 

Gyatri Shahi, the Islamic ruler of the Sultanate of Malwa in central India, wrote the Ni'matnama in the 15th century, or the Book of Delights, which probes into a realm of sybaritic pleasures. 

The virtues of smelling good are relayed through countless passages. Kannauj's first royal patrons are considered to be the Mughal emperor Jahangir and his wife, Noor Jahan, the parents of Shah Jahan, who went on to create the Taj Mahal. 

Noor Jahan ignited a run on a rose attar, according to local legend, after being bewitched by the fragrance of Kannauj roses in her bath.

 

Fragrance Revival

 

Why Kannauj, though? Kannauj lies in the middle if you triangulate Agra, Lucknow, and Kanpur, three Mughal strongholds with a fondness for the smell. 

The town is especially suited to cultivating jasmine, vetiver, and Damask rose, which owes its name to Damascus but is native to Central Asia, founded on the rich alluvial Ganges soil. 

In Kannauj, Kapoor explains, master perfumers were already in operation. The Mughals clearly fired up demand, and he jumped on the bandwagon with Kannauj.

 

Instead of sandalwood, natural replacements, such as liquid paraffin, are used and, although this version of attar is a close approximation, it does not match up to the original.

 

For paan, a popular national snack of tobacco and spices wrapped in betel leaf, Kannauj also produces an extraordinary amount of rose water. 

But these markets are not enough to support the distilleries in the town, and many have had to close or move to produce Western perfume facsimiles.

 

The Aroma Of Ittar

 

Attar is the perfumery of the old world. Perfume, rooted in Latin per and fume (through smoke), started with humans crushing and directly infusing botanicals into oil or water. 

For simple purposes, modern perfumery uses alcohol as a carrier or solvent, because it is cheap, inert, and easily diffused. But attars are usually made with sandalwood oil, which makes them extremely absorbent and unctuous. 

On the wrist or behind the ear, a small droplet, and the scent filters through the skin and lingers happily, often for days. Attars have an androgynous quality, just as attractive to males and females. 

They strike intense notes of floral, wood, musky, smoky, green, or grass. These are created by Kannauj, as well as the dramatic attar mitti, which evokes the fragrance of the earth after rainfall and is made of shards of unfired clay from the Ganges.  

Sweet, spice, smoke, and damp can be harmonized by the fragrance and one whisks off to an otherworldly dimension.

 

The Art Of Perfume Making

 

Kannauj is a four-hour drive from Agra, two hours shy of historic Lucknow, a former princely state ruled by the Oudh Nawabs. Kannauj is wedged somewhere between the past and the present, like many smaller Indian cities. 

Time does not move on here, it just piles up. Duck into the narrow lanes of the main market, Bara Bazaar, and Kannauj completely revert to medieval times. 

Long-standing shops in this labyrinth are full of finely cut glass bottles holding attar and ruh, or essential oil, each smelling better than the last. 

On cushioned floor mats, men sit cross-legged, sniffing vials and dabbing with exceedingly long, perfumed cotton swabs behind their ears.

 

The attar sazh, or perfumer, conjuring and tempting with the aura of an imperial alchemist, rules this age-old trade. Attar is referring to the mind. 

In a tiny room, all the fire and smoke may seem apocalyptic, but it's authentic and beautiful, too. You cannot recreate this in a lab in Europe.

 

Written by - Nandita Singh

 

Edited by - Christeena George