The smell of life

Oh the smell of earth! The intoxicating aroma of that first rains, that unique smell of earth; mitti smell. There is nothing in this whole wide world which can even come close to this beautiful smell. It triggers off a wave of memories, always happy ones as this one smell is always associated with a feeling of goodness. And every time we get this waft of good earth, we cannot help but say that mankind has made so many perfumes, of every possible fruit, flower, spices but this smell of earth, that of first rains, is beyond us to capture; it is just divine.

Well, this divine smell is actually being made and sold! The city of Kannauj in UP is the perfume capital of India. There, generations after generations have been making perfumes in the traditional old way, the exact same process which was followed during the Indus valley civilization.

Kannauj is the place to fetch the fine scents—jasmine oils, rose waters, the roots of grasses called vetiver, with a bouquet cooling to the nose. Exactly when attar-making began there, no one is certain; archaeologists have unearthed clay distillation pots dating back thousands of years to the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley. But the best of all – they have captured the smell of rain.

In Kannauj, perfume is extracted from parched clay and distilled with ancient techniques and it is known as mitti attar—Earth’s perfume. The ancient, painstakingly slow distillation practiced in Kannauj is called deg-bhapka. Making this perfume is a long drawn process - a typical 100-pound batch of petals takes six or seven hours to distill.