SORCERY OF SCENTS
Long before spray bottles became ubiquitous essentials in wellness boxes, India
perfumed itself with patience slowly concocting aromas and oils extracted from nature’s bounty. This festive season, MOSAIC unravels the story of four niche labels bringing the time-tested craft back to your dressing boudoir
WORDS by ALISHA UVAIS
Callouts
“Rediscovering attar feels like unearthing a part of Indian identity. Every scent resonates with deep feelings” – Krati Tandon
“Reverting to old practices signals reaching out to ancient wisdom for wellness” – Deepti Verma
“Some products have been around for as long as a hundred years. This denotes preserving
a place for traditions in the modern times” – Shubham Gupta
“We seem to have forgotten that when we purchase perfumes, we buy a feeling” –Vidushi Vijayvergiya
Scents are closely tied to memory, the old cliché goes. And, as is the case with most clichés, there is a kernel of truth in it. Let us explain this with an instance from French novelist Marcel Proust’s massive seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. During a moment, he reaches for a madeleine dipped in tea, leading to what is now called the Proust effect. One familiar smell, and an entire childhood came rushing back uninvited.
Scent, of all senses, has always taken the shortest route to memory — arriving before thought has a chance to catch up. India has understood this for centuries. Attars distilled from flowers, roots, and resins have carried memory, ritual and identity through generations, much before anyone figured it was involuntary recall. We bring this old craft into focus, carried forward by a handful of homegrown houses treating fragrance with real reverence.
BOOND’S BEAUTIFUL BET
Krati Tandon had spent over a decade building consumer businesses in the corporate world when the pandemic forced her to return to her hometown Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh. Her brother Varun, a filmmaker more accustomed to city sets, was back home as well.
For the first time in years, the siblings had nothing to do but ask questions. Among a lot of reflections they kept returning to one question: Why is there such minimal curiosity about one of India’s oldest and most beautiful crafts within the country itself?
Interestingly, the thought propelled them to meet artisans in Kannauj whose families, for generations, had been distilling attars using the deg-bhapka method where flowers, woods, roots and even mud are sealed into copper vessels and coaxed slowly over a wood fire to emanate fragrance.
Watching a shrinking pool of young people willing to carry the craft forward, Krati and Varun were affected by the absence of patrons for such a craft. Boond, launched in 2021, was conceived thereafter — to build a bridge between Kannauj’s artisans and a generation that had mostly forgotten to look for them.
Krati puts it emotionally, “Rediscovering attar feels like unearthing a part of Indian identity. Every scent resonates with deep feelings.” For instance, Maati, her favourite, bottles the petrichor when the first draft of monsoon hits parched earth.
Satparni chases down a flower whose fragrance most Indians would recognise in a heartbeat but couldn’t name; Shamama, distilled from more than 120 herbs, spices and botanicals over several months, unfolds slowly and is the perfect go-to when the seasons are changing.
For festive gifting, Krati points people toward Motiya and Sandali, scents woven into nearly every celebration in the country.
“Festivals are about creating memories with the people we love and fragrance has the remarkable ability to become part of those.”
MEMORIES IN A BOTTLE
Hrisikesh describes itself as a story about the senses as much as it is about the soul. As the founder, Deepti Verma, puts it, “Smell is the first association you have with memory,” associating scents with a collective, cellular memory carried through generations of place and culture.
Creating its attars with deg-bhapka distillation, Verma’s brand, launched in 2022, resists shortcuts while being known for crafting natural, alcohol-free attars coaxed from flowers, herbs and oud, with no synthetic base anywhere near the bottle. This makes them gentle enough for use even during pregnancy or by children.
The collection unfolds like a study of Indian botanicals: Ruh Gulab pressed from rose, Mitti conjuring wet earth after the first rain, Noor and Basant tuned to spring’s lighter register, Chamak and Nirvana warm and resinous.
Deepti tells us that the scents are as much about heritage as they are about wellness.
“Reverting to old practices signals reaching out to ancient wisdom for wellness,” elaborates the owner.
For festive gifting this year, the label is leaning into its reed diffusers, built to fill a room with the same quality of aroma its attars kiss the skin with. Mitti and Kasturi suit the cooler, contemplative mood of the season, while Mogra and Ruh Gulab carry the brighter, celebratory register most Indian festivals call for.
RAAHI’S ROOTED RITUAL
In 1818, a man named Ayodhya Prasad departed from the town of Kannauj in bullock carts carrying perfume oils bound for Kolkata. This set the ball rolling for the fragrance house of Makhulal Ayodhya Prasad.
Two centuries and seven generations later, his descendants Shubham and Divy Gupta are carrying forward the family legacy of attar making under the name Raahi Parfums.
Retaining the original philosophy first pronounced by their ancestor that attar is prepared slowly from the hero ingredients, until all necessary processes are done, the family firmly believes that “attar is not made, but born.”
The distillers at Raahi use copper degs in the deg-bhapka method, soaking flowers, roots, resins, and spices in a base oil for as long as it is necessary. One of the most popular perfumes produced by the house is sandalwood attar, whose every drop reminds one of festive pooja mornings.
Among the newer flavour variants, Rumi’s Rose Oud and Sambac Noix — a tender weaving of jasmine, almond, and vanilla — are worth mentioning. For festive gifting, there is a Discovery Set that lets buyers sample five attars together.
“Some products have been around for as long as a hundred years,” says Shubham, adding, “This denotes preserving a place for traditions in the modern times.”
PERFUMES WITH A PASSION
This tale begins in the 1850s when a Begum in Awadh received an anonymous parcel of chikankari fabric carrying a scent so mesmerizing it caught her attention instantly.
The man behind the aroma was Vidushi Vijayvergiya’s ancestor, Chhunnamal Vijayvergiya, a Lucknow perfumer whose blends captured the imagination of Nawabs and aristocrats across the region.
This storied legacy passed down through six generations before reaching Vidushi, who pursued an MBA in Pune before moving to Switzerland, where she spent years studying the French and Swiss luxury perfume industries.
In 2017, she brought that knowledge home and relaunched the 160-year-old family business as Isak Fragrances, meaning love or ‘Ishq’, pronounced the way it’s spoken in Lucknow’s own Purabiya dialect.
She inherited recipes, techniques, and an entire worldview about what a perfume is for.
“We seem to have forgotten that when we purchase perfumes, we buy a feeling,” she remarks, hoping to remind Indian buyers of what their own heritage already holds.
Isak’s attars are handcrafted using the infusion and distillation techniques the House of Chhunnamal once used for the Awadh court, with some blends needing close to 5,000 flowers to yield a single millilitre. The formulations are completely vegan and they can be worn by anyone, irrespective of genders.
Image Credit: Pankaj S Chadha