The alluring, musky perfume of marigolds floats from a Hindu shrine, as a gaggle of males chuckle over ginger-infused milk teas served in clay cups referred to as kulhads. In a close-by fragrance distillery, a person turns his head in the direction of the laughter as he crushes a batch of discarded kulhads. Here in Kannauj, a city within the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, generations of perfumers have used kulhads and different clay supplies to seize an attractive scent often called 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 corporate together with his brother, have been bottling the enigmatic perfume for hundreds of years.

At his workplace, some 500 toes away from Meena’s tin-roofed distillery, Mehothra rigorously pours the thick mitti attar oil right into a glass bottle. “You cannot get mitti attar anywhere else,” he says, resting his eyes on every treasured drop—0.26 gallons promote for about 180,000 Indian rupees, round $2,178.

Attars, additionally spelled ittar, are scented oils made out of pure elements. The scent profiles in attars fluctuate extensively, from fragrances derived from flowers akin to Damsak roses and jasmine to heavy, heat scents made out of agarwood. Mitti means “earth,” and mitti attar loosely interprets to the scent of rain-soaked earth. The perfume is made solely right here in Kannauj utilizing a particular, centuries-old method.

This early Nineteenth-century gouache portray exhibits a Muslim fragrance vendor (proper) together with his spouse (left). (PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Despite the scent’s lengthy native historical past, little is understood about mitti attar’s origins, says Giti Datt, a boutique fragrance home proprietor and an anthropologist on the Australian National University who research attar. Datt says no one is aware of when attars have been first made or why Kannauj is the epicenter. It’s believed that attar distillation is much like a distillation technique discovered within 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 folks used fragrant waters and plant extracts to create totally different scents utilized in drugs and non secular rituals; later Vedic Age folks continued these practices, wrote historian Jyoti Marwah within the paper, Attars: The Fading Aromatic Cultures of India. The Sanskrit epic Mahabharata—compiled by the top of the third century—additionally mentions the usage of fragrance in royal courts. This Indigenous Indian fragrance observe later mingled with perfume traditions of early Muslims who arrived within the subcontinent, says Datt. “So we ended up with a very unique, rich combination of Indo-Islamic perfume culture.”

In the Nineteenth century, the British colonized India and worn out many Indigenous artwork varieties. “So we are trying to figure out what that meant for attar,” says Datt, who hasn’t discovered any Kannauj perfumery with pre-British origins. Mehrotra household’s enterprise can solely hint its roots to the twentieth century. Although there’s little proof, it’s potential that the British needed to make attar right into a commodity and arrange the Kannauj fragrance homes, says Datt.

Despite these murky origins, immediately mitti attar is well-known all through the Indian subcontinent. Sacred Hindu scriptures such because 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.

Back on the manufacturing unit, Mehrotra watches as a distiller collects kiln-baked clay discs purchased from an area potter and different discarded clay supplies, akin to kulhads. The perfumer then dumps the clay supplies (some 600 kilos of the stuff) into a big copper vat referred to as a deg and pours in some water earlier than closing it.

The distiller then takes a small, long-necked copper vessel, referred to as a bhapka, that’s crammed with sandalwood oil—the bottom of all attars. The bhapka’s opening is fastened to an angled bamboo pipe, which is in flip linked to the clay-filled deg. Once the set-up is full, the distiller seals any opening with moist multani mitti, a sort of clay typically used as a pores and skin cleanser. “Now, it’s naturally air-tight,” Mehrotra says, smiling.

Using a mixture of wooden and sun-dried cow dung, the distiller then lights up a small, carefully-controlled fireplace beneath the deg. For about seven hours, the clay and water-filled deg simmers over the flames. Mehrotra watches because the distiller splashes water onto the blaze, “because he knew the heat was too much.” If the flames go down, the distiller will add extra cow dung to maintain the fireplace scorching sufficient.

When the clay boils contained in the heated deg, an fragrant steam builds up and travels by the bamboo pipe and into the oil-filled bhapka. The sandalwood oil contained in the bhapka then slowly absorbs the clay-essence of the vapor.

At the top of the day, the distillers separate the water from the sandalwood oil by a small opening. The total course of repeats for a minimum of 10 days till the thick oil is saturated with the heady perfume of baked clay that mimics the scent of earth after monsoon showers. “You won’t get any smell in one day. It takes at least four or five days to start getting the aroma,” Mehrotra explains.

Once completed, perfumers retailer the mitti attar in camel-skin flasks, which helps extra water to evaporate and preserves the perfume. “Attar is like liquor,” Mehrotra laughs. “It ages like fine wine. The older it becomes, the [more] mature and expensive it gets.”

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Mehrotra has guests and patrons from many nations, from Grasse, France, the “perfume capital of the world,” to New Delhi and Mumbai. “People from Grasse come here to see how we make mitti attar. They’ve tried [to make] it but they can’t get the right essence,” he says, displaying his WhatsApp chats with French perfumers. Some of Mehrotra’s different patrons combine artificial supplies with attar to create new, distinctive scents of their very own. “Attar is the base. They can’t make those perfumes without it. So anyone who wants natural perfume oil has to come here,” he says.

Distillers in New Delhi as soon as made their very own attars to use in paan, an after-meal mouth freshener in India, says Datt. But over time, paan has fallen in reputation. “So a lot of those distillers stopped and moved into other businesses,” she says.

Despite these business shifts, Datt says that attar continues to endure and evolve. “I don’t think it’s a dying industry, but certainly a changing one,” she says. “Certain types of markets—like paan—[are] maybe no longer there, but there are new, up-and-coming perfume houses in India that use attar, and we are seeing an increasingly growing switch towards natural oils across the world.”

Mehrotra says there’s extra demand for attar than ever earlier than. “If you use chemical perfumes, it’s not good for your body,” he says, “but attar is natural. You can even eat it!” It appears so long as folks proceed to savor the scent of monsoon rains on dry earth, mitti attar isn’t going anyplace.

This article initially appeared on Atlas Obscura, the definitive information to the world’s hidden surprise. Sign up for Atlas Obscura’s newsletter.