Divrina Dhingra

Dhingra’s book is divided into six chapters dedicated to six natural sources from which perfumes are made: rose, jasmine, sandalwood, saffron, oud and vetiver. “These are the six that have been really influential historically and continue to be so in the Indian fragrant landscape. They are what we’re known for,” she says. While there are other ingredients that show up in historical records, they are largely fleeting mentions which meant that those materials would not lend to proper historical contextualisation with anecdotes and sources.

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Peppered with personal anecdotes such as the one of a cologne she composed for her father to introduce him to sandalwood, an ingredient she believed his personality closely resembled—“both seemingly tough but unexpectedly gentle” —is her study of texts tracing the evolution and use of fragrance which offers up information such as the mention of Sita’s preference for red sandalwood paste in the Ramayana.

The book also, as its title suggests, guides the reader down a variety of winding perfume trails. The author writes about her travels to the places where the farming, extraction and making of perfumes take place, from Kannauj, the city that was once the centre of Uttar Pradesh’s traditional perfume industry and invited parallels to the French town of Grasse where perfumery developed in the 19th century in her chapter on the rose, to the Institute of Wood Sciences and Technology in Bengaluru, and the 100-year-old Karnataka Soaps and Detergents Limited (KSDL), the oldest sandalwood distillery in the country and makers of the famed Mysore Sandalwood Soap in Mysore in her chapter on the sandalwood. “I realised that I really wanted to just document what was happening and do it honestly without romanticising it too much.” The travel came in easily, she says. “You can go to different parts of the country and we have so much that we are growing. It’s this little industry that’s truly craft-oriented and everywhere you go, there’s something happening.”

Dhingra’s travels and conversations also revealed issues specific to the way the perfume industry operates in India. “Standardisation and testing is wanting; that’s where we lose out. If you want to export, there are stringent standards that the product is held to. There seem to be [instances] of people taking shortcuts or that somewhere between the place that it’s made and the place that it’s sold, it exchanges hands and there’s the fear of adulteration.” She also discusses the craft-dependent nature of the work and fluctuating incomes due to the vagaries of the seasons. “So much of the work is done by hand. And so much of it depends on karigars, men from the villages who are masters of this craft. It’s passed down from generation to generation and there are all these livelihoods dependent on their skill. I think they don’t get their due. Anywhere else, this is [recognised] as artisanal craft. Here, it’s taken for granted even though the people who produce it know that without these men who work for them every season, the work can’t be done.”

Dhingra also draws attention to the issue of climate change looming on the horizon. She discusses saffron and the many years of terrible harvests. “It’s the same with khus or vertiver because the North Indian khus is wild. It doesn’t grow in the abundance that it used to. There isn’t as much land given over to cultivation as there used to be and the rain patterns of course, are now all over the place.”