Oils and Attars: The Essence of India

This story was originally published in JAL's inflight magazine SKYWARD, written by Carl Duncan and used here with permission from the author.

On a hot pre-monsoon April-afternoon, a steady stream of sari-clad shoppers, pedal rickshaws and barefoot porters crowd the narrow lanes of Dariba Kalan, the marketplace of Shahjahanabad, as Old Delhi is still called.

All motor traffic is mercifully restricted here and tradition thrives. Dariba Kalan is known for its jewelry merchants, its colorful and pungent spice market, and for its traditional "perfumeries" or attar shops.

A dusty sign above the entrance to the oldest and most-respected such attar shop in Delhi simply reads: “Gulab Singh Johrimal, Manufacturers & Exporters. Estd. 1816.”

Behind the counter colorful glass decanters fill the shelves that run along the wall. These bottles contain the natural aromatic essences of some of the world's most fragrant and useful plants. Bottles of lavender, ylang ylang, geranium, jasmine, patchouli, and rose rub shoulders with others containing clary sage, rosemary, bergamot, chamomile, eucalyptus, peppermint and juniper berry.

A customer slips off her sandals and steps inside. Settling herself on a cushioned settee at the counter she asks to sample the “ruh gulab.”

The proprietor, Prafil Gundhi, takes down a heavy glass decanter and places a single pale-pink drop of liquid on the inside of her wrist.

Ruh gulab – pure, undiluted, steam-distilled rose oil (rosa damascena), the costliest and, for many, most alluring aroma of them all.

Twenty thousand pink rose blossoms, picked on their first day of bloom, in the cool of the morning before the sun can sap their strength, yield just seven grams of essential rose oil: the contents of a glass vial the size of one's little finger.

Cleopatra, the legendary seductress and Queen of Egypt, chose exactly this, it is said, for her first fateful meeting with Marc Antony aboard that royal barge on the Nile in 41 BCE.

Essential oils and attars – sandalwood oil suffused with a floral essence – have not only been the classic perfumes of Indian royalty and aristocratic connoisseurs for centuries, but have been an integral part of the age-old plant-based Indian system of holistic health known as Ayurveda.

These oils, as they are still being made in India today, are laboriously steam distilled in small quantities right alongside the flower fields themselves. The traditional process produces some of the finest essential oils obtainable, sought after not only by the perfume and cosmetic industries but by the best spas and aromatherapists around the world.

Essential oils are the highly concentrated distillation of aromatic and volatile liquids found in the living cells of various flowers, grasses, herbs, bushes, and trees. They have been defined as the "virtual life force of the plant itself", and are very complicated, containing up to 100 compounds each, compounds that the plants evolved for their own survival.

The beautiful fragrances of flowers such as night blooming jasmine or rose, for example, are actually pheromones designed to attract pollinating insects. Other compounds act as hormones for cellular growth and elasticity, as well as anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-viral agents to combat disease and infection.

Specific essential oils can alleviate pain, act as an anti-depressant, an anti-biotic, lower blood pressure, detoxify, elevate one's mood, revitalize the skin, or reduce anxiety. Even rose oil, as romantically aromatic as it is, being an essential oil, is much more than just a pretty fragrance.

While Cleopatra used her rose oil as an alluring perfume with reputed aphrodisiac qualities, the Roman emperor Nero, a century later, used the very same oil to relieve the headaches and indigestion he suffered from as a result of his extravagant lifestyle.

Up until the early part of the 20th century, in fact, essential oils were the most powerful medicines known (consider clove oil's continued popularity for relieving toothache pains). But it is their use as perfumes that have given Indian essential oils and attars the world-wide cachet they enjoy today.

The secret of making attars (from the Arabic “itr” meaning “fragrance” or “scent”) came from the Arabs who invaded India over a thousand years ago. The co-distillation process infuses sandalwood oil with a dominant floral essence, such as jasmine, ylang ylang, or rose.

In the process, the sandalwood oil loses its own lovely scent and completely assumes the floral aroma. Just 100 grams of rose oil will turn a full kilo of sandalwood oil into attar. And yet its aroma is, magically, all rose.

The great Mughal emperors Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jehan, under whose reigns Mughal art and architecture reached their highest peak (1556 to 1658) were all devoted attar users. Such was the Oriental opulence and sensuality of the Mughal lifestyle that they used to soak huge bamboo blinds in precious essential oils and hang them in palace breezeways to scent the air. Jehangir's wife Nur Jehan loved bathing in rose water so much that one legend has her being the discoverer of the famous oil. But it is only a pretty fable.

The most favored scents in the Mughal courts were rose, jasmine, champa, tuberose, ginger, vetiver and sandalwood. These classic attars and oils remain in demand today. Prafil Gundhi measures them out by the gram on a pendulum balance just as his great grandfather used to do when the daughters of the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II (1806 - 1837) would come down from their palace in the nearby Red Fort to buy their favorite oils.

In India the production of essential oils and attars remains a traditional cottage industry. There are few industry standards and oil quality can vary greatly.

These days there are cheap artificial scents that smell nearly identical to the natural ones, as well as chemically extracted oils that are much less expensive than true steam-distilled oils. Although these are technically termed "absolutes", rather than essential oils, unscrupulous merchants often do not advertise the distinction. Absolutes are fine for perfumes, but are worthless for the health and cosmetic industries as they have lost their therapeutic virtues.

Gundhi and his family have a 190-year old reputation to uphold, and, since “testing complex essential oils is very difficult,” he says, “we take no chances. Especially with the florals. We do our own processing.” This is the only way they can be certain of the quality and freshness of the flowers and the purity of the final product.

They keep a close watch on the flower fields and when the crop is ready they send their own team out to oversee the harvesting and do the distilling. Each crop has its own season. Roses are harvested in the spring and in the fall, before and after the monsoons.

Since the flowers must be processed immediately upon picking for the highest quality oils, the distilleries are located wherever the flower fields are. By contrast, non-floral oil crops such as vetiver (a grass) or sandalwood (a tree) are not nearly as volatile. These can be harvested in one place and then processed in another, even a considerable distance away, with no loss in quality.

The rose fields Gulab Singh Jorimal uses are deep in a timeless, rural landscape about four hours from New Delhi in the district of Hathras, not far from the Taj Mahal. Hathras has been known for its fragrant roses since Mughal times.

There are no roads out here and only a cart path winding through the fields connects the distillery with the nearest village several miles away. A low wall separates the distillery from the sea of roses.

Inside, rows upon rows of copper stills line waist-deep pools of water. The stills sit atop open brick ovens fired with dried cow dung and kindling. Starting at sunrise, harvesters haul sack loads of rose blossoms in from the fields. The flowers are weighed into 40 kilo bundles with traditional hand scales. One bundle goes into each copper still, along with 20 kilos of water to make the steam.

The still (known as a degh) is then sealed and clamped tight; although the pressures are slight, the vapors are precious and leaks are costly. A bamboo pipe, insulated with a simple wrapping of rope, descends from the top of the still to the condenser (or bhapka), an urn-shaped vessel partially submerged in the pool of water.

All joints are sealed with natural clay. No plastics or oils or metals that might taint the essential oil vapors are used. This traditional degh-bhapka system of steam distillation, according to archeologists, has changed little since its invention in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BCE.

The stills set up for making rose attar use special condensers filled with sandalwood oil (also an essential oil). The floral vapor condenses as it percolates through the sandalwood oil, imparting its inimitable aroma.

It takes a full six hours of constant tending of fires and condensers to complete the distillation process. Each of the stills produces just 6 or 7 grams of oil from their 40 kilos of roses.

The process is the same for all the other oils, although each plant yields oil in different ratios. Eight thousand jasmine blossoms make just a single gram of jasmine oil, which is understandably nearly as precious as rose. Lavender, on the other hand, one of the loveliest scented and most therapeutically useful of all plants, yields a bountiful kilo of oil for every 30 kilos of flowers.

In the Hathras fields on a recent spring season, Gundhi's crew processed 57,000 kilos of roses in 40 days. The fruit of their labors, 10 kilos of pure essential rose oil, arrived at the little attar shop in Shahjahanabad in a battered aluminum canister on the back of a dusty old motorcycle.

A humble entrance for what Egyptian queens and Mughal emperors have valued far more than gold.