Thread by @thebetterindia

1/ If you wish you could capture the scent of wet earth into a bottle, #Kannauj in #Uttar Pradesh made that possible a long time ago.

Sometime in the past, the perfumers of ancient Kannauj created a scent that would capture the fragrance of earth when first touched by the rains.

2/ Extracted from parched clay and distilled with ancient techniques, it is today known as mitti attar – Earth’s perfume. It is also called itr-e-khaki.

3/ Mitti attar is made even today in Kannauj’s traditional perfumeries, where sinewy craftsmen tend to fires under ageing copper cauldrons or degs. The distillation process, called deg bhapka, is painstakingly slow and long, with no trace of industrial machinery or modernity.

4/ The copper deg is built atop its own fireplace & has its own trough of water. It is connected to a bulbous condenser called bhapka,b that receives the fragrant liquid after distillation.

Little clay shards are made in villages before they are sun baked and placed in the degs.

5/ The craftsmen put these shards of half-baked clay into the deg, cover them with water, hammer a lid down on top, and seal it with mud.

They light a wood fire underneath, before filling the bhapka with sandalwood oil and sinking it into the water trough.

6/ The deg and bhapka are connected with a hollow bamboo pipe that carries the heady vapours into the receiver, where it mixes with the sandalwood oil base. Every few hours, the receiver is switched and the deg cooled down with wet cloths, to stop the condensation.

7/ The perfumes are kept in leather bottles called kuppis. These bottles are then placed in the sun to allow the excess water to evaporate and for the true scent of attar to develop – warm, organic and mineral-rich.

Read more here: thebetterindia.com/59606/scent-ra…