From the warm resin of temple incense to the sweetness of jasmine at dusk, fragrance has long been the subcontinent’s most enduring language. It appears everywhere: in archaeology, where traces of ancient botanicals cling to Indus Valley pottery shards; in literature and ritual, where scent is both offering and metaphor; and in the visual traditions that shaped India’s artistic self-image. Indian painters, from Mughal miniaturists to Company School artists, repeatedly returned to scenes of bathing, grooming, and perfuming as meditations on refinement, intimacy, and social ritual. Even Raja Ravi Varma, chronicler of myth and domestic life, painted women preparing for the bath, attended by figures bearing unguent bottles and rose-scented waters, compositions steeped in the quiet luxury of fragrance.
In these artworks, perfume was never mere ornament. A woman’s toilette became a stage upon which identity, sensuality, and status were performed. Rosewater, attar, sandalwood paste, and floral oils served as visual shorthand for mood, lineage, and atmosphere. Indian art understood instinctively, long before modern perfume houses or olfactory theorists attempted to define it, that scent is a story told without words.
Among the many ways to read India—through its texts, its dynasties, its architecture—scent offers the most continuous and unbroken narrative. Its history stretches across more than four millennia, threading itself into trade routes, medical treatises, incense rituals, and courtly life. Medieval chroniclers describe attars fit for emperors; Ayurvedic scholars frame fragrance as both medicine and metaphysics; and generations of artisans in places like Kannauj have distilled the spirit of flowers, woods, and even monsoon-soaked earth.
Against this profound backdrop, the news of India’s first-ever smell trademark acquires unexpected significance. It is not merely a corporate milestone but a moment where contemporary law finally intersects with a sensory tradition that predates writing itself, a tradition India has painted, distilled, worshipped, and traded for thousands of years. The law is only now learning to articulate what artists and perfumers have always known: scent is memory, culture, and meaning made tangible.
The earliest evidence of Indian perfumery comes from the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3300–1300 BCE). Archaeologists have uncovered terracotta distillation vessels, traces of scented oils, and bathing areas lined with aromatic substances. Some scholars argue these vessels resemble early deg-bhapka setups still used in Kannauj today, suggesting astonishing continuity across four millennia.
Excavated pottery contains residues of botanical extractions: vetiver, agarwood, myrrh, and even compounds similar to modern attars. Clay bullae found at Harappa carry impressions scented with natural resins. In essence, perfumery in India predates written history.
By the first millennium BCE, Indian texts were unusually sophisticated in their understanding of fragrance.
The Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, foundational Ayurvedic treatises, dedicate sections to perfumed oils, fumigation blends, and the medicinal role of aromatics: sandalwood to cool fevered bodies, vetiver to calm the mind, camphor to sanitise spaces.
The Vedas overflow with references to fragrant offerings—agarwood, frankincense, ghee lamp smoke, and lotus. Scent was not merely aesthetic; it was metaphysical. Fragrance was the medium through which human devotion reached the divine.
By the early centuries CE, the Kama Sutra elevated perfumery into an art, cataloguing ointments, garlands, incense, and perfumed bath rituals. The text even describes a “perfumer’s workshop,” complete with recipes and techniques. In ancient India, scent was intimately linked with knowledge, intimacy, and refinement.
Kannauj, India’s “city of perfumes”, reached its zenith between the 9th and 13th centuries. Medieval chronicles praised its attars, and trade with Persia, Arabia, and the broader Indian Ocean world proliferated. By this time, the deg-bhapka distillation method—copper stills, bamboo condensers, sandalwood as base—had stabilised into the form still used today.
Notably, sandalwood oil became the base of Indian perfumery not merely for fragrance but for chemistry: molecularly stable, non-volatile, absorbent, and spiritually revered.
The arrival of Islamic influence enriched the tradition further. Persian techniques mingled with Indian botanicals, producing complex attars like gulab (rose), shamama (a warm, spicy blend), and hina, which became staples of Mughal courts.
The Mughal emperors were passionate patrons of perfume. Jahangir wrote rapturously of roses, while Nur Jahan is credited in chronicles with refining rose attar production after discovering a fragrant layer of oil floating on rosewater during her bath.
With European colonisation came mass-produced eau de colognes, alcohol-based formulations, and synthetic aroma molecules. Colonial economics favoured large importers over artisanal distillers. Attars became associated with “vernacular” scent, as French perfumes took over elite consumption.
By the late 20th century, Kannauj’s perfumers found themselves squeezed between global brands and low-cost synthetics. The craft survived more through devotion than profit.
Yet traditions that last thousands of years rarely die. India’s renewed interest in artisanal heritage combined with global demand for natural, sustainable fragrances has sparked a quiet renaissance.
Perfumers today experiment with ancient formulae, climate-conscious distillation, and collaborations with academic chemists who analyse the molecular signatures of traditional attars. The export market for jasmine, oud, and vetiver has surged. Indian botanicals are in high demand in niche perfumery houses from Paris to Tokyo.
The revival is not nostalgic; it is innovative. And that brings us to the present moment where heritage meets law, and scent meets intellectual property.
India’s first smell trademark, granted for a rose-fragranced tire, is more than a novelty. Legally, it marks the country’s entry into a global movement toward protecting non-traditional trademarks: colours, shapes, sounds, and now, scent.
India historically hesitated, citing the “subjectivity” of smell and the difficulty of representation. But new frameworks, including seven-dimensional vectors that map aromatic notes, have made it possible to describe fragrance with scientific precision.
This innovation opens remarkable possibilities: from protecting traditional attars from imitation, allowing Kannauj’s distillers to claim geographic and aromatic identity, enabling heritage hotels, textile houses, and wellness brands to trademark signature scents, and also giving academic researchers a legal structure to catalogue and safeguard India’s olfactory traditions.
India, a civilisation that has always lived through its senses, is finally giving scent a legal vocabulary.
India’s relationship with perfume is a continuum, not a revival. The smell trademark may belong to a tire, but the story it unlocks belongs to the subcontinent’s long, fragrant history.
India has always smelt in stories.
Now, at last, it is beginning to copyright them.