The mitti attar is also now available on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.
By Rakesh Agrawal
Read earth and pouring rains. The first raindrops falling on earth is enough of swing the musical nodes of a dreamy heart, but its hypnotizing smell leaves any earthy person spellbound. However, as more and more people shift to the cities and live in high rise apartments, rains bring just muck and filth, not vibgyor color and hypnotizing fragrance.
Until a few enterprising and determined Indian villagers envisaged a way to bottle the fragrance the first monsoons showers! (See a YouTube video: Essential Oil : Making of Mitti Attar – Fragrance of the First Rain by Sugandhim  Making Perfume From the Rain: https://youtu.be/vz4DGTue98U)
It happened in the village of Kannauj In Uttar Pradesh, India’s fragrance capital, where attars or fine scents from all kinds of flowers, grasses and now even mitti (earth) are being made since to the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley. Now, Kannauj is a hub of a historic perfumery. The villagers of Kannauj have inherited a remarkable skill: They can capture the scent of rain.
Kannauj looks like any other typical north Indian village, but with a difference as fields here are planted with aromatic crops stretching for miles, interspersed with the chimneys of hundreds of small-scale brick kilns. Like the attars, bricks are manufactured in Kannauj today since centuries. Here, white jasmine flowers shaped like starfish bloom everywhere, as they make a delicate, sweet attar. And, now the twon produce mitti attar in its one of two dozen steam distilleries.
The mitti attar is also now available on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, among other e-commerce sites, from Rs. 400 (about $ 6) for a 10 ml pack to Rs. 28,000 (about $ 410) for a bottle of 1,000 ml, depending on the base oil it uses. And, not just in India, this fragrance is exported to the USA, Australia, Britain and many European counties.
And, a beautiful word: petrichor, describes mitti attar, meaning the fragrance of the first rain.  It’s derived from the Greek “petra†(stone) and “ichor†which, in Greek mythology, is the ethereal blood of the gods. (See: The Conversation: The smell of rain: how Australia’s CSIRO invented a new word https://theconversation.com/the-smell-of-rain-how-csiro-invented-a-new-word-39231)
Many songs have been sung and poems written about it and now you could get it in a bottle.
There are about 400 attar perfumeries in Kannauj but only about 10 per cent of them make the mitti attar, according to the government-run Fragrance & Flavor Development Centre (FFDC).
Mitti attar is used as a fragrance, an air freshener, an essential oil — and in aromatherapy, because the smell of it is so calming.