Publishing in the journal Nature in 1964, Bear and Thomas proposed a name for the scent brought on by rain. They called it “petrichor,” a blend of the Greek words petra, rock, and ikhor, the blood of the gods in Greek mythology. But the scientists acknowledged that they were not the first to identify the stormy smell. They were not even the first to extract it. In fact, what they had dubbed petrichor was already a signature fragrance produced in Kannauj. Extracted from parched clay and distilled with ancient techniques, it is known as mitti attar—Earth’s perfume.

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When I read the Australian scientists’ paper, I doubted that Kannauj’s villagers would still be crafting the rain perfume half a century later. But just in case, I tracked down Shakti Vinay Shulka, the director of India’s Fragrance & Flavour Development Centre, a government agency that supports the local essential-oil industry. I was thrilled to learn that not only were the villagers still making the mitti attar, but I could see the process for myself if I could make it to Kannauj on the eve of the monsoons. After flying 8,000 miles to India and taking a train to rural north-central Uttar Pradesh, I found myself in an ancient city holding tightly to the past.

On its outskirts, fields planted with aromatic crops stretched for miles, interspersed with the chimneys of hundreds of small-scale brick kilns for which the region is also known. Like the attars, bricks are manufactured in Kannauj today like they were centuries ago—red-clay earth cut from topsoil, then stacked and fired by men whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers cut, stacked, and fired bricks too.

In the crop rows, white jasmine flowers shaped like starfish bloomed in their ocean of waxy dark green. Twiggy trees called gul-hina were blooming too, their tiny flowers clustered into points of white flame. Ordinary on the tree, gul-hina leaves become the extraordinary henna that decorates women’s hands and feet for special occasions, or tints dark hair a spicy red. The tree’s flowers also make a delicate, sweet attar. It can take about 100 pounds of flower petals or herbs, infused into a pound of sandalwood oil—the ideal and purest base for essential oils—to make about one pound of pure attar. Extended families head out in the early mornings or cooler evenings to pick the fragile flowers. They pack their harvest in jute sacks, then rush, before the petals start to wilt, to one of two dozen steam distilleries in the town.

In modern times, Kannauj is also the name of a political district—a sprawling home to more than 1.5 million people. But the old city retains much of its aromatic history; an estimated 40,000 of its 70,000 residents are engaged in the fragrance industry in one way or another. When I arrived, I spotted small houses and perfume shops packed side-by-side on the streets. Colorful one-person Hindu temples were tucked here and there to honor gods. Cows wandered the road, and bicycles loaded perilously high with bundles of incense sticks wobbled by. Stretched across the main road, a brick archway announced the business of Kannauj in Hindi and Urdu: “Perfumes, Scented Tobaccos and Rose Waters.”

Shukla, a man whom colleagues described as a supersmeller (“the nose of all noses,” said one), served as my guide. He was trained in the European perfume industry and has been pained to watch his native country’s attar industry lose market share to modernity. When India opened its economy to foreign trade in the early 1990s, brand-conscious young Indians began turning to French perfumes. For the past decade or so, the industry has survived in part on attar’s popularity as a fragrance for tobacco products. But with many Indian states calling for bans on the cancer-causing materials, reliance on this single market may not be possible in the future.