Guggul

Ask what incense smells like in a Hindu temple and the answer for most of India is guggul, not frankincense. The gum resin of Commiphora wightii, a thorny shrub of the dry western states, is the base of dhoop, the thick compounded incense pressed into cones and sticks or burned loose on charcoal, and it does the job that frankincense does around the Mediterranean.

The plant is a close relative of the myrrh tree, and the resins behave alike: tapped from a cut in the bark, hardening into brittle lumps, burning with a bitter and slightly medicinal smoke. Guggul is sharper and less sweet than frankincense and reads as more astringent.

It is also a major Ayurvedic drug rather than only an aromatic. The classical texts prescribe it for stiff joints, for obesity and for the condition they call ama, and modern pharmacological interest in guggulsterones for cholesterol came directly out of that indication. The Sushruta Samhita treats it at length.

The plant is in trouble. Demand for the resin has outrun the shrub's ability to recover from tapping, wild Commiphora wightii is assessed as critically endangered, and a substantial part of what is sold as guggul is now adulterated or is a different Commiphora species altogether. Cultivation exists but the shrub is slow and yields poorly.

Indian incense divides into two forms and confusing them makes the literature hard to follow. Dhoop is the older: a resin, or a paste of resins, gums and powders, burned on charcoal or moulded into a cone that burns on its own. Agarbatti is the stick, in which the aromatic paste is rolled onto a thin bamboo splint, and it is a comparatively recent industrial product.

The bamboo core matters. It is why a stick of agarbatti smells partly of burning bamboo, which is a note the older forms do not have, and why practitioners who care about the material tend to prefer dhoop or a solid stick with no core. Japanese and Tibetan sticks are made without a splint for that reason.

The compounded pastes rest on a binder. Makko, the bark powder of Machilus thunbergii, is standard in Japan and increasingly elsewhere; halmaddi, an oleoresin from Ailanthus triphysa, was the traditional Indian binder and gives the soft honeyed quality that older Nag Champa is remembered for. Halmaddi supply collapsed from overtapping and the substitutions that followed are why the modern product smells different.

The industry is large and largely informal: hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, rolling sticks by hand at piece rates, concentrated in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. It is an offering, a household smell and a rural livelihood at once.