Walk into almost any luxury perfume store and you’ll hear the same story: fine fragrance began in France.
But during a session at SP Jain Global with Batch 18 students of the Global Luxury Goods & Services Management (MGLuxM) program, master perfumer Pranav Kapoor challenged that idea in the very first few minutes.
“India was never absent from perfumery. It was just never credited properly,” he said.
Pranav, an eighth generation perfumer from Kannauj, the historic heart of Indian fragrance making spoke about perfumery not as branding or luxury packaging, but as something that begins in soil, weather, and raw material selection long before a bottle is designed.
What surprised many students was how little of perfumery, in his words, actually happens in the bottle.
“The real work is in sourcing,” he explained. “Finding the right flower, the right oil, the right harvest. If that is wrong, everything after it is irrelevant.”
As he spoke, the MGLuxM students were drawn into a less visible side of luxury, one that rarely shows up in advertisements or retail displays. Instead of marketing stories, the focus shifted to ingredients, extraction methods, and generations of inherited knowledge.
He also pointed out a quiet contradiction in the global luxury industry: Indian materials and expertise are deeply embedded in international perfumery, yet Indian creators are often missing from the storytelling around it.
The discussion wasn’t framed as critique alone, but as a shift in mindset; moving from being suppliers of raw materials to authors of fragrance narratives.
For students, the session became less about perfume as a product and more about perfume as memory, geography, and craft. By the end, fragrance no longer felt like something that starts in a store; it began to feel like something that starts in Kannauj, in fields, and in generational knowledge passed down quietly over time.