A Hyderabad attar shop that’s served Nizams and politicians alike

At a busy thoroughfare a short distance from where the Charminar rises majestically, tucked between stores selling college textbooks and khada dupattas, an 80 sq ft shop sits unobtrusively, unfazed by the chaos around it. Peek in and its walls glint with shelf after shelf lined with glass bottles, each holding the promise of olfactory delights.

This is Nizam Attar, a store that has been scenting local residents since 1840. Here, friends drop in without a reason (I overheard heated conversations about real estate prices in Hi-tech City), have chats over cups of chai, while customers move in and out with tiny vials of perfume. It’s a sight you’d encounter only in Hyderabad’s old city.

The man behind the counter is its fifth-generation owner, Ghulam Mohammad Fareed, 38, who runs the shop with his family. The business began with their forefather Ghulam Mohammad Ramzan, who travelled from Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, the country’s perfume capital, in the mid 1800s, to serve the Nizams of Hyderabad.

The oldest Ramzan started selling his wares in the Chowk area, since nearby Charminar was already chock-full with shops. His most famous patron was Mahboob Ali Khan, the sixth Nizam and a known connoisseur of attars, for whom Ramzan created a special blend. It came to be called Nizam Durbar and the name stuck so firmly that, as the family tells it, no one else was permitted to sell under the Nizam Attar label. From aristocratic families to Asaduddin Owaisi, Hyderabad’s Member of Parliament, the business still counts many from the old families as its patrons.

Fareed shares that the Nizam Durbar is still made but with a variation; it now blends six flowers, among them rose, jasmine and mogra, alongside three local flowers that have replaced the ones from the original formula since they no longer bloom. The result is a powerful essence that is sold at ₹600 a tola—the old measure still used here, which roughly translates to 10 grams.

For those not in the know, attar is a natural alcohol-free perfume oil made by distilling flowers, herbs, spices or even baked earth into a base of sandalwood oil, which is why it is worn directly on the skin and lingers for hours. All this also makes it slow work. Flowers or herbs go into a copper deg set over a wood fire, and the steam travels through a bamboo pipe into a receiving vessel that holds sandalwood oil. The oil drinks in the fragrance. This is why a true attar is alcohol-free, oily rather than sharp, and the reason it lingers on the skin for hours when a spray-on perfume fades in minutes. A batch can take from a few weeks to months to prepare, depending on the raw material. A kilo of mitti attar, the scent akin to petrichor, is distilled from baked clay and can take two to three months. Ten grams sell for ₹1,200, and they continue to manufacture their scents at their workshop in the Haji Gunj locality of Kannauj.

Then there are the bottles. On the shelves sit glass vessels more than 100 years old, gilded and slender-necked, along with antique leather bottles. A few still hold attars as old as 50 or 60 years and even a century, thick as honey. Like wine, attars only age better with time, and the family has many of those, including an 80-year-old rose version that filled the room with fragrance as soon as the cork was removed.

Attars here are also categorised by weather. The family sorts them into garm (hot), thanda (cold) and barish (monsoons). The garm attars are the warming ones meant for winter: amber, shamama, zafraan, and oudh. The thanda attars cool the body and belong to summer: rose, jasmine, mogra, lavender, kashish, and the shop’s own royal flower blend that includes khus, or vetiver grass, the classic scent for the hottest months. Then comes baarish, when mitti takes over. It is a small system of seasonal etiquette that most perfume counters have long forgotten. “A cooling attar, like rose or khus, is traditionally left off in the cold months, and a warming one is left off in the heat. We also have an attar to ward off colds or fevers during seasonal changes,” adds Fareed.

The shop stocks around 150 natural varieties. They include common ones made from flowers (picked at dawn), ranging from marigold, tuberose and lotus, to specific offerings for connoisseurs, like the classic Jannat-ul Firdaus (made from flowers and whose name translates to ‘highest station in heaven’). Then there is the traditional Mukhallat (meaning ‘mixture’), created by blending existing fragrance notes like rose, saffron, amber, and sandalwood, among others.

The oldest and costliest are oudh and amber, which is built on ambergris, the prized whale secretion that Fareed bluntly calls “whale vomit”. Amber runs to tens of thousands of rupees a tola and oudh to ₹18,000 or so. Shamama, a dark, resinous blend of amber, saffron, and spices, is cooked and matured over time, and that shows in its depth.

Attars also served as medicine. Hakeems once prescribed them to cool a fever or ease a cold, and some still send patients to the shop. Today the bigger business is events, pujas (because natural attars do not use alcohol), and gifting, with orders placed one to two months ahead. The challenge is the market outside—chemical perfumes are cheaper, faster to produce, and easier to find, and younger buyers are drifting toward them.

Asked about the future, Fareed is matter-of-fact: “We will exist as long as we are meant to be. Yes, business is down, as most youngsters don’t understand the significance of attar, but I hope there is a revival soon.” For now, the brothers keep the shelves full and the chai flowing, as their forefathers have done since 1840.