Shroff Channabasappa Suganda Bathi

 

Two stick sample from Padma Store in Germany - the name roughly means scented light or incense stick. The paper bag has had to be wrapped in cling film - presumably because it was absorbing so much of the fragrant oils that had been used in the stick. 

I like this incense. It's rich and fragrant, with a sweet, heady floral bouquet.  Quite fresh with notes of rose and gardenia - creamy, zesty, little touches of spice to keep the interest and stop it becoming cloying. The stick has a dry, crumbly charcoal paste hand-rolled quite well onto a roughly cut bamboo splint dyed pink, and then finished with a wood powder (melnoorva). It smells very Indian - Indian incense. A sort of typical, ah, yes, that's Indian incense. And there's some prickly warm wool there as well, so a bit of halmaddi. The scent is mainly floral. 

 

I was unsure about the name, as I have seen it written various ways, Shroff, Channabasappa, Shroff Channabasappa & Sons, Channabasappa Company, etc. I looked into it, and it appeared to me that the family had diverged, with one side (Shroff) dealing with the incense making and the other side  (Channabasappa) dealing with the retail, so I asked, and Prathik Shroff confirmed: "To your question, yes, it’s two sides of the same coin. Channabasappa & Co is our official trade name and Shroff is our family name and we decided to keep that name as we have for the past 100 years or more."  The family have their shop on Avenue Road in Bangalore - this is a busy retail street with numerous  other incense families making and/or selling incense as they have done for around a hundred years. 

Avenue Road in 2021, three doors down 

from the Shroff  shop

The company was founded in 1882 by Shroff Channabasappa. They sold incense to the Maharaja of Mysore (Mysore was the original name of the state of Karnataka), and they had a stand at the 1930 British Industries Fair in Olympia. In 1949 they were one of the founding members of the All India Agarbathi Manufacturers’ Association, along with other leading Mysore/Karnataka incense companies. Mysore is the region where incense with a bamboo stick was first developed, and the Mysore manufacturers T.l Updhayay and Attar Khasim Sahib  had displayed this idea at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, so the Shroff Channabasappa family were well placed in the region that was at the heart of the early development of modern Indian incense.  

  

The Shroff family stand at the 
1930 British Industries Fair in Olympia

The company still use some of the original, secret family recipes (some of the recipes were stolen in a data breach,  so clones may turn up), though are also keen to develop new recipes to expand the range, and to utilise some of the positives of new technology, particularly to use high-quality man-made fragrances to replace the original raw materials which are no longer readily available, in order to keep some of the old recipes alive. Some of  Shroff's original recipes can contain up to 20 fragrances, a number of which are rare and valuable, and so quite costly. 


The scent on the burn is gorgeously bright and floral, living up to the promise on the stick. It is driven by the fragrance oils (which are possibly a blend of traditional and modern, as there is a bright, clean, modern feel running on top of an earthier floral note), though some of the heavier, woody, herbal notes of the powdered masala are present underneath, grounding the playful florals. 

I like this. It's a happy, rich scent - the sort I like. And I like the history and background of Shroff's story. I do like knowing who makes the incense - it makes it more real for me.  

Shroff can be bought from EssenceOfTheAges in the US, and Padma or Raeucherwelt in Europe. 


Date: March 2022   Score: 43 

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Shroff Incense

Reviewed on Rauchfahne