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Farm | In Depth

Jasmine’s journey: From the fields of Madurai to French luxury perfume

The Madurai jasmine is the best in the world. It ends up in your favourite luxury perfumes like Dior, Guerlain and Tom Ford. Here’s how.

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Seethapuram is a small, squalid village home largely to Telugu-speaking Naickers, at the foot of the Western Ghats, some 50km northwest of Madurai. Overnight showers, unseasonal in late March, make it hard to see puddles from open sewers in the darkness of 3am.

The village is not just stirring; its people are out and about.

Chinnaraman, 54, and his wife Murugayi, 48, are both dressed in sky-blue half-sleeved shirts. She wears hers over a sari, and he adds a grey flannel jacket on top. They are ready to leave for their farm, a ten-minute ride over undulating terrain on a grunting 100cc bike.

A multicoloured rooster, perched on a moringa branch outside their newly built home painted in grape purple with psychedelic ceramic tiles, has timed its crow to match their routine.
Walking briskly along slippery grass bunds, barefoot, they switch on the heavy-duty lamps strapped to their foreheads. The first order of business is harvesting roses.
Two fingers—index and thumb—a twist and snap. Snap, snap, snap. After an hour and about two thousand flowers, it’s time to move on to the jasmines in an adjoining section of their three-acre land.

The night bloom
Harvesting jasmine, or specifically, jasmine sambac, commonly known as Madurai malli, requires the same two fingers but no snap. Pffff, pfff, pfff… a hoovering sound only audible to the fingers. The jasmine buds are far more numerous and more delicate than roses. They go into the sari and lungi pouches like a kangaroo’s marsupium. There is no time to catch a breath or engage in small talk. In the darkness dotted by headlamps, they need to be alert to the rustle of insects and even snakes. This being hardcore Ilaiyaraaja country, his music blasts through PA systems of distant temples celebrating all-night fests. Humming along is the only form of distraction.

In the crimson gauze of dawn, when moonlight and the headlamps are in a gentle tussle, the closest flat-top hill, blue-black and covered in a tablecloth of cloud, comes into view first. This truel-de-lux of natural and artificial sources makes the jasmines, springing forth from the red soil, seem like stars in an upside-down sky. The pink roses glint like rubies, and the pale yellow chrysanthemums glow, positively neon. The cattle egrets start swooping to the ground, their flight elegant, keeping time with the peacocks’ vuvuzela-cry. The couple’s farm of flowers, in that moment, is as fetching as their village is bleak.

A race against time

By 7.30am, when the magic of light and sound has faded and the heat draws sweat from every pore, Chinnaraman and Murugayi have collected two kilos of jasmine. If Chinnaraman can reach the wholesale market in Nilakottai, six kilometers away, by 8am, the flowers will command the day’s peak price of ₹350–400 per kilo, earning a handy ₹800 for their first shift.

This is where the world’s best jasmine, the Madurai malli, grows. And this is the kind of backbreaking work that gets it to travel the world.
It can reach the local temples for puja throughout the day. It can rest around the neck of stone statues that are worshipped, be strung into garlands and the strings that women wear. It can catch the afternoon flight to cities like Mumbai and Delhi, even Dubai, Singapore or San Francisco, where it’s coveted by the Indian diaspora. It might even end up in a bottle of super-luxury perfume that the world’s rich and famous are happy to splurge on.

Ancient roots
“Jasmine and rose are the king and queen of any luxury perfume with floral notes you can think of. And the jasmine sambac, or Madurai malli, is the soul of any high-end floral perfume made by brands such as Dior, Guerlain or Tom Ford,” says Raja Palaniswami, the founder and director of Jasmine Concrete, the largest floral extraction firm in India based in Madurai.

Of the nearly 200 species of jasmine, some 90 grow in India. The most prized among them is jasmine sambac, known globally as Arabian jasmine—a somewhat misleading moniker since it is native to India and this is where it is grown on the biggest commercial scale. Besides Madurai, it is cultivated in other parts of Tamil Nadu, the Mysuru region, Andhra Pradesh and even Bengal and the northeast.

Madurai is one of the most ancient cities in India, the literary and cultural heart of Tamil civilization. During the Tamil Sangam era—estimated from around 300 BCE to 300 CE—Madurai served as the epicenter for academies of poets and scholars that nurtured classical Tamil literature and language. The city’s ancient Meenakshi Temple and the legend of the divine wedding of Meenakshi and Shiva’s most enchanting form, Sundareshwara, are inextricably linked to Tamil culture.
A Sangam Tamil poem recounts the generosity of a local chieftain, Pari, who could not bear to see a delicate jasmine creeper lying on the hard forest floor. He gifted his royal chariot to the plant so it could twine itself around the wheels and rest more comfortably.

Bold and heady
Modern Madurai is a pulsating city, loud and proud in every way. Its festivals are boisterous, its food bursts with big flavors, and even the banners announcing weddings or mundane ceremonies like ear-piercing are larger than life. Madurai’s influence on Tamil culture is so outsized that it can verily be called the Punjab of Tamil Nadu.

The jasmine sambac, or Madurai malli, is no different. This tiny milky-white flower, no larger than a thumbnail, has 8–12 petals and grows on an evergreen shrub that reaches three feet in height and can last 7–10 years.
Madurai’s red laterite soil, rich in sulfur and a climate that is hot and humid for much of the year, produces a jasmine whose fragrance is bold, heady, and intense, untouched by nuance. It carries no citrusy tang, no woody or spicy warmth—only pure, unadulterated floral power. In the company of this jasmine, it is always a glorious day or the darkest night. It can take you to the peaks of amorous passion, or into the depths of devotion.

A personal connection
The sight and smell of jasmine fill me with pleasure. I can’t quite explain why—perhaps it’s the intensity that lodges itself permanently in the nostrils—but it evokes vivid, sunken memories. Having spent part of my childhood and all of my adolescence in Chennai, jasmine remains the scent of a warm place I call home. About 25 years ago, as a struggling, homesick journalist getting by on a shoestring in Delhi, I would always save at least ₹10 to buy a small string of jasmine as I walked back to my depressing tenement in the erstwhile Tamil ghetto of Munirka. I placed it around a tiny laminated picture of Ranganatha. By the time the stove—less efficient than a Bunsen burner—produced a hot one-pot meal, the flowers, accompanied by Ilaiyaraaja or Carnatic music, would take me on a journey to the banks of the Kaveri in Srirangam via Chennai. In those moments, life felt worth the struggle—and sometimes even beautiful.

“Such a small thing can be so iconic of so many bigger things: love, beauty, and purity. Of course, it is the favorite flower of Goddess Meenakshi, which was partly responsible for luring her husband, Shiva. But when a man meets his beloved, the most precious thing he can offer is a potlam—a small packet—of malli,” says Uma Kannan, a PhD in social and cultural anthropology who has spent years researching the flower and even written a book on it. Uma is married into one of the richest business families in South India, firmly rooted in Madurai. Her father-in-law, Karumuttu Thiagaraja Chettiar was a staunch nationalist during the British Raj. He founded swadeshi businesses spanning textile mills to banking, alongside educational institutions and philanthropies. Recognizing Uma’s love for jasmine, her husband Kannan Thiagarajan gifted her not a potlam, but a jasmine extraction business.

“He kept it a secret and told me only six or seven months before the factory became operational. He said it was for me to run, but he passed away in 2023 before it was inaugurated,” says Uma, clad in a pink silk sari at her Madurai family home with enough Chola bronze statues to make many Indian museums feel inadequate.

The French connection
While Madurai has been synonymous with jasmine for centuries, the French luxury perfume industry discovered it only recently. In 1989, Jean-Paul Guerlain, a fourth-generation master perfumer at the 200-year-old luxury firm (now owned by the LVMH Group), used Madurai jasmine to create a perfume called Samsara. Its success made every fragrance manufacturer seek out this precious sambac.
Thierry Wasser, the Swiss master perfumer and “nose” of Guerlain since 2008, has created perfumes like Dior’s Addict and Guerlain’s L’Homme Idéal. He was bowled over by the Madurai jasmine and now makes an annual visit to the region—not just to check on the quality of the flowers and the sustainability of the farmers, but also for inspiration.

“I wasn’t really acquainted with jasmine sambac much before. When I saw how people here used it—religious rituals, weddings, and celebrations—I suddenly understood the power of this flower. It stands for a celebration of love, friendship, brotherhood, and even your most secret hopes to the Gods,” says Wasser, waxing lyrical about Madurai jasmine, his dramatic Gallic gestures matching his words.

The variety of jasmine called grandiflorum, called jathi malli in Tamil, with buds that are spear-shaped and a pink tint, was grown in the southern France region around Grasse bordering Italy. Along with rose, it had been a staple in floral fragrances.
“Since Europe is cold, people used a lot of leather goods like gloves and jackets, and it doesn’t have a pleasing smell. The French found that they could mask the smell of leather by macerating it with the jasmine grandiflorum flowers readily available there. That’s when they realized they could make extractions from it,” says Raja Palaniswami.
When production of flowers in France became too expensive, the perfume companies looked elsewhere—initially to places closer to home such as Morocco and Egypt.
That’s when they discovered India grew grandiflorum in abundance. “But in India they got swept away by the power of jasmine sambac. Which is why it is the rock star among flowers today,” says Palaniswami, whose firm supplies jasmine and other floral extracts to luxury perfumers.

The jasmine season begins in March with the onset of summer and lasts until October. When the bushes fully mature in three years, farmers can harvest up to 4–6 tons of jasmine from an acre every season.
The early morning’s first harvest usually fetches farmers up to ₹450/kg while in the main city markets like Mattuthavani in Madurai, standing cheek-by-jowl to the primary bus stand, it can sell for ₹500–600/kg. But the harvesting continues through the day. Only the buds are plucked so that they can blossom en route without losing fragrance. The afternoon harvest finds its way to the numerous fragrance factories in the region. Companies like Palaniswami’s Jasmine Concrete pick it up at the farmgate at ₹300/kg. Although lower, it’s an insurance against price fluctuations in the open market.

Maria Velankanni, 48, is a farmer who looks many years younger, with a thick crop of hair, wearing a blue shirt and a matching lungi, in Kamalapuram, a village 50km from Madurai. Unmarried, he likes to think of his land and crops as family. “The jasmine grows well in our land because of the red soil and the heat. The heat gives it a unique smell. The Madurai jasmine is much thicker than other varieties. It can withstand long journeys to other parts of India and overseas even,” he says. Velankanni now prefers to sell to extraction companies for a fixed rate instead of making the daily dash to wholesale markets.

The fragrance extraction factories come to life after sundown. Tonnes of jasmine in wet jute sacks start arriving in mini-trucks by 8pm. The buds are dried and let bloom in large sheltered yards, spread out by a combination of feet and rakes. Once the moisture content is down, the flowers are loaded onto what seem like giant idli plates in a steamer and sent into the extractor. There they are subjected to hexane, a highly combustible, colorless hydrocarbon in liquid form, that can trap the aromatic molecules of jasmine. After the hexane is evaporated, a waxy substance called “concrete” remains. After this treatment, the “spent” jasmine flowers smell no different from tomato residue post pulp extraction.

The waxy concrete is then washed with alcohol to produce the liquid gold called jasmine absolute, which can be stored for decades. It is the most concentrated version of jasmine’s flavours. It takes 1,000 kg of jasmine to produce a litre of absolute. Raja Palaniswami’s factory in Madurai can produce 120 kilolitres of jasmine extract a day. A 100ml bottle of perfume needs as little as 1ml of this absolute. Lighter products like eau de toilette need even less. Applying a tiny drop of jasmine absolute directly on the skin might leave you with burns, not to mention, making you smell like a string of flowers for a few weeks.

However, jasmine farming has its unique challenges beyond the flower’s extremely perishable nature—its value and fragrance fall by the minute after it is harvested. Jasmine needs more pesticides than even vegetables. “We need to spray the field every four days and each spray costs ₹4,000,” says Ravindran, 27, an industrial engineer who works as a supervisor at a jasmine factory at night and helps his father Chinnaraman in the fields by day. Between 3pm and 5pm, the jasmine fields bring the deafening roar of diesel-powered pesticide sprayers; the sweetness of jasmine is doused by the acrid, metallic smell of engine fumes.

R Moorthy, 34, a tall sinewy farmer in Kamalapuram, gave up on jasmine some years ago. The high cost of cultivation was getting out of hand, and heavy doses of pesticides and fertilizers were wrecking his soil.
“A few years ago, I started attending programmes conducted by government and private jasmine factory agri-experts. There I discovered that it was possible to grow jasmine using natural inputs without chemicals. Now I grow it on a quarter acre in a fully natural way. The yields are fine, I get more money per kilo and more importantly, the soil has regained its health,” he says, showing his farm around wearing a pair of flip-flops, a printed blue shirt and an ochre veshti that matches the color of the land.

The lure of jasmine for the farmers, despite all the odds, is understandable. Unlike crops like rice or pulses, it brings valuable everyday income. Farmers such as Chinnaraman, for instance, can make a profit of up to ₹600,000 a year, especially with rising demand from perfume factories around.

Being part of an international supply chain brings some benefits.
“Customers and investors globally are asking companies like LVMH questions on traceability and sustainability of their products. There is the realization that if we don’t do things right today, there may not be a tomorrow,” says Palaniswami. Of the 2,500 farmers his company deals with directly, around 700 have been introduced to practices that minimize or even shun the use of chemicals.

For Thierry Wasser, a trained botanist, buying ingredients for his perfumes is a human adventure.
“You don’t buy jasmine, vetiver or rose from the market. You buy it from people. It’s a connection with life. The health of the people, the soil and biodiversity itself is of fundamental importance,” he says.

Meenakshi of Madurai may not disagree.