What happened to the soft sweetness of sandalwood?

The store-room of Agra Fort has two huge doors that the British rulers dumped there 177 years ago. The folding doors, made of sandalwood, were believed to have been taken to Ghazni in central Afghanistan by Mahmud the Marauder after the destruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat in 1026.

Four years later, Mahmud died and the doors were fixed in his tomb in Ghazni. Nearly eight centuries later, Edward Law, first earl of Ellenborough, issued his famous ‘Proclamation of the Gates’ and ordered the British army to bring back to India the sandalwood gates from the tomb of Ghazni.

The British raiders uprooted the doors and laboriously transported them to Agra Fort in 1842, only to discover they were mere replicas. The doors have been gathering dust in the store-room ever since.

The whereabouts of the original sandalwood doors, stolen almost a millennium ago, are not known and it can only be guessed that they changed many hands in the black antique markets of India and abroad and made rich countless smugglers. In modern times, bandit Veerappan, better known as the ‘sandalwood smuggler’, not only appropriated this most expensive wood in the world to run his jungle empire but also plundered it to near extinction.

Forget about temple doors being made out of the sacred and precious wood today, even a few millilitres of its oil for medicinal purposes are hard to get. Proof of that is the metre-long waiting list of customers at Cauvery, the Karnataka State Handicrafts Development Corporation (KSHDC)-run emporium in New Delhi. Given the severe shortage, it is hard to believe that not long ago, sandalwood was in common use in India for making funeral pyres, especially of the elite.

From Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 to AB Vajpayee 70 years later --in 2018-- all were cremated with sandalwood. However, the quantity of sandalwood used in the pyres reduced from quintals to kilograms, for obvious reasons. According to Andhra Pradesh-based farming project builder Prakruthi Vanam, sandalwood was priced at less than Rs 10 a kg in 1956. Today, the price is Rs 12,000 per kg.

Production of the Indian sandalwood or santalum album, the most prized variety in the world, has plummeted sharply over the last 75 years. In the mid-1940s, India produced 4,000 tonnes of it, but now independent estimates put the figure at a pathetic 20 to 50 tonnes. The world demand for sandalwood, mostly in the form of oil for perfumeries, is about 6,000 tonnes of wood, two-thirds of it for santalum album. Australia has experimented on the cultivation of the Indian variety in preference to the indigenous species, santalum spicatum, but not with much success.

Gnawing void

According to the Bengaluru-based Wood Science and Technology Institute, the Australian sandalwood has only 40% santalol against the Indian variety, which has 90% of it. Traditionally, the world’s perfumeries have depended on India for 90% of the sandalwood oil and it is this market that today reports a gnawing void.

“I tried to set up a situation where I would personally buy sandalwood logs at the auction, escort them up to the distilleries of Uttar Pradesh and stay for the entire distillation. At any price. Despite assurances to the contrary, this proved to be impossible. So, no Indian sandalwood, no attars. Sorry,” wrote an industry man based in New York a few years ago. He said that there was plenty of sandalwood coming from plantations in Australia, usually santalum spicatum, and sustainable, but “nothing really like the lovely warm soft sweetness we know as sandalwood.”

Consumers and experts alike agree that there is no substitute for the wood that is grown in India, particularly in Karnataka. Even within the state, Shivamogga, Sirsi and Sagar are known to produce a high-quality wood that cannot be matched by the other places. So important is the quality of soil, water and air to the tree that with the general environmental degradation having affected all the three, even the sandal growing in these very places has lost some of its scent.

Cauvery’s loyal customers for decades rue that the currently available wood sticks and oil are nowhere near what was available in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Forty years ago, some customers would visit Cauvery just for the scent that permeated the air, be it from pieces of wood, items made out of it and garlands of the wood shavings. Today, most of the sandalwood products, like soaps and talcum, are out of stock and the items that are available do not boast of the same quality.

According to experts, 90% of the forests, an overwhelming 85% of them in Karnataka, have been plundered, and urban dacoits even today sneak out 500 tonnes of wood annually. State control over sandalwood that started in the time of Tipu Sultan was relaxed only in the early years of 2000.

The fact that the sandalwood tree is a very late bloomer — literally requiring generations — does not help the situation. The essential oil develops in the roots and heartwood in 20 to 30 years and full maturity takes 60 to 80 years. The core of the dark heartwood develops gradually, covered by sapwood. When cultivated right, the tree is never felled, only uprooted in the rainy season when the roots are richer in precious oil. Over-exploitation, mafia and regulations have all added up to make the story of sandalwood a sad one. It is a story that is unlikely to change any time soon.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in New Delhi)