A Tapestry Woven with Fragrance: The Sushyam story
In the heart of India, where the Ganges winds through the fertile plains near Kannauj — a city Westerners once called the "Grasse of India" — a family's devotion to fragrance took root long before anyone thought to write it down. By 1863, the Khattri family of Kannauj — India's ancient perfume capital — were already coaxing attar from flower and root, patience measured in the slow rhythm of the degh and the bhapka.
It was Lala Debi Prasad Khattri, a retired officer of the Provincial Police Service, who gave that inheritance its formal shape. In 1870, with modest capital and no shortage of difficulty, he built the family's manufacturing house in Kannauj under the name Debi Prasad Sunder Lal Khattri. His sons, Lala Sunderlal and Lala Shyamlal Khattri, had already carried the family's trade further still to Kashi, the city of temples and pilgrims, where records place their business running by Samvat 1921, 1865 AD, under the name Sunderlal Shyamlal Khattri. Sunderlal minded the craft at home in Kannauj; Shyamlal carried it into Varanasi's markets — two brothers, two cities, one enterprise bound by a single scent.
Shyam Sunder Bhavan, Kannauj, UP.(Still standing)
(Photo from 1960)
As the business flourished, the mantle passed to the next generation. Lala Khunni Lal, Sunderlal's son, and Lala Siddh Gopal known as Sukkhilal Shyamlal's son, expanded the factory until it drew visitors from across India, simply to watch the old art at work.
As Sukkhilal's son, Lala Baijnath, carried the enterprise forward, its reach widened well beyond Kannauj — field distilleries sprang up for rose in Aligarh, for khas in Bharatpur, for jasmine in Ghazipur, and for kewda in the coastal groves of Ganjam, Odisha. By 1934, its standing was such that the Governor of the United Provinces himself signed a warrant naming the firm official supplier to Government House. Then Baijnath's son, Shri Dwarkanath Tandon, took the helm, and his own vision would change the business's course entirely. Under Dwarkanath's stewardship, the business found the name it still carries: Sushyam — a new chapter, built on an old foundation.
Our Rose field distillation unit
(Photo from 1960)
Today, that same thread runs through Milan Tandon, Dwarkanath's son, and now through Milan's own sons, Madhav and Amogh, carrying the craft into its seventh generation. Seven generations of hands. One continuous scent, unbroken since a retired policeman and his two sons first trusted the fire, the flower, and the patience it takes to capture what cannot be rushed.