The market attracts a multicultural clientele.

Mohamed Khan was just 12 years old when he started helping out with his grandfather’s perfumery stall.

“But I could recognise a scent a long time before that,” he says. “I grew up with flowers up my nostrils!”

Now 23, Khan runs stall 241 of Mysore’s famous Devaraja market, selling perfumed oils to both tourists and locals.

An indirect offshoot of the south Indian city’s renowned trade in flowers – garlands of Mysore jasmine tens of metres long are standard fare – the perfumed oil business has taken off here in recent years.

Perfume sellers jostle for space and attention within the crowded marketplace and a casually strolling shop assistant is always round the corner, enticing beguiling tourists with the promise of smelling “like Dolce and Gabbana for very cheap”.

But if Mysore has become a city of scents, much of the merit belongs to Khan’s grandfather Shantha, who back in 1941 thought of crushing some flowers and selling the resultant oil.

“He was the first oil seller in Mysore,” Khan boasts, “and his business is still going strong, 70 years later”.

Going strong is something of an understatement. Starting with a little bench as a marketplace stall, Shantha’s extended family run two award-winning perfumed oil market stalls to regularly export tens of kilograms of their oils and have an incense factory, which ships thousands of kilograms of sticks around India each month.

Years of daily interaction mean Khan can also get by in Italian, Spanish and Hebrew. Just don’t test his Maltese

All of it remains family-run. The grandfather has now moved into semi-retirement, with his sons and grandsons taking over the business reins in his stead. Khan and his brother Suhail, 19, run one market shop; two cousins run the other.

The variety of scents available at Khan’s store is enough to induce choice paralysis in the most headstrong of customers.

One uncle oversees the market selling, while another focuses on closing export deals. Many of the women work at the incense factory, hand-rolling incense sticks by combining scented powders with gum and water.

The variety of scents available at Khan’s store is enough to induce choice paralysis in the most headstrong of customers. Classic smells, such as musk and jasmine, line up alongside less recognised scents (Himalaya flower anyone?) and imitations of high-street classics (10 points for guessing what Cool Water or Kenzo Flower resemble).

Oils for these imitation perfumes are actually manufactured in Mumbai using Mysore flowers, and then re-imported into the city to be sold by vendors, such as Khan. But more traditional scents, such as Kerala flower and amber, are entirely homemade, with flowers distilled in local villages through crushing, boiling or steaming.

The resultant oil is several times more potent than the alcohol-diffused colognes one buys off the shelves – something Khan is understandably keen to point out.

“All you need is a single drop of oil to last you the entire day,” he says, claiming that a 10ml bottle of oil will last 10 weeks if used daily.

Foreign customers certainly seem convinced. The walls of Khan’s stall are lined with battered, hardbound copybooks with country names – France, US, Belgium, Japan – scribbled onto their spines. The copybooks are filled with testimonials and photos of grinning customers clutching perfume bottles.

“Look,” Khan says as he pulls a dog-eared folder from the top shelf. “This is my grandfather.”

He points to a weathered photograph. In the middle sits a bell-bottomed Indian man, his white shirt tight across his torso.

To his left and right are a variety of Caucasian men and women dressed in tie-dye fabrics, their braided hair and beards an indicator of the date scribbled onto the top right of the photo: 1968.

“Hippie tourists from Germany and France,” beams Khan. “This photo was taken right here, outside this shop.”

There might be slightly less tie-dye around these days, but there’s certainly no shortage of Europeans milling around Mysore’s streets. The city lost its title as the capital of Karnataka state around the same time that Shantha was opening his perfumery business, but it’s hard to see that blow as anything other than a blessing in disguise.

While brash, young Bangalore has exploded into a traffic-choked IT metropolis of a capital, Mysore has gradually blossomed into Karnataka’s cultural hub, with clean, paved streets and large, green parks neatly contrasting with the energy and colour of markets such as Devaraja.

Many foreigners come to Mysore on student visas and enlist at one of the city’s renowned yoga centres. Others come with huge orders of sandalwood incense and perfumed oils such as Khan’s, which they then ship back to the West and sell for a profit.

“Most of my customers are French,” Khan says, and just at that moment, a French-speaking couple wander past his stall.

“Bonjour, mes amis...” he begins. Within 20 seconds, he is joking with them in fluent French. A minute later, they have agreed to sample his oils. It takes Khan roughly 10 minutes to sell them a box of assorted scented oils and, as he pockets the 1,700 rupees (€18) he has just made, he returns to me.

“I learnt to speak French by chatting to tourists, but don’t ask me to read or write it,” he explains.

Years of daily interaction mean Khan can also get by in Italian, Spanish and Hebrew. Just don’t test his Maltese.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of Malta,” he candidly admits, “but, inshallah, it will not be the last.”

There is enough time for Khan to show off photos of his grandfather with the mayor of Mysore – their stalls have been voted Mysore’s best perfumed oil multiple times – before a handshake and a goodbye.

“Who knows, perhaps the next time you visit, there will be a copybook called Malta on that shelf,” he jokes.

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