Mysore Sandal Soap

Mysore Sandal Soap is an oval cake of toilet soap, pale buff in colour, perfumed with oil distilled from the heartwood of the Indian sandalwood tree. Its face has a raised rim and carries the soap's name moulded into it. It is sold in a small carton printed in red, cream and green, with roses at the corners and the Sharabha, the elephant-headed lion of Hindu myth that serves as its maker's emblem. In southern India it is an ordinary bath soap, used every day on face and body.

Before the First World War the princely state of Mysore auctioned its sandalwood, most of it to be distilled in Germany. The war closed that trade, and the state began distilling the oil itself, with help from the Indian Institute of Science; a sandalwood oil factory opened in Mysore in 1916, under Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV and his Diwan, M. Visvesvaraya. A soap factory followed in Bangalore. The young chemist S. G. Sastry, sent to London to learn soap-making, took charge of it, and commercial production began in 1918. Sastry is credited with the oval shape and the Sharabha.

The soap sold well. The factory was making 356 tons a year by the mid-1930s, and advertised in the Bombay papers; in 1933 a rival, Godrej, took out a notice protesting at remarks attributed to the Mysore factory's analyst. In 1980 the Government Soap Factory became Karnataka Soaps and Detergents Limited, still owned by the state, and in 2006 the soap received a Geographical Indication, the Indian protection for goods tied to a place.

Sandalwood is now scarce, and the company buys wood at auction in other states to keep the stills supplied. The carton reads "Since 1916", the year of the factories; the soap itself went on sale two years later. It is still the oval sandalwood cake Sastry designed, made in Bangalore and sold in 75, 125 and 150 gram sizes.