Sal Dhuna: How Jharkhand's Ritual Resin Is Collected

You know the smell before you know the name. Someone drops a pinch of something pale and lumpy onto a coal, and for about four seconds nothing happens — then the smoke arrives all at once, thick and white and faintly sweet, and fills the room from the floor upward. In our part of Jharkhand that lump is called dhuna. Elsewhere it is jhuna, or raal, or sold in a paper packet simply as dhoop.

It is not made in a factory. It is the resin of a tree, and it comes off the trunk by hand, in the forest, mostly in the months after the rains.

The tree everything comes from

The sal — Shorea robusta, sakhua to most people here — is the tree the Chhotanagpur plateau is built around. Straight trunk, thick corky bark, big leathery leaves that go coppery before they drop. Sal forest covers a great deal of Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and the Bengal duars, and the tree gets used down to the last part of itself.

The leaves are stitched into the disposable plates and bowls that every village feast in eastern India is served on. The seeds are collected off the forest floor and pressed for fat. The timber goes into beams and sleepers. And the resin — the thing that oozes when the bark is wounded — is what gets burned in front of a deity.

That resin has more names than any material should. In the trade it turns up as sal dammar, Bengal dammar or Indian dammar. In classical Sanskrit sources it is sarjarasa. In a Ranchi shop you ask for dhuna and nobody blinks.

The cut

A tapper works with a small axe or a heavy knife and picks a mature tree. The outer bark is pried away in a rough rectangle, roughly a hand's span across — studies of the practice among tribal collectors in Odisha describe patches of about 15 by 20 centimetres — so that the resin ducts underneath are opened.

Then you leave it alone.

That is the part people never picture. There is no bucket, no tap, no spile. The tree bleeds slowly down its own trunk and the exudate stiffens where it lands, in pale drips and crusts that look like candle wax left out in the rain. Days later the collector comes back and scrapes the hardened resin off with the same knife, into a basket, and moves on to the next tree.

A mature sal will give somewhere between one and two kilograms in a season. Under good tapping conditions, up to four kilos has been recorded. Set against a whole day of walking, that is not much, which is why resin is almost never collected on its own — it is done on the same round as the leaves and the seeds, by the same households, by people who know which trees in which patch are worth the detour.

Among the Hill Kharia in the sal country to our south, the resin season runs roughly September to November. It is not arbitrary. Resin tapped in spring has been found to carry more volatile matter, tannin and phenolic content than resin taken in winter, and a collector will tell you the same thing in plainer language: the same tree gives you different stuff in April than it does in December, and a buyer can smell the difference.

Drying, sorting, and what a bad lot looks like

Fresh scrapings are not saleable. They come in soft and sticky, mixed with flakes of bark, grit and the odd insect, and they have to be spread out and dried until the lumps go hard and rattle against each other.

Then someone sits down and sorts them, which is the slowest part of the whole business.

• Colour is the first sort. The cleanest resin runs pale — cream, ivory, almost white. Darker brown and greenish lumps are older, or picked up off the ground, or full of bark.
• Grit is the killer. Resin that has fallen and been scooped up off the forest floor carries sand. Sand does not burn. It sits on the coal and gives you smoke that smells of nothing but hot dust, and one bad handful will make a buyer distrust a whole sack.
• Damp is the other one. Resin put away before it has properly hardened cakes into a single block in storage, and comes out gummy and impossible to portion.

Heat is a nuisance throughout. Sal resin softens easily — which is exactly why it catches so readily on a coal — so anything left in a tin in the sun goes tacky and starts binding into a lump. It is kept in the coolest, darkest corner of the house, and sold in small quantities rather than hoarded.

What it is actually for

The honest answer is: several things, and the ritual use is only one of them. Sal resin has gone into varnishes and paints, into caulking the seams of boats, and it appears in classical Indian materia medica under its Sanskrit name — a fact about the material's history, not a claim about what it does for anybody. An oil traditionally distilled from it is used as a fixative.

But the use that keeps the trade alive is the burner.

You do not light dhuna directly. It needs a bed — a piece of smouldering coconut husk or charcoal, often with a little camphor to get it going — and the resin is sprinkled on top of that, which is precisely what a dhunuchi is built to hold. The Bengali dhunuchi is an earthen cup on a stem, flared wide at the mouth, and during Durga Puja people dance with two or three of them at once to the beat of the dhak, trailing smoke behind them. Across the villages of the plateau the same resin gets burned with far less ceremony: a few coals in a broken pot, carried once around a room.

Dhuna, loban, dhoop: what is actually in the packet

Here is where buyers get misled, and it is worth being blunt about.

Dhuna properly means sal resin. Loban usually means benzoin, from Styrax trees, a different plant family altogether, often sold as sambrani in the south. Frankincense means Boswellia — in India usually Boswellia serrata, the salai tree. Guggul is Commiphora wightii. And a fair amount of what is sold loose in Indian markets as "dhuna" is imported dammar from Southeast Asia.

These do not smell alike. Benzoin is sweet and vanilla-ish; sal dhuna is drier, greener, more plainly resinous; frankincense is sharper, with a citrus-pine edge. When we name one of our own signature fragrances Loban, that is the benzoin-frankincense side of the family and not sal resin — and the distinction matters, because a shopkeeper who uses the words interchangeably will happily sell you whichever lump is cheapest that week.

Who gets paid

Resin belongs to the category the government calls minor forest produce — the non-timber things forest-dwelling households gather and sell. That category matters enormously here. The minimum support price scheme for minor forest produce began with ten items, sal seed and sal leaf among them, and has since been widened to cover dozens; it was rolled out first in the states with Fifth Schedule areas, Jharkhand included.

Sal resin sits more awkwardly. A great deal of it still moves through village traders and weekly haats rather than any procurement counter, which means the person who walked the forest and did the scraping has the least say in the price. That is the real economics behind a small packet of dhoop.

Back to the coal

None of this changes what happens in the room. But the next time the smoke comes up white off the coal, it is worth knowing that the pale lump making it was a wound on a tree somewhere out past Khunti or Simdega, opened deliberately, left to bleed for days, scraped off by hand, dried on a mat, and picked over lump by lump by someone who knew that a little sand in the batch would ruin it.

Almost everything we burn in front of our gods was gathered by somebody. Dhuna just makes it obvious.