Opinion What Prada doesn’t get about the smell of chai
In India, chai is social infrastructure. It appears at railway platforms before dawn, in office corners between deadlines, outside hospitals and factories and in college canteens where arguments stretch across hours.
The perfume, called Infusion de Santal Chai, joins Prada’s Les Infusions collection Earlier this year, Prada launched Infusion de Santal Chai, a fragrance that blends sandalwood with what it calls notes of “chai latte” — a phrasing that already performs translation to make the drink recognisable for a Western audience. Edibles have long travelled into perfumery — cacao, fruits, vanilla and tobacco are staples of the form. What is curious is the choice of chai, a drink so ubiquitous that its meaning cannot be located in flavour alone. Bottled up, detached from its context, it becomes a mood piece — warmth without the heat and clangour, comfort without company — and it is in this abstraction that something begins to thin.
In India, chai is social infrastructure. It appears at railway platforms before dawn, in office corners between deadlines, outside hospitals and factories and in college canteens where arguments stretch across hours. But chai tapris are more than sites of transaction. Office ranks loosen, caste and class blur, addas form around them; “chai pe charcha” named a habit before it became campaign strategy. Chai moves easily between celebration and grief — offered to guests almost instinctively, poured again when words run out. It is the background hum that allows social life to cohere.
This ordinariness has a history, though not one that confers prestige. Tea entered India through colonial policy in the 19th century, when the British cultivated Assam varietals to undercut China’s monopoly. The milky, spiced chai emerged later, and it survived because it was caloric, cheap and adaptable. Gandhi famously objected to tea consumption yet chai prevailed precisely because it answered everyday needs. Reduce chai to an aesthetic and the loss is not merely cultural colour, it is invisibilisation — a dissolution of social world and informal economies. This is where provenance enters, unevenly. Luxury has become fluent in the language of origin, especially when it comes to products that align with established Western heritage regimes. Wine, cheese and leather arrive with mapped terroirs, protected vocabularies and carefully narrated lineages. Yet, when the source is an everyday practice of the Global South, provenance dissolves, at best, into approximation.
A similar omission surfaced a few months ago, when Prada sent models sashaying down the ramp at Milan Fashion Week in “leather sandals” that closely resembled Kolhapuri chappals. Only after public pushback did Prada acknowledge the source, announcing visits and memoranda of understanding with artisan groups. Chai is too diffused, too collectively held, to submit to a GI tag. But this does not mean its genealogy of use, labour and exchange cannot be acknowledged. What remains necessary is citation, marking a refusal to strip collective life for parts, naming the social worlds that bring a product into existence and the recognition that when context is discarded, what is left to consume is not culture but its absence.
Luxury often claims to refine the ordinary. But chai was never an object in need of refinement. Turn it into a note in a $190 perfume and the true cost becomes visible: What organises social life is reduced to sensation, severed from the conditions that gave it meaning and from the people who sustain it — and whom it sustains.
Ralleigh is an independent writer and co-founder of indicā, Delhi
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