The press has not stopped.

The press in Sangli has not stopped since 1965. A wooden ghaani, the kind that takes two men to set turning, drawing oil from mustard seed cold and slow. The family bought the press second-hand, rebuilt the bullock harness, and pressed the first batch in a leased shed at the edge of the town. The bottles were glass. The labels were hand-lettered.

Groundnut joined mustard before the end of the decade. The second press was bought new — wood again, never steel — and the shed was extended at the back. The bottling line was three women and a tin funnel. By the late 1970s the labels were printed; the lettering, still in the same hand, was photographed onto plates by a press in Pune.

The 1980s were the truck years. Bharat Oils reached the kirana stores of Kolhapur, Solapur, and Pune; by 1985, Mumbai. The truck was painted with the Bharat wordmark and a red-and-green tricolour rule beneath it — the same rule that lives on the bottles now. Deepam joined the catalogue in 1987, formulated for the daily diya, blended in a separate room from the kitchen oils. That separation has never moved.

The founder’s children joined the press in the early 1990s — three of them, all with engineering degrees, all of whom chose the press anyway. Sesame and coconut came on in 1993 and 1996. The bottling line moved from tin funnels to a small German filler. The ghaanis stayed wooden. Refined oils were already cheaper, already taking shelf space; the family chose to stay cold-pressed. That choice cost a decade of growth and earned the next.

FSSAI compliance, ISO 22000, halal certification — the 2000s were the audit decade. The press did not change; the paperwork around it did. By 2007 the first export shipment left for the UAE — a single pallet of mustard oil bound for an Indian grocer in Sharjah, an order placed by phone from a customer who had moved from Pune the year before. He has been our customer ever since.

The 2010s belonged to the diaspora. Indian families in the Gulf had grown up on Bharat at their parents’ table; now they wanted it at their own. The catalogue went onto Amazon.ae in 2018, and the orders came not in pallets but in single bottles — one family at a time, in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Al Ain. The press in Sangli stayed exactly where it was. The world reached out to it.

The original wooden ghaani still stands at the back of the press, behind the newer line. It is run once a month, on the first Monday, for the family’s own household supply. The mustard for that batch is the year’s first. The seed varieties are the same the press began with. The hands are the third generation.

A Bagason Group house. Pressed since 1965. Unchanged on purpose.