Most jars of honey in a kitchen get treated as an afterthought, something reached for when sugar's run out, stirred into tea without much thought given to it at all. That undersells it rather badly, considering how much work usually goes into a single jar before it ever reaches a shelf.
Older than sweetness
Honey's place in Indian tradition has rarely been just culinary. In parts of Vedic ritual, a mixture called madhuparka— honey blended with curd, ghee and a few other ingredients was traditionally offered as a welcome to an honoured guest, treated as too significant an offering to be reduced to a simple sweetener. In Ayurvedic practice, honey also shows up as one of several substances used as an anupana— a carrier mixed with herbal preparations, chosen partly for how well it was believed to help the body take in whatever it was combined with.
None of this is a claim about what honey does medically that's a separate question, and not one we're equipped to answer on its behalf. But it says something about how it was regarded: not a background sweetener, but an ingredient significant enough to hand to a guest, or blend with medicine.
Where it actually comes from
Honey doesn’t start in a jar. It starts somewhere much wilder.
In parts of the Western Ghats and the Himalayan foothills, people still gather honey from wild cliffs. They climb to reach combs built by Apis dorsata, the giant rock bee, in places where no hive box could ever sit.
Other honey comes from managed apiaries, where beekeepers keep the hives and the bees fly out to feed on whatever is flowering nearby. Sometimes that is a single crop, like mustard. Other times it is a mix of many wildflowers through the season.
That difference matters more than it sounds. Honey drawn largely from one flower tulsi, say, or mustard, or litchi is called monofloral, and tends to carry a distinct, recognisable character from that plant. Honey gathered from a wider mix of flowering sources across a season is multifloral: less predictable from batch to batch, but often closer to what bees actually do when left mostly alone.
A small ritual worth keeping
One old piece of advice worth keeping regardless: in Ayurvedic tradition, honey is generally not added to anything very hot, on the belief that heat changes it in ways that aren't considered desirable. Whatever one makes of that specific reasoning, it results in a nice small ritual either way — stir honey into tea or milk only once it's cooled to warm rather than steaming, and actually taste it, rather than losing it in the heat.
Where Tattvam fits in
We keep two honeys for two different moods. Tulsi Honey leans toward a single dominant source bees foraging mostly on tulsi, carrying a little of that plant's sharper, herbal edge into the jar. Multiflora Honey is the more unpredictable one: whatever a season's mix of wildflowers happened to offer, gathered as it came.
