Nag Champa is unusual among the incenses on this site for being a manufactured compound rather than a single plant, and its modern history is really the story of one ingredient running out and the whole formula changing to cope.
The traditional blend combines sandalwood, the champak flower, Magnolia champaca, and halmaddi, a soft resin tapped from the tree Ailanthus triphysa, whose oleoresin gave older Nag Champa its distinctive soft, honeyed quality. Supplies of halmaddi have collapsed in recent decades from overtapping, and many modern producers have quietly reformulated their blends around synthetic fixatives while keeping the same name on the box, so that "Nag Champa" today can mean a noticeably different smell depending on when and where it was made.
The style's global fame traces to a specific source rather than a diffuse Indian tradition: Bangalore-produced brands sold from the 1960s onward, most famously the formulation associated with the Sathya Sai Baba ashram, spread abroad alongside the broader wave of Indian ashram and meditation movements that reached Western counterculture in that period.
That single, traceable origin is why Nag Champa reads differently from every other incense here: it is not an ancient material read through many traditions, but one twentieth-century South Indian manufactured product that became, almost by accident of timing, one of the most recognisable incense smells in the West.