A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia

Intoxicating Affairs

Harald Fischer-Tiné,Jana Tschurenev

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317916819
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

At the beginning of the 21st century, alcoholism, transnational drug trafficking and drug addiction constitute major problems in various South Asian countries. The production, circulation and consumption of intoxicating substances created (and responded to) social upheavals in the region and had widespread economic, political and cultural repercussions on an international level. This book looks at the cultural, social, and economic history of intoxicants in South Asia, and analyses the role that alcohol and drugs have played in the region.

The book explores the linkages between changing meanings of intoxicating substances, the making of and contestations over colonial and national regimes of regulation, economics, and practices and experiences of consumption. It shows the development of current meanings of intoxicants in South Asia – in terms of politics, cultural norms and identity formation – and the way in which the history of drugs and alcohol is enmeshed in the history of modern empires and nation states — even in a country in which a staunch teetotaller and active anti-drug crusader like Mohandas Gandhi is presented as the 'father of the nation'.

Primarily a historical analysis, the book also includes perspectives from Modern Indology and Cultural Anthropology and situates developments in South Asia in wider imperial and global contexts. It is of interest to scholars working on the social and cultural history of alcohol and drugs, South Asian Studies and Global History.

Part I

Trajectories: Reconstructing the history of intoxicants in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods

1 Alcohol in pre-modern South Asia

James McHugh

Introduction

There is a very long history of the production and consumption of alcoholic drinks in pre-modern South Asia. In the texts called the Vedas, our earliest surviving textual sources for South Asia, there are references to what is evidently a fermented and intoxicating drink called surā. For later periods, references to intoxicating, alcohol-containing drinks are numerous in many genres. A number of sugars and grains were available in South Asia, and thus from around the turn of the Common Era many varied intoxicating drinks are named, and in many cases described, as being made from wheat, rice, barley, palm sap, sugar cane products, honey, flowers, and fruits, including dates and grapes. Texts on religious law and on statecraft legislate the consumption and sale of these drinks, and medical texts describe the virtues and dangers of intoxicating drinks in some detail. Literary texts in Sanskrit sometimes portray scenes of drunkenness, a state that often has erotic and humorous associations.

Intoxicating drinks were apparently frowned upon in some contexts, yet in others they are presented as acceptable and even useful. The ethical-legal and medical discourses show that the world of intoxicating drinks was socially complex: not all people were socially permitted or physically suited to drink intoxicants, and those who could do so could not always drink the same types of beverage owing to caste restrictions and the varied constitutions of people’s bodies. Thus, as we shall see below, in some texts intoxicating drink is presented as a bad thing, and in others it is praised. While not universally condemned, alcohol was never universally celebrated. Sanskrit texts that discuss alcohol not only display variety in terms of genre and social/sectarian context, but such texts were also produced, expanded, and interpreted over many centuries. We therefore find there to be significant diachronic change in the manner drinks are represented.

In the second millennium CE Muslim rulers and Islamic cultures became increasingly prominent in South Asia. As in the earlier medieval period, the status of alcohol was ambiguous in these contexts because of the prohibition of alcoholic drinks in Islam. As before, disapproval amongst certain clerics by no means led to universal abstinence, and from our sources it seems that many elite and powerful Muslims in South Asia quite openly engaged in drinking alcohol: indeed, the wine cup was endowed with powerful symbolism in Indo-Persian culture. It appears that it was also during this period that the various beers, wines and toddies of early medieval South Asia came to be distilled, producing a stronger product – a type of arrack – than had previously been available.

In this short survey of alcohol in pre-modern South Asia I shall first orient the reader to certain debates and questions that have dominated secondary scholarship. In particular I will examine the question of the history of distillation. I shall then provide an overview of the history of intoxicating drinks in South Asia prior to the presence of Islam in the region, pausing to examine a few genres of texts in a little more detail. Finally, I shall briefly discuss the status of alcohol in Islamic cultures in pre-modern South Asia. The history of alcohol in this region is vast and complex, and much remains to be discovered, translated, and theorized. This chapter is only the very start of a longer project in which I intend to write a far more comprehensive account of this topic.

‘Spirituous liquor’, distillation, and moral judgments

In South Asia, during the period under consideration – approximately the first millennium CE until the mid-second millennium CE – there is no concept of a substance equivalent to our ‘alcohol’ as present in various drinks. Rather, certain drinks are understood to have a potency to intoxicate, a state most commonly designated in Sanskrit by means of various forms derived from the verbal root √mad, which can mean amongst other things ‘to be drunk’ or ‘to be intoxicated’, as well as ‘to be exhilarated’ or ‘to be glad’. The most general term for drinks that create this intoxicated state in people, the term used in legal texts for example, and a term that does not imply any particular ingredient used (such as grains or grape juice), is madya, ‘intoxicating [drink]’. The power of certain drinks to intoxicate is explained as the spontaneous result of combining certain materials. As I shall discuss below, a sort of fermentation starter called kiṇva (also sometimes called surābījam) is sometimes mentioned in the context of making intoxicating drinks, but there was no concept of yeast. Indeed, in many early Indic recipes for grain-based drinks there appear to be no malted grains, so in these cases the starter might have been the sort of dried cakes containing saccharifying moulds, fermentation yeasts, and supplementary herbs one still sees used in the production of rice wines throughout much of Asia.¹

Until around the thirteenth century CE, South Asian sources do not mention distillation of alcoholic drinks. However, scholarly writing on alcohol in pre-modern South Asia is not infrequently characterized by what are arguably anachronistic and loose translations that imply drinks were distilled products, something that is further complicated by the lively debate as to whether distillation was practised at a very early date in South Asia.

In his still commonly used Sanskrit-English dictionary, composed in the late nineteenth century, Monier Williams translates madya as ‘any intoxicating drink, vinous or spirituous liquor, wine’ and he translates a term meaning ‘a jar for madya’ as ‘a vessel for intoxicating liquors, brandy jar’.² Another important late nineteenth-century dictionary, that of Apte, also translates madya as ‘spirituous liquor, wine, any intoxicating drink’. Indeed, Apte even foregrounds the term ‘spirituous’. Thus some readers and translators of Sanskrit texts that mention these drinks might well be tempted to think they were reading about a distilled drink at all times and in all places.

The reasons why these scholars translated these Sanskrit words with English terms that suggest distilled drinks are a worthy subject for study. I would tentatively suggest that for traditional scholars educated in Sanskrit in India in the nineteenth century, madya and other words for intoxicants might well have referred to distilled drinks, as such drinks were available in India and had been so for many centuries. For example, in what remains perhaps one of the more thorough surveys of Sanskrit texts for references to intoxicating drinks, Rajendralal Mitra in 1873 routinely used the term ‘spirituous drinks’ to refer to very early sources.³ This continues today, and Om Prakash, an authority on food and drink in India, wrote in 1961 that ‘Another beverage of the Vedic period was Surā (intoxicating liquor) which was prepared from fermented barley or wild paddy after distillation.’ ⁴ South Asian scholars of Sanskrit could well have understood madya to cover various distilled arracks for quite a long time, as below we shall see that distilled alcoholic drinks had been recorded as being produced since approximately the thirteenth century CE. So, in Sanskrit texts as composed or as read in the nineteenth century madya might well refer to some sort of arrack, and given the well-established nature of these products and the lack of a detailed history of intoxicants in South Asia, it would seem reasonable for these scholars to understand very early references to madya as referring to such a product.

This tendency to translate terms for intoxicating drinks with English terms that suggest distillation would appear, at least in the nineteenth century, to be a separate issue from the vigorous, and very historically aware, discussion concerning the origins of distillation in South Asia. It appears that we can trace this latter controversy to the publication in 1951 by Sir John Marshall of an illustrated account of archaeological excavations at the ancient city of Taxila, in what is now Pakistan. ⁵ Here, he reported finds of some pottery vessels dating from around a century before or after the turn of the Common Era, which he lists as ‘water-condensers’. About these vessels he says the following: ‘The precise use made of these vessels is not certain, but it seems probable that the condensing was done as shown in the sketch.’ The sketch in question is in the accompanying volume of illustrations. Here three vessels are illustrated both separately and also in a diagram that shows two of them assembled into a still that also utilizes other types of vessels. Notably, Marshall does not mention alcohol, and instead mentions steam distillation, a process that could, of course, have many other applications. It is important to note here that from Marshall’s description it is clear that the three vessels were not all found together in the same area: rather they appear to have been found in different locations of the site and also in different strata.

In 1979 the late F.R. Allchin, an important archaeologist of South Asia, published a paper entitled ‘India: The Ancient Home of Distillation’ in which he considerably expanded Marshall’s theory of such vessels being water condensers.⁶ Allchin notes that over a hundred vessels similar to the still ‘receiver’ were found at another Indo-Greek archaeological site, Shaikhan Dheri, and these vessels could be dated from c. 150 BCE until the end of the occupation of the site in the fourth or fifth century CE. ⁷ He also notes that, since the work of Marshall, other scholars have suggested that his proposed ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge studies in the modern history of Asia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Indian anomalies? – Drink and drugs in the land of Gandhi
• Part I Trajectories: Reconstructing the history of intoxicants in the pre- colonial and early colonial periods
• Part II Cultural encounters: European alcohol and drug consumption in the situation coloniale
• Part III Nationalism and Internationalism: Contested regulatory regimes
• Part IV Postcolonial India: The legacy of prohibitionist politics
• Afterword
• Index