Every day as dusk settles over the subcontinent, an estimated 70 million Indians reach for the bottle to partake of their regular quota of a few burra pegs.
Many of them gather for the relaxing evening ritual in bars, clubs and restaurants dotted across virtually every small town and metropolis in the country.
One survey has suggested that as many as 30 to 35 per cent of adult men and five per cent of women in India are regular drinkers. Not surprisingly, India has emerged as one of the largest producers of liquor in the world.
This would have been unthinkable even a couple of centuries ago. Indians did not frequent bars or clubs, leave alone bring liquor home; alcohol was taboo for most middle-class Muslims and Hindus. The peasants and the aristocracy, however, had a long history of alcohol consumption and most historians today agree that the first form of alcohol (toddy) was an Indian invention.
An English seafarer, Captain W. Symson, travelling to India in the early 18th century, was intrigued by the variety of liquor produced and drunk in India. He observed that arrack could be distilled from palm toddy, from fermented rice or from fermented jaggery mixed with water in which the bark of the babool tree had been soaked.
The last kind, he claimed was known as “Jagre Arrack” and was as “hot as brandy and drunk in drams by Europeans.” Toddy, he explained, was “the liquor that runs from the coconut tree without any other mixture” and “affects the head as much as English beer. In the morning it is laxative and in the evening astringent.”
While some Indians clearly consumed liquor throughout the ages, there can be no denying that the drinking habit as Indians practice it today is a singular gift of the British Raj. The story of how the British introduced the European liquor to India can be gleaned from two not so well-known books published in the UK: Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer that Built the British Empire (2009) by Pete Brown and The Raj at Table (1994) by David Burton.
While their books are not focused on the history of liquor in India per se, many passages from their books are devoted to the subject.
Liquor for the European has traditionally not just been integral to their lifestyles but also to their diet.
In India, the need to drink was augmented by the intense loneliness of the Europeans, who first came as traders holed up in dreary, isolated posts with little hope of seeing their home country in the near future.
The East India Company not just encouraged drinking but also provided prodigious quantities of liquor for its employees stationed in India. This led to much intemperate behaviour.
“Thus in turbulent Bombay, we find John Lock being suspended from the Council in 1701 for striking Sir Nicholas Waite and refusing to apologise, and the absence of another member, Benjamin Morse, from the Council, was explained on the ground that his intellect was disordered by liquor and that he was ‘unfit for virtuous conversation.’ Later this same reverend senior caused further scandal by getting drunk in another senior’s room and finally breaking his head with a bottle.”
Captain Symson remarked on the heavy drinking by a lot of Europeans, who “lose their lives by the immoderate use of these tempting liquors with which when once inflamed, they become so restless that no place is cool enough and therefore they lie down on the ground all night which occasions their being snatched away in a very short time. The best remedy after hard drinking is to keep a close and convenient covering.”
William Hickey, a rake who penned his astounding memoirs, has left behind many an account of binge drinking in 18th century Calcutta.
“The dinners and balls were endless,” writes Pete Brown. “People would drink in groups in each other’s houses first, arriving late in loud, dishevelled groups, battered and bruised by their short journey, blaming potholes and bad lighting. Hickey once turned up at a ball with the skin scraped away from one side of his face, but still proceeded to be the life and soul of the party...When dessert had been served and a few loyal healths drunk, the ladies withdrew and the gentlemen sat down to the serious business of disposing of three bottles of claret each. It would have seemed oddly unsocial for a gentleman to drink less when, as a Mrs Fay wrote, ‘every lady (even your humble servant) drinks at least a bottle’. The men would demonstrate their drinking prowess by piling up empty bottles in front of them.”
“Not even the clergy could be relied upon to set an example,” writes Burton.
“The diarist William Hickey tells of the Army chaplain Blunt: This incomprehensible young man got abominably drunk and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs, so as to render himself a common laughing stock.”
The Raj sobered as the 18th century wore on and the need to dilute liquor was increasingly appreciated. The world’s first soda or carbonated water plant was opened in 1783 in Geneva by German-born naturalised Swiss watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe, who subsequently moved his business to London where soda quickly became hugely popular.
English merchants were shipping soda water in porcelain jars to Calcutta as early as in 1812 according to an account in Good Old Days of John Company. Soda water’s popularity in the initial days was due to the belief that it was more salubrious than local water, which tended to be horribly contaminated. It was probably mixed with arrack to produce a more palatable, safer and perhaps cooler drink more suited to the Indian climate.
At around the same time, French brandy started gaining in popularity, especially among the Raj upper class. According to Burton, the “age of brandy succeeded that of beer, accounting for the introduction of soda water to India. First manufactured in Futtygurh about 1835, by the mid-1840s soda water was to be found in every British household. Servants knew it as billayati-pani or English water. Brandy and soda ruled supreme until the 1870s, when the devastation of France’s vineyards by phylloxera resulted in a scarcity of brandy. This coincided with the mass-marketing of blended Scotch whiskies, and so whisky supplanted brandy as the favourite drink of the Raj. Contrary to the English practice of just adding a dash of soda to whisky, in India the whisky was well diluted.”
Soda water’s popularity has greatly declined in the UK but not in India where it is still the preferred additive to whisky and other drinks. Almost every grocery outlet in the country sells soda water along with other aerated drinks. Millions of bottles of all kinds of whiskies, ranging from those made from industrial alcohol to imported single malts, are annually bought by eager Indian imbibers.
Few of them would, however, know that all this would never have been possible but for the British determination to replicate their drinking habits to the furthest corners of the Raj.