An Unholy Brew
Alcohol in Indian History and Religions
JAMES M c HUGH
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McHugh, James (James Andrew) author.
Title: An unholy brew : alcohol in Indian history and religions / James McHugh. Description: 1. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021027066 (print) | LCCN 2021027067 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199375943 (paperback) | ISBN 9780199375936 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197603031 (epub) | ISBN 9780197603048 | ISBN 9780199375950 Subjects: LCSH: Drinking of alcoholic beverages India. | Alcoholic beverages India. | Alcoholic beverages History. | Drinking of alcoholic beverages Religious aspects. | Drinking of alcoholic beverages History. | Alcoholism Religious aspects. Classification: LCC GT2883.I4 M34 2021 (print) | LCC GT2883.I4 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/30954 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027066
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027067
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199375936.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To Mat
Figures
3.1: Possible image of a surā shop in the Asura realm from the Saṃsāracakra in Cave 17 at Ajanta. 101
© Ajanta Archives of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Research Centre “Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road,” photograph Andreas Stellmacher. I thank Monika Zin for sharing this image with me.
4.1: Couple embracing with a cup, from Cave 3 at Badami, late sixth century. 115
Photo © James McHugh 2014.
4.2: Standing drinking couple, with stumbling woman. Mallikārjuna Temple at Pattadakal, eighth century. 118
Photo © James McHugh 2014.
4.3: Couples drinking with attendants present, Virūpākṣa Temple at Pattadakal, eighth century. 133
Photo © James McHugh 2014.
7.1: Indra appears with the jar before the king in an image of the Kumbha Jātaka From Borobudur, Java. 225
From Krom (1920–1931, vol. 1: Reliefs, Serie 1.(B).a. Plaat VII, image 59). I thank the University of Chicago Library, and especially librarian Laura Ring, for allowing me to take this photo.
8.1: The Goddess Surā/Vāruṇī with nine cups and nine vessels, Kangra 1810–1820 (Losty 2019, 72). She also emerges from the water. Despite the fact that some details such as the lotus, the heads, the freshwater setting are not as in the text, I believe this is quite likely to be Surā. 262
Credit: Steven Kossak, The Kronos Collections. I thank Siddhartha Shah for alerting me to the existence of this image and Kurt Behrendt for helping me obtain this copy and permissions.
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped directly and indirectly with this multifarious project, from scholars to brewers. I am especially sad that my Ph.D. advisor Anne Monius died before the book was finished and I could not share it with her—I raise my glass to Anne.
First, I wish to thank my friend and mentor Stephanie Jamison for all her support and advice over the last few years. The thoughtful anonymous readers of the proposal and draft at Oxford University Press were enormously helpful in bringing some shape and order to what started out as a rather unwieldy project and I am grateful for all their diligent work. The University of Southern California also generously provided an opportunity for two scholars to read the book at a later stage, Patrick Olivelle and Projit Mukharji, whom I thank for their excellent comments and suggestions. I also thank all my colleagues and the graduate students in my department who attended this manuscript discussion event, and who offered many useful suggestions.
I also thank the many people who helped me in various ways in India, listed here roughly in the order I consulted with them: Dr. Shajahan at the Government Ayurveda College, Trivandrum; Dr. Rajagopalan at Kerala University; Mr. Balakrishnan Unni and Mr. Shashi Unni at Vasudeva Vilasam Ayurveda; T. K. Devanarayanan in Thrissur; Mr. V. S. Sunil Kumar, MLA; and Dr. Sivakaran Namboothiri at Sreedhary Ayurvedic Centre. At Sitaram Ayurveda, Kerala: Dr. Sankaranarayanan, Dr. R. Vighnesh Devraj, Dr. V. M. Wilson, and Dr. V. Neelakandan. At Vaidyaratna: Dr. G. Krishnadas. Arshad Faiz in Hyderabad. At the Tribal Museum Bhubaneswar: Baidar Murmu, Dr. Purusottam Pattanail, Mr. Nilamadhaba Kanhar. Mr. Jai Chacko in Mankotta. And John Mathew, Chandrahas Choudhury, Vivek Benegal. Also, Jatin Nayak in Bhubaneswar. In Kolkata: Protima Dutta, Rajarshi Ghose, Gautam Bhadra, Debasish Bose, Santanu Mitra, Arun Nag. At Shaw’s Bar: Gour Chandra Shaw and Shibaji Shaw. Also, Debasis Bose, Abhik Ray, Amritendu Roy, Gautam Bhadra. In Jaipur: Surendra Bothra, Jyoti Kothari, and at Dhanvantari Aushadhalaya, Dr. Vimlesh Sharma, Mr. Vishvabandhu and Thakur Man Singh Kanota. In China several people helped me observe and learn about brewing Shaoxing wine, which helped me think in new ways about large scale surā brewing. I thank my interpreter Mr. Shi Pu, and Mr. Kim whom I thank for all his time and generosity. I also thank all the brewers and guides I met at the following breweries: Guyue Longshan, Yuewangtai, Jianhu, and Kuaijishan.
The following people kindly read all or sections of the book and/or shared their own writing, images, and translations with me: Kurt Behrendt, Erik Braun, Phyllis Granoff, Ludwig Habighorst, Betsey Halpern, Lilian Handlin, Shaman Hatley, Maria Heim, Jiri Jakl, Sonam Kachru, Jesse Knutson, Finn Moore Gerety, Jason Neelis, Eva Schinzel, Gregory Schopen, Harald Wiese, Dominik Wujastyk, Monika Zin, Kenneth Zysk. In the USA, Canada, and Europe I also thank: Daud Ali, Lou Amdur, Vitus Angermeier, Stefan Baums, James Benn, Lisa Bitel, Willem Bollée, Joel Bordeaux, Gudrun Bühnemann, Beatrice Chrystall, Whitney Cox, Christopher Fleming, Rich Freeman, Adam Golab at Bent Water Brewing, Samuel Grimes, Andrea Gutierrez, Eric Gurevitch, Lilian Handlin, Johnna Tyrrell, Frank Korom, Christophe Laudamiel, my liver, James Mallinson, Mark McClish, Patrick McGovern, Arthur McKeown, Deonnie Moodie, Ernie Ocampo (for supplying basi), Nithya Raman, Laura Ring, David Roman, Nicolas Roth, Richard Salomon, Alexis Sanderson, Tom Sapsford, S. R. Sarma, Siddhartha Shah, Oktor Skjaervo, Walter Slaje, Donald Stadtner, Somdev Vasudeva, Linda Wootton, Thomas Zumbroich.
In order to shorten this book, I cut several longer sections to publish as articles, and the basic findings of these articles are now merely sketched in the book. Also, in some other cases my translations in this book also appear in articles, particularly in several articles that are reviews and surveys of the topic of drugs and alcohol in India. I thank all the editors and publishers of these journals for permitting me to reuse those translations, and for letting me briefly summarize my detailed research articles in this book. I also thank all the anonymous peer reviewers at those journals whose comments helped refine the conclusions of this large project as a whole.
Research for this book was supported by the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, as well as by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the American Council of Learned Societies.
At Oxford University Press I thank my editor Cynthia Read for her enormous patience in supporting and guiding this project, and also Rachel Gilman for all her work on the editorial process. Ursula DeYoung (independent editor) did an excellent job of cleaning up a very messy, overwrought manuscript. And Katherine Ulrich did an excellent, thorough job of the final copyedits. In India, Haripriya Ravichandran managed the production process brilliantly.
Finally, I thank my family for all their support over the years: my parents Celia and Damian, and Peter, Cordelia, and Elly. I also thank Mat for sharing drinks over the years.
Introduction
bhabhabhramati kiṃ mahī lalalalambate candramāḥ kṛkṛṣṇa vavada drutaṃ hahahasanti kiṃ vṛṣṇayaḥ |
śiśīdhu mumumuñca me vavavavaktram ity ādikam madaskhalitam ālapan haladharaḥ śriyaṃ vaḥ kriyāt ||
“Why is the earth whiwhiwhirling and why so lolololow the moon?
Krikrishna, tetell me right now why the Vrishnis hohohowl?
Shusugar-wine, lelelet go of my mumumumouth . . .”
May drunk-stammering Balarāma the Plough-bearer grant you blessings.
Puruṣottamadeva1
We should begin the book in a bar. Shaw’s Bar in Kolkata is one of the oldest bars in India, founded by an Indian family in 1872. Housed in a lofty shed from a long-gone market, male-only Shaw’s has marble floors and tabletops, Burmese teak tables, and an army of twenty-six efficient uniformed waiters who serve pegs of whisky and rum as well as bottles of beer to a crowd of politicians, writers, actors, and retired military men, among others. The waiters also dish out small trays of snacks: chickpeas and chopped ginger—the house drinking snack. In 2014 Mr. Gour Chandra Shaw, whose family has been running the bar for four generations, showed me round and proudly related the history and traditions of this institution, where patrons share tables with whoever arrives, and where a varied crowd has enjoyed drink and conversation for well over a century.
Reading the country’s newspapers, though, one might get the impression that much drinking in India consists of mass poisonings. And the various political and social movements to ban or restrict the trade in liquor in South Asia are too numerous and complex to consider here.
When I mention to people in the USA that I’m writing a book about alcohol in pre-modern India, they often ask, “But was there much alcohol in ancient India?”2 Surveys of alcohol use in world histories are not typically much help, unless you’re interested in the origins of Indian Pale Ale. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of books on soma, the “mystery drug” of ancient India.
An Unholy Brew. James McHugh, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199375936.003.0001
Why do so few people know anything of the history of alcohol in India as compared with, say, that of ancient Rome, which many people, at least in Western countries, think of as a drinking culture? First, very few people in Europe and America study early Indian history. And the study of ancient and medieval India in the West is often concerned with matters more conventionally religious, philosophical, and literary. Popular Western interest is typically focused on the religious aspects of premodern India, especially on practices like meditation and yoga, as the shelves of American bookshops demonstrate (which is not in any way to denigrate excellent scholarship on such topics). The Kāmasūtra is an exception, but that text is often presented in a distorted or sensationalized way. Whereas for classical Greece and Rome, earthy social history is common— “courtesans and fishcakes,” brothels in Pompeii, and so on—this sort of history writing about ancient India is relatively rare in Europe and America. Of course there are many exceptions. Gregory Schopen has shown that the lives of monks, nuns, and other Buddhists in ancient India were frequently far more worldly than previous scholars suggested. My agenda here, however, is not to correct previous scholarship on drinking in premodern India; there has been too little work done for that to be needed, and most people have almost no preconceived ideas about the topic, apart, perhaps, from a general awareness that certain groups did not drink. Rather I wish to fill the enormous, often unnoticed, gap in histories of alcohol and drinking where India is concerned. Thus one main aim of this book is simply to collect, translate, and communicate data about drinking in India. Substances that we nowadays call “drugs” are another matter entirely. Western scholarship has often presented India as an exotic land of drug consumption and mystical states, less noteworthy for alcohol than for substances such as soma, cannabis, and opium. So, while drinks are largely absent, drugs are prominent in Western visions of India’s past. Fischer-Tiné and Tschurenev describe this “editing out of the role of drink” as originating in the efforts of a diverse set of actors from the nineteenth century onward.3 Many Indian nationalists, along with their Western allies, such as missionaries and devotees of Indian religious sects, presented the perceived problems of Indian drinking as being due to European influence, while the “Oriental state” was imagined as permitting unrestrained indulgence in drugs—a view that was important among British colonial administrators.4 This Western view of Indian drug-taking was not entirely critical, and certain imagined “Oriental drug habits” (and altered states of consciousness in general) attracted people to the region and the culture, as they still do today.5
As an alternative to this vision, I provide in this book a detailed survey of drinks, drinking, and ideas about drinking in premodern India, based mainly on Sanskrit sources. It is impossible to be comprehensive when dealing with such a wide-ranging topic. The period covered is long and surviving texts numerous.
Moreover, I am not an expert in many of the subfields involved here, such as the Vedas or Hindu law. I focus on ancient, early medieval, and later medieval South Asia, starting with the Vedas and continuing until the early to mid-second millennium ce. At the end of the book I look briefly at the afterlife of some drinks and ways of talking about drinks, for example in Sanskrit texts from the eighteenth century. I have not used texts in classical Tamil, nor in other vernacular and literary languages such as Bengali; nor have I dealt with drink and Islam. I consider some visual evidence, though very much in the light of texts, as I am no art historian. In writing this book, I came to realize that drinks and drugs often need to be considered together, so there are shorter sections included on betel and cannabis. (King Soma has a tendency to steal the limelight, so I discuss soma in an Appendix.) In some cases I give a detailed chronological account of a topic, but in other cases I discuss only a few case studies, such as those concerning Jainism, Tantra, and medicine.
Sometimes academics call a book “descriptive” in a derogatory way, implying that there is little theory or no thesis. This book is very descriptive. It is necessary to excavate, reconstruct, and contextualize a mass of data before anyone can begin to analyze any subject. Also, when writing about over two thousand years of history in a vast region, it would be strange to expect a single thesis to emerge. Nevertheless, I offer various specific analyses and conclusions throughout the book.
Some Notes about My Approach
What Can We Do with the Evidence?
This book is based on texts, mostly in Sanskrit and related languages. Many of these texts are literary or scholastic, abounding in conventions, standard lists, stock characters, and motifs that I explain throughout the book. Many of the texts had a long and varied afterlife, often in tandem with scholarly commentaries composed centuries later.
Given this evidence, a text-focused approach to the history of drinking in India is relatively easy. That is to say, we’re on safer ground when thinking about the history of ideas and textual traditions. Given the clarity of some of the descriptions we have of making drinks, I also think it is possible to get some sense of the material culture of making drinks, at least for a few times and places. It’s much harder, however, to infer from our texts what was going on socially in the worlds when they were being written and read. Readers not familiar with the study of India in these periods might be unaware of how limited the historical archives are for writing certain types of history. By contrast, in his social history
of the English alehouse, Peter Clark draws on the rich materials available to historians of England. He writes that in one unlicensed premises in Leicester, on a Saturday night in October 1607, we know that there were present two slaters, a laborer, a butcher, a weaver, and others, some of whose names we know too.6 Accessing such historical detail is utterly inconceivable for the Indian equivalent of such a place in, say, the first millennium ce, and for most of the second millennium too. Thus writing a detailed social or material-culture history of India is exceptionally difficult.
In addition, the dates and origins of many of our surviving textual sources are poorly understood, such that an estimated date within a few centuries is quite common for some texts. One should not be overly pessimistic, however, and we do know more about certain works. But we possess nothing like dated monastic accounts and inventories, nor detailed autobiographies or diaries. There are many inscriptions, such as records of land donations, and these have been of some use here, though they’re not enormously informative with regard to alcohol. We do have a large number of texts in many other genres for the period under consideration—literary, legal, philosophical, and medical texts, along with ones on statecraft and erotics. However, if we’re also interested in thinking about the social history of drinking (as I am, with many qualifications) using these texts is difficult. But we might cautiously assume that some basic common features of drinking in the texts were also features of practice—for example, drinking out of individual cups as opposed to shared jars with straws; groupdrinking at festivals; drinking at places that brewed and sold drink. And, taking a few such basic elements, we might then compare these features to better documented drinking cultures, tentatively imagining a social and economic history of drinking in India.7 But the more material we consider in our triangulation, the vaguer our conclusions become in terms of time and place. Thus Rajendralal Mitra, who wrote so eloquently of drinking in India, would be irritated by the many “hypotheses hedged in by flimsy pretenses of ‘it seems,’ ‘it is probable’ . . .” that litter this book.8
Even when texts are clear about drink and can be placed historically, they need to be treated with caution. James Benn writes of China that one “has to admit that textual evidence is not necessarily an accurate indicator of what people in premodern times actually consumed or how they did so. Let us remember, for example, the case of the history of noodles in China. Although scholars of culture and foodways pored over the surviving texts, they could not discover any trace of noodles earlier than sources from the Eastern Han (25–220 ce). However, a recent archaeological discovery of a bowl with noodles still contained within it has obliged us to push back the date of noodle consumption to Neolithic times (about 4,000 years ago).”9 Such a point is valid, though I would qualify it: the discovery of a Neolithic bowl of noodles does mean that there were noodles in
that one time and place, but it by no means implies that noodles were common in China from the date of the excavated bowl. You would need more evidence to make that case.
Yet, perhaps the glass is half full. Particularly with technical materials such as recipes, incomplete evidence arguably sometimes implies the existence of a set of embodied, unstated, assumed practices that we might now be more aware of when looking at other types of evidence. There are various ways in which we can try to get a sense of where such gaps lie in our data and what might have filled them. We might try recreating these recipes today, in a manner similar to scholars who practice the experimental history of science. For example, in attempting to recreate James Prescott Joule’s experiments to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat, historian of science Heinz Otto Sibum was able to highlight just how essential Joule’s distinctive practical skills were to performing these experiments in an accurate manner, skills that he possessed largely thanks to his background in beer brewing.10 Although I have tried to recreate some of the simpler recipes we possess for early Indian drinks (with very mixed successes), I have found more useful to emulate the methods of ethno-archaeology, observing various fermentation methods in person (in India and China) and reading widely about traditional methods for making alcoholic drinks in a number of cultures. Such comparative work is valuable both for understanding technical processes and sometimes for enriching our ability to imagine the social processes surrounding drink culture. This sort of work certainly allowed me to shake off many of my assumptions about brewing based on English beer manufacture. Then, becoming conscious of the implied skills of brewers of the drink called surā may focus our attention on other texts that do hint at the nature and value of such tacit knowledge, as when we read in a Buddhist legal text of woman who ruins a large batch of drink she is making for a wedding, which drink is saved, however, by a Buddhist nun who does have the right skills—but the social and economic implications of the nun’s skills are not without significance.
To summarize the discussion thus far: given the limited nature of our evidence and my interest in examining and comparing a wide range of sources, from technical recipes to poetic descriptions of drinking bouts, this book somewhat eludes clear classification in terms of standard categories of scholarship. But if pressed to state the nature of this book in such terms I would say that it is a literary and intellectual history of drinking in India, with considerable reflection on the material culture of various drinks, along with some tentative explorations of the social and economic history of drinking. Where materials are contextualized, this is more in terms of connecting some parts of alcohol culture to others, for instance our understanding of recipes to legal texts, and I have not in general found it easy to relate this material to wider processes of historical change, to regional tendencies, and to political history, though other scholars might do a better job
of that. Finally, I also view many of the Indian materials presented in this book as innately clever and interesting ideas in themselves, as a collection of new and original ways to think about relations between humans, intoxicating substances, and intoxication.
Words
The range of words for alcoholic drinks in Sanskrit is both impressive and confusing. A search for “liquor” in an online version of Apte’s Practical Sanskrit English Dictionary brings up dozens of words for such drinks, many of which I never even mention in this book. Unfortunately, one can’t rely on dictionaries for the exact meaning of Sanskrit words for alcoholic drinks, so for this book and several related articles I’ve done a lot of philological work—close, comparative reading of texts, and consulting works of historical linguistics—to get a sense of how we should understand these words: what they refer to (which is often a constellation of somewhat similar drinks), what they connote (e.g., rich or poor people drinking), how they are used in different genres, and how their meaning changes over time (e.g., the word “vāruṇī” is generic in poems and specific in medicine, where it starts out as a grain-based drink and later sometimes means palm toddy).
It is not strictly correct to say the dictionaries are wrong or even vague when it comes to the names of drinks, as some English (and German) entries may reflect changes in Sanskrit usage in India. In discussing drink in dharmaśāstra, the great legal scholar Kane uses “wine,” “rum,” and quite often “liquor.”11 For the Sanskrit word “surā,” Monier-Williams gives “spirituous liquor, wine (in ancient times ‘a kind of beer’).” All these options for translating the word have some value. To compare, H. T. Huang chose to translate a Chinese word for an alcoholic drink as “wine,” in order to convey in English the antiquity of this drink, mentioned in the ancient classics and associated with rituals—for which “wine” is a good fit.12 However this ancient Chinese drink was made from grains, so something is lost as well as gained here. “Beer” is imperfect too, as these Chinese drinks were quite unlike European beer. And what do we do with Monier-Williams’s translation “spirituous liquor”? I am far from convinced that distillation was present in South Asia in the period when many of the texts I shall discuss were composed, as I explain elsewhere.13 Yet to call surā a “spirituous drink” in English is by no means entirely incorrect: for a nineteenth- or twentieth-century Indian scholar writing in Sanskrit, surā sometimes was a distilled liquor, as we shall see in Chapter 9. No doubt the paṇḍits, as well as more recent Indian lexical works consulted by early European scholars, understood surā to be a distilled drink,
which means that Monier-Williams’s definition is correct, at least for a certain time and place.
Even for a given period or genre in which a word seems to have a narrow meaning and a tangible material referent, it can be hard to render it in English. In a study of a clay tablet listing brewing terms in Sumerian and Akkadian, Hartman and Oppenheim wrote that “an extensive and complicated nomenclature . . . was evolved by the brewers, which is highly difficult, if not impossible, to render into a modern language. Technical processes that are apparently quite simple . . . are subject to exceedingly exact terminological differentiations. . . . Each of these specific processes (and many others) was essential if a brew was to be manufactured which was clearly defined in taste, strength, and color. And each of these steps was identified by a specific technical term. . . . Further complications are caused by regional and diachronic differences in this nomenclature.”14 These are exactly the sorts of difficulties we have with words for drinks, drink components, and brewing processes in India.
Drinks are not just substances; they also have varied cultural and social meanings. Lager and champagne are made of different substances, in different places, by different methods. On top of that, swigging lager has a very different connotation from raising a glass of champagne. So, in many cases in this book, I interpret the material nature of a drink alongside its social, aesthetic, and cultural connotations, as for example with maireya.
Another complication is that the meanings of words (and the meanings of drinks) change over time. Take the English word “beer.” A common story one hears about the history of words for beer explains that “beer” refers to a hopped drink (as opposed to unhopped “ale”), and the word in this sense became common in the sixteenth century.15 Yet in the eighteenth century, usage changed and “ale” referred to strong beer, and in the nineteenth century “ale” was sometimes used for drinks made with lighter-colored malt, as in “India pale ale.” In Old English, however, “ale” was the common word for an alcoholic drink made from malt, and “bēor” may have been used for a sweeter, stronger drink; it was also sometimes used for other varieties of alcoholic drink. Today, “ale” is often used in marketing for beers perceived to be made in a traditional manner: “real ale.” Finally, we have root beer and ginger beer, and a beer called “barley wine.”
Sanskrit words for drinks likewise changed over the centuries and had varied technical, legal, and medicinal usages, as well as all manner of other connotations. Some words, given in common lexica, are used in poetic texts for reasons of metrics and alliteration. It is unlikely, moreover, that people at the local surā house were ordering drinks in Sanskrit, nor did brewers probably speak classical Sanskrit. So, much of the surviving terminology is artificial, literary, or academic, interacting with vernaculars in all sorts of ways that are difficult to establish. Sometimes Sanskrit words might relate somehow to the
vernacular words used in a given time and place, but sometimes the Sanskrit language of drink might offer a scholarly alternative universe that had little to do with everyday usage. Still, some educated people immersed in Sanskrit would have used it to write and talk about alcohol culture, whether they drank or not.16
The challenges become even more complex when we look at words for intoxicating substances in general, like English “drug,” and for states of intoxication and inebriation. In South Asia during the period under consideration, there is no concept of a substance equivalent to alcohol or ethanol. This is why I have chosen mostly to avoid “alcohol” in discussing the drinks in this book (though I have kept things simple in the book’s title). Rather, certain drinks, including soma, were understood to have the power to intoxicate, a state commonly designated with words derived from the Sanskrit root √mad, which can mean among other things “to be drunk” or “to be intoxicated” when applied to a state produced by alcohol, as well as referring to states of exhilaration, joy, and elation.17 Elephants in rut are also “intoxicated” (matta). A number of words that often have the sense of madness (e.g., unmāda) and carelessness (e.g., pramāda) are derived from the same root, though, as with most Sanskrit words, all these terms have a wide range of meanings.18 Steven Collins has noted that in one Pali Buddhist text, drunkenness is given as one form of madness (caused by drink, pāna-) in a list of the causes of eight varieties of madman (-ummattako), so at least in that one classification of mental states there is some overlap between madness and drunkenness.19 As we’ll see later in the book, the concept of negligence or heedlessness (pramāda) also plays an important role in some Buddhist texts on the morality of drinking. But this book is not the place to explore all these concepts in depth, and I focus mainly on states caused by fermented drinks and some non-fermented intoxicants.20
The most general Sanskrit term to denote drinks that create a drunken state is madya “intoxicating [drink].” Translating this word is hard. “Inebriating drink” is clumsy to my ear. “Intoxicating” contains the unfortunate “toxic” element that is not present in the Sanskrit word, though at least in English this is a common word, applicable to various substances and states and lacking any “toxic” associations in everyday usage. I also use “drink” in the sense of alcoholic drink, a usage paralleled in Sanskrit. And I have used “liquor” as a generic term for drink, though this is not ideal as it can suggest distilled drinks to some people. As with my use of the English word “intoxicated,” these translations are merely placeholders that allow us to think about mental states and substances in English, while also paying attention to the nuances of the Indian words. On a related note, I have decided not to use the word “entheogen” in this book, since using this word assumes from the outset a lot of connections between drugs, what we might nowadays call mystical states, and religion. “Entheogen” is a word best used in conclusions, if used at all.
In many contemporary Western societies, drink—and especially drink considered as a drug—is associated not only with intoxication but with addiction. Indeed, the concept of drugs and addiction go hand in hand for many people. In her essay “Epidemics of the Will,” Eve Sedgwick wrote of the philosophy and development of the modern ideology of addiction.21 In a pervasive modern framing of drug consumption, taking drugs is not simply an act; consumers themselves are a type, with a distinctive identity: addicts.22 Pathologized addiction has now been extended from drugs to food, sex, shopping, exercise, and other activities, so that the object pursued by the addict can no longer be defined automatically as a foreign substance or even an unhealthy behavior. Rather, addiction today is found in “the structure of the will that is always somehow insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is insufficiently pure.”23 Inseparable from our modern concept of addiction, therefore, is the search for a reified, absolute free will, a pure voluntarity, thwarted at every turn, ironically, by the apparent tendency of voluntary acts to become compulsory addictions. Related, but more polemical in nature, is the recent popular-scientific description of the addict as having a “hijacked brain” that has been chronically, pathologically altered by drugs, which thereby foster uncontrollable, compulsive consumption.24 Again, in this scenario, the people suffering though drug use have lost control of their will, though this way of talking about drugs shifts agency to the substance consumed (and thus justifies a crusade against the drugs themselves and those who produce or trade them). This is not to say, however, that people do not actually experience and suffer from addictions of various sorts. Rather I mean that the language and ideas we often use to talk about, demarcate, and understand this complex phenomenon very much belong to a certain time and place, and shape our thinking and ability to act in certain ways.
The connection between the word “addiction” and modifications of the will is long established in English-language texts. Rebecca Lemon writes of the concept of addiction in early modern England, when the word described an “overthrow of the will” and was applied both to familiar modern “addictions,” such as to alcohol and tobacco, as well as to God.25 In the latter case, addiction was an exclusive and zealous dedication of the self to God as a form of devotion, the binding over of a person’s will to God, for both “addiction and devotion are forms of service.”26 This addiction, to God or to alcohol, was entered into freely and “represents an exercise of will even in the relinquishing of it.”27
Why explain all of this? First, I want to be clear on why I avoid the concept of addiction in this book. The word is far too loaded, connected to a constellation of modern, mostly Western ideas about free will, ethics, neuroscience, pathology, and political rhetoric. Second, articulating some of these modern ideas here offers a useful foil to display what is distinctive in Indian thinking about intoxicants and intoxication. Third, becoming more conscious of our notion of
addiction exposes the fact that most of us, often unknowingly, are embedded in a complex, culture-specific discourse about drugs and their effects—a way of understanding, talking about, and acting with regard to drugs, alcohol, and many forms of behavior that has countless economic, medical, legal, racial, and personal repercussions. This network of ideas, language, and practice regularly manifests itself in literature, television, and film, and is even given an erotic twist in the names of perfumes that conjure sexual irresistibility (Addict, Opium).
Intoxicants and intoxication in early India are likewise part of a web of words, practices, ideas, and associations. Although accounts of intoxication and drink in the texts I analyze in this book vary considerably, we shall see how premodern South Asian ideas about people and drink are often different from ours today.28 Admittedly, sometimes people in these texts are attached to drink and intoxication, and repeatedly seek out drink with desire, and thus “addiction” is by no means a terrible translation for some Sanskrit concepts.29 But in the Indian texts, this will or desire to drink has not in most cases been “hijacked” by the powers of the substance itself. The drinkers’ relationship to the intoxicant has not changed them so that they are now compelled to take it. In many of the texts intoxicated people’s desires and intentions may well be transformed, but this is part of a multitude of other changes: drunks perceive differently (e.g., a black drink as a bee); they interpret what they see in a jumbled manner (e.g., mother as lover, lover as mother); they react in confused ways (e.g., both laughing and crying); their bodies change (e.g., flushed faces, stumbling); their inhibitions are dissolved; and their sense of right and wrong is muddled. Intoxication confuses people and heightens their confused experience of the world. Yet, drunks in these texts typically choose and desire to become drunk—hence some legal discussions of purposeful versus accidental drinking. Although drunk people are not their usual selves—a concept implied by the fact that a son is not responsible for the drink debts accrued by the father—drunk intoxication in our sources is not simply a removal or take-over of the will. Drunks may sometimes be said to be “like possessed people,” but they are not actually possessed. People in the texts exercise their will to ingest a substance that causes intoxication (mada), and the resulting state places them in a world of new, changed perceptions, conceptualizations, and reactions. Yet they can still exercise their own will to do other things in this state; for example, they can desire, uninhibitedly, to kiss their lover’s face reflected at the bottom of a glass (but, amusingly or sadly, the face is not actually there). Rather than control the drinker, liquor in these texts often removes the bonds and fetters of everyday life, unleashing the drinker. Imagine purposefully driving the chariot of your body, mind, and senses into a vast city of illusions and distorting mirror mazes, where you feel as if you can do anything. It can be very enjoyable in there, but also damaging. And some people might really want to go back for more.
We need to approach this topic with an open mind, as the very ontology of drinks and intoxication is different in the sources that I explore. For us a unity underlies the variety of intoxicating drinks because they all contain alcohol. Some people, moreover, argue that there is a neurological basis common to a variety of addictions. By contrast, in early India, both drink and intoxication were often characterized by multiplicity. Some texts explain that different (alcoholic) drinks all share the property of causing mada, intoxication, but others describe the many different types of mada itself. Intoxicants and intoxication take multiple forms in these texts, and this theme is explored in an array of genres of texts over a long period. Surā, sometimes a goddess with many arms carrying many drinks, and Intoxication, sometimes a demon lurking in many entities, mutually define each other. They are both innately multifarious and innately confusing. Compared to these Indian concepts, Western categories for such substances and states seem simplistic and rigid. This is another reason why I avoid trying to line up the Indian materials with modern ideas (“they discovered alcoholism two thousand years ago!”), for this would only impoverish our understanding of this impressive tradition, a collection of texts and ideas that we might even view as a resource of novel ways of thinking about and even actually dealing with intoxicating substances and intoxicated people (ourselves and others).
It is not the case that anything goes, however. Surā only has so many arms, and there were limits to the complexity and variety of liquor and intoxication in any given time, place, and social context. And when the penance for Brahmins drinking liquor, to give one example, could involve drinking boiling hot liquid until they died, it was important to define the contours of these substances and concepts, changeable as they may be. This explains, broadly speaking, the purpose of some of our texts where we meet the nitty-gritty of intoxicating substances, lists of drinks, ingredients, discussions of fermentation times, permitted additives, and other factors. If liquor is multiple, variable, and potent, and some people cannot drink, we need to establish precisely what counts as liquor.
Another translation problem: Sanskrit names for plants are notoriously confusing. Suggested modern equivalents for a single Sanskrit word are often numerous and inconsistent. Moreover, Projit Mukharji writes of the problems of “retro-botanizing” in the study of ancient plant names, a process that “reproduces a problematic divide—that between ‘nature’ as an ahistorical universal and ‘culture’ as a historical and regional variable.”30 He notes that historians of science have argued that botany is also historically contingent.31 Does that mean we should not attempt to line up Sanskrit words with modern botanical names, as I have sometimes done in this book? The dangers of retro-botanizing are variable: we’re on safer ground with rice than with certain herbs, never mind with plants that feature only in mythology. I don’t think it unreasonable to translate some Sanskrit grain words as “a sort of grain, maybe barley” or what seem to be
Sanskrit words for coconut palm trees as “coconut palms.” Such practices enable us to write a more nuanced economic history, drawing on what we know today about how people make palm toddy, for example. Putting modern scholarship into productive conversation with older texts does not imply that you assume one side embodies universal truth and the other is quaint, primitive indigenous lore, at the best blindly shuffling around the contours of science. The same applies to the way people dealt with liquor in the absence of the concept of alcohol—we are all finding ways to talk about these things, and the way we do so says a lot about all of us. Moreover, tentatively identifying some plants does not exclude writing about the other connotations of these words in the texts. And by accepting that certain words refer to distinct things, like words for grapes or opium, I can make more useful arguments about how people assimilated new substances into preexisting intellectual frameworks, relating the Indian texts to images, archaeology, and texts from other parts of the world. So, while Mukharji’s critique is valuable, you have to pick your fights, and in this book I will indulge in careful retro-botanizing.
Previous Scholarship
There is no other academic book on the general history of alcohol and drinking in early India, but there are some good articles. One of the best, and the earliest I have used in this book, is by Rajendralal Mitra (1822–1891).32 Mitra, from Kolkata, came from a prominent family. In addition to studying Indian languages and Persian, he immersed himself in the study of Greek, Latin, English, and German. In 1846 he was made secretary and librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and ultimately became the first Indian president of this institution. As a historian and philologist he wrote prodigiously on many topics. His work includes analytic studies, such as his article on the history of alcohol in India, alongside erudite editions of numerous texts. He was no stranger to controversial topics, once publishing a famous article on “Beef in Ancient India,”33 and he wrote that “The Earliest Brahmin settlers were a spiritdrinking race, and indulged largely both in Soma beer and strong spirits.”34 It appears that Mitra himself was fond of a drink.35 Though dated in some ways, his papers on drinking in ancient India remain thorough and useful resources for this topic, and his work is also a window on how ancient Indian drinking looked to an erudite Indian scholar in the nineteenth century.
Several other South Asian scholars have discussed alcohol in premodern South Asia, though this is not the place for a full bibliography. Historian Om Prakash provides copious data on liquor, as well as other substances like sugar, in his Economy and Food in Ancient India. Likewise, the late scholar of Indian
food K. T. Achaya has much to say about drink.36 Some excellent works by Indian scholars on the cultural history of India “as seen in various texts” are also useful for studying drink.37 For drink in the Vedic period, Madhavi Bhaskar Kolhatkar’s book on surā and the sacrifice has been invaluable.38 For later periods, which I cover only briefly here, an article by Prasun Chatterjee is highly recommended—though that topic deserves a whole book.39 For legal matters, I rely on the magisterial work of P. V. Kane.40
Works on alcohol in India by Western scholars include a thorough article on drink by the Finnish philologist Pentti Aalto, as well as a study of the concept of intoxication in Hinduism by Oliver Hellwig, this latter article introducing some statistical analysis of Sanskrit texts.41 Also, Ludwig Habighorst amassed an excellent collection of miniature paintings (later than most of the material in this book) of drugs and alcohol that has been published.42 The many scholars who have researched soma have produced a sophisticated body of work, and there are a number of good studies on various drugs.43 All of these works have been useful in locating some of the primary sources pertinent to this book—though I shall not cite them at every turn, for reasons of space (and in many cases I encountered these sources in my own research too). The many works by Patrick Olivelle on Indian law and culture and by G. J. Meulenbeld on Indian medicine have been foundational to my primary research. Jiri Jakl has been working on a book on alcohol in pre-Islamic Java, and timing was such that I was able to share early drafts of many of the chapters in this book (especially on drinks) with him. Once both our books are published this should open the way to more comparative work.
I have also read extensively about the history of drugs and alcohol in other times and places, from Mexico to China, and this has informed my thinking in many places. Again, for reasons of space, I will not give a complete bibliography of those materials, though I should highlight Peter Clark’s exemplary social history of the English alehouse and Michael Dietler’s stimulating work on alcohol and feasting.44 For understanding traditional fermentation methods, Keith Steinkraus’s work has been invaluable.45 For ancient alcoholic drinks, the writings of Patrick McGovern are inspiring, and although the materials in this book are not as old as the archaeological evidence he discusses, I hope this book is a complement to his work.46
Is This Book Offensive?
Some readers may worry that this book is offensive or provocative, given the subject matter. If and when those people read it, they will appreciate that this is not the case. This book is as much a study of the complexities of abstinence in Indian religion and culture as of the various ways in which people appreciated drink
