Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
Fermentation, Distillation and Rum in Premodern India Part 1
As our readers know, one of my favourite topics has always been the origin of rum and of alcoholic distillation. To these subjects I have devoted the bulk of my research and I believe I have reached interesting results, which I have tried to relate in many articles of our magazine (see the series “The Origins of Alcoholic Distillation in the West” 2018 and “A Tale of Rum” 2021).
My research has always focused on the origin of rum and of alcoholic distillation IN THE WEST. I am well aware of the fact that also the East played an important role in this history, and that there would be so much to find out, particularly in India and in China, but I have never dealt with what happened in the East for I was not competent enough to undertake such a quest. To put it in the simplest way, I do not know enough about the historical and cultural context of the East and I do not know the languages at all (see the article “Panning For Gold” in the December 2021 issue).
However, I have now decided to break my own rule. In the latest issue of GOT RUM? I wrote a short Review of James McHugh’s “An Unholy Brew-Alcohol in Indian History and Religion”. Now I’m going to present the first in a short series of three articles dedicated to FERMENTATION, DISTILLATION, AND RUM IN PREMODERN INDIA. I decided to do that for two reasons.
Firstly, the growing importance of India in the World of Rum. Today India is one of the major producers of rum in the world, even though it had in the past, and continues to have today, a complicated relationship with alcohol. Actually, in some states of India, alcoholic drinks are banned while in other Prohibition has become controversial. Moreover, an Indian state may observe dry days on major religious festivals/occasions while certain national holidays, such as Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti (October 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi), are meant to be dry nationally. Dry days are also observed on voting days. Perhaps these difficulties of relationship with alcohol in India has local roots, connected to the culture and politics of that enormous, ancient country, I don’t know. What I do know is that there is an ongoing neo-Prohibitionist trend in the West too, often masked by health-conscious arguments. Maybe we ought to give this matter some attention in the future. Anyway, Indian rum does not enjoy a good reputation abroad. It is intended mainly for local consumption, it is often considered of low quality and sometimes it could not even qualify as rum in Europe and the USA because, as well as with the sugar cane, it is made from rice and other stuff too. But over the last few years I have seen new, ambitious brands (at least, I think they are new), attentive to the choice of raw material, production and aging process, aware of the importance of packaging, marketing etc. These brands are starting to enter on the world market. To sum up, Indian rum deserves greater attention.
Secondly, I still am not competent enough to undertake a personal quest, but I have found someone who has already carried it out. For this short series of articles on alcohol in pre-modern India, I will rely mostly on three works written by Prof James McHugh: “Alcohol in pre-modern South Asia” 2013, “Too Big to Fail-The Idea of Ancient Indian Distillation” 2020, and “An Unholy Brew-Alcohol in Indian History and Religion” 2021. When not otherwise specified, the quotes come from these works. Of course, these are for me secondary sources, which I cannot myself verify, but they are extremely trustworthy, as well as well written. They are complex, challenging texts, at least for me, as I am not knowledgeable about the historical and cultural context. At times I even got lost in the intricate labyrinth of city names, deities, literary works etc. which I had never heard about. However, I think I got the main points right and I have tried to sum them up to the best of my abilities. For the sake of simplicity and fluency, I have ‘plundered’ quotes and information here and there, and then I put the quotes in the order which I thought most useful to my line of argument. Should any passages be unclear, the fault is mine, certainly not Prof McHugh’s.
A word of caution. When McHugh speaks about pre-modern India, he refers to a territory encompassing not only the present-day Republic of India, but a larger, less clearly-defined area which – depending on the period – roughly included present-day Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, part of Myanmar and possibly even Nepal and Bhutan. A land (relatively) bound together by mighty, ancient cultures and religions, but which has never been politically unified into a single state.
As is often necessary when dealing with complex issues, it is a good idea to start from the very beginning, that is, words and their meanings.
“The range of words for alcoholic drinks in SansSkrit is both impressive and confusing. A search for ‘liquor’ in an online version of Apte’s Practical Sanskrit English Dictionary brings us 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 change over time (e.g. the word ‘vāruṇi’ is generic in poems and specific in medicine, where it starts out as a grain-based drink and later sometimes means palm toddy) ”.
Translation is always a big problem. It has been challenging for me to translate from some European languages, close together in history, religion, culture etc., and which use the same Latin alphabet. I can hardly imagine the effort it has taken to translate into English texts written in ancient Sanskrit, a dead language, expression of a far away, profoundly dissimilar culture, with a completely different alphabet. Another complication is that the meanings of words (and the meanings of drinks) change over time, moreover “Even for a given period in which a word seems to have a narrow meaning and a tangible material referent, it can be hard to render it in English.”
To make things even worse “Drinks are not just substances; they also have a varied cultural and social meaning.” Of course, food and drinks, indeed all material goods, have also a social and cultural significance which changes with time and place, but when we speak about alcohol, though, everything becomes more complicated.
“The challenges become ever more complex when we look at words for intoxicating substance 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. … The most general Sanskrit term to denote drinks that create a drunken state is madya ‘intoxicating [drink]’. Translating this word is difficult. ‘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.”
Over the last few years, in our Western World alcohol consumption has have become even more controversial. Oversimplifying matters, it seems to me that the underlying Puritan background of great part of Western culture is again joining forces with science, or better, with a part of it, as happened with the Temperance Movements which paved the way for Prohibition.
“In many contemporary Western societies, drink – and especially drink considered as a drug – is associated not only with intoxication but with addiction. In her essay “Epidemics of the Will”, Eve Sedgwick wrote of the philosophy and development of the modern ideology of addiction. 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. 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 insufficient pure’. 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.”
And now we get to alcohol production and consumption in pre-modern India. Everything started with Surā, first mentioned in Ṛgveda, a collection of texts the most ancient of which, according to Wikipedia, date back to the 2nd millennium BC.
“Surā is the alcoholic drink mentioned in the earliest Indic sources, such as the Ṛgveda. Although, as noted, ”Surā”(f.) has a number of meanings, in its narrowest sense it refers to a fermented alcoholic drink made from grains. Thus, as in ancient Mesopotamia, the primary alcoholic drink in the earliest Indian written sources was made from grains. … In European brewing, sprouted, malted grains (especially barley) are used. These contain saccharifying enzymes, and are sometimes mixed with another, unmalted, adjunct grain that the malts then also saccharify. In much of Asia, saccharifying molds are used, often in conjunction with yeasts and other microorganisms, to achieve saccharafication and fermentation simultaneously (e.g. in Chinese huang jiu). These microorganisms are often stored in the form of ‘cakes’ that have been inoculated and dried, sometimes with herbs added, and frequently this sort of brewing is achieved in solid or semisolid state. … Although largely absent from surveys of alcohol history, and confusing to many scholars of early India, surā as made from grains was highly developed as a drink and discussed in many texts in premodern India.”
In pre-modern India other fermented beverages were produced and consumed in abundance. Toddy, made from the sap of various species of palm tree and still a common drink in parts of South Asia and elsewhere in the world; Mahua liquor, unique to South Asia, made from the nectar-filled flowers of the mahua tree, a large tree that grows in central and North India; Honey Mead, made from honey, and others, while grape wine was not produced in India, but imported from abroad, an expensive and esteemed foreign good. “Drinks made from sugarcane are a notable feature of the early alcohol culture of South Asia. By the early first millennium CE such drinks were consumed alongside grain surās, grape wine, and betel nur; they form part of a distinctive intoxicant culture of the region. Unlike in Europe, where sugarcane products have been known from only a comparatively recent period, sugarcane was well known in ancient India before the Common Era. Sanskrit texts mention several varieties of sugarcane, as well as numerous products derived from sugarcane juice. These variety of sugars can be confusing to scholars, particularly as most people who speak only a European language don’t possess words for many of this products (though sugar specialists, of course, have more expansive vocabulary for their field). These many words attest to a complex sugar culture in India, much of which survives to this day. Even now one finds many varieties of the sugar called jaggery on sale in India, and often people have strong opinions about their virtues. It’s unfortunate that sugar is often denigrated in the West nowadays, and that the jaggery varieties of South Asia are not well known as, say, French cheeses or Italian olive oils. … The drink primarily made from sugarcane juice, raw or cooked, was called sīdhu (also śīdhu), though sugarcane products were also used in many other drinks … Some types of sīdhu were made with other, more refined sugar products, but the basic version may well have been made simply with the juice. The drink was not distilled, so sīdhu is not rum.”“
Sīdhu is a distinctive drink of ancient India, with several varieties. Two thousand years ago, Europe did not have sugarcane drinks, nor, probably, did China at early periods, whereas South Asian were making liquors from a variety of sugarcane products at that time, not to mention from the several varieties of sugarcane plants that we read of in early texts. As with grain surā, the eventual rise of distillation may have slowly effaced the distinctive qualities of these sugar wines (medicinal ones excepted), and the drink from the Philippines called basi is perhaps the closest thing made nowadays to the fragrant, colored, ‘old sīdhus’ celebrated by poets. Basi has the aroma of rum and sugarcane juice and tastes like a light, watery amontillado, very dry and a little tannic.”
To sum up, “The actual drinking culture of South Asia must have been even more complex than we can deduce from our surviving, patchy evidence. People in India manufactured a huge number of alcoholic drinks, managing the processes of obtaining sugars, fermentation, and flavoring in ingenious ways. Whether one approves of drinking or not, one can’t deny that there should always be a chapter about pre-modern India in any world history of alcohol.”
Marco Pierini
