Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
Fermentation, Distillation and Rum
in Pre-Modern India Part 2
All of us, in our everyday life, tend to take for granted what we are used to seeing and doing day after day, and we forget that that is the specific product of a history and a culture, that things were different in the past and may be different in the future. This applies to everything, even to that iconic place of Western culture that is the modern bar. In today’s Western world, bars usually include “a literal bar: a flat counter behind which the bartenders stand and the drinks and vessels themselves are displayed. But bars are not an inevitable feature of all drinking places in all times and places. Bars of this kind first appeared in England, at least, in the early seventeenth century. We can be fairly sure that pre-modern Indian drinking places did not have bars, but they did probably feature proprietor-brewers who sold drinks and snacks to a mixed bunch of customers seated or standing in drinking areas, much as one sees in a toddy shop today. They also probably had distinctive signs or banners.”
(Remember that, as I have written in the first article of this series, when not otherwise specified, the quotes come from the works of Prof James McHugh.)
In pre-modern India brewing, selling and consuming intoxicating beverages was heavily regulated; the state imposed heavy taxation on their production and sale and subjected their consumption to many rules to control public order and morality. Naturally, in the course of the long history of such a huge, complex sub-continent as India, taxes and rules have changed greatly, according to the place and the historic period. Let us make just two examples.
The Arthaśāstra (literally “Treatise on what is useful”) is the oldest and most celebrated textbook on political economy in ancient India; according to tradition it dates back to the 4th century BCE, but the text which we have today in all likelihood dates back to a period between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. It describes the ideal state regulation of drink production, trade, and drinking places: along with prostitution and the trade in salt, the sale of liquor in this text is a state monopoly. A specialized official, the “Superintendent of Liquor”, organized the trade through qualified officials and, it would seem, allowed the opening of a limited number of private taverns, upon payment of a license and various taxes on sales.
The “Charter of Viṣṇuṣena, from 592 CE, on the other hand, is a rare legal inscription from the early medieval period in which a feudatory king endorses the customary rules of a set of merchants in a community in western India. … Despite the significant translation difficulties, these rules give us some sense of the liquor trade, particularly the complexity of liquor regulations. The main word for drink is madya, the most generic term, referring to all intoxicating drinks. … In this inscription it seems that we’re dealing with the regulation of manufacture and sale rather than a state monopoly. Despite the difficulties of the text, a picture emerges from this inscription of a merchant community in which the production and transport of liquor were closely regulated, generating revenue for the king though fees as well as tithes of liquor. The drink was transported in a variety of standardized containers, which implies that it was not highly perishable.”
In both cases, it is clear that the production and sale of alcoholic beverages represented an important part of the economy and of social intercourse, that it took place in specific buildings, and the it was managed by specialized, skilled operators, whether public officials or licensed private citizens. The consumption of these beverages was widespread and it was an integral part of the daily life of a great part of the population.
In these ancient texts, there was no concept of alcohol as a single, specific substance but rather an understanding that a new property arises when certain things are combined/fermented and that certain beverages could cause drunkenness. In order to designate them, the word madya is often used. Usually, drinking madya with moderation is not censored in itself, whereas drunkenness is morally, and sometimes even legally, condemned. Women were allowed to drink too, especially during religious festivals, weddings and other ceremonies. Festivals in particular were periods of great consumption. Moreover, the sources tell us about women who legally produced and sold madya, sometimes without being subjected to any moral judgement, while in other cases the women who had to do with drinking were not considered respectable.
There were also great differences depending on the social status of the drinkers. Many cheap taverns were crowded and noisy, frequented by the lower classes, by soldiers and wayfarers. These taverns were viewed with suspicion by the authorities, as places where also thieves and prostitutes, or otherwise dangerous people could be found. Often the State would sneak in spies who, often with the help of the owners and the maids, eavesdropped the conversations and observed the behavior of the drinkers, thus watching over the security of the State and public order. At the other end of the social ladder, there were instead refined, expensive and quieter inns, for respectable upper class guests. Moreover, elite men often drank at home, at parties and friends’ reunions, with complex, refined rituals in which, sometimes, respectable women participated too.
All over pre-modern India, however, there was a widespread diffidence towards drinking madya and its effects on behavior and the mind. Actually, for some especially high-ranking people, like Hindu Brahmins, Buddhist monks and nuns, Jain ascetics, and others, drinking madya was clearly prohibited or at least strongly discouraged. Moreover, for these high-ranking people, getting drunk was prohibited, often regarded as a true crime, and as such, harshly punished. Compared to contemporary Europe, the relationship between food and drink was different. “Accompanying snacks were inseparable from drinking, whether at the surā shop or in the bedroom of the wealthy. They were clearly light refreshments, though, as opposed to full meals. Drinking was for drinking’s sake and you have special salty, spicy snack food to go with it. Typically we do not read of people drinking liquor to accompany and enhance meals, as with the European concept of ‘food and wine’.”(94) Last but not least, alcoholic beverages were used also as medication.
Let us be frank: the alcoholic beverages about which we have spoken so far were all fermented, not distilled beverages. Contrary to a widely held belief, in relation to pre-modern India no reliable sources mention alcoholic distillation, and definitely there was no commercial production of spirits.
But let us see what Prof McHugh says, starting, as usual, from the words. According to Wikipedia, Prākṛta literally means “natural”, as opposed to Saṃskṛta, which literally means “constructed” or “refined”. Prakrits were considered the regional spoken (informal) languages of people, and Sanskrit was considered the standardized (formal) language used for literary, official and religious purposes across the Indian kingdoms of the subcontinent. Dravidian languages, on the other hand, are a family of many languages spoken today by 220 million people, mainly in southern India and northeast Sri Lanka, that cannot easily be connected to any other language family and could well be indigenous to India. “Roughly around the year 1000 CE, the Sanskrit word ‘kalyapāla‘ becomes prominent in inscriptions, lexica, and narrative texts. Kalyapālas are people, a caste it seems, involved in making drink – they are related to the modern Kalvārs. The word may be quite old, though it’s not clear whether the early attestations of similar forms all refer to people connected with alcohol. The word and related forms in Prakrits (kallā) may be derived ultimately from words connected with intoxication and liquor in South Indian, Dravidian languages. Recent form of this word, such as Kalvār, refer to communities who practice distillation. So, when we read of Kalyapālas in older Sanskrit texts, does that mean we have evidence of distillers? No – especially since I believe that alcoholic distillation was not common in India until around 1200 CE. Just as ‘drivers’ in the past did not drive motorcars, so the Kalyapālas in earlier times did not necessarily distill liquor, despite the word’s later meaning. Also, whatever the origins of the word, these early forms do not mean anything of the lines of ‘burned-wine maker’ (either in Dravidian languages or as Sanskritized). It makes sense, however, that a community of liquor-makers would eventually adopt distillation, so the brewer Kalyapālas might well have become brewer-distiller Kalyapālas once alcoholic distillation became common.” Or, to make another easy example, coach-builders today deal with metal cars powered by internal combustion engines, not wooden, horse-drawn, stage-coaches. But the word “coach” stuck, maybe because in good time many craftsmen who took care of the maintenance of coaches, when these started to fall into disuse, switched to the newly arrived cars.
Ok, all this is interesting, compelling stuff and makes a clean sweep of the many casual theories that we hear around us. But I am a historian, and quite obsessed with dates and chronology, so let’s get back to the main issue: when did alcoholic distillation appear in India? For the sake of clarity, in India as in the West, the problem is not who first made any sort of distillation (Mercury? Medicinal? Alchemical?), but where and when alcoholic distillation for retail and pleasure consumption became a common commercial practice.
Bearing in mind that āsava can be roughly translated as liquor and that arrak was and still is a common Asian word meaning distillate, here is Prof McHugh’s answer:
“The earliest explicit description of alcoholic distillation that I am aware of is from a medical text, the Gadanigraha by Sodala, a Gujarati, dating from around 1200 CE. In this text one āsava recipe describes the distillation of an “arka”, a Sanskritized word derived from Arabic to describe a distillate. To make this date (kharjūra) preparation, many plant products, including dates, emblic myrobalan, grapes, and dhātakī flowers, are all ground together with jaggery [a kind of Indian sugar]. Then the recipe describes the fermentation and distillation process:
‘Put it [i.e. the herb-jaggery mixture] inside a capacious ghee-vessel (ghṛtasya bhāṇḍe), and add one hundred and ten prasthas [a measure] of water, and put it in the earth for five days, and having ascertained that it is ready to be finished on their sixth day, it should be well attached in the middle part of a pair of devices (yantra) made from copper. Wash three hundred betel leaves and two thousands lotuses, and add them according to the method, and then, having sealed the connection, place the device on a hearth. Then one should properly distill (níṣkāśayet) the arka, having put water on top of the device.’
The fine details are unclear, but certainly fermentation is taking place, and, when ‘finished’, the liquid (or maybe the vessel) is placed with fresh leaves and flowers in the ‘middle part’ of two copper vessels. The whole is placed on a fire, and a distillate, arka, is expelled or drawn out, with water condensing it. It is absolutely clear that a distillation process is described here and that the liquid distilled is a fermented, sugar-based drink, so this is alcoholic distillation (of a specialized medicine, not a common liquor).” So, in 1200s’ India too, as it happened in Italy at the same time, at the beginning alcohol was used to produce medicines, not pleasure drinks.
“An important point to note here is that, when Sanskrit texts mention alcoholic distillation, they are quite clear about it, using specific vocabulary: a distilled drink, arka, is made by distillation (níṣ Ѵkaś/kas, caus. ‘expel).
McHugh then quotes other academics, among whom Irfan Habib: “Habib quotes an account of distillation that Zia Barani composed in 1357, in writing about the time of Sultan Kaiqubad (1286-9): ‘the wine makers of Kol and Meerut brought [to Delhi] distilled (chakānīda) sweeet-scented unfermented (be-khammari) arrak (‘arq), two or three years old, filling wine flagons with it.” He is referring here to a well-established commercial practice, a veritable business of distilling, including intentional, planned aging of the product. Of course, I would like to know what that “wine” was made from, and I do not understand what that ‘unfermented’ meant. Once again, in order to really understand it would be necessary to know the context and the original language, which, in this case, I think is Persian.
“In conclusion, we have abundant positive textual evidence for early alcoholic drinks in South Asia being only fermented, not distilled. We also have clear textual evidence for alcoholic distillation in the region as of around the thirteenth century CE which neatly matches Irfan Habib’s approximate estimate of when alcoholic distillation became common, based on Persian sources from India.” To sum up, “Given the dates of these texts that mention distillation, alcoholic distillation for recreational drinking may have become common in South Asia from roughly the thirteenth century onward.”
Marco Pierini
