Free Spirit

Prohibition is no answer. Indians will drink, and they deserve to do so. The way out of the current mess is to encourage responsible drinking

Idrink the alcohol,” growled the old Babaji, “I don’t let the alcohol drink me.” I was in my early twenties when I heard the old sadhu say this, sitting outside his hut in a village in Birbhum. That winter night, everybody was drinking rum that we, the visiting party, had brought with us from Calcutta. One of the Babaji’s young shishyas had got into a close and personal tangle with the liquor, drinking faster than everybody else, and the old guru was admonishing him about overdoing the Old Monk before sending him off to bed. It took me a while to understand what the Babaji meant, but then I heard it said a lot among the Bauls and Vaishnav sadhus as I spent time with them. There were variations, where ‘alcohol’—mawdh in Bangla—was replaced by ganja or just neshaa, nashaa in Hindustani, as in intoxication—“Aami neshaa kori, neshaa amaake korey na,” do the intoxication, the intoxication doesn’t do me. The meaning was: do partake of the intoxicant but don’t let it take you over, don’t let the addiction control you.

I come from a family and culture in which drink was anathema. My parents didn’t drink at all and my mother, especially, judged people who drank—for her, drinking any alcohol whatsoever was the same thing as being a drunkard and it didn’t matter if it was an actor on a movie screen, someone at the next table in a restaurant or people who were close friends. In this classic Indian urban ‘middle-class’ worldview, the ramparts of sobriety and morally upright citizenship were under constant attack from two directions: from the poor and the lower castes whose men drank away their money, as well as from westerner-foreigners or westernised Indians, including royalty and the wealthy, who also did the same, except they didn’t usually run out of money. Both my parents had participated in the freedom movement and—at least for my mother—the yoke of alcohol was among the things from which they had fought to be free. Oddly, there was a strange overlap and partnership in this view, not just from the completely hypocritical, hard-drinking commercial cinema-makers of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras but even from serious Calcutta directors like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, all of whom imbibed to different degrees but chose to portray the ‘nightclub’ as a den of upper-class, West-aping debauchery fuelled by the dreaded booze.

Growing up under a worldview such as my mother’s, one tended to believe that the ‘real’ India was largely a vegetarian, non-beef eating, nondrinking culture upon which terrible outside influences had left some scars. It’s only after I started to try out non-veg food and enjoy different kinds of alcohol that my eyes opened up to a different reality. Most people in India were not vegetarian; many of those who were vegetarian were not so out of choice—the moment they moved up a notch economically, they began to buy and eat meat; India also had its old drinking cultures that well pre-dated

IT’S ONLY AFTER I STARTED TRYING NON-VEG FOOD AND ENJOYING ALCOHOL THAT MY EYES OPENED UP TO A DIFFERENT REALITY...

the arrival of the British, but these had been distorted and buried under the double whammy of the Raj and the quasi-Victorian morals of the freedom movement that opposed it; drinking regularly was not equal to being dead drunk regularly and occasionally getting very merry and high did not mean you were an alcoholic and a threat to society.

As I grew older, I realised there are, and always have been, many different kinds of drinking cultures in India. As we knew, in the urban working class, drinking could often be a nasty business, a tension-alleviating chore that actually adds to the tension and violence of a poor person’s existence. The culture which I initially became a part of could perhaps be described as ‘urban middle-class drinking’. This was a milieu in which drink was had usually in the evening before a meal, with or without the occasion of a party or special dinner; in these circles, daytime drinking was limited to occasional weekends, usually a few Sundays. In corporate circles, drinking could again be a chore, or at least connected to the job. In former royal households, drink became yet something else, as it did with those of India’s super rich who did drink, a symbol of money, refinement and endless free time and often a deadly albatross around necks and livers. In other sections of Indian society, drink was traditional, a part and parcel both in daily life and festive occasions from Goa to Guwahati. Parallely, for India’s tribal communities, locally brewed or distilled liquor was central to the structure of life and the Raj authorities tampering with that in the 19th century led to disastrous consequences, bringing in alcoholism and indebtedness where previously there had been none.

It is into one such situation in south Gujarat that the temperanceloving M.K. Gandhi comes in the early 1920s: the adivasis banned from making their own toddy and mahua liquor, exploitative Parsi booze barons fortifying these traditional drinks with industrial alcohol to increase storage times, leading to the adivasis then becoming prey to the toddy shop owners, first in debt, then with their lands snatched away to pay the booze bills, and then as addicted and enslaved labour on the farms they once owned. Perhaps the total rejection and banning of alcohol was the only option at the time, but it should never have become permanent policy.

Even as Gandhi preached abstinence, many of the other leaders around him continued to drink, most of them in moderation. It may come as no surprise that someone like Motilal Nehru wrote a polite but firm letter basically telling Bapu that he could not, in good conscience, agree to become teetotal. We know Jawaharlal both smoked and drank. We also know that on the other side Jinnah also smoked and drank and loved his ham sandwiches. But it may be more surprising to note that not all the major Gujarati Congress leaders were vegetarian or teetotal. It may be instructive to imagine the reality that at least one great son of Gujarat and India whenever he visited Bombay—which was often—knew that his hosts would have ready a bottle of Scotch and a chicken curry for his dinner. The older Bapu and the younger Morarji Desai might both have disapproved, but their comrade—already regarded as a colossus by 1947—and the

IT COULD BE ARGUED THAT THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO BENEFIT FROM PROHIBITION ARE THE CORRUPT POLITICIANS AND COPS WHO CONTROL THE ILLICIT TRADE IN SMUGGLED LIQUOR

steely will he brought to the freedom movement were not to be trifled with.

I drink the alcohol, the alcohol doesn’t drink me. When I think about this sentence today, I find wider meanings in it. For instance, it could be argued that the alcohol is ‘doing’ Gujarat and Bihar, as in controlling those states. It could be argued that the fear of alcohol and drunkenness is controlling the state governments and deluding them into imposing a dangerous, unhealthy and ultimately untenable policy upon their people. It could be argued that the only people who benefit from prohibition are the corrupt politicians and policemen who control the illicit trade in smuggled liquor.

We know that the medical experts who’ve studied addiction in the country have not recommended prohibition. In a population of young people who quite rightly want the right to party and have fun, the addiction experts have time and again told different central and state governments that the way forward is to encourage a very different drinking culture from the one brewed up by the bad alchemy of the British Raj and the freedom movement; the way forward is to encourage the drinking of wine and ‘normal’ beer by taxing these less and upping the tax on ‘strong’ beer and hard liquor; the way forward is to encourage people to treat alcohol as an accompaniment to food rather than a long prelude to eating; the way out of the current mess is to encourage responsible drinking, and to come down hard on drunken behaviour, whether it be drunk driving or assaults on women.

We know Indians will drink alcohol, whether it reaches them in plastic pouches, in gas cylinders, through illicit and deadly stills or home delivered by some unctuous bootlegger. We know that more than ever before, Indians are engaging with other cultures where drinking and meat-eating are not taboo. We know that we want people from these other cultures to invest in India and for their people to come and work the factories and ports they set up. Our cowardly and wrong-headed leaders may not do anything about it for the short-term gains but we know we need freedom, aazaadi, from 19th century notions about alcohol and 20th century Indian drinking habits.