Reforming Politics and Reform as Politics

The commissioner of excise asked his subordinates to gather information about the liquor Indians preferred most in the Presidency of Fort St George in 1905. He also wrote to laboratories to clarify whether toddy was indeed ‘a completely innocuous liquor containing a large proportion of food material’. Major Charles H. Bedford's report concluded that most of the toddy being consumed in the province was at an advanced fermentation stage. Samples sent for laboratory testing had revealed a high proportion of fusel oil – a known cause of indigestion, dysentery and rheumatism. With the hydrometer's use in testing the proof strength of alcoholic drinks in mid-eighteenth-century England, utilising technology to regulate alcohol had become an exercise in building public trust. The hydrometer's subsequent use to test and establish the proof strengths of different country liquors in India was comparable but much more significant in its impact. It demonstrates the colonial state's determination to penetrate an indigenous industry in order to bring it into alignment with Western scientific technologies, processes and practices. Remarkably, the Congress leadership would similarly show interest in ascertaining toddy's nutritional properties. As the president of the Prohibition League of India (PLI), Rajaji wrote to the heads of the Tropical School of Medicine in Calcutta and the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor in 1931. He sought to verify that ‘to drink beer in order to ensure efficient enzyme action in the body (was) as unnecessary as to drink toddy in order to ensure a sufficient supply of Vitamin B’.

Prohibitions, Permits, Power

A mill owner in Salem conducted his own social experiment in sobriety in February 1939. He assembled his workers and instructed them to sit and stand several times in rapid succession, noting that they would ‘never have been so responsive to orders in the days when they drank’. Salem went dry on 1 October 1937. Chittoor and Cuddapah followed suit a year later, and North Arcot went dry in 1939. Prohibition's introduction occurred at the convergence of state-directed reform, political competition, entrenched social anxieties and waves of resistance to the policy. Official assessments painted a glowing picture of its successes, reflecting the ‘idiom of enthusiasm’ so characteristic of Congress mass mobilisation. English and vernacular newspapers joined studies commissioned by Rajaji's government in heaping praise on prohibition for apparently improving the lives of former addicts. Much of the extant literature has echoed this bias while dismissing non-elite resistance to prohibition as ‘local nuisances’ to a policy of great societal importance.

That there would be such a bias is not surprising. Prohibition had been won after a long, hard struggle. By the time the policy was introduced, the priority was proving that it would work. Policymakers found themselves having to justify the sacrifices that had already been made and that were yet to come. Publicly, they feted prohibition. Privately, however, the policy continued to function as prohibitioning between political elites, between the authorities and society, and between different social groups. Prohibition thus developed a double life until the colonial government suspended it in September 1943.

Locating Prohibition's Origins in Colonial India

India is the only country in the world to have prohibition written into its national constitution as an ideal. Article 47 of the Constitution of India establishes that ‘the state shall undertake rules to bring about prohibition of the consumption, except for medicinal purposes, of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health’. Although the state is obligated to implement the policy, there is no compulsion to do so within a stipulated time frame, which makes it a Directive Principle of State Policy – an ideal. As much a national ideal as an instrument of state power, prohibition's fate has been entwined with the rise and fall of state governments since the country's independence.

Prohibition has also spawned its own political economy in India, with a broad spectrum of political parties professing commitment – though usually short-lived – to its enforcement. The specific circumstances of its introduction have varied across the country, as have the policy's trajectories and outcomes. Local cultures, economic circumstances and the demands of state governance have directly contributed to these differences. Besides Gujarat, which has enforced prohibition since 1947 despite a series of hooch-related tragedies and other controversies, Bihar, Mizoram and Nagaland are all ‘dry’ states at the time of this book's writing. Alcohol is all but banned in the union territory of Lakshadweep, although prohibition has been greatly contested in recent years. The association between prohibition and M. K. Gandhi has been the strongest in Gujarat, whereas evangelical Christianity paved the way for the policy's introduction in Nagaland. Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Manipur and Haryana have all tried prohibition on for size at various times since independence, only to suspend it as better suited for implementation at an unspecified time in the distant future. Crippling fiscal deficits and a strong liquor lobby heralded prohibition's termination in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala respectively.

Prohibitioning and the Constitution of India

Prohibition was reviewed and re-conceptualised following the achievement of independence, when the foundations of the modern Indian state were formally established. In the long run, the prohibition ideal filtered through new administrative and legal frameworks that nevertheless bore the imprint of both colonialism and the struggle against it. As the independent Indian republic was premised upon the founding principles of secular democracy and federalism, prohibition had to reckon with both debates relating to personal liberties and issues of state autonomy.

Following independence, the national democratic state – having won the mandate of representing national society – sought to intervene in that domain in order to transform it. The processes that had accompanied the birth of the Indian nation had brought forth institutions, structures and practices that enabled policies like prohibition to be operationalised through the workings of the state. However, the problem remained that a national society still had to be fashioned anew from the fluid, overlapping identities that made up the fabric of Indian social life. Amidst such a ‘recalcitrant social’, which, Prathama Banerjee argues, continued to function as ‘a network of multiple nodes of caste, community and regional sovereignties’, postcolonial governmentality appeared from the very outset ‘a compromised project’.

In this, however, postcolonial governmentality did not constitute as radical a rupture from the colonial past as Banerjee's discussion would suggest. The careful balancing act that the nationalist government attempted to strike between ‘mobilising the social and mobilising the political’ had already set the tone for things to come before independence was achieved; prohibition's colonial-era origins are a case in point.

Profiling as Policy

At the height of the Non-Cooperation movement in 1921, supporters of the Congress harassed six men – all of them labourers – trying to enter a toddy shop in Vellandivalasu, Salem district. The violence was enough to deter four of the men, who promptly turned away from the premises. However, Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were determined to have their drink that day. Leaving the establishment later, Sowariappan was ‘garlanded and beaten with a shoe, and Innasi Muthu was garlanded and slapped on the cheeks’. The latter was reportedly so furious that he would have whipped out a knife in self-defence but for the number of assailants. Filtered through the perspective of colonial officials, this account noted that Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were Dalit Christians and sympathised with the drinking public for the caste violence they had had to endure owing to Congress nationalism.

Excise records surfaced a distinctive administrative term towards the end of the nineteenth century: ‘the drinking public’. Akin to ‘the criminal tribes’, the term circulated through repeated usage, so much so that official correspondences often did not elaborate any further on the subject. As we have seen, drinkers came from every strata of society and drinking in public triggered a great deal of alarm. However, the drinking public meant something entirely different and very particular. Erected at the intersection of caste, class and gender identities, it referred to working-class men drawn from the lowest caste communities. In the Presidency of Fort St George, it also included tribal communities from the Nilgiris whom the state defined by their economic role as servants of the resident European community.

Policies have complex lives and afterlives. They interact with contingent political and social agents and are mediated by their wider contexts, from the processes that inform their conceptualisation through their enforcement.1 Prohibition in India originated in the context of late colonialism. It took shape as an idea, became part of a mass movement and crystallised into an ideal before emerging as a policy with the Madras Prohibition Act of 1937. The ensuing interactions are best understood as constituting the long-term process of prohibitioning, wherein each phase of the policy's development simultaneously overdetermined and constrained its subsequent iterations. As we have seen, this formative experience also enabled prohibition to migrate from the colonial context to the postcolonial era, its origins illuminating crucial parallels and precedents for developments that followed the achievement of independence. Through all this, prohibition bore – indeed, has borne – the imprint of the interactions that produced it, which are discernible in its manifestations as an idea, ideal and policy. As much a history of the policy as it is a history of the Indian state, Sober State has presented a history of prohibitioning that rests on three related arguments.

First, we saw that prohibition emerged as a function of the exercise of state power by the colonial and nationalist states. The colonial state engaged with alcohol policy as a means to maintain power by achieving revenue maximisation and ensuring regulatory checks and balances at a time when said power was quickly slipping out of its hands. The nationalist leadership saw the prohibition demand as a trump card that would expose the colonial state's avarice and hypocrisy, while signifying a new and superior model of governance.

Three-Way Tango: Politics of Liquor Production

Any account of prohibitioning in the decades leading up to the Madras Prohibition Act would necessarily be incomplete without addressing the politics of alcohol production. Colonial officials and nationalist elites were interacting as much with one another and diverse segments of society as with liquor business interests to devise policies aimed at regulating drinking. The cumulative impact of the ensuing developments had a tremendous impact on prohibitioning by influencing the momentum towards the policy's introduction in 1937.

During the period in question, liquor businesses had to contend with mounting social pressure against their trade on the one hand and political manoeuvring by both the colonial government and the Congress leadership on the other. Whilst prohibition discourse cast drinkers as victims who could eventually be redeemed of their affliction and transformed into upstanding citizens, it painted the producers, distributors and retailers of alcohol unforgivingly and with a large brush stroke as traitors of the nation. ‘A number of Indian merchants, be it said to their shame,’ charged a letter that was published in The Hindu, ‘have taken up the merchandise of liquor to ruin their countrymen.’ The most spectacular anti-alcohol protests were, unsurprisingly, directed at toddy and arrack shop contractors.

The constraints imposed on liquor business interests by, first, the colonial establishment and, subsequently, the nationalist leadership were part of an overarching political contest to dictate the terms of liquor production. If the colonial government was concerned that the emergence of liquor monopolies would result in lowered revenue yields for the state, the nationalist leadership sought the right to altogether remove liquor production from the workings of the national economy.

Caste, Country Liquor and Company Raj

The year was 1710. The wardens of a European cemetery in Madras wrote to East India Company officials complaining about the nuisance they had to put up with owing to the coconut trees on the property. This was a peculiar complaint; we do not normally imagine coconut trees when we think about sources of public nuisance. The crux of the matter at hand was that the gates had to be kept open all the time so that a certain country liquor could be drawn and sold. Variously described as the homegrown beer or palm wine of the Madras Presidency, the miscreant in question was toddy, the word deriving from the Hindi tari. In this imperial account, the cemetery was rendered noisier than all the punch houses in Madras put together as basket makers, scavengers, buffalo keepers ‘and other Parriars (Paraiyars)’ converged there at night to drink toddy, whereupon inebriated ‘beggars and other vagabonds’ even proceeded to lie down in freshly dug graves. Company officials wrote to the governor recommending replanting the trees elsewhere to relieve the European community of their troubles. The offending coconut trees were promptly removed.

As Company officials increasingly found themselves thrust into the role of a governing body in the Presidency of Fort St George, they found themselves having to develop a coherent response to the issue of alcohol, which eventually became the precursor to the colonial state's alcohol policy. Observations of local drinking cultures that a broad cross-section of European society had contributed became the basis of their response, which evidenced a growing reliance on strategies constituting governmentality over time.

Civil Society and Prohibition

While politics at the national and provincial levels converged to produce prohibition as a political idea and demand, thereby influencing its policy features along the way, it was the concurrent development of a vibrant prohibition culture that imbued the policy with moral force as the demand of the Indian people. Prohibition become an ideal as it filtered through society before crystallising in the provinces as a policy. Indeed, civil society activism reinforced the Congress's demand for the policy as it took shape, bringing a distinct casteist and gendered worldview into alignment with teetotalism-as-patriotism.

Reflecting ‘a convergence of modern science with a synthesis of Victorian morality and established merchant/Bania and Brahman pious norms’, social movements across India had surfaced certain elitist values that gradually became cultural norms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. As they often included the threat of social exclusion, movements that originated and developed within caste communities proved remarkably effective in persuading large numbers of people to turn away from drink – more so, arguably, than state-led prohibition subsequently was. However, there was a key difference between earlier movements and the distinct culture of prohibition that took root between 1920 and 1937. Although the latter was overtly political in its orientation and outlook, it was embedded in a discourse that elevated it above the domain of politics. As an influential Tamil newspaper put it, ‘the political issue need not be mixed up with this. Go to your villages and organise compacts so that there may not be any drunkard therein.’