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.