The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.

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.

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms are complementary to court proceedings and have gained wide acceptance. The main advantage of ADR techniques is that litigants are not bound by the technicalities of ordinary court procedures. Society, the state and parties to a dispute are equally under an obligation to resolve the dispute before it disturbs the peace in the family, business community and, ultimately, humanity as a whole, because a civilised society implies the application of the rule of law and principles of natural justice. In fact, arbitration, one such ADR mechanism, has a long tradition in many countries, and India too has an age-old tradition of settlement of disputes through arbitration and conciliation. In ancient rural India, panchayats were a forum for the settlement of disputes. In villages, disputes were not to be taken to the courts of law; instead, they were referred to the panchayats consisting of village elders who commanded great respect. The village panchayats were so called because each consisted of five (panch) elders, who used to preside over civil, criminal and family disputes; these five elders were referred to as panch parameswar (equating them to the gods). This system worked successfully in the villages and was independent of state authority and control. The concept of parties settling their disputes in a binding manner by referring them to a person or persons of their choice or private tribunals was thus well known in ancient and medieval India. Appeals were also often made against the decisions of such persons or tribunals to the courts of judges appointed by the king and, ultimately, to the king himself.

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.

State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.