The earliest textual reference to a heady drink, associated with the Aryans, is found in the Rgveda. It is called Soma to which the Rgveda devotes one full section (Mandala IX). Soma was also the name of a Vedic god. Another drink, Sura, grain based unlike the plant based Soma, is also mentioned in the Rgveda. Soma was offered to Vedic gods; among them Indra was an inveterate imbiber and a dipsomaniac. Sura was used in the Sautramani ritual. Unlike Soma, which was offered to the gods and which the brahmanas/priests had the privilege to drink, Sura was popular among the ordinary people and was considered inferior to the former; it was also drunk at weddings, tournaments and other festive occasions. The Vedic and post-Vedic literature mentions other drinks as well, and some of them may have been substitutes for Soma which grew in the mountains and gradually became scarce as the Aryans moved into the plains. The name Soma, however, continued to be used in the general sense of an alcoholic drink. In subsequent times, greater variety of wine and other drinks were known and with the emergence of states, they tended to come under state control. Kautilya in his Arthasastra, assignable to the Mauryan period, provides for the appointment of a superintendent of liquor (suradhyaksa) who controlled the sale and manufacture of liquor.
In the early centuries before and after Christ there was an unprecedented spurt in trade with the Western world; Rome exported a huge quantity of wine to India. Along with the brisk Indo-Roman trade came the Graeco-Roman influence in different spheres, especially in art as is evident from the Bacchanalian group of sculptures from Mathura whose Dionysiac aspect has been a prominent theme of discussion among art historians and which is noticeable, in varying degrees, in later times too.
The literary texts of ancient India often describe drinking scenes in explicit detail. The Ramayana, Mahabharata, the works of Kalidasa, etc., depict Rama, Krsna and other godly figures as engaging in drinking bouts. The twelfth-century work, Manasollasa, written by the Western Calukya king Somesvara III, describes what a royal drinking party was like.
Religions of ancient India had varied attitudes to the use of liquor. The Vedic religion used Soma in rituals but early Buddhism did not favour drinking though the extent to which Buddhists abstained from it is a matter of speculation. However, there is evidence of wine making under the supervision of Buddhist monasteries in north-western India during the post- Mauryan period. Later, alcohol use became de rigueur with the rise of Vajrayana Buddhism and other Tantric sects like the Kapalika and Kalamukha; the Mattavilasaprahasana (seventh century) by the Pallava king Mahendravarman parodies a Kapalika who is heavily drunk.
It is evident from the above that the history of alcohol use goes back to very early times. The first article on the theme was written by Rajendralal Mitra and was published in the Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1878, Since then no full length and comprehensive study has been undertaken of the subject so far and, as a result, there has been a vacuum in the area of alcohol studies. The present volume is not intended to fill that vacuum but only to create an awareness of the need to study the history of liquor consumption in early India. Mitra’s paper provides an overview of liquor use in ancient India, but like all pioneering work it has its shortcomings. Mitra uses the term distillation in a loose sense and does not discuss its antiquity. This forms the subject matter of Part I which includes articles by F.R. Allchin, M.S. Oort, James McHugh, and Irfan Habib; the last one draws mainly on medieval sources (Chs. 1, 2, 3 and 4). In Part II Rajendralal Mitra (ch. 5) deals with drinking habits of ancient Indians. Articles by Rajesh Kochhar and Jan Houben (Chs. 6 and 7) deal with the various issues related to the identity and historiography of Soma; and Pentti Aalto (Ch. 8) surveys the evidence of drinking in ancient India and focuses on the types of intoxicating drinks that were used. The article by Martha Carter (Ch. 9) discusses how the drink culture permeated in Indian art in the wake of India’s interaction with the West during the early centuries AD, especially the Kusana period. The last section (Ch. 10) is a translation by David Lorenzen of the one-act farce, Mattavilasaprahasana (seventh century), whose protagonist Kapdlika is suitably tipsy and provides a fitting finale to this volume on alcohol. In a collection like this overlapping is inevitable; for this I crave the indulgence of the reader.
I thank Professor Niraj Kumar Jha (Princeton), and Dr Jyotsna Arora and Malvika Gulati of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, for their help. 1 am grateful to Ramesh Jain and Siddharth Chowdhury for expediting the publication of the book.
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