INTOXICATING TRANSFORMATIONS

Part One, in which …

Food becomes a drug.

Set aside everything you know about alcohol, yeast, distillation and vast liquor stores selling pasteurised beer. Imagine instead that you have some sweet, clear palm tree sap in a clay vessel.

In a warm climate, this liquid would transform over a few hours into a tangy, cloudy, fizzy and intoxicating drink called toddy (‘toddy’, along with ‘punch’, being derived from Indian languages).{{¹}}{{{See ‘toddy’ and ‘punch’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.}}}

Consider how amazing and fascinating this transformation must have seemed to people who did not have concepts of yeast and alcohol, of agents present in the drink from the start transforming one substance into another … {{²}}{{{For reasons of simplicity, I refer here to alcohol in the singular and do likewise with sugar. I also use ‘India’ in place of ‘South Asia’, which many people in the USA confuse with South-East Asia.}}}

A drink called surā (pronounced suraa) is mentioned in the oldest Indian texts, the Vedas, and is arguably the prototypical liquor of Hindu law and of medicine, like wine for the ancient Mediterranean.{{³}}{{{For a recent brief review of alcohol and drinking in India see James McHugh, ‘Alcohol in Pre-Modern South Asia’, in A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs, ed. H. Fischer-Tiné and J. Tschurenev (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 29–44. The present essay is a mere sample of this material. I explore all the texts and issues considered in this essay, and many other topics related to alcohol and intoxication, in far more scholarly detail in James McHugh, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).}}} Surā was a ‘common drink’, it seems, made easily all year round from grains. Similar drinks are made today in India.{{⁴}}{{{For example, handia in Odisha. The earliest surā recipes, such as that in the Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra (17.31–32) seem to use malted grains as well as a starter. Later references to surā all mention the ground grains + kiṇva method.}}}

Cereal grains do not ‘transform’ as easily as sugars; cooked rice does not typically become intoxicating when left to its own devices. In making alcohol from starch, you first need to make a sugar, which is achieved in various ways.{{⁵}}{{{Using the enzymes in malted grains, salivary enzymes (= Peruvian chicha), or aspergillus moulds that are common in many parts of Asia.}}} A few centuries before the turn of the Common Era, people in India wrote about making liquor from grains by adding another substance to cooked grains. Called kiṇva in Sanskrit, this starter (like Chinese jiuqu 酒麴) no doubt contained fungi and yeasts capable of digesting starch to sugar and fermenting sugar to alcohol. But, from the point of view of people in pre-modern India, all that happens is that two non-intoxicating substances are combined, left for some time, and the mixture develops intoxicating properties that are more than a sum of the parts.

Drinks made in this way are also unlike other intoxicating drugs, say cannabis, which are intoxicating from the start, requiring no transformation. Hence, what we now call alcoholic drinks were classified together in pre-modern Indian texts on medicine and law, where there was no concept of alcohol as a substance present in such drinks.{{⁶}}{{{I refer here to texts that cover a long period—from the Vedas to the early second millennium; of course, a lot changed over that time. The main ideas discussed in this article are found in texts from the first millennium through to the early second, but this is by no means the only Hindu approach to drink, nor the only Jain one. Rather, these are contrasting case studies to illustrate the sheer range of ideas about drink in South Asia in this period.}}}

The ease with which a sugary liquid becomes an intoxicating drink is a blessing and a curse.

These remarkable drinks also have complex and powerful effects on a person—but how does this matter work on the body and mind?

Food becomes a fluid drug. But did people see this as good or bad? How does this fluid affect the body?

Also, if you are avoiding liquor, the fact that this transformation happens with such little effort is alarming: abstinence is not just about staying away from liquor vendors, but also involves closely monitoring your sweet liquids.{{⁷}}{{{On this issue in Islamic law see Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).}}}

As we shall see below, scholars explored the strange nature of these drinks for a number of reasons, metaphysical, moral and medical.

What did religions have to say about this amazing transformation?

In many Hindu texts, surā is forbidden to Brahmins and other ‘higher’ classes. It is called the ‘filth of grains’ in one Hindu legal text from after the turn of the Common Era.{{⁹}}{{{Mānavadharmaśāstra, 11.94.}}}

Surā is the drink of humans, of demons even, which contrasts with the divine soma drink of the Vedas, made from an unidentified plant.{{¹⁰}}{{{On the theological contrast between these drinks, see Charles Malamoud, ‘Le soma et sa contrepartie: remarques sur les stupéfiants et les spiritueux dans les rites de l’Inde ancienne’, in Le Ferment Divin, ed. D. Fourier and S. D’Onofrio (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1991), 19–33. Also see Mānavadharmaśāstra, 11.96. For a good recent review of the soma problem, see Jan Houben, ‘The Soma-Haoma Problem: Introductory Overview and Observations on the Discussion’, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 1–47.}}}

The Brahmin class (varṇa), who shared the drinks of the gods, could never drink its beverage nemesis: surā. Thus, both ritually and economically, locally brewed surā differs from a drink such as Persian wine (exotic, precious, imported), which has no place in the Vedas and came with far less scriptural ‘baggage’. Perhaps not surprisingly, Hindu law is often less strict about elite drinks like grape wine than grain surā.{{¹¹}}{{{In Mānavadharmaśāstra, 11.95, surā is defined as threefold, and only the grain-based one is forbidden to all three twice-born varṇas. Varṇas are four theoretical social ‘estates’: Brahmins (priestly), kṣatriyas (kings, warriors), vaiśyas (merchants, traders) and śūdras (servants). One type of surā, mādhvī, was interpreted by some commentators to mean grape wine. Even if one takes the term to refer to honey surā, then grape wine is thereby not a type of surā at all, and even less regulated as non-surā madya (intoxicating drink). On wine in India, see Harry Falk, ‘Making Wine in Gandhara under Buddhist Monastic Supervision’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute [new series] 23 (2009): 65–78; Roberta Tomber, ‘Rome and Mesopotamia—Importers into India in the First Millennium AD’, Antiquity 81 (2007): 972–88.}}}

The process of making grain into this powerful, sometimes despised, drink caught people’s imaginations in other ways.

A materialist philosophical school, the Cārvākas (Chaarvaakas), denied the existence of a soul and therefore of god, and were apparently not keen on Brahmins charging people to perform rituals.{{¹²}}{{{Many descriptions of them are polemical accounts by their opponents. For accessible translations of texts relating to this school, see Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Alexander Moore, A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 227–49.}}}

Yet, how were they to explain the presence of consciousness/mind in a body just made of the elements?

If a pile of mere stuff has no consciousness, how does a human, which is also, according to them, a pile of mere stuff? Surely something like a soul is what makes the difference between a log pile and a person?

‘No!’ say the Cārvākas; consciousness simply emerges from the particular combination of elements in a human body, like the intoxicating power in surā from grains and kiṇva-starter.{{¹³}}{{{Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha, 1.}}}

Consciousness—a key quality of the divine soul in many schools of Hindu philosophy—is just like the boozy effects of surā, the drink so shunned by many orthodox Hindus.