The Lives of Alcohol in Pre-colonial India

Abstract

Alcohol appeared in several varieties in South Asia during the seventeenth century. This object lived different lives in that it was produced locally as well as brought from Europe, Africa and the Middle-east Asia, was exchanged in several networks within the subcontinent and consumed by a diversity of people. Alcohol was at once the agent of social interaction, and an object of exchange. It was perceived as being central to the constitution of authority. Hierarchies of class, caste, gender and community both participated and came to be represented around the object. In discourses on the body and health, alcohol became the metaphor for completely opposite qualities—birth and death, health and disease. Embedded in processes and representations of great diversity, alcohol can be considered as not just mute but as integral to the dynamics of pre-colonial India.