Varieties of Drunk Experience in Early Medieval South Asia

Abstract

Scholars of Indian cultural history have neglected the topic of alcohol and drinking, instead mostly emphasising a discourse of abstinence. Yet many Sanskrit technical and literary texts of the first through the early second millennium CE describe drinking in a positive light. There, drink is presented as a vital accessory for pleasure: drink is tasty, drink enhances the senses, loosens inhibitions and is associated with the enjoyment of sex for both women and men. The drinker is also an entertaining spectacle. Even those who abstained for religious reasons could savour the pleasures of drink as presented in poetry. Thus, within certain Sanskrit discourses that were presumably produced and used by an (unfortunately vaguely defined) educated elite through the later first and early second millennium CE, the multifaceted pleasures of drink are quite often celebrated. It is only by using a restricted archive that one would conclude that attitudes to drink among those who consumed Sanskrit texts in the early medieval period were largely negative.