An Unholy Brew

Walk into a wine store in suburban America, and you will be greeted with a wealth of sensations and a treasury of words. You will learn of the difference between bouquets and aromas, of varietals and vintages. This talk is about wine, but it is also about more than that: it is about society and class, education and exclusion. The vast technical vocabulary of consumption and enjoyment—of connoisseurship—in English is a reminder that the experience of drinking is never merely about the gustatory sensations that occur when the fermented juice of grapes flows across the palate. Drinking is an experience preceded and followed by layers of history and culture. With such powerful cultural signifiers, wine talk—oinoglossia, if you will—has traveled far beyond the world of wine. We now encounter tasting notes on the chocolate we bite into, the coffee we sip, and yes, even the beer we chug. James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions is a tour of how people in precolonial South Asia drank alcohol. But more than that, it is a tour of how people spoke about drinking alcohol. It is a guide to the rich vocabularies people in precolonial South Asia developed to discuss drinking alcohol; what McHugh calls “the cultural grammar of liquor in the long Sanskritic tradition” (281).First things first: despite the book's subtitle, McHugh is insistent that people in precolonial South Asia did not, in fact, drink alcohol. Rather, they drank surā, āsava, and ariṣṭa, and later arka. These beverages made people dizzy, happy, and sometimes violent, but McHugh is careful to warn us away of retrojecting our current understanding of alcohol onto the past. Alcohol is a curious word in that it can both denote a class of beverages that cause intoxication and a distinct substance within those beverages. Such an understanding is of recent vintage, and McHugh invites his readers to explore a world of drinking that existed before the isolation and identification of ethanol.McHugh opens and closes An Unholy Brew by labeling the book as descriptive rather than thesis driven. What this means is that the book surveys a vast corpus of primary and secondary sources related to intoxicating drinks in premodern India; the fact that there are multiple stories to emerge from this corpus is not a defect. Rather, it shows the diversity of ways that drinking was incorporated into everyday life in the millennia-long period McHugh analyzes. In performing this ground-clearing exercise, a larger methodology emerges for constructing cultural histories—with a constant eye toward material culture as well as literary and intellectual history—from Sanskrit sources that are often seen to resist the touch of the social.McHugh argues that there were different styles of drinking in premodern India, which were articulated in different sorts of texts. The types of drinking that are denigrated in Sanskrit legal texts were quite distinct from the types of drinking celebrated in Sanskrit belles lettres. These differences correspond to class and caste differences but are also expressed in the types of drinks consumed. Chapters 1 and 3 focus on fermented—but not distilled—grain-based drinks called surā that require the addition of saccharifying enzymes to break down starches prior to fermentation. The meaning of surā shifted over time, but after the Vedic period it came to be associated with public drinking houses that were sometimes regulated and taxed and that were often accompanied by the mingling of people from different parts of society. Chapters 2 and 4 examine sugar-based drinks directly fermented—again, without distillation—from things such as grapes, sugarcane, palm sap, and honey without the need of an intermediate saccharifying step. These drinks were often associated with luxury consumption and the kāmaśāstra-inflected social world of elite, private drinking parties and the erotic worlds of Sanskrit poetry. Moving across a range of sources—including satirical plays, the Sanskrit epics, and Buddhist jātaka stories—McHugh shows how different beverages were used to express social distinctions within South Asian history.To tell the full story of this cultural grammar of liquor, McHugh moves beyond the drinks themselves. He shows how drinking was articulated with other acts of consumption: the court-centered practices of betel chewing, the salty and spicy snacks that accompanied drinking parties in premodern India, and eventually the rise of cannabis as a parallel medical and ritual substance.Indeed, drinks were not only for intoxication. Today, we use alcohol for a range of purposes: to sanitize our hands, to power our cars, and to convey perfumes and colognes. The primary association of alcohol and intoxication needs to be seen as one use of many. To this end, chapter 5 focuses on medical understandings of intoxicating drinks—and the book often returns to medical uses of these substances, since it was often medical texts that adapted to changing practices and novel substances ahead of other scholarly genres.If the first half of the book establishes the basic patterns of drink culture in precolonial India, the second half provides a closer analysis of drink in an array of religious contexts: Sanskrit mythology, juridical codes, and tantric ritual. These chapters provide close readings of the often-conflicting understandings of alcohol in different areas of religious life.The descriptive nature of An Unholy Brew itself constitutes an argument. The very fact that there was so much talk about alcohol—sometimes by people who enthusiastically drank and sometimes by people who were fastidiously abstinent—presents an image of Sanskrit intellectual life at odds with many contemporary representations. McHugh relishes taking his reader through recipe after recipe in mouthwatering detail, along the way showing not only the material worlds expressed in Sanskrit texts but also the elaborate epistemic culture of recipe writing and collecting that was interwoven with scholarly life.An Unholy Brew opens several avenues of research that develop from questions the book leaves open. With the rise of Islamic states that employed scholars and courtiers trained in Persian idioms, new patterns of drinking took center stage in medieval and early modern South Asia. These sometimes found their way into the Sanskrit texts that form the basis of An Unholy Brew, the most prominent example being the introduction of distillation to Sanskrit texts that talk of a new substance called arka, a clear derivative of the Arabic ʿaraq, after the twelfth century CE. But An Unholy Brew also provides an opportunity for future scholars working on the second millennium to show how the wine-dominant drinking culture expressed in Persian and early Hindi texts articulated with the drinking cultures developed in Sanskrit sources that McHugh analyzes. Wine—broadly construed—was one particularly potent “object of translation” of the sort that Finbarr Flood has discussed.With his two monographs, James McHugh has now established himself as one of the most prominent analysts of material culture as described in Sanskrit texts. An Unholy Brew provides a sensitive reading that manages to negotiate the difficult gap between text and world. Such a practice is not limited to understanding the place of alcohol in precolonial Indian society and should serve as a guide to other scholars seeking to make sense the worlds described in South Asian texts

Alcohol · Ancient history · Biology · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · Religious studies

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