ABSTRACT
The Gariahat Whisky Conspiracy was a massive international criminal operation that manufactured bootlegged whisky in Calcutta and sold it throughout Asia and Europe. When it was finally discovered, its sheer complexity, proportions and the technology involved in producing the whisky staggered the British Indian authorities. In this article I want to move away from the narratives of criminality and look at the operation as an instance of what I call ‘bootlegged cosmopolitanism’, namely, where bootlegging and smuggling constitute rich forms of cosmopolitanism. This is particularly significant for the time, since it is a period of growing ethnic divisions in South Asia. I also want to rethink the final collapse of the operations not simply as a triumph of law over crime, but as a sign of the mutation of colonial state into what I call a nationalistic state in the run up to decolonization.
