ABSTRACT
Probably better than anybody else, the serious pub-goers of Bangalore know where the current boundaries of the city lie. This rapidly growing city has been swallowing many surrounding villages, officially and unofficially, as its area has expanded. The poor residents of nearby villages are waiting for the day when their village is included within the Greater Bangalore area and the price of their not-so-productive agricultural lands suddenly shoots up. However, the serious pub-goers will not be so happy because the expansion of the city means they will possibly have to travel even further than before to satisfy their thirst. The habit of going outside of the city to drink began when the city authority introduced a series of restrictions on alcohol consumption within the city boundary. Currently the pubs, clubs and bars have to close at 11 p.m. sharp. Surprisingly, this rule has been efficiently enforced by the police. While visiting the city’s famous clubs, we often encountered policemen coming to make sure that the club was closing. Drinkers do not mind this at all; if they have the energy, they simply drive their cars or bikes (it is hoped that some of them are still sober) out of the city to continue drinking. There are numerous venues that have been established just outside the boundary for this purpose. On New Year’s Eve of 2006, the city authority went so far as to entirely close the city centre M.G. Road to all business and traffic in order to prevent the recurrence of a street party that had spontaneously erupted there the previous year. Again, the young middle classes of Bangalore were well prepared: many discos outside of the city boundary offered attractive all-night parties and sold tickets in the city centre well in advance. M.G. Road was dead on that day, but there were many people enjoying themselves elsewhere. In May 2008, over 180 people lost their lives as a result of consuming illicit alcohol in the border areas of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. At least 80 of them were from slum areas of Bangalore and another 30 from rural suburbs outside of the city. The Congress party immediately condemned the BJP government for banning the legal manufacture and sale of arrack in the state, which they held to be the cause. The newly elected chief minister, Y.S. Yediyurappa, was the architect of this ban on arrack in July 2007. Such so-called hooch tragedies seem to arise regularly in India, while the number of deaths is often especially high following the introduction of regulations restricting drinking. Gujarat, the only
remaining dry state in India, has come under special criticism on these grounds, with the horrific casualties from illegal liquor consumption in recent years attracting profound criticism and the scorn of licit distillers elsewhere in India.1 Drinking in India has always been an extremely contentious issue. Christian missionaries encouraged a policy of temperance, while the army in cantonment cities such as Bangalore fortified its troops with copious quantities of spirits. Giving up drinking was considered to be one of the ways in which lower castes could claim higher status in the varna hierarchy. Gandhi added to this ‘Sanskritising’ behaviour a sense of patriotism, since alcohol was a major source of income for the colonial state (Carroll 1976). Unfortunately, the excise duty on alcohol remained an extremely important source of income for postindependence state governments, accounting for more than 20 per cent of tax revenues in most states. Inheriting as it did both the nationalist (or Gandhian) moral agenda and the financial structures of the colonial era, the postcolonial state has had to play a seemingly contradictory role. Some states tried to introduce a total prohibition on alcohol sales, but most of them failed to continue this, with the exception of Gujarat. However, adopting a moral stance while meeting financial demands is not necessarily a contradictory aim. After all, it is all about controlling people’s moral and bodily practices. The southern states have thus all of them now banned the sale of arrack, a typical working-class drink, on the grounds of health and family welfare, while encouraging the sale of Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL), a more middle-class drink, which happens to be centrally distributed. This is a clear example of how the state has endeavoured to exercise moral authority while controlling and collecting excise revenues more efficiently. Earlier, toddy liquor was banned for similar reasons. Studies on alcohol in general have been dominated by the disciplines of biology, public health, social policy and social psychology, which have tended to regard alcohol consumption as a question of individual pathology (addiction) or as a social problem leading to alcohol-related violence, family neglect and various other problems. Anthropological studies, especially functionalist approaches, on the other hand, have tended to emphasise the socially integrative role of drinking (Heath 1987: 105, Dietler 2006: 230). Here, drinking alcoholic beverages has been understood as normal social behaviour and even as crucially important for its socially integrative role (see, for example, Douglas 1987). However, anthropologists have notably neglected the political and economical aspects of drinking, as observed by Singer (1986), and it is only recently that socio-cultural anthropology has begun to examine historically sensitive issues concerning how alcohol is deployed within the micro-and macro-politics of society. It is noticeable, furthermore, that the wealth of studies on the social meanings of food in India (for example, Dwyer 2004, Osella 2008) have tended, delicately, to avoid the issue of alcohol altogether. There are relatively few academic studies concerning alcohol in India, but historians have contributed immensely. Lucy Carroll (1976) has demonstrated the clear connections between nineteenth-century temperance movements in the
west and the Gandhian agitation for prohibition, which had otherwise often been regarded a uniquely Indian process of ‘Sanskritisation’ or a pure product of anticolonial nationalism. David Hardiman (1987), on the other hand, has shown how the avoidance of alcohol in India might have had an agenda of its own, entirely unrelated to the temperance advocacy of missionaries or that of Gandhian nationalists. This agenda sought to release subaltern groups from the thrall of exploitative liquor dealers and moneylenders, and conceived of self-improvement in indigenous, but neither Christian nor Sanskritic, terms. These historical contributions have shown how intimately the consumption of alcohol is linked to power and politics, and that moralising about alcohol has commonly been adapted and interpreted in ways that suit purely material self-interests. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the fate of the Gandhian temperance campaign of the 1930s and 1940s, which enjoyed total and complete ideological and political acceptance at the dawn of independence, but was almost entirely abandoned over the course of the subsequent three decades. However, even half a century after Gandhi’s death, it seems that the social and political economy of drink cannot escape from the rhetoric of morality and temperance, and even perhaps demands it in order to legitimise specific practices. Thus, as alcohol consumption has diversified and increased, the discourse of abstinence has been re-born in new forms which echo the growth in inequality, new political agendas and the changing class divisions within Indian society. The moral, economic and political tensions arising from the political economy of alcohol consumption are nowhere more intensely felt than within the confines of Indian cities. It is within Indian cities that we see most vividly the segregation of the drinking public in class terms being enacted within spatial terms as well. This is perhaps most dramatically apparent in India’s most modern metros, where whole zones of shopping malls, five-star hotels and nightclubs have become no-go areas for poorer and less prosperous city residents. This chapter focuses on this phenomenon specifically within the city of Bangalore, the IT capital of India, one of the fastest growing cities in Asia, and the capital city of the state of Karnataka, which has also, incidentally, become a gateway for the entry of the Hindu nationalist BJP into the south of India.
