India and Central Asia are crucial to the early history of distillation, although today their participation in the global spirits trade rather belies their importance. There is a good deal of archaeological evidence and even some textual evidence to suggest that the Indian subcontinent was one of the earliest centers of distillation and was perhaps even the first place to develop the practice on something approaching an industrial scale.
The archeological record covers a period from 100 bce (and perhaps earlier) to 200 ce and an area stretching from Gandhara in the north (present-day northwest Pakistan and southern Afghanistan) to Mysore in the far south. It is not unambiguous: the people doing the digging, in the mid-twentieth century, were not looking specifically for evidence of distillation, and even if there were sufficient interest in pursuing some of the most promising findings, around Taxila in the old Gandharan kingdom, present conditions in the region make such a dig unlikely. But combined with evidence from various Ayurvedic texts (admittedly also ambiguous) that suggest the term surā, normally taken to mean a fermented drink, actually means a distilled one, and from the less-ambiguous Arthashastra, an administrative manual attributed to Kautilya and completed by the third century ce, which notes that “householders should be free to manufacture white liquor on festive occasions,” there is a strong case for early distillation in India. Indeed, the Gandharan excavations appear to show combined distillery-taverns, where spirits were made in the back and served in the front. See distillation, history.
In any case, by the late 1200s, as Baranî, the historian of the Delhi Sultanate (the predecessor to the Mughal Empire), records, there was a lively trade in cane spirits in Delhi and northern India. See rum. At the same time, southern and western India made large amounts of palm-sap arrack. See arrack and palmsap. These spirits were full-fledged articles of commerce, at a time when the European spirits trade was just beginning. See spirits trade, history of. These were not the only spirits made in India; mahua flowers were distilled in central India; the southwest saw cashew fruits were made into the spirit that would eventually be called feni; and jaggery, or palm sugar, was widely distilled, often with various botanicals (sometimes including cannabis). See feni and mahua.
The arrival of European colonizers in the late 1400s did little to change the subcontinent’s drinkways, at least at first. Indeed, it was the Europeans who adopted Indian drinks. The Portuguese, unable to get wine, took to distilling raisins in palm arrack to make a (strong) facsimile. The English made an artificial wine of arrack, citrus juice, sugar, and water, either following an Indian model or at the very least adopting Indian ingredients wholesale. This punch, as they called it, became the first globally popular drink based on spirits, and did more than anything else to normalize spirits drinking. See punch.
Eventually, however, European, and specifically English, influences took root. It wasn’t just the punch houses and London-style taverns that began popping up wherever the English settled (e.g., the famous Harmonic Tavern in Calcutta, whose bohemian patronage in the 1780s would have been considered fast company even in London). It was also things like Bengal rum (which had been known as Bengal arrack before the rise of the British rum trade), which developed along lines first laid out in the British Caribbean (e.g., barrel aging) and was widely exported throughout Asia and the East Indies. The explosive growth of the British whisky industry in the nineteenth century took full advantage of the huge export market that India represented, but already by the end of the 1820s the inevitable had happened, and India had started making its own whisky, at Kasauli in the western Himalayas where the cool climate resembles that of Scotland. Today, India’s whisky industry is one of the largest in the world, although the bulk of what it makes are blends of scotch malt and grain whiskies and local spirit, either grain- or molasses-based; several of these are among the largest-selling whisky brands in the world. See
Amrut is made from grain grown in the Punjab and elsewhere in northern India. Today, however, other than the whisky still made at Kasauli, the region is not the distilling center it once was. In the 1700s, for instance, one would have found cane-spirit drinkers in Delhi, and if one had continued north, Nepal would perhaps have yielded some more cane spirit (it certainly makes that now) and Kashmir would have yielded grape brandy, as would Afghanistan, if you knew whom to talk to (wines and spirits were made in small quantities there by members of the Jewish and Armenian Christian communities, as was common throughout the region). In the northern parts of Afghanistan, one would have been likely to encounter the true spirit of Central Asia, arajhi. This distilled kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) was the preferred drink of the Mongols, and its manufacture dates back to at least the 1100s ce. This at least can still be found in the region: in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, it is sold as chagirmak (although vodka is much easier to find there, thanks to the state-of-the-art former Soviet vodka distillery maintained at Tokmok). It is somewhat easier to find in Mongolia, where it is called arkhi. This is one of the oldest distilling traditions on earth. The product, however, is not exported. See arrack.
Allchin, F. R. “India: The Ancient Home of Distillation?” Man, March 1979, 55–63.
Hobbs, H. John Barleycorn Bahadur. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1944.
Mahdihassan, S. “The Earliest Distillation Units: Pottery in Indo-Pakistan.” Pakistan Archaeology 8 (197): 159–168.
Oort, Marianne S. “Surā in the Paippalāda Samhitā of the Atharvaveda.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, April-June 2002, pp. 355–60.
Park, Hyunhee. Soju: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Prakash Sangar, Satya. Food and Drinks in Mughhal India. New Delhi: Reliance, 1999.
Wondrich, David. Punch! New York: Perigee, 2010.
By: David Wondrich