Mahua: The Indian liquor the British banned

I smelled the sweet flowers before I saw them. During an early morning drive inside the Similipal National Park in the east Indian state of Odisha, I had stopped near a picturesque waterfall where thousands of pale-green blooms were falling from the surrounding trees and carpeting the forest floor.

"These are mahua trees," said Suresh Kisku, my guide from the Santhal tribal community. He pointed towards the cluster of short, stout trunks and dome-shaped canopies that edged a small clearing.

The mahua tree, or madhuca longifolia, grows abundantly in the forested plains of western, central and eastern India, where tribes – such as the Santhal, Gond, Munda and Oraon – who have inhabited the area for the last 3,000 years, consider it the "Tree of Life".

Traditionally, theses tribes have used its flowers, fruits, branches and leaves for food, cattle fodder, fuel, art, medicine and even as currency to barter for grains. They've also revered it through vibrant folk festivals, songs and verses. Perhaps its most well-known use, though, is in the form of a sweetish liquor with strong floral notes simply called "mahua", which is brewed over a pot still in a meticulously detailed eight-day process.

This means the mahua spirit is pure

Later that day, Kisku brought me to his house on the fringes of the forest, where his mother and younger sister, Geeta, crouched close to a sturdy metal pot containing fermented mahua juices over a woodfire. Two other pots were positioned over the larger pot to brew the spirit that would condense and travel through a tube to be stored in a container on the mud floor. After a while, Geeta dipped a ladle into the brew and threw the liquid into the fire, the flames shooting up in a white blaze. "This means the mahua spirit is pure," said Kisku.That evening I slowly sipped the clear, colourless liquid from a small cup made with leaves that Geeta had handed to me. The freshly distilled mahua liquor went down my throat with a delightfully fiery trail, leaving a smoky, floral aftertaste.

"Why haven't I tasted this before?" I wondered. 

From ancient times until the late 1800s, indigenous families like Kisku's were free to distil, consume and sell mahua liquor. However, the production of what was considered a "country spirit" by the Indian government suffered a heavy blow during the British Raj rule in India. Mahua was deemed a dangerous intoxicant that was a threat to public health and morality, so colonial lawmakers created legislation – such as the Bombay Abkari Act of 1878 and Mhowra Act of 1892 – that not only banned or restricted the distillation of the spirit, but also clamped down on the collection and storage of the mahua flowers by indigenous tribes.

Fewer mahua flowers led to clandestine brewing that was often infused with impurities being added as filler. The resulting decline in quality only furthered the British Raj's agenda at the time: to control the production of local spirits in general, as the revenue generated from imported alcohol from places such as Britain and Germany helped fund military occupations.

"While some colonial officials recognised the cultural and nutritional importance of indigenous drinks like mahua, the threat to revenue took precedence", said Dr Erica Wald, a modern history professor at the University of London.

Interestingly, even after India gained independence in 1947, the old economic and social mores stayed intact. "The state remained closely associated with the monopoly on sale and production of alcohol just like the erstwhile colonial rulers, and mahua remained under stringent laws and limitations," said Wald.

"Alcohol was a frequent target for temperance advocates and early nationalists," Wald continued. "Boycotts and pickets of alcohol stores, and the insistence of some nationalists that alcohol was 'foreign' to India, meant that even drinks like mahua, which were so important in the lives of many tribals, were lumped together as problematic."

Thus, mahua remained classified as a low-quality, "dangerous" drink, and the tribal people were denied the right to produce and sell it beyond traditional village markets. 

"It tells you the nature of post-independence Indian elites who were highly disdainful of the lifestyles of the indigenous population," said Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University. "It ended up producing a lot of mediocre, homogenous stuff that shaped the Indian liquor industry."

Against the legacy of this socio-political canvas, it would take a few strong entrepreneurial voices interested in rebranding mahua as a quality craft spirit, while also trying to bring about changes in excise legislations, to begin to lift bans on the liquor.

"We introduced mahua in Goa, made under the IML (Indian-Made Liquor) category, a tag we got after much persuasion with the government," said Desmond Nazareth, who launched Mahua Spirit and Mahua Liqueur under the brand DesmondJi in 2018.

The Goa-based craft distiller also sells mahua in Karnataka, the only other Indian state to recognise mahua as an IML opposed to a "country spirit". According to Indian law, country spirits cannot be sold across inter-state borders, so by branding it as IML, it can reach a larger consumer base when sold in other states. 

For the last couple of years, a change in attitude has slowly been occurring among local governments and agencies. For example, in 2021, the government of Madhya Pradesh declared mahua as a heritage liquor, and the government of Maharashtra state changed its archaic laws to legalise the collection and storage of the flowers by local tribal groups. For the first time, in that same year, a government organisation called the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority shipped dehydrated mahua flowers, which were collected by the tribal population from the forests of Chhattisgarh, to France.

While some states are ending bans on mahua, lifting them at a pan-India level will make it a much more viable business venture for distillers.

Susan Dias, director of Mumbai-based start-up Native Brews started brewing mahua with Vasantdada Sugar Institute back in 2018. She said, "We have our recipe in place, and need the regulations around production, distribution and marketing of mahua to ease up on a national level to commence with our first batch."

-bbc