Texts on Dharmaśāstra are often quite concerned, both directly and indirectly, with material things. People wear or avoid garlands, carry bedposts and skulls, and even count (or in fact, fail to count) rhinoceros toes. 1 Scholars who have worked on these texts will know that in many cases these things, which are in many ways the most concrete referents of the texts, have become rather elusive over the years—it is often difficult to establish what the things are (bedpost? skull on a stick? something else?), and why one thing as opposed to another is used in a certain context, especially in a tradition that covers such a large geographical area and long period of time. In this chapter, I wish to explore what we can do about studying these material things—how we can go about studying these nebulous objects, and why trying to do so can be useful and productive.
It will be easier to discuss this topic if we deal with an actual thing. A suitably remote yet quite fascinating “dharmaśāstric object” is the ancient Indian alehouse sign, namely the object called the surādhvaja (“surā banner,” “surā flag”) or sometimes simply a dhvaja (“banner,” “flag”). As far as I am aware, all the surviving references to this interesting object are found in texts on Dharmaśāstra or in texts of an ethical and didactic nature, such as certain parts of the Mahābhārata and the Arthaśāstra . On first sight, this seems a straightforward object, some sort of sign displayed by a person who sells some sort of alcoholic drink. It actually seems quite like a lot of objects we know today. But on closer inspection, both the banner and the drink advertised are more complex than might at first seem. As we shall see from exploring the case of this material object—a thing we only know about via written texts—the study of Dharmaśāstra is often one of our better sources for learning about the material culture of early South Asia, about the usage and significance of certain material things. Further, the study of material culture through sources other than those on dharma is often very enlightening about what is going on in Dharmaśāstra, not just materially, but also socially and ritually. This background knowledge can help us appreciate what is peculiar, innovative, or reactionary in Dharmaśāstra. And considered together, the study of material culture and texts on dharma make an invaluable source for the study of the social history of early South Asia—something that is often overlooked, or at least understated, in the study of material culture.
Of course, all these texts are of an elite nature, often Brahmanical, and one would think this limits what one can learn about society from them. Yet reading between the lines, and reflecting on what is possibly implied by these surviving sources, especially when they are dealing with a topic like alehouses and getting drunk, can give us some small but important glimpses into the lived world of ancient India. And more directly, these texts furnish a wealth of data regarding the categories that the educated and/or powerful may have used, promoted, resisted, or reinterpreted in dealing with the matter of alcohol, and many other such topics. In exploring this particular question, Kane’s magisterial History of Dharmaśāstra remains by far the most valuable resource for navigating the considerable traditional scholarship on the matter. 2
Let us start, however, with the drink associated with the sign we are discussing, a drink called surā , a word that is relatively familiar to all scholars of Sanskrit. As noted, one major methodological challenge in studying ancient material culture from texts is how to understand what exactly these lost things were, and in this case, what sort of drink surā was (and its exact nature does matter to the tradition). Also, translation is important here, and we need to decide how to talk about this drink in English. And we need to deal with the fact that the words and ideas associated with the traditions of Dharmaśāstra circulated for extremely long periods, during which the material culture and society changed greatly.
In discussing the regulation of drinking alcohol in Dharmaśāstra, Kane uses a variety of words. He does not always translate the term surā into English, and for other drinks, he uses such words as “wine” or “rum” and quite often “liquor.” 3 The range of words for alcoholic drinks in Sanskrit is quite impressive (and very confusing). Drinks were normally differentiated in terms of what they were made of; so, for example, sīdhu was made from sugar cane and its products though, as it was not a distilled drink, “rum” is not the best translation for this word. There are no closely analogous beverage words in the English language for many of these drinks. For the Sanskrit word that concerns us, here, however—surā —Monier Williams in his dictionary gives: “spirituous liquor, wine (in ancient times ‘a kind of beer’).” All these options for translating the word have a certain value or validity. In a study of the history of fermentation in ancient China, H. T. Huang chose to translate the Chinese term for a type of alcoholic drink made from grains as “wine,” in order to convey in English the antiquity of this drink, mentioned in the ancient classics, and associated with ritual and religious usage—for which the English word “wine” seems a good fit (2001:149–50). However, this ancient Chinese drink was made from grains, so something quite important is lost as well as gained here. In the case of surā , which was basically made from grains and was often considered to be a lower-class drink, perhaps “ale” is a good translation—somewhat archaic, and associated with the lower-class “alehouse,” which makes a good translation for various establishments that serve surā . Yet the word surā has other senses, both in common usage and by legal definition, as we shall shortly see. Also, from surviving recipes, it seems surā might often have been more like Japanese sake than European beer—or at the very least, the drink was made both in the manner of a malted-grain drink and a mold-fermented drink (sake does not involve the malt enzymes that turn starch into sugar, but instead uses molds to achieve this process). And what do we do with Monier Williams’s translation “spirituous liquor”? I am far from convinced that distillation was present in South Asia in the period when many of the texts I shall discuss here were composed, for example the Mānava Dharmaśāstra . 4 Despite this, to call surā a “spirituous drink” in English is by no means entirely incorrect. For consider the following comment about surā from an eighteenth-century Tantric text, the Haṃsavilāsa , where the flammable nature of distilled alcoholic drinks is explained in terms of traditional Indian theory of the elements during a scholarly discussion of the morality of drinking in ritual contexts: “It is not made of the element water but rather made of the element fire because it burns in a lamp like oil does.” 5 Evidently, the surā in this text is a distilled drink, and yet the same text refers to far older tantras and Dharmaśāstric sources that mention surā . So, for a highly educated eighteenth-century Indian writing in Sanskrit, surā was a “distilled liquor,” and this is how he retroactively understood the classical, canonical references too, for he added this quite fascinating reference to surā as made from fire! And no doubt the paṇḍits consulted by early European scholars likewise frequently understood surā to be a distilled drink, which means Monier Williams’s definition is quite correct, at least for a certain time and place. Thus not only does the word surā have a number of senses in ancient India, but the referents of the word change over time. Now, if readers are at this point a little overwhelmed by the many meanings of surā , I might note that one feature of the history of alcohol in India is that there were a vast number of types of drinks available, arguably far more types than in, say, medieval France, and the names of all of them present translation challenges. This is only the tip of an ever-melting, slippery, philological alcohol iceberg. And I should add, there was no concept of “alcohol” in ancient India, yet these drinks were conceptually united by the fact that a transformation takes place that renders the raw materials intoxicating.
Now, all the above might seem rather arcane and even pedantic, possibly irrelevant to the study of Dharmaśāstra, material culture, and social history in India. But, let us pause and imagine if in a non-English-speaking country in two thousand years’ time, the principal intoxicating substance was a new type of musk called “gavagai secretion.” Then imagine that a scholar living in that world, working on the legislation of drugs and intoxicants in twenty-first-century America were to translate whiskey, cannabis, coffee, and cocaine using the phrase “gavagai secretion” as that was the most familiar drug, all others having fallen out of use. This would obscure extremely important aspects of both law and social practice, both legal and illegal, and economics, not to mention the significance of these substances and their consumption as depicted in literary texts, cinema, and other media. Yet this is exactly what we see in ancient India: a simple village surā shop was no doubt an utterly different affair, both legally and socially, to a cellar stocked with imported wine, not to mention the paraphernalia of a betel seller or betel servant, and we should strive to tease out the nature of this complexity.
Religiously, legally, and economically, surā is such a distinctive drink in ancient India that I shall not translate this word in this chapter—if we can cope with “sake ” and “pulque ,” we can probably manage “surā ,” too, at least in more academic contexts. 6 But, what exactly was surā ? The word has a number of usages. As a particular type of drink, the earliest recipes we possess from Vedic sources 7 and in the Arthaśāstra 8 list the ingredients as various grains, sometimes malted, plus herbs and a ferment starter called kiṇva . 9 The word surā is also used as a generic term for all alcoholic drinks, as we see in the Arthaśāstra chapter on the duties of the “Superintendent of Surā ,” who oversees a great many types of drinks, and the commentator Medhātithi notes this usage of surā too. 10 Drinks such as this, made from grains, have certain characteristics. They are frequently made from the same material as the staple diet, so the raw materials are commonly, locally available. They require more effort to produce. A drink such as grape wine that begins with sugars ferments spontaneously from the juice, so juice left alone, can accidentally become intoxicating. Whereas to make a beer, one needs to thresh, dehusk, and cook the grains, as well as transform the starches into sugars, before a careful alcoholic fermentation, using yeasts and bacteria. So while beer is potentially available all year around, made from easily available materials, it nevertheless requires some skill, and certain additives, and it condenses a lot of human labor in its manufacture—all local labor, much like the labor of farming and cooking, and not the labor of shipping wines from abroad.
If we compare surā with ale in premodern England, about which we know far more than ancient India, we can imagine that to set oneself up as a surā trader one only required relatively simple common equipment: various jars, strainers, pestle and mortar, firewood, grains, herbs, and fermentation starters—many of which would already be available for the preparation of food. 11 And as with the people who ran alehouses in England, this was probably an easy way for poor people to transform their staple food into a commodity, largely obtained by means of extra labor, such that they could supplement whatever they obtained from other sources. Making surā would have been an easy way to get into commerce. Yet making surā on a small scale cannot have been enormously profitable, and, no doubt, the business of serving alcoholic drinks to a poorer section of society had its obvious risks. Manu states that a son is not responsible for his father’s drinking debts (MDh . 8.158). This small point is important, as it suggests that drink, and no doubt surā , was sometimes available on some sort of credit. Again, for ancient India, we only have such small hints as to the economy of small-scale surā trading, and, yet again, a comparison with ale in England is enlightening. There, bad debts were a major problem for tipplers (ale sellers). As Peter Clark explained for Canterbury between 1560 and 1640, “Of the 61 alehouse-keepers’ inventories surviving from this period 15 record debts outstanding to the deceased… among poorer victuallers…uncleared debts amounted to half their personal estate” (1983 : 80–2). Of course, ancient India and early modern England were very different places. Nevertheless, we can tentatively imagine that for the lower-class surā trader, sometimes using credit but preferring cash, 12 and unable to recover the debts of the deceased, life could be very hard. A line in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra that might only seem interesting for what it tells us about legal responsibility is in fact a small window into a system that created a way of life for people who labored to turn everyday rice into alcohol, and received nothing but social stigma for doing so.
For surā was evidently considered a very-low-class drink in ancient India. Ritual reasons aside, perhaps this was in part because of its potential ubiquity and low cost when compared with more prestigious intoxicants, from imported soma at very early periods, to foreign wines and exotically perfumed betel—all of which were the subject of quite-respectful discourse at various times. 13 Indeed, distancing yourself from surā culture was a mark of the “upper” Varṇas . Drinking surā was forbidden to all three twice-born Varṇas , such that only Śūdras and other communities could drink surā . 14
Another key word in legal texts on alcohol is madya , “intoxicating beverage,” which covered many more types of drinks, and non-surā madya was indeed permitted to kṣatriyas and vaiśyas , but forbidden to Brahmins, who can take no alcoholic drinks of any variety. And it is in this context that we can understand the rather dramatic intervention in Manu (MDh . 11.95), where surā is legally defined as three fold, made from ground grains (paiṣṭī ), jaggery (gauḍī ), and wine/honey/mahua flowers (mādhvī ), the third, rather ambiguous term being subject to considerable commentarial discussion in the following centuries. Where in early texts surā , the sole drink forbidden to Kshatriyas and Vaiśyas , was only one among many other practically available choices of drink, Manu attempts to restrict drinking for these communities by this aggressively expanded redefinition of surā . Later texts and commentaries, however, manage to salvage the situation for Kṣatriyas, and Vaiśyas, producing rather extensive lists of non-surā drinks that are acceptable, and indeed these lists constitute some of our most detailed information on drinks in the medieval period. 15 And no doubt these later lists reflect, support, or justify cultures among the Hindu elite that were at times quite tolerant of drinking, so long as Brahmins did not drink—surā is what other people drink. And possibly further work on drinking in South Asian society might permit us to historicize these developments in the dharma of drinking, bearing in mind such difficulties as the fact that the material culture described in Sanskrit literary texts is often frozen as an expression of the high culture of the mid to late first millennium ce .
To conclude this extremely superficial survey, surā was most commonly a grain-based drink, for the lower classes. It was cheap and relatively easy to make, and the upper classes, the three twice-born varṇas , were strictly forbidden to drink it. A range of sources, including references in Dharmaśāstra can help us imagine the life of the surā seller, the person who would have displayed the surā banner we started with—and closer reflection on the nature of these people’s lives makes us see Dharmaśāstra in a new light too.
Let us return to the surā banner. This banner was either carried as a penance or branded onto the forehead as a punishment. It is important to understand that punishment and penance in ancient India were public acts, so the visibility and self-evident meaning of these marks really mattered (Olivelle 2011 : 28). The older sources that mention this object do not tell us anything about what it was or what it looked like. Although the practice of branding with the surā banner is not mentioned in the earliest text on dharma we possess, the Āpastamba Dharmasūtra , nevertheless, we do see in that text the notion of carrying a distinctive identifying banner as part of the penance (prāyaścitta ) for killing a Brahmin (ĀpDh . 1.24.11: śavaśirodhvajo ). 16 The surādhvaja appears for the first time in the dharma literature in the Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra , dating from some time after the middle of the second century bce and the turn of the Common Era, where we are told that the king, who cannot apply capital punishment to a Brahmin, should instead apply punishment (daṇḍa ), branding the forehead of a Brahmin who has drunk surā (surāpāna ) with [the image of] a surādhvaja , using a heated iron (taptenāyasā ) and banishing him from the kingdom (BDh . 1.8.17–1.8.18). 17 Manu also mentions this banner, both as penance and punishment, and it is mentioned in the Arthaśāstra . 18
When the king has the image of a headless corpse branded onto the forehead of a murderer in the same circumstances, we know that the image was a headless body, and it is clear that heads separated from bodies were emblematic of murder and killing. 19 But for the crime or sin (which was very varṇa specific) of drinking surā , the older texts do not say that one is branded with a more obvious symbol such as a cup or jar, but rather with the evidently familiar sign or banner of a seller of surā . Later commentators do explain the banner. When discussing the penance of carrying an actual banner, the ninth-century-ce commentator Medhātithi, as well as other commentators, clarify that the banner is a jar for intoxicating drink. Yet when discussing the banner-mark branded on the forehead as a punishment, commentators state only that a surā banner is the “banner of a surā shop.” 20 Also, these texts are considerably later than the older texts that mention the banner. 21
This uncertainty as to the exact form of the banner does not, however, diminish the interest of this object for us, as whatever the exact nature of the banner, the surā -drinking offender is branded with an image of a sign , of a commercial sign. Effectively the body of the offender with its surā-banner appendage is visually transformed into a permanent surā shop—one is reminded of the Summoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , whose garland transforms his head into an alestake, “A gerland hadde he set upon his heed, As greet as it were for an ale-stake.” 22 But why would a surā shop have a sign or flag? This might seem a strange question when we live in a world so full of advertising and signs, but we should consider why a retail establishment would be so marked in early India. In medieval and early modern England, alehouses also had signs, as did taverns and inns. Chaucer’s alestake was a pole with a bush at the end that did not so much indicate the location of an alehouse as advertise that a brewing had taken place and that ale, very perishable in those days, was available (Clark 1983 : 29, 67). In a small village or town with few visitors, presumably everyone would know where the surā shop was, so the use of a sign might imply intermittent availability of the drink—this is one possibility for the purpose of the surādhvaja . Yet this was not the only use of beer signage in premodern England. Smaller London alehouses often had a red lattice or checkers pattern painted on the wall, as one sees, for example, on the wall of the “Sun” tavern in Hogarth’s famous engraving of “Beer Street” (Clark 1983 : 68). In a large city with many new arrivals and travelers, such a sign indicated where to buy ale. And the surā sign could be this sort of sign, which would, therefore, imply that surā shops were frequented by newcomers and travelers in a populous urban setting, as is, indeed, indicated in the description of inns in the Arthaśāstra . 23
There is another, more detailed description of this sign. In the Yajñavalkyasmṛti , in the section on the dharma of the snātaka Brahmin, the “bath graduate,” it is stated that he should not accept a gift from a butcher (sūnin ), an oil presser (cakrin ), a surā seller (dhvajin ), a prostitute (veśyā ), or a king (narādhipa ) (YDh . I. 139). Viśvarūpa’s commentary on this passage, probably from the early ninth century (Olivelle 2010b: 52), quotes a verse to explain why the word banner possessor means a surā seller:
He should make a banner (dhvaja ) for a sign (cihna ) and dwell in the middle of the village, and should not give surā to low class people (antāvasāyin ) when there is no calamity. 24
The original context and date of this intriguing verse are, as far as I am aware, not known. 25 The word dhvajin is quite striking too. Where an oil presser is characterized by his stone rolling wheel, the surā seller is simply characterized by a banner. In the town or village the “banner-possessing person,” the one with a sign, is the surā merchant, suggesting that this was the only retail sign commonly used in early India. (We might now also look for visual representations in early art.) Commentaries on a similar verse in Manu suggest the person with the sign might sell, trade, or make the drink. 26 The meaning of the verse seems a little odd, and maybe the verse originally stated, “he should not give surā to people who are not low class when there is no calamity.” It seems strange to stipulate that the surā seller cannot sell to these communities, as who else would he provide with the drink? 27 Or, possibly what is at stake here is giving surā to people, as opposed to selling it. Or, maybe this is just a very unrealistic text written from a very high-class point of view, and the surā seller should simply exist and sell almost no surā ? This latter idea leads us to another possibility regarding the purpose of the surā sign—that it functioned as a warning of the presence of a highly defiling substance, and a structure that should not be approached by those forbidden to drink surā . Even if that was not why surā sellers actually possessed signs (though maybe the quote above reflects a high-class tradition of enforcing warning-signage), nevertheless, this could well be how the signs were viewed by those for whom the consequences of drinking surā , especially in public, were theoretically quite harsh. Thus the meager data on surā signs in texts on dharma can be read from a Brahmanical point of view, or, rather hypothetically, from the point of view of those who produced and drank surā —communities quite divided over access to this nourishing, easily made drink, yet an almost necessary material counterpoint to Brahmanical life.
There is also a proverbial reference to the surā sign in the Mahābhārata . Possibly the verse below implies that these signs were constantly displayed, and probably prominently, too, since the verse concerns ostentatious, hypocritical piety:
He who has a banner of righteousness forever raised-up like a surā banner, but whose evil deeds are hidden follows the cat-observance. 28
After this verse, the story of the “cat observance” is explained. A cat once posed as a holy man to impress some mice he was then able to eat, but, eventually, they saw through this disguise and escaped his pious trap. Thus, the “cat observance” is hypocritical conspicuous behavior of some variety (charmingly depicted in a relief at Mahabalipuram). 29 As to why the banner of righteousness is compared with a surā sign, possibly, this is because, in the case of surā shops, an innocent outward sign corresponds to an interior where sinful drinking takes place, both a warning and a mark of shame. 30 Certainly this object was well known and highly conspicuous in ancient India, and any reference, visual or textual, to this distinctive retail sign would have evoked participation in a practice, economy, and social class that, while evidently thriving, is not typically celebrated by our surviving sources.
Penances such as that mentioned in this chapter—carrying a surā banner among other observances—had the power to repair the soteriological, karmic harm created by sinning, as well as the social exclusion resulting from certain sins. 31 Some sins were said to be marked on the body in future births in a manner that, in at least some cases, correlated to the body parts associated with the sin; thus, drinkers are born with black teeth (Olivelle 2011 : 36). As Olivelle notes, by extending the system of bodily marking for sins beyond the human practices of penance and punishment into a realm of cosmic retribution “the upholders of the established order are able to anchor the moral and legal systems in the very working of the cosmos; they become naturalized” (ibid.) Here it is notable that what gets naturalized in future births are the more corporeal parts of penance and punishment, the more basic mutilations of the body—and the flag of the surā seller, purely a product of social convention, is not somehow reproduced on the cosmic level. This object belongs to an almost secular realm of material culture that cannot penetrate to the cosmic level—whereas the forbidden drink surā itself (and “herself”—Surā being also a goddess) is well established in the Vedic and mythical realm.
To conclude, though a rather elusive object, the surā banner was the product and focus of a complex network of factors, both in practice and as represented in surviving sources: hard-working brewers, financially insecure lower-class traders, and drunk customers (with everything that implies). The surā banner as we know it today is also, ironically, more closely associated with the well-documented Brahmins who shunned these surā houses and produced texts and prescribed rituals that reproduced the ancient Indian alestake in order to indicate the social exclusion of twice borns who dared to consume surā —a drink so forbidden, yet so tantalizingly similar to the simple barley gruels that were the very stuff of certain penances. We see in this case how the well-defined and relatively well-recorded boundaries of high-class respectability also demarcate parts of a mostly undocumented world of lower-class drinking culture in ancient India. Also, though an aspect of the ancient Indian material culture of drinking (and penance/punishment), this type of “alestake” is primarily of social interest. This sign, whatever exactly it was, helps us understand hierarchies of matter and social exclusion, and these insights can then enrich our reading of other texts, not just Dharmaśāstra (e.g., drinking features frequently in Sanskrit drama). The material culture of ancient India as revealed through Dharmaśāstra means nothing unless we also imagine the communities and individuals who interacted with it.
In moving beyond a simple enumeration of textual data, we can tentatively compare aspects of Dharmaśāstra (here, the surā banner) with other evidence from ancient India (here, narratives of drinking, surā recipes, etc.), as well as with scholarship on other times and places (here, premodern English drinking), in order to produce hypothetical models of social history and material culture that are revealing for scholars of law, cultural history, and religion. We will never write the sorts of richly detailed histories possible when working with some other types of archives, yet it is still possible to historicize and animate our meager data by cautiously applying such a wide-ranging methodology.
dhvajaṃ ca kuryāc cihnārthaṃ samayā grāmaṃ ca saṃvaset |
na caivāntāvasāyibhyāḥ surāṃ dadyād anāpadi ||
pracchannāni ca pāpāni baiḍālaṃ nāma tadvratam || MBh . 5 App. 1, no 9, 11.8–11.9.