‘When Bada Dev, the great god, created earth, he also made the tree of life. He called it mahua. It gives us food, timber, it shelters birds, insects and animals. Only good spirits live on it, for it gives us the water of life.’ On the edge of Kanha National Park, Bagh Singh Dhurwe, a Gond tribal, told me this story many years ago.
And as with popular folk tales, I have heard many variations of this theme over the years. It seems when Bada Dev, who is a formless top-god spirit for the Gond and Baiga tribes in central India, created the world, he also created Nanga Baiga and Nangi Baigin. These first naked Baiga humans, like Adam and Eve, were the progenitors of the entire Baiga race. But having done that, and being a caring godfather, he was genuinely concerned: ‘What will these guys drink, and more importantly, offer us gods in their shrines?’ he worried. So he called a few animals that happened to be around: a tiger, a dove and a parakeet, and a mouse and a pig; he then asked them to turn into mahua trees. When these trees started flowering in spring, birds and animals ate the flowers and became loud and happy. The humans noticed this and got hooked on to it as well. ‘Mahua has a way with you. If you have a few, you feel happy and chirp like a parakeet or coo like a dove, laughing a lot, saying the same things over and over again. If you drink a little more, you become a tiger, full of courage and bluster and you roar. But if you drink even more, it turns you into a pig or a mouse, sniffling and rolling on the ground, wallowing in mud or looking for a hole to hide in. Such are the ways of mahua,’ Bagh Singh said.
Ten years ago I thought this was a quaint lesson on the etiquette of rural drinking, little knowing that this tree is so primary to life here that on the central Indian deciduous landscape an entire forest can get wiped out but no one will touch a mahua tree!
There is another charming story as well. It seems a couple was in love, but could not marry as they were from different tribes. Rather than break this union, they went deep into the forest and killed themselves. It is said that watered by their blood two plants grew on that spot. God was so moved that he named one plant ganja (or cannabis) and the other, mahua. It is believed that mahua and ganja are family.
My first drink of mahua was a bit of a shock. Having run out of rum on a long assignment in the interiors of Chhattisgarh, I asked our local assistant if there was anything that he could get for us. He came back late in the evening looking very happy, with a dirty mineral water bottle filled with an opaque fluid. It smelt strong as I took a swig from it, but it was surprisingly smooth and had a flavour like nothing else I had ever had before. It is difficult to describe the flavour of mahua if you have not smelt it. The closest I can think of is a cross between musk, ripe jack fruit, guava and rice wine, but many might disagree. After three swigs I was slurring, but it was a nice, benumbed feeling. By about seven swigs I was happily immobile, I am told, with a smile fixed on my face. My eyelids and limbs felt leaden and everything around moved as if in slow motion. I have since had mahua regularly and it always makes me relaxed, slow and peaceful. But it takes getting used to. There are very few people I have introduced mahua to, and they have loved it from the word go. I usually serve it at home with some fizzy lemon drink or even soda with a slice of lime. But in the forest I have seen people dancing rhythmically, drinking through moonlit nights around warm campfires in spring or autumn after the harvest. They dance and drink, and drink and dance till they collapse in a stupor. Someone else then takes their place till they wake up again and start dancing. It’s a part of their lives.
In 1861 James Forsyth, an English civil servant, was assigned to be the Acting Conservator of Forests, Central Provinces, to survey a large patch of forest around what is today the Pachmarhi Biosphere and the Satpura Tiger Reserve near Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh. Basing himself at Pachmarhi, he travelled around this rich stretch of almost virgin forest with its Gond and Baiga people for a little less than a decade. A keen hunter himself, he enjoyed shooting tigers and other game as he rode through the territory. He took copious notes which he later turned into a book that was posthumously published in London in 1871 as The Highlands of Central India: Notes on the Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History and Sports. In a style that is very Victorian evangelist, full of reformist posturing that was typical of those days, this book is the only one I have come across that compares mahua alcohol to Irish whisky. ‘The spirit, when well made and mellowed by age, is by no means of despicable quality, resembling in some degree Irish whisky.’ He was a keen observer of village life and must have imbibed mahua regularly as he is the only one who has written with some affinity and erudition on the subject. But more on that later.
Mahua alcohol is regularly offered to forest spirits and gods. It is a must for celebrations around births, deaths and weddings. Among Gonds the boy’s parents go to the girl’s with an offering of good mahua as an engagement ritual. On the wedding day two young boys from the groom’s family are sent to the forest to collect small branches of mahua. They are then sent with these to the bride’s house where an elderly lady receives them. She washes the branches and their feet with water and turmeric. These branches are then kept at the wedding location as celestial witnesses to the marriage. Of course a lot of mahua is drunk as well.
In another corner of the country, near the infamous Godhara in Gujarat, live the Rathwa Bhil tribals who paint a temple to their god, Pithora Baba, on the main wall of their house. Every Rathwa Bhil tribal family is expected to do this once in their lifetime. It is an elaborate and expensive nine-day ritual which includes daily feasts with drinks for the entire village community. People collect in hundreds for it. Preparations begin well in advance with large drums of mahua being made as excise officials look the other way in this predominantly tribal zone of dry Gujarat. Local Pithora painters are booked for the ceremony with gifts that vary according to the intricacy and the number of gods that need to be drawn. The goats and chickens that are to be sacrificed are also in direct proportion to the gods being painted. The gods look like humans and ride horses across the wall, along with vignettes of daily life in the villages and surrounding forests full of wild animals. Among the recurrent motifs are a chameleon, a spiky sloth bear and one toddy tapper climbing up a date palm in a lower corner of the wall. Traditionally, the colours used for the painting are made of local dyes mixed with milk and mahua alcohol. The painting has to be completed in nine days, with the prayers, drinking, singing and feasting going on simultaneously, and consecrated on the last day. Once created, these paintings are never touched, even if they fade or the wall crumbles.
Contrary to what the Internet will tell you, mahua is a slow grower with low survival rates. But once it crosses the first few years, it starts gathering speed depending on how nutritious the soil is. In thick forests it tends to grow straight, but on open land the tree spreads out with a big and handsome head. It can grow over 20 metres and easily survive for over a century. Found on the edges of Gujarat and Rajasthan bordering Madhya Pradesh, it extends as far as the plains of Nepal through the Gangetic basin and then through Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Karnataka all the way down to the edges of Kerala and Goa through Tamil Nadu. The central Indian species has rounded leaves, but further south a sub-species with elongated leaves takes over, though the flower and fruit are really no different. The tree starts flowering after about ten years, which is a long time.
Called mahua or mahwa in Hindi; mahuda in Gujarati; irupa, mohu and idu in central Indian tribal languages like Durva, Halbi and Gondi; mahool in Oriya; ippa in Telegu and iluppai in Tamil, the tree does not cross over into Northeast India, though it is found in Bangladesh and Myanmar. According to Amirthalingam Murugesan, the author of Sacred Trees of Tamil Nadu, it survives as sthala vriksha or temple tree in many Shiva temples.
The story goes that Shiva asked the mahua tree to grow at a particular corner of the Sri Neelakandeswarar temple in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu. Why Shiva zeroed in on an iluppai in his backyard, I don’t know, (Nanditha Krishna and Amirthalingam Murugesan, who wrote the Sacred Plants of India, do not elucidate), but the tree did exactly what he wanted, and flourished. Shiva was so happy that he granted the tree two wishes: that its oil would be used to light the temple lamps and that mahua would be the most popular tree in that area. The temple seems to be at least a thousand years old and I am unable to confirm if its lamps are still lit with mahua oil, but as testimony to the second wish, the area apparently became so dense with the species that the temple town was named Iluppaipattu or ‘the land of the mahua tree’ and even now has an illupai as its thala virutcham (temple tree). The name madhuka or booze-lover is also a synonym for Shiva, which may have been a reason for his wish.
As winter slowly gives in to spring, the mahua tree yellows and sheds. For the uninitiated, a bizarre ritual now begins. When I saw this for the first time in Barkot, Odisha, six years ago, I did not know what was happening. Women and children were going around in groups tying colourful strips of old sarees to the bare mahua trees that stood in forests or even on common land. A few old trees were left alone. ‘This tells others that the tree is taken,’ Manju told me. ‘We know which trees are ours, but this is just to make sure that no one else lays claim. The ones without ribbons are ancestral family trees on private land. Everyone knows that so no one will touch them. The tree, which can live over a hundred years, is shared by many generations of a family.’
Manju’s family, which had three old trees, now cleaned all the land under the spread of the trees. The undergrowth was cut, fallen leaves swept away and then, to give the land a distinct ash colour, the stubble on the ground was burnt. The tree was then anointed with prayers.
As spring sets in (usually March-April), the naked trees burst into buds that hang like olive green tassels from the ends of the branches. Soon these turn into light yellow-green succulent, hollow, grape-like flowers rich in sugar and nutrients that bloom and drop usually between 2 and 6 a.m.!
James Forsyth noted in the 1860s something that must have been known to the people forever: ‘The value of the Mhowa consists in the fleshy corolla of its flower, and in its seeds. The flower is highly deciduous, ripening and falling in the months of March and April. It possesses considerable substance, and sweet but sickly taste and smell. It is a favourite article of food with all wild tribes, and the lower classes of Hindus; but its main use is in the distillation of ardent spirits, most of what is consumed is made from Mhowa.’
I trekked with Manju’s family, including her three young children, to the trees after dinner. We walked through a fairly dense forest patch in the dark. Her sister and two brothers carried axes and the children carried baskets to collect the flowers. Her husband was away on a road project in the neighbouring district. They were all barefoot and carried lanterns. I was wearing boots and my bright headlamp lit the way. ‘Aren’t you worried about snakes while walking barefoot?’ I asked in concern. ‘Why don’t you marry and settle down in our village—we can always use your headlamp then,’ said Sarju, her brother, and they all doubled up in giggles. ‘Ummu’s brother died last year,’ Manju said in the middle of all this laughter. ‘A bear got him in the night. We just did not see it in the lantern light.’ I was suddenly a little more alert and flashed the light around and they all rolled up in laughter again. I remembered my colleague Debobroto Sircar’s study on human-bear conflicts in Madhya Pradesh. Almost 70 per cent of bear attacks are during the season when both bears and people eagerly wait for the mahua trees to blossom. Entire villages, mostly women and children, are out in the forest at night. Lactating mother bears with young cubs need the food and are more aggressive around this time. Clashes are inevitable.
I quote Forsyth again: ‘The luscious flowers are no less a favourite food of the brute creation than of man. Every vegetable-eating animal and bird incessantly endeavours to fill itself with Mhowa during its flowering season. Sambar, nilgae and bears appear to lose their natural apprehensions of danger in some degree during the Mhowa season; and the most favourable chance of shooting them are then obtained.’
We reached Manju’s trees a little before midnight and lit a fire to keep the animals away. At a distance I could see other fires. Some people were beating tins and drums. Even then an average of ten human and unaccounted-for bear lives are lost every year in Madhya Pradesh alone. This competition for mahua flowers has disfigured, maimed and paralysed thousands of people and led bears and their cubs to brutal deaths.
Debo took me to the Chaura Dadar village near the famous shrine at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh, known as the source of the Narmada river. We must have travelled 20 kilometres through rough tracks, climbing up to a mesa where the village was. On one side was a gorge through which the Narmada flowed and on the other side was a mix of forest and terraced farmland. There was not a single mahua tree in the vicinity, but twenty-seven attacks took place in the past few years with two deaths, the highest in any village in central India. I sat dumbfounded in a victim’s house surrounded by twelve completely disfigured human beings straight out of a horror film. ‘During the season we have to walk more than10 kilometres across the Narmada into Chhattisgarh in the night to collect the flower, for we have no trees near the village.’ Why not plant mahua if there are none around the village, why do you need to walk so far away, I asked. ‘Your forefathers had planted so many other trees in the village, so why not mahua?’ They were a bit surprised by this dumb city question. ‘How can you plant mahua? It grows on its own. No one plants mahua,’ one of them said, and they all nodded, whatever remained of their mutilated heads, in a frightening display of collective agreement.
Ten years ago, when I started taking a little more than a cursory interest in mahua, I would find it odd that no nurseries stocked this plant. The forest department, which focusses only on trees that can be cut and sold, may not have had an interest in this species. But even the Van Samiti (village forest societies), which harvested the flower and the seed for substantial profits, did not grow it in their nurseries. If this tree was economically so important for the people, why did they not plant it?
In December 2012, I bumped into Nishikant Jadhav at a lodge near Tadoba National Park in Maharashtra, where he was supervising the afforestation of its grounds. A retired forest officer from Madhya Pradesh with intense eyes, long peppery hair and an abiding interest in botany, N.J. told me of a forest department mahua plantation on the Chhindwara-Nagpur road. ‘It’s quite old, I can’t remember the details, and I don’t know if it still exists, but you can check. It’s the only one that I know of,’ he casually said. My antennae went up and thus began my search for the only known mahua plantation ever planted.
My first stop was the forest department in Bhopal and there everyone drew a blank. No one seemed to recall such a thing. ‘Can’t be,’ they said, echoing what I had heard in villages. ‘Why would someone plant mahua? Try the M.P. Forest Research Institute, they might have started something.’ MPFRI in Jabalpur was working on some quick-yielding mahua strains, but was so cagey that I felt they were building a nuclear bomb. It was finally a tiger researcher working at the Pench National Park, adjacent to Chhindwara, who came to my rescue. When Aniruddha Majumdar, the researcher, heard about this plantation, he was intrigued. ‘Strange, this is in my area and I have never heard of it. Let me talk to a few people,’ he said. We were at a workshop in Pench and I did not hear from him for three days. On the fourth day, he came back with a eureka look in his eyes and we set up a visit once the workshop ended.
We exited Pench through the Jamtara gate watching a large pack of wild dogs en route—their muscular red bodies sprinting effortlessly through tall, yellow grass swaying in the breeze as their loud whistles rang through the air. We drove through the beautiful countryside that alternated between yellow, red and black with patches of bright green. The Chhindwara-Nagpur road rolled up and down through hills and valleys with what looked like deep canyons in the distance till we reached the Sillewani forest rest house. Built in 1934, it was large and looked like it had been recently restored with garish new furniture and tiles. ‘Not too many people come here,’ the caretaker said, as he gave us chai. ‘Politicians camp here during elections, officers in passage, sometimes there are parties.’ Walking around, I noticed a swimming pool. Yes, a swimming pool! It’s probably the only forest rest house in India with a swimming pool.
The forest guard, Gangaram Sanodiya, of the Khutama Beat in the Sillewani Forest Range of the South Chhindwara Division, was dressed in his best and confused. He clearly expected someone of note, who wouldn’t be excited by silly things such as mahua plantations. ‘You want to see the mahua plantation,’ he very politely murmured. ‘Sure I will take you, but you passed it on the way here. There is a board right on the highway, didn’t you see it?’ Strangely enough, we had not, but once we went back there, I could see why we had missed it despite the signage. It is a small two-acre plot screened by other trees on the highway and it did not look any different from other patches of forest except it had a lot more mahua trees which were exactly 65 years, 8 months, 3 weeks and 2 days old on 23 April 2013, the day we were there. Probably the only bunch of old mahua trees in a central Indian forest where you can tell the exact age to the day.
It made me even more curious. To be fair to Gangaram, once he got interested he spent time and dug up old records. Three months later, he sent me a copy of the original planning file with the help of his Range officer, M.K. Solanki. It was a revelation. Forest officers in 1948, just a year after Independence, had recognized the worth of the mahua species. The file written in cursive long hand titled Experimental Mahua Plantation began thus: ‘The Central Provinces government in its forest department has ordered that artificial regeneration of mahua should be undertaken on an experimental scale as it is desirable to adopt measures to increase the number of this valuable species.’ It defined the objectives of this experiment as ‘primarily to evolve a suitable technique for the artificial regeneration of mahua (Bassia latifolia) which will ultimately be utilized for augmenting the individuals of the species in localities where it is scarce.’
On 19 June 1948 Sillewani Forest Range Officer S.A. Sayeed went with an assistant to collect dry seeds of ‘healthy and mature mahua trees’ from the nearby Nandudhana and Amla forest villages. The next day, he planted 120 seeds in clusters of four or five at a distance of 30x30 feet in four patches. The seeds started germinating around 4 July and continued to do so till 7 August. It must have started raining heavily during this period, but weather conditions are not recorded on the file.
Planned painstakingly at an estimated cost of Rs 196 in May 1948 by Sayeed and Divisional Forest Officer, N.I. Kurian, this mahua patch was closely followed by the department till 1954. The total expense till then was 973 rupees 15 annas and 3 paise. I could not trace either of these officers or their families. Interest seemed to fade after 1954 and there are no records to show if this experiment yielded anything of note. Today ninety-six surviving trees on a two-acre patch stand desolate by the roadside tended to by a man from the Amla village across the road. He gets to collect all the flowers and seeds in return for this service.
In July 2012 I was looking for plants at a forest department nursery in a mining town called Ukba, about 30 kilometres from Kanha. I asked the person in charge if he had any mahua seedlings.
‘Now that you ask,’ he said, ‘I am actually desperately looking for seeds. It is so late in the season, most goollis (pronounced gool-lees) have been used up for oil. I just can’t find any. Do you know anyone who can give me a few hundred?’
I was surprised. Why would he suddenly start planting mahua?
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘We don’t do mahua, but the government has declared this as the “Year of the mahua” and informed us late. Even the funds have arrived so late that we can’t find seeds.’
Exactly sixty-three years after this experiment in Chhindwara, the Madhya Pradesh forest department, after ignoring one of its most useful trees, did an about-turn and declared 2011 as the ‘Year of the mahua’. Throughout 2012 I looked for places where the department was planting mahua, but could find only a few miserable patches. In 2013, I met the Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests in charge of Research and Development in Bhopal, who kept track of such things. ‘We must have planted a few hundred thousand nursery-grown trees across the state. We have not collated figures as yet, but will mail you once we do so. You see, our minister likes to adopt one particular tree every year and encourage it. Last year was bamboo, before that was mahua. Just routine, nothing special really.’ And I thought someone was finally righting a historical wrong. Of course, I never heard from him.
We sat around the warmth of the fire waiting for the flowers to fall. ‘The tree seems to follow a distinct cycle. Two years of good flowering followed by a lean season. If the rains aren’t good for a few years, the yield automatically declines. When there is a drought, the trees don’t flower as much. In those years our crops fail as well and we actually cook and eat the dried flower that is stored in the house. Very little daru is made during those years. Before our village got a ration shop, most poor tribal families had mahua in the dry summer months, when there was no other food in the forest,’ Manju said.
In Barkot, Odisha, I must have been in a deep sleep for Sarju’s urgent taps woke me up with a start. ‘Listen,’ he said dramatically. A bit groggy, I first thought he was pointing to a bear. And then it came to me: in the silence of the night, a steady pitter-patter of light rain, but with big drops. But though the April night had cooled down considerably, this was certainly no rain. So what was that sound? ‘Flowers falling ...’ We both listened to this rain in silence. Round and fleshy grape-like things which hardly looked like any flower that I knew of steadily plopped on my head. I put one in my mouth. It tasted musky, refreshing and very sweet with a bit of grit.
All around women and children slept while men kept watch. On the edges of a few trees some ghosts began to move. I flashed the headlamp and noticed a spotted deer and a wild boar seeking their share. As tins clanged they melted away. Slowly the skies lit up. Women and children awoke, stretched and started picking the fallen flowers one by one, bodies bent double. The flowers stopped falling around 7 a.m., but this meticulous and painstaking collection went on till almost 9.00. And then, with baskets full and heavy, we slowly walked back.
At the village there was no rest. The courtyard was swept and the morning’s collection spread out to dry. Next to it was yesterday’s lot, already changing colour. The dried flowers looked brownish red. These were thrashed to take off the dust and then stored in nylon sacks. There was enough work to keep them going twenty-four hours without a break. The leafless mahua tree flowers continuously for nearly three weeks before rich red leaves erupt and the flowering stops. As the flowering cycle varies, for a little over two months thousands of villages and millions of people in central India get busy going through this ritual every day, perhaps for thousands of years. The local markets closely watch this activity as they eagerly await the harvest.
Each of Manju’s adult trees yield around 150 kilos. In a good year she could end up with 600 kilos, if not more. In a bad year she could get less than half of that, but the prices would go up. She will at best store around 50 kilos at home and sell the rest in the local market. In 2013, the prices started at Rs 16 per kilo and went up to 21. Manju held her stock and made over Rs 10,000—a substantial amount in that economy. Larger households, which have the ability to harvest more trees, can end up with much more. ‘This is ready money used to buy a lot of our household needs. Storage trunks for clothes, grain and so many other things, even jewellery. In my grandfather’s time, dried mahua was exchanged for salt. In some areas they do so even today,’ Manju told me.
I visited the bustling weekly market at Keswahi in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh during the season. Groups of women in colourful clothes were streaming in, carrying sacks of mahua flowers which were being weighed by shop hands on traditional, manual and also electronic scales. Traders sat watching the activity, noting down the weight and doling out the right amount immediately. For small change there were bars of soap, which the women happily accepted. By the evening there was easily more than 50 tonnes collected in that small market. ‘On a busy day we collect more than a hundred tonnes by the evening,’ one trader said. At nightfall I counted twenty-two large trucks laden with dried mahua flowers driving out of that market. Forest department sources said that although no clear records were kept, the Keswahi market alone could be buying between 3-5000 tonnes of dried mahua. At least a hundred markets of this size or larger exist in Madhya Pradesh alone, excluding the smaller markets, not to talk of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, which are the largest mahua-producing states in central India. There are no federal records of this activity and very inaccurate state records, but we are easily talking hundreds of thousands of tonnes of dried mahua!
‘Where does it all go and what is it for?’ I could not help but ask one of the traders I had befriended. ‘It’s a long chain and we are the smallest unit in it. There are mid-level buyers between us and the cold storages. At all levels the margins are a rupee or two per kilo, but we deal in say 50 tonnes in a season and make a few lakhs. In the mid and top levels the quantities are mind-boggling. In the larger cold storages in Raipur and Bilaspur, where most of the mahua is stored, the quantities could easily be 7-8 lakh tonnes in each cold storage. And 98 per cent of this is distilled alcohol,’ he said.
Mahua is in the cold storages by May-June. It remains there till September and then it starts moving back. ‘Bastar is the largest market. Probably 25 per cent of the collection goes there. But the product moves all the way up to Rajasthan and UP for bulk use in distilleries. However, the largest amount of what is kept in cold storages is consumed in retail. Probably, the same wholesale merchants who bought the produce in the first instance will be selling it to retailers or shopkeepers in villages, who will then sell it to the very same people who collected it from the forests and sold it to them, but at prices (in 2013) which will now vary from Rs 25-30.’ The turnover can run into billions of rupees and this economy is almost completely cash.
Things were just the same just 200 years ago as Forsyth observed: ‘The trees have to be watched night and day if the crop is to be saved; and the wilder races, who fear neither wild beast or the evil spirit, are generally engaged to do this for a wage of one half the produce. The yield of flowers from a single tree is about 130 lbs, worth five shillings in the market; and the nuts, which form in bunches after the droppings of flowers, yield a thick oil, much resembling tallow in appearance and properties. It is used for burning, for the manufacture of soap, and adulterating the clarified butter so largely consumed by all natives. A demand for it has lately sprung up in the Bombay market; and a good deal has been exported since the opening of the railway. The supply must be immense; and probably this new demand will be the means of greatly increasing the value of these trees.’
It was a very wet December in Redhakhol, Odisha, when I first reached Michael’s house. That was in 2009. It was raining heavily. We were drenched and shivering. There was ankle-deep water all around and we saw smoke rising out of his hut. We were on a wildlife survey and our local guide said that this was a friend who could give us some tea.
A lanky man with a boyish smile opened the door and welcomed the five of us in. He took one look at us and said, ‘Tea not good, I have something better.’ He came with glasses of warm mahua and we were instantly revived. That first meeting turned into a party!
We slowly found Michael to be one of the best animal trackers in the area and promptly hired him. And Michael adopted me as his distillation assistant. If he was preparing a new batch and I happened to be around, he would call me. ‘Saar, new batch, need free labour,’ he would say with a mischievous smile on his face. We would first clean the dry mahua flower, beating it with a stick to get rid of the dust. Simultaneously, large quantities of water would be set to boil. Next, it would be soaked and washed, making sure that the residue at the bottom is thrown away. Then in a ratio of five kilos to five litres, the mahua would be soaked in a large aluminium container in cool water. Before covering and consigning it to a dark corner, one small ball of dried rice flour, yeast and herbs were crushed into the mixture.
I gradually found out that this was a Jharkhand and Bihar technique, as Michael and Bina were Oraon tribals from Jharkhand whose forefathers had settled down in Odisha at Redhakhol near Sambalpur. The Gond and Baiga tribes of Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh or the Kondhs of Malkangiri in Odisha did not add this starter called ranu. Mahua flowers, like grapes or apples, self-ferment, which is universally considered a sign of good raw material that produces healthy alcohol.
In the summer the pot starts bubbling on the second day as the yeast gets going and by the fourth day, it is ready to be distilled. In winter it takes a few days longer, but they know it is ready by the look of it and by putting a few drops in their mouth. At this stage it emits that heady mahua fragrance which is unmistakable. Ants and other insects claim their share and are seen swimming in the froth. Many a time, while walking through villages, I have caught a whiff of this and got drawn to its source. Sure enough, the owner was distilling. He would happily call me in, force me to stay on for a few drinks before sending me staggering on my way. It is only in Bastar that they also drink this brew by straining out the liquid at this stage. It is a summer drink, called landa (pronounced laan-da) thought cooling for the body.
Michael’s distillation technique was simple and similar to that practised across many tribes in central India. The fermented mahua is set on a very slow fire. On top of this a similar sized pot with holes in the bottom is placed. Inside this, on a raised surface so that the holes don’t get choked, a smaller sized clay pot is inserted. The second pot is then topped by another large vessel filled with cold water. The two joints between the three pots are sealed with strips of wet cloth dipped in fine clay picked up from termite nests. When the pots heat up, the clay and cloth dry and harden, sealing the joints tightly.
As the brew in the bottommost pot warms up, vapours rise up through the holes in the second pot and hit the cold bottom of the third pot on top. The vapour condenses to drip into the clay pot kept inside the second pot. In some parts of Madhya Pradesh, I found this top pot made of copper. The heat remains steady and low and as the water in the top container heats up, it is replaced with cold water. A 5 kilo mash takes about four hours to finish, with the water being changed at least five times.
What comes out of this clay pot is called mahua, mahuli, mahuda and other names in various parts of central India. The technique varies mildly in terms of innovations for draining the alcohol as it condenses. Clay and bamboo tools have slowly given way to aluminium and plastic, but the alcohol and the distillation apparatus have remained essentially the same from perhaps before the Christian era, making it arguably the first recorded distillery in the world.
To get around this effort of changing the water repeatedly, many people set up their stills next to a river. The flowing water provides constant cooling and distillation becomes easier and better. In the interiors of Baliguda in Odisha, I met Nupur, the local tribal hooch queen. This stunning beauty ran an almost industrial-sized illegal distillery within the forest next to a waterfall. We trekked a few miles to get to the location. She and her ragtag gang of seven were very suspicious to begin with, but once the ice broke, we had full access.
A 40-litre aluminium pot sat heating on a raised mud platform from which two bamboo pipes descended on to two mud pots in the river. This was mid-summer. It was hot and the waterfall had almost dried up. A bamboo pipe directed a steady flow from the little that remained, splashing water on the two condensing pots. On a ledge above was a fermentation station where many large terracota containers embedded in the earth full of bubbling mahua were getting ready for the pot still. Down the stream was a herd of nineteen buffaloes wallowing in the mud with their faces turned towards the still, nostrils flared and quivering, sniffing the heady aroma.
‘My husband was a distillation worker and doing very well. We were a happy family. Many people were jealous of us and then someone put an evil spell on him. We tried everything by going to the best shamans, but he simply wasted and died. I was left alone with two children. I had seen him doing this and had worked with him, so I thought why not take over where he left,’ Nupur told us over glasses of fresh mahua. She first joined as a worker, but others soon realized she was smarter than the others, so she started handling the business and became the boss. She now had the largest share of investment in that group and took care of police and excise as well. ‘Ours is the best mahua you can get in these parts. We give the best quality and get the best prices. People queue up to buy our stuff,’ she said with pride.
Meanwhile, the batch on the flame was ready. The alcohol was poured into truck tyre tubes for ease of storage and transportation. The big pot was carried over to the waiting buffaloes and overturned. The brown liquid slowly seeped in the muddy water as smoke rose from the pile of mash. The animals drew a semicircle around this mound patiently, waiting for it to cool and then started eating voraciously. Mahua-flavoured milk, I thought.
It is a travesty that mahua, which is so much a part of the social and cultural fabric of central India, is outlawed in Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. At least Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh respect the traditions and allow the tribals to brew and distill for personal use.
We were at Michael’s for a drink one evening. A chicken had been freshly killed and fried with salt and chillies in mahua oil. It was a delicious snack. We were all laughing and joking when his elder brother arrived, took one look at us, and went inside. He emerged a little later and said, ‘Oh, I thought you were Biharis,’ and everyone started laughing. ‘The government gives out mahua distillation licenses every year in an auction. This is controlled entirely by the Biharis. The investors are Marwaris from Bihar or Jharkhand and the workers, usually Rajputs or Brahmins. They run an informer network in the area. The distillery manager gives free bottles for information, which they then follow up with the help of the excise department. There are raids and people are harassed, their stills broken and utensils taken away, sometimes they are arrested and jailed. Why should the government force us to drink that mass-made stuff when we can make the best quality at home? Now when I have to make large amounts for family weddings and rituals, I go deep inside the forest and distill where no one can find me,’ Michael said.
I visited three licensed mahua distilleries in Barkot, Odisha. Each of them was producing between 500 and 1000 litres daily in huge copper pots. There were rows of 300 litre plastic fermentation drums in a covered yard. But what caught my eye was the size of the staff. Each one of them was over 6.5 feet in height, built like a wrestler and together they looked like a private army. Every one of them was from Bihar or Jharkhand.
‘Why do you think we choose people of this size? Why do you think we need to keep this fauj here?’ the distillery manager, Manoj Kumar Dubey, asked me and started laughing. Tall and well built himself, he sat on a chair in a vest and lungi inside a large courtyard piled with wood and pieces of steel. In the middle of the courtyard was a huge still that sat on a medium-sized brick and cement furnace. Made of copper, it looked like a scaled-up version of a copper pot that people use in homes to store water. Five people could easily stand inside it. In fact that is what they did to clean it. Dialogues and background music from the popular serial Ramayana blared on cable TV at the back. Everything about this distillery reminded me more of a strict ashram than something to do with alcohol.
Dubeyji has spent over twenty years in the business. ‘I started as a sixteen year old in the owner’s country liquor distribution outlet in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. After working there for about ten years, he must have found me reliable for he moved me here to Barkot where they were just setting up in 2002.’ The business is owned by a Sahu, originally from Ranchi, now in Jharkhand, but he is now settled in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, where his family runs a string of businesses.
‘I slowly learnt to distill, to extract the best quantity and the quality, but this is not a great business to be in, there is too much chik chik here. People get drunk and violent, and the biggest menace is illegal distilling. These tribals think they can get away with just anything. I am permitted by the government to distill; I have to pay for a license. The excise department regularly checks my quality, but these people set up their dirty stills just anywhere, mix all kinds of things in the wash and then die.’ I slowly realized that his six-feet-plus fauj were the rural equivalent of urban bar bouncers. ‘I need these people for security and to keep things under control. I can never stop illegal distilling completely, but at least I can minimize it. My staff keeps in touch with the people and finds out where the trouble is, and then we conduct raids with the help of excise and police. There is also a bit of pressure from these departments to get them a quota of cases every month. They have their targets too. Now you know why I need to keep an army,’ he laughed again.
‘Do you bribe people with liquor to get information?’ I ask.
‘Arre sahab,’ he started laughing again at my naiveté, ‘kya kya nahin karna padta. I am a Brahmin and I have been here for many years. I am there for the people in their sukh dukh, I do puja for them, everyone knows me here and calls me Pandeyji. They come to me for help, that is how we keep in touch. Par kuch lene ke liye kuch dena to padta hi hai.’
‘A Brahmin, really?’ I said. ‘I thought you were a Bhumihar.’ A land-owning community of farmers found only in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bhumihars consider themselves Brahmins, but are looked down upon by the latter. Tall and well built, and with a lot of political muscle as well, Bhumihars practise some of the more violent politics in Bihar and are feared. Dubey was indignant.
‘Kya bat kar rahe hain, I am a Dubey. I am a high-caste Kanyakubj Brahmin.’
‘Oh, I was told I am a Kanyakubj Brahmin as well.’
‘Really,’ he sized me up with a new look. ‘One of us. Why didn’t you tell me before? What is your gotra?’ This stumped me completely as I just could not remember.
‘You can’t remember your gotra,’ he towered over me like an Oxford don who had summarily lost faith in his star pupil. ‘People like you will ruin our caste.’
‘So how come a high-caste Brahmin like you is working in the liquor business?’
‘Arre sahab, this is kaliyug. If a Brahmin like you can’t remember his gotra, anything can happen. Do you think I like this chik chik? I am forced to do this for it gets me a decent salary and I can look after my children. It is my misfortune that I have to live in this environment, but I don’t touch this stuff, not even a drop. Every one of my staff does puja with me in a temple that I have built inside the distillery, every day, without fail, and none of them are allowed to drink.’ No wonder, the place looked like an austere ashram.
‘But how do you gauge quality, then, if none of you touch this stuff?’
‘I have spent so much time doing this paap (sin) that I can tell just by the smell and the consistency of the distill,’ he told me with some pride.
Each 300 litre blue plastic drum, that had once housed some intensely corrosive chemical and had a skull and crossbones on it with a few strands of lightning added for effect, held 35 kilos of dry mahua. This was topped with 50 litres of mildly warm water. A few hours later the brown mahua would start rehydrating and swell up to look like raisins. ‘We don’t add anything else to it and we are not permitted to do so either. This is the purest mahua alcohol you can get. But yes, some unscrupulous people do sometimes add molasses or jaggery to give the wash some strength when dry mahua is in short supply, but that usually makes the process more expensive. The only thing we sometimes add is a few mugfuls of active wash from other vats to speed up the fermentation in case it is lagging, but that is about it, nothing else,’ Dubeyji said. He reminded me of the Brahmin equivalent of a Trappist monk, isolated in his monastery distillery, immersed in what he considered a disgusting craft with some of his senses trained to abhor this work but others so finely attuned to excelling in it.
I asked for a taste on the way out. It seemed sweet compared to what I was used to drinking in village homes. Dubeyji was disgusted. He refused to shake hands with a Brahmin who drank.
For many years, while travelling through Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh on various assignments, I would hear of sweets that were made with dried mahua, but never found them. Nobody makes them any more, I was told. ‘Maybe during festivals some people might, but it is not as common as it used to be. I sometimes see it being sold at a village fair, but it is getting to be rare,’ Alikh Kanhar of Banigoccha, Odisha, told me. ‘In fact, we used to just roast it on a griddle and eat it as a snack. It had a smoky sweet taste. I can’t remember when I had it last. I think people have lost the taste for it, now that they have Bikaner bhujiya,’ he smiled. He spoke fondly of mahul peetha, kakra pitha, mahul chokoli, mahul seejha and latha.
On my last day in Banigoccha in Odisha, I walked a few kilometres in the evening to the Phalpaju village to meet Chanchala Behera, who headed the local village forest society. Sitting in the courtyard of her spread-out mud house, I found her and her daughter Manasi eating a large, round roti-like thing that had an utthapam look, but was certainly not an utthapam. ‘Seejha,’ she casually told me. ‘Mahul seejha?!’ She was amused by my excitement. ‘Can I taste?’ I asked. They were most embarrassed that I wanted to try a piece from their plate and Manasi rushed inside to make a new one for me. Made from dried mahua soaked overnight and boiled to a pulp, then kneaded with besan or soaked kuluth dal (channa or gram), raised for a few hours and lightly fried, seejha was coarse. It was not so sweet either and I found it difficult to finish the big one she had lovingly made for me. But I could see that it was full of energy and could keep a person going for long.
In parts of Madhya Pradesh the juice from the pulp is squeezed out, kneaded with wholewheat flour, seasoned and fried like a parantha. ‘We call it mahuari. It stays in a closed box for a few days and travels well. We mix the same juice with rice flour and steam it, like idli. That’s kachi (kaa-chee), very tasty. In fact, this same juice is boiled to a thick syrup and they cook coarse, home-made wheat or rice noodles in it. We call it farah (fa-raa). That’s a dessert. Sometimes we roast wheat or rice flour on a griddle, cook it in the syrup and as it thickens just let it cool down. We then set it in trays and cut it like barfi,’ Samar Singh from Satna, near Rewa in Madhya Pradesh told me. ‘Twenty years ago it used to be made at home and as young boys we used to love it. I don’t think my children will even touch it. Tastes have radically changed. There is even a stigma attached to eating or drinking mahua.’
Mahul peetha, I was told, was more sophisticated. Mahua was soaked and boiled to a pulp and kneaded with rice flour and khoya (milk solids). Then rolled by hand into oblong pieces, stuffed with dried fruits, then fried a deep brown and dipped in syrup. But in Odisha, the land of pithas with hundreds of amazing variations, this one is almost unheard of.
Latha (laa-taa), in fact, is common to almost all of central India with mild variations. Dry mahua is cleaned of grit and roasted. It is then pounded with roasted black or white sesame seeds or peanuts or both to a point when they fuse together. In some places they add roasted bajra or pearl millet and dry fruits as well. It is then rolled into laddoos by hand and stored. If kept in air-tight containers, it stays for long. It reminded me of an energy ball as opposed to a bar. In Shahdol, Madhya Pradesh, they keep it as a powder and call it bhookha or hungry. ‘It is for the elderly who can’t bite into a hard laddoo.’ In ten years I have not seen it anywhere.
‘Raanb (rna-aab) was the rage in our growing years around Rajnandgaon,’ senior forest officer and botanist B.P. Nonhare reminisced in Raipur. ‘Our roots are in Marathwada, but for generations we have been here. My mother would take 5 kilos of dried mahua and thoroughly clean it. She would then put it into a degh with double the amount of water so that it was fully covered. This would soak for a while and then put to boil on low heat. It would keep boiling like this for 16-17 hours, sometimes overnight, while someone watched it carefully to ensure it did not burn and there was enough liquid in there. After about ten hours a kilo each of dried coconut and cashew were added to it. By the time it started to look dark and took on a viscous consistency, the coconut and cashew had almost dissolved. This was cooled and strained with a cheese cloth, squeezing every drop of goodness out, and stored in glass jars in our store. I remember being given a breakfast of raanb, milk and roti almost every day in the winter during our childhood and we would very happily eat it. It must have done something for our resistance because we almost never had coughs and colds. For the elderly who had gout or aching joints, my mother would add dried ginger to this.’
‘I remember this vividly as an elaborate winter ritual. There was great excitement in the house. Mahua would be bought and we would all help clean it. Then a fire would be lit in the courtyard and we would sit and watch the degh bubble away. As my mother grew older, we would have less and less of it, till one day she stopped. She said it was just too tiring and her joints ached. I don’t think I have seen this anywhere these days, but in the fifties and sixties, it was common on the borders of Chattisgarh and Maharashtra.’
His children have not tasted it either.