The Battle Against the Bottle

Wrathful women by the hundreds rampaged through the village liquor store here, hurling the inventory into the streets and smashing the bottles with broomsticks. For added measure, they shaved the heads of a few soused men, passed out among the chickens on the dusty footpaths.

The motive was self-defense. In India’s vast countryside, where most of this nation’s 930 million people live, getting drunk is a common way for a man to finish his day, though a great thirst often outlasts a meager income.

Hooch-drinking then all too frequently leads to wife-beating. A husband wants some of his wife’s scant earnings. A quarrel erupts when she chooses to put food on the family table rather than liquor down his unsated gullet.

In a stunning rebellion, the women of a thousand Indian villages have gone to war against booze. Rural wives are usually a stifled lot. Their uprising, however, has been so massive that politicians have taken heed.

Temperance is now a national issue. Last year, liquor was banned here in Andhra Pradesh, the state where the revolt began. A few months ago, another state, Haryana, went dry as well.

But declaring whiskey to be taboo is not the same as making it disappear. As fans of American gangster films well know, prohibition brings along its evil twin, bootlegging. Criminals cannot wait to play bartender, and crooked cops are content to look the other way.

In “dry” hamlets like Raghunathapuram, the men still come home with liquor on their breath and a weak hold on their tempers.

“We were better off before,” said Balla Kausalya, the forceful woman who led the attack on the liquor store here in 1993. “Before, there were two whiskey outlets out in the open; now there are 40 off in the shadows. And the liquor is more expensive. Our men are wasting more money than ever.”

On a recent Wednesday, the forbidden drinking began as darkness first swathed the village. By then, day laborers had returned from the corn fields and rice paddies with their $1 in pay. Weavers were no longer at their looms turning out simple white cloth. The oxen had been uncoupled from carts heavy with grain. Dinner fires glowed beneath red earthen cooking pots.

Kadkam Tulasidis eased into his liquor the way another man might put on a comfortable pair of slippers. Sitting on a log, he took a swig and relaxed, the clear whiskey providing a welcome burn on its way down.

“I drink because it gives me a good sleep, and it makes me wake up fresh,” Tulasidis said, using an excuse so standard here it seemed to be the village motto.

At 50, he was a decayed-looking man with the bent-over posture of a comma. The whites of his eyes were cloudy with brown. His face was wrinkled like the binding of an old book. He has eight children, including the one who brings liquor home on her bicycle, hiding it beneath her shirt as if it were poached game.

In India, the moonshine is called arrack. Most often, it is fermented from sugar cane; sometimes it is flavored with overripe fruit. Tulasidis’ half-bottle cost him 60 cents. It packed the same sudden fire as tequila, but left the aftertaste of a cheap brandy. He carelessly poured it into his big, pink mouth, allowing a thin rivulet to moisten the gray whiskers of his jaw.

He explained the beating of his wife. “When she pesters me about money, it goes against the very reason I drink in the first place,” Tulasidis said. “Her nagging provokes me. It makes me feel rage. I have to shut her up.”

For a while, this answer satisfied him. He was content with his cleverness, a man who knew to avoid his conscience like a ride through a bad neighborhood. But finally, as his wife looked on, he grudgingly showed a trace of shame.

“Actually, I only hit her maybe one in 10 times she nags me,” he said.

Roots of Rebellion

Modern India has never quite known what to do about liquor. Mahatma Gandhi called drinking a “more damnable vice than thievery and perhaps even prostitution.” India’s Constitution calls upon states to “endeavor to bring about prohibition,” and several measures have been tried: dry areas, educational campaigns, consumption taxes. But always, booze finds a way.

Morarji Desai, the nation’s prime minister in the late ‘70s, had a near-manic hatred of liquor, though his personal taste in beverages was itself suspect. He began each day with a steaming glass of his own urine, urging others to tap into their own “healthful”--and always affordable--supply.

The odd temperance of Desai was followed by the expedient tolerance of his successors. Liquor, amply taxed, kept the states flush with revenue.

In Andhra Pradesh, the state’s chief minister during the mid-’80s was the legendary N.T. Rama Rao, an actor who had played so many Hindu demigods in the movies that he seemed one in real life. Rama Rao brought the government into the liquor business, manufacturing state-approved arrack and selling it in state-approved stores. Drinking was almost a mark of good citizenship.

“Even the nondrinkers became drunkards then,” Balla Kausalya said.

With 60 million people, Andhra Pradesh is the fifth largest of India’s 25 states. The poor and landless fill its villages. Women work right beside their husbands in the backbreaking toil of the fields, but by custom only the men consider liquor a tranquilizing rite at the end of a hard day. Men drink until their minds fog up. By some estimates, 40% of the state’s rural men are alcoholics, a besotted group that litters the cement stoops and rutted roads.

Five years ago, a literacy drive was begun in the villages. Oddly enough, this instruction in letters led to an insurrection against booze. A cautionary story about arrack seemed a natural thing to put among the reading materials. In the tale, the angry wife of a drunkard forces the closing of an arrack shop.

What a bold idea! concluded the women readers in Doobagunta. They set fire to their village’s arrack outlet, and, when attempts were made to reopen it, they ambushed the delivery trucks and emptied the booze onto the road.

Mass movements, of course, usually have leadership and coordination. But this one swept along on its own power, going from place to place like a vengeful wind. Kakinada, Mothkur, Sayipeta, Raghunathapuram: towns where stick-wielding women raided the arrack stores, sometimes parading the proprietor around on a donkey. When necessary, they went on strike: no cooking, no laundry, no sex.

Suryadguara Rajyalaxmi Devi, 83, once a staunch ally of Gandhi in the freedom struggle and always a renowned battler for prohibition, still cannot believe the spontaneous events in her home state. “The women are from every social class, all political parties; this is what is so amazing,” she said.

The campaign began after Rama Rao--the actor-politician who had made high-quality, low-cost arrack a government duty--had lost his state office. But to get his job back, he boarded the fast-moving bandwagon for prohibition. The women’s vote propelled the demigod’s return to power, and booze was banned.

Rama Rao, once again voted out of office, died last January. His successor has since publicly wondered if the angel of temperance has been more damaging than the devil of drink.

Taxes on liquor were the state’s second-largest revenue source, yielding $400 million a year. That has proved to be an impossible hole to plug. Spending cuts have been needed, and it is health care and schools that have suffered the most.

Enforcement is a vexation as well. How can booze be policed when borders are a sieve? Liquor trucks cross state lines; their drivers claiming to be only passing through. At the Blue Fox, a nice restaurant in Hyderabad, the state capital, a request for whiskey led to the summoning of a courteous maitre d’. He said, “I can have imported Scotch here for you in 10 minutes, sir.”

R.M. Gonela, the bureaucrat in charge of enforcing prohibition, complained that “contraband is everywhere.” By one calculation, “anti-social elements” are earning $285 million a year by supplying the illegal liquor.

“Imagine the power to corrupt,” Gonela said. “It is our time bomb.”

Teetotalers vs. Tipplers

The temperance movement is staking out more territory. Gujarat--Mahatma Gandhi’s home state--has been dry since 1947. Now, Kerala, Meghalaya and Orissa are joining Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Nagaland in imposing limits.

That is causing two trends to collide. While Indians in general are still not the methodical guzzlers common in some other countries, they have never been more keen than now to wet their whistles. An emerging middle class imitates the West, and as presented by the media, Westerners like to bend an elbow.

Last year, a record 200 million cases of legal hard liquor was consumed in India--in addition to an estimated 20 million cases of country hooch.

“Indians have been drinking for 10,000 years; you’ll find mention of it in our scriptures,” said L.N. Batra, secretary of the All-India Distillers Assn. “Prohibition won’t stop the problem of wife-beating. That needs to be done with education: Teach people how to drink without abusing it.”

Two-thirds of the liquor sold in India is whiskey. Rum and brandy are also popular; gin, vodka, beer and wine less so. Among the wealthy, foreign brands have great cache.

“India is a great market,” one American liquor salesman said. “That whole health-consciousness thing has not caught on here.”

Certainly, health is of little concern to the arrack drinker, especially in states where prohibition has taken root. In what fetid barrel have the illicit spirits been concocted? Has a dash of varnish been added to double the kick?

Raghunathapuram is 20 miles east of Hyderabad, these days a bustling dispensary of illegal hooch. In a shabby neighborhood called Dhoolpet, the liquid yield of hundreds of stills drips within the radius of just a few miles. The smell of sugar-cane juice sits in the air like cut-rate perfume.

To an outsider, Dhoolpet can seem a hallucinatory labyrinth of alleyways. Wooden stalls hold the neighborhood’s other mass-produced item, giant papier-mache figurines of Ganesha, the Hindu god with the face of an elephant.

Strangers find no welcome among the lurking eyes of the lookouts. Some of the cement houses are interconnected by secret pipelines, a way to safely stash a supply of arrack from sudden discovery by a rare honest cop.

The actual stills are small, primitive factories. One stood in a ravine, shielded by rocks and trees. The apparatus was nothing more than a pot of cool water resting atop a steel barrel, the two vessels joined together by a gunnysack slathered with mud. A wood fire heated a gooey mass of sugar cane in the barrel, sending vapors toward the pot. Freshly condensed arrack dribbled from a hose, filling nine bottles an hour at a profit of about $11.

“We can’t make it fast enough,” said the woman who was stirring the pot with a flat piece of wood. Around her were a dozen men, idle but smiling. “Prohibition,” one said, “is making all of Dhoolpet rich.”

Sour Frustration

Tulasidis’ wife, a proud woman named Pentamma, watched her husband getting tipsy, something as inevitable as the cries of roosters in the morning. She described the beatings that he and the arrack have meted out together. “Usually, it is nothing like a boxing match,” she said. “He gives me a few slaps, maybe more. This is to shut me up. It is to make me scared.”

Sitting beside her in a small courtyard was a close friend, Bingi Kamala. The two women were less interested in complaining than in reminiscing. Oh, it felt so exceptionally good, that day they attacked the arrack shop.

“It was a spectacle for the whole village, almost impossible to imagine,” Bingi Kamala said. “Almost every woman joined us. If they weren’t breaking bottles, they were shouting slogans. The men were just mute spectators.”

They had a clear purpose then: prohibition.

But these days, even when women turn in an arrack dealer, the police just let him go. The husbands have their booze, the wives the sour mash of frustration.

“You know, it is not often that a traditional Indian woman steps out of her house to take on the world,” Bingi Kamala said in reflection. “When we were in the thick of the struggle, it felt very good. But now we see. . . .”

She hesitated a moment before finishing her thought. “Changing the law turned out to be easy. What we could not change was the way people act.”