Can You Culturally Appropriate Booze?

I distinctly remember the first time I had mahua. I worked with a newspaper then, and was dispatched to Daman on a story. The firebrand of a Parsi woman who was chaperoning my photographer and me took us to her friend’s massive chikoo orchard once we were done with work. As soon as we rolled out a picnic mat, a woman promptly appeared with three glasses of a homemade liquor my olfactories were not used to. We sipped on our sour and strong mahua suspiciously at first, but with abandon later. It was potent and heady—I don’t know if I’d call it delicious, but it hit me hard (which, in your early 20s, is sometimes all you’re looking for). And when I filed my story later that day under enduring intoxication, it came out, well, pretty bombastic. You were kinda right, Hemingway.

Mahua is a drink made from fermenting mahua (Madhuca longifolia) flowers. “The mahua plant is considered sacred out here,” says Jeet Singh Arya, who runs Unexplored Bastar, a start-up focused on sustainable tourism in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region through a community-based approach. “The mahua flower makes for a major source of income for the tribal communities, and is important in many socio-economic activities [from making oil, soap, jam and medicinal syrup to being a big part of their religious and celebratory events].”

While winging a swig of the mahua originally required you to head to the hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh or Odisha [Maharashtra and Gujarat have swathes of mahua as well but not as prolific], and hope to befriend a local who could share his ration with you, you can now simply head to Goa. Here, the cloudy ‘country liquor’, which is often sold in reused beer bottles in the villages, is now available in a lovely glass bottle, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Desmond Nazareth who has founded the DesmondJi (DJ) brand of distilled spirits, liqueurs and cocktail blends.

“We are trying to create a new category between the IMFL (Indian-made Foreign Liquor) and country liquor, and we’re calling it ‘heritage liquor,” he tells VICE. Feni (a Goan spirit made from cashew fruit or toddy palm), tadi (toddy or palm wine) and handiya (a rice beer popular among tribes in central India) and share the spotlight here alongside mahua. “Mahua is rooted in the indigenous tribal culture. We could’ve been blamed for culturally appropriating it if we had decided to call our drink just mahua instead of DJ Mahua—that would have made it seem like we were the only ones representing it. In this case, it’s our story layered on top of the indigenous tribal story, and we are acknowledging that.”

Cultural appropriation is a topic that often divides many, and there is no easy answer to many instances. It has to do with the idea of taking an aspect of a different culture, stripping it of its original complexity and layered history, tradition and meaning, and introducing it to a different context in a far simpler form, to the point where its connection to the original culture is rendered irrelevant. It then becomes a cultural simulacrum: It might resemble something, but it means nothing. For some, wearing sombreros and getting pissed drunk on tequila on Cinco de Mayo is culturally inappropriate. As a kid growing up in India in the ’90s, though, I thought of Madonna wearing a bindi for the MTV Video Music Awards, with religious imagery in the background, or Oprah wearing a sari, as exciting. Conversation on when appreciation turns to appropriation are still rampant in discussions with colleagues and friends. But even as these cross over to food at times, alcohol is largely missing as a topic of conversation within this realm.

“That’s because we haven’t been introduced to too many marginalised communities to whose culture a specific alcohol might belong, which might suddenly be taken up by a business which would want to take it to other people with higher disposable incomes,” says anthropologist Abhay Sutaria. “I believe that as long as the profits are filtering back to the very communities whose stories are being told through the products being sold, and it’s being done in as respectful a way as possible, it’s not cultural appropriation. But there are no easy answers here, especially because culinary influences often transcend borders. Would you pull up an Indian chef making taco or sushi? What about someone who is not a Dalit cooking Dalit food? I guess the only thing we can do is be as respectful of new cultures as possible, and wherever possible, give back to the communities you are profiting off.”

Trying to do this is Mumbai-based chartered accountant Susan Dias who kickstarted Native Brews around four years ago, with an intention to look at indigenous spirits, beers and wines. They’re rolling out a gin next year with Indian botanicals, as also liquor derived from mahua, that has taken over a couple of years to research and formulate. “What we found fascinating was that nowhere else on the planet will you find a spirit distilled from a flower,” she says. “But I don’t want to appropriate anything. The structure I want to follow is that I want to set up cooperatives within the districts where there are mahua trees. The locals usually collect flowers, dry them and sell them to middlemen who aggregate them to sell to distillers who make country liquor. But while the tribal is making, say Rs 17, the middleman is making Rs 40. Instead, we want to buy directly from the source, and set up a structure through which the tribals can set up co-operatives. By eliminating the middleman, we can then pay them better.”

Nazareth works directly with the tribals as well, helping them understand that if they improve their collection and storage conditions, they can have a higher quality of dried mahua, and get a better price for it. “Getting a GI [a Geographical Indication tag that corresponds to a specific geographical region, and vouches for authenticity and quality] is not really enough— feni is theoretically under GI but it’s written very poorly and is so tight-assed that there is no wiggle room. If one were to take it seriously, most of the producers would not meet the requirements. With mahua, we are trying to move it from a position of shame to pride. I believe that what we have done with DJ Mahua is an example of what could be done by entrepreneurs belonging to these communities.”

Jeet Singh Arya, who works directly with tribals living in Bastar and around, believes that the popularisation of the spirit will only benefit them. “I don’t see how tribals can be eliminated from the mahua-making process even if the drink were to become popular, since they know the forest best. I do believe private players entering the market to bottle it will help raise the prices of the flower, and have the ones on ground earn more. Our own business model has seen how it’s possible to empower them. But you need regulations to ensure that you are not selling their story without having them in the picture altogether.”

Is the government listening?

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