Prohibition, similarly, is often accompanied by purported concern for women suffering the effects of alcoholism in men
Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
While it is a growing fashion to want to be the first person to have done something or other, I doubt that 34-year-old Wu Tiandong, is feeling fashionable. That's because he is the first foreign national to have been arrested in Bihar for violating prohibition, yaniki anti-booze law. In Bihar for work, he was arrested for being in possession of a bottle or two. As if it wasn't bad enough, that poor Tiangdong was in jail, a sly sub-editor somewhere served up this headline: Hakka noodles in prison for Chinese who landed in soup.
Turns out poor Tiangdong can't eat Indian prison food because it too spicy. So, he was on a 'prison-sponsored' diet of Hakka noodles and boiled vegetables (a diet which might drive some to alcohol) said the news report, sniffily.
I particularly sympathise with this story as a person who was shocked to discover that there is no alcohol allowed on the Lakshadweep islands when I was going there on vacation some years ago. Chalo, I thought, they don't sell it, but surely I could take some along? That too was forbidden under a list of scary consequences. I considered sneaking some in a bottle of shampoo but finally relented to the pleading of my extremely law-abiding companion.
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Now it is not that I am the rebellious, daaru-peeke-danga-karta-hai type of law-breaking character. Nor am I hopelessly addicted to alcohol. Like Mr Tiangdong, I too found it difficult to understand what I consider a harmless entertainment, which hurts no one else, nor within reason, the drinker, being so sternly forbidden in another context. I mean imagine going some place and finding chillies were banned. You'd be scratching your head na?
Perhaps Mr Tiangdong should have been like me in Lakshadweep and found some local toddy. But it's not like local toddy is so easy to find. The banning of alcohol is a stiff drink of morality with a hefty shot of invalidating some cultural practices.
Old movies showed the club as a place of terrible venality and moral degradation, fuelled by the downing of dark drinks, eventually wreaking suffering on women. Prohibition, similarly, is often accompanied by purported concern for women suffering the effects of alcoholism in men. While this fact is true, that suffering is rooted in gender, not alcohol. And the prohibition of alcohol is often rooted in class, caste and race.
In some instances, traditional, organic liquors like mahua, toddy and rice-wine have been outlawed. Woven into the rationale is the implication that adivasi and rural communities do not know how to look after themselves and that aspects of their culture are inherently 'primitive', impure, irregular, 'jungli'. Often where these alcohols are prohibited, IMFL, or alcohol drunk by elites is permitted, marked as purer, more sanitary, 'civilised'. This results in the production of cheap and dangerous alcohols for the poor and the impoverishing of communities whose traditional occupation was making toddy.
When general liquor bans are proposed, it is with the same paternalistic logic: the pure hand of discipline will regularise the unstable and destabilising folks who drink because we don't know what's good for us.
Is too much alcohol bad for you — any kind? Yes, of course, like too much of anything — too much mirchi in your food
(as Tiangdong can attest) and too much morality in your law.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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