Spirited away: Where did all our traditional alcohols go, asks Mridula Ramesh
Hindustan TimesThere was once a strictly-brought-up man named Sanudasa, a child conceived after many years of fervent prayer. Alcohol was the ideal handmaiden to erotica, as the book puts it: “Liquor, or Madira, intoxicates by its nature, how much more so when beautified by contact with the beloved’s mouth?” The story of Sanudasa was my favourite of the tales in An Unholy Brew, a fascinating book on alcohol in ancient India, by James McHugh, a professor of South Asian religions at University of Southern California. Data from the World Health Organization indicates that, in 2019, 2.9 million people worldwide died because of alcohol, 400 million suffered from alcohol-linked disorders, and 209 million were dependent on it. The proportion of spirits to wine and beer drunk in India is among the highest in the world too, with spirits accounting for about 92% of all alcohol consumed in the country, as of 2016. Using water footprints from the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable, a global beverage industry think-tank, and India-specific data from WHO, I reckon that, in 2019, India’s alcohol production used about 1,550 million litres of water a day.
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