Making a new year prediction: Sooner or later, the world will discover mahua as the first indigenous, tequila-like drink to savour from India
Liquor being prepared from mahua flowers. Pic/iStock
Call me tasteless, in another context, if you will—I’m convinced all of the world’s top booze industry runs on ‘Chivas Regal Effect’.
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Which essentially means, you mindlessly pump up the price. Marketing/advertising/word-of-mouth follows. Revenues, sometimes also sales, simultaneously shoot up. As does the snob-value.
The product remains the same. It becomes luxury/premium, on its own.
That’s reportedly what happened to the blended whisky, founded by Chivas Brothers, James and John, in early 1800s—once Seagrams bought over the company, in 1949. Pernod Ricard owns it now.
As it is, most major alcohol brands, with multiple variants, are owned by a handful of companies. And that booze, more often than not, gets distilled in the same plants, by external agencies, inevitably.
Cocktails at Bandra Born, which claims to be the ‘world’s first mahura bar’
The same principle applies to vodka, that hardly has as many gradations. Only the quality appears better, with cooler ads and bottles progressively getting ornate, like jewel design—offering the same damn drink, that has little to separate its ‘superior’ from entry-level.
This isn’t to suggest you glug down the desi, Lady Di vodka, instead. Drank it through college. Relieved, didn’t die. Smirnoff, too sasta for some, seems fine to me.
Price also viscerally inspires trust—after a certain point, you feel assured the distilling/ingredients involved are okay. Gotta play safe, when booze is your poison, anyway.
In that context, no matter how adventurous a drinker, what’s that one alcohol, you’ve generally refrained from?
Can speak for myself: it’s the ‘country liquor’; both unbranded ones, and brands, observed from distance—Naarangi, Baahubali, Super Himmat Santra, etc—packed in pouches, plastic or cough-syrup bottles, priced about the same as a bag of chakhna, to go with it.
That’s ‘desi daru’. As in the song from the film Cocktail: “Chadhi mujhe yaari teri aisi, jaise daru desi!’
I’ve come close to a windowless country-liquor bar once, with a faded curtain separating it from the crowded street, hanging with the homeless in Mahim (for a journalistic story).
Chilled with them over everything else. Stopped short of the bar. Fear of the unknown took over. Whether or not it’d be a hoot, just thought, hooch! Precisely what social conditioning does.
Also, you know that cliché? “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”—somehow doesn’t hold true for alcohol!
That said, what exactly is country liquor? Simply, a British-colonial term for any Indian-made Indian liquor—as against Indian-made foreign (IMFL), or imported liquor itself. Examples of what you may have tried?
Say, feni (hopefully, only with Limca), geo-tagged from Goa. Or toddy, from Kerala, which ought to be consumed fresh. Once distilled, it becomes arrack, more commonly associated with Sri Lanka.
These are all, technically, country liquor—deemed by the erstwhile Empire as inferior. In a way that other indigenous drinks—bourbon (for the US), raki (Turkey’s national drink), soju (Korea), sake (Japan), etc—aren’t.
To the extent that when Indians, abroad, get asked about their own drink, they naturally draw a blank. There are several options. They just haven’t tried it.
No, Kingfisher doesn’t count. Much as I guzzle that enough to bankroll Vijay Mallya’s former brand, originally owned by the Scots. It’s beer!
Or Old Monk, that’s rum, also founded by the family of General Reginald Dyer, mass-murderer of Jallianwala Bagh.
Take mahua/mahura/mhowra, then. It’s loved/savoured in 13 Indian states, chiefly by tribal populations. More so, in Madhya Pradesh (MP), Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha.
The booze comes from the mahua tree—with such strong worth/value, including medicinal (even to do with liver)—that tribals, over generations, have deemed it the “tree of life”.
Mahua is the world’s only drink to emerge from a fragrant flower, collected from the tree. The British banned the plucking/collection of this flower, under Mhowra Act, in the late 1800s, in the bid to ban the drink itself.
They were on a ‘civilising mission’; felt it wasn’t good for tribals, apparently given to violence, upon consumption. Most likely, they wished to own the alcohol business in India—produced, distilled locally (IMFL), or imported.
Mhowra laws persisted, once the Brits left. Not a surprise. Mahatma Gandhi, leading India’s national movement, was himself a staunch prohibitionist. Who would care.
I first saw a well-packaged bottle of mahua at a government-owned bar in Bhopal, in 2023, when MP had declared it a “heritage drink”. I’d heard people talk about ‘alcohol alchemist’ Desmond Nazareth’s brand, DJ Mahua, couple of years ago.
Finally, I tried mahua, recently, thanks to a friend, who took me along to the launch of Six Brothers Mahura, crafted in Dahanu, Maharashtra, by the Chinoy family, old-time distillers of top global brands.
Bandra Born in Mumbai subsequently opened the “world’s first mahura” bar, serving Six Brothers’ cocktails. What does mahura, straight, taste like—having gone easy, with 30 ml, and soda, feeling a gentle buzz?
It’s smooth, with vibes, somewhere between regular tequila, and gin. Anybody in the world could replace mahura for either drink; all three priced the same.
What about Chivas Regal Effect? The most expensive Six Brothers Mahura costs R1,02,000; huh!
It’s December 31 evening as I write this. Plan to hit the cheaper variant, tonight; obviously. Only fair to talk up a bottle, as we wrap the quarter (of a century), no? Cheers.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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