INDIA: Toddy and Taxes

In the city of Bombay one night last week the big hotel restaurants were virtually empty because most of the waiters were drunk. In the slum section 20,000 women and 50,000 textile workers paraded to celebrate the downfall of liquor, undisturbed by crowds thronging shops to get their last drink of toddy, the potent, fresh or fermented palm tree sap which, retailing for 4¢ a pint, gives India’s native drinkers most of their alcohol. At the Royal Yacht Club Britons drank champagne and sang Auld Lang Syne as midnight struck and prohibition went into effect in the Bombay Presidency (77,221 square miles). For Bombay’s 8,000 foreigners, mostly located in the city of Bombay (pop. 1,161,383), the law meant liquor rations —seven bottles of whiskey, or 21 bottles of wine, or 63 bottles of beer a month. It meant the closing of the celebrated Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Bar, centre of Bombay’s white community, where Britons regularly go for their “sundowners,” the neat, half-size whiskey and soda known as a chotapeg. But for Bombay Presidency’s 18,192,500 natives it meant the end of the liquor trade, put some 8,000 members of the wealthy Parsi community out of work, closed 8,500 bars and liquor shops.

Most natives are total abstainers. For Moslems drinking is forbidden by edicts of the Prophet, and while it is not specifically banned for Hindus, it is regarded as immoral, disrespectful to age and to women. Supported by most of the population, the Indian National Congress Party had no difficulty last year in initiating prohibition experimentally in districts of four provinces of British India, especially after Mahatma Gandhi declared that British India could be dry in three years, that prohibition would be one of the Congress’ first proofs of its ability to rule India. On moral grounds wets put up a feeble fight, claiming that Indian liquors contained Vitamin B and made for healthy babies. This prohibitionists answered by declaring that drunkards were violent and that there was “no need to drink Vitamin B and beat your wife.” But on financial grounds, wets were powerful. In many an Indian province liquor taxes account for 25% of total revenue. Liquor consumption has been increasing: tax in 1920 brought in $23,000,000; in 1928, $82,000,000; in 1938, $350,000,000. Bombay’s revenue losses were estimated at $10,000,000 annually. To compensate for this, Treasury experts could offer only higher property taxes.

Day prohibition went into effect Bombay’s whites arose in their hangovers to find 500,000 natives milling in the streets. Egged on by Parsis, bone-dry Moslems paraded, denouncing, not prohibition, but the tax increase, stoned Hindu bystanders. Police and Prohibition Guards (see cut), whose motto is “harder than a diamond, yet softer than a flower,” went into action. At the end of it more than 40 had been injured by bullets, blows or bludgeons, a 10 p. m. curfew was clapped on Bombay for 14 days, and assemblies of more than five forbidden. To popularize prohibition, authorities put on showings of Ten Nights in a Barroom, charging 2¢ to 4¢ admissions.