INDIA: Noble Experiment

Thousands of Hindus marched through the streets dragging hideous effigies labeled DEMON LIQUOR. At strategic corners, city officials stepped forward to set fire to the images. Last week Madras Province was celebrating Gandhi’s birthday (it would have been his 79th) by going dry.

Madrasis could scarcely have chosen a better way to honor the Mahatma. “If I were appointed dictator for one hour for all India,” Gandhi once wrote, “the first thing I would do would be to close without compensation all liquor shops, destroy all toddy palms*. . . Exceptions would be made for Europeans . . .”

Madras has made prohibition a major crusade. There is a minister for prohibition in the provincial cabinet. A prohibition-enforcement staff college has recently been started, with a student body of 366 inspectors.

The bonds of orthodox Hinduism are stronger in Madras than anywhere else in India. Abstention from liquor, tobacco and meat are cardinal points in the orthodox Hindu code. Prohibition is spreading from Madras to other parts of Hindu India where orthodoxy is not so strong. Nationwide prohibition has long been one of the main planks of the Congress Party, and the party has pushed it wherever it could. About one-seventh of Travancore, half of the Central Provinces, portions of the United Provinces and the East Punjab are experimenting with liquor bans. Both Bombay and New Delhi have control systems.

Moslems are also forbidden by their religion to drink alcohol. Last week the West Punjab provincial government decreed complete prohibition for all Moslems. Non-Moslems can be exempted by applying for a special drinking permit costing 5 rupees a year. A loophole in the law makes the drinking permits available to those Moslems who can present doctors’ certificates saying that they are “alcohol addicts.”

Governor General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, one of India’s leading prohibitionists, also recognizes the difficulty of curing addicts. He recently said: “Those who have got used to spirituous liquor of any kind cannot bear the compulsory privation ordained by state prohibition without a suitable substitute. To replace wine, whiskey or toddy by tea is based on the fallacious notion that the problem is only a matter of selection of fluids.”

Premier Jawaharlal Nehru, who used to drink very moderately, has now gone on the wagon, and his government is trying to get other public officials to do the same. The Bombay provincial government recently warned its civil servants that it would take “serious notice” if they were found taking alcoholic drinks in public places.

A government official who once worked on a temporary trial of prohibition in Bombay reported: “The first result of the experiment was a large increase in water consumption. Not because people were quenching their thirst on water. We found it was because people were taking more baths. A woman who had only one sari had not bothered to take a bath; but when her husband could no longer spend his money on toddy he would go out and buy his wife a second sari. She was then encouraged to take baths.”

*Toddy, a strong liquor distilled from palm sap, is the favorite drink of India’s poor; it tastes like sugared laundry soap; and is not to be confused with the American toddy made of whiskey, water and sugar.