The Madras Abkari Act of 1886

Caste, Country Liquor and Company Raj The year was 1710. The wardens of a European cemetery in Madras wrote to East India Company officials complaining about the nuisance they had to put up with owing to the coconut trees on the property. This was a peculiar complaint; we do not normally imagine coconut trees when we think about sources of public nuisance. The crux of the matter at hand was that the gates had to be kept open all the time so that a certain country liquor could be drawn and sold. Variously described as the homegrown beer or palm wine of the Madras Presidency, the miscreant in question was toddy, the word deriving from the Hindi tari . In this imperial account, the cemetery was rendered noisier than all the punch houses in Madras put together as basket makers, scavengers, buffalo keepers ‘and other Parriars (Paraiyars)’ converged there at night to drink toddy, whereupon inebriated ‘beggars and other vagabonds’ even proceeded to lie down in freshly dug graves. Company officials wrote to the governor recommending replanting the trees elsewhere to relieve the European community of their troubles. The offending coconut trees were promptly removed. As Company officials increasingly found themselves thrust into the role of a governing body in the Presidency of Fort St George, they found themselves having to develop a coherent response to the issue of alcohol, which eventually became the precursor to the colonial state's alcohol policy. Observations of local drinking cultures that a broad cross-section of European society had contributed became the basis of their response, which evidenced a growing reliance on strategies constituting governmentality over time.