What if the history of India could be read through a glass? In Toddy to Tequila, Sandhya Mulchandani turns alcohol into an unexpected historical guide, moving from Vedic rituals and indigenous brews to Mughal courts, colonial trade and modern distilleries. Her subject is never simply drinking. It is faith, pleasure, prohibition, commerce, class, power and the people caught between them.
Have you ever wondered what your drink says about the country you live in?
Perhaps you are sitting somewhere with a drink in front of you.
Nothing dramatic. No palace. No Mughal durbar. No colonial club with men in linen suits pretending the weather isn't trying to kill them.
Just a glass.
You might be holding whisky. Or feni. Or beer. Perhaps a cocktail with a name that requires three attempts before you can pronounce it without embarrassing yourself. Perhaps it is toddy, poured from a humble container that has travelled a very long distance from the fashionable cocktail menus of modern India.
Now ask yourself a slightly strange question.
Who decided what this drink means?
Who decided that one drink could be sacred, another sinful, another medicinal, another respectable and another a reason for the government to reach for its tax ledger?
That is where Sandhya Mulchandani's Toddy to Tequila: The Story of Alcohol in India becomes such an intriguing book.
Published by Juggernaut on 19 January 2026, the 256 page hardback attempts something deceptively difficult. It tells the story of alcohol in India, but in doing so it has to tell stories about religion, mythology, medicine, trade, empire, caste, class, gender, politics, economics and changing ideas of morality. Juggernaut describes the book as a history stretching from Vedic altars and tribal stills to Mughal courts, colonial taverns and contemporary distilleries.
That is an enormous glass to fill.
And, for the most part, Mulchandani pours something surprisingly rich into it.
Her central idea is wonderfully simple: India's history of alcohol is ultimately a history of India itself.
The cleverness lies in what happens after that sentence.
You begin thinking about alcohol.
Then you find yourself thinking about gods.
Then kings.
Then merchants.
Then soldiers.
Then women whose work has traditionally been pushed into the margins of historical narratives.
Then colonial administrators.
Then taxation.
Then medicine.
Then prohibition.
And eventually you are back where you started, looking at your drink and wondering how an apparently ordinary liquid acquired such an extraordinary political biography.
That is the trick of Toddy to Tequila.
It makes the glass look bigger.
Who is Sandhya Mulchandani?
Mulchandani comes to the subject with a background that makes the book's combination of mythology, sensuality, history and cultural practice particularly interesting.
She is an author and researcher whose work has explored eroticism in mythology and ancient and medieval literature. Her previous books include For the Love of God, The Indian Man, Love and Lust, The Five Arrows of Kama and Kama Sutra for Women. She has also produced a modern translation of Muddupalani's Radhika Santawanam and has appeared in documentaries. Juggernaut notes her continuing interest in Hindu philosophy, mythology and music.
That background matters.
Alcohol, like eroticism, is one of those subjects that refuses to remain neatly inside a single box.
It belongs to the body, but also to society.
It can be private and public.
It can be pleasurable and dangerous.
It can be sacred and profane.
It can be a matter of personal choice until a government decides it is a matter of public policy.
Mulchandani therefore approaches a subject that could easily become a catalogue of beverages with an instinct for the stories surrounding them.
And that makes a difference.
A weaker book might tell you what people drank.
A more interesting book asks why that drink was available, who produced it, who consumed it, who objected to it and who profited from it.
Toddy to Tequila repeatedly moves towards those larger questions.
That is where its historical imagination is strongest.
What exactly is Toddy to Tequila about?
At its simplest, the book traces alcohol across India's long history.
But “traces” makes it sound more orderly than the subject actually is.
The book moves through a landscape in which alcohol changes its identity depending on who is looking at it.
A ritual substance can become a social drink.
A social drink can become a commercial commodity.
A commodity can become a source of government revenue.
A source of revenue can become a political problem.
A political problem can become a prohibition campaign.
And the prohibited substance, rather inconveniently, can continue being consumed.
History has a sense of humour like that.
Mulchandani's account moves through Vedic traditions, local brewing practices, mythology, medicine, royal courts, European trade, colonial administration and modern drinking culture. The publisher presents alcohol as sacred libation, social glue, political weapon and economic engine, while emphasising the diversity of Indian drinking traditions.
The book's breadth is one of its greatest attractions.
It also creates its biggest challenge.
India is not one drinking culture.
It never was.
The toddy of one region cannot simply stand in for the drinking practices of another. A courtly drink cannot explain a village brew. A colonial officer's gin cannot explain a tribal community's fermented beverage. A modern urban cocktail cannot tell you what a traditional distiller experienced.
The story is therefore less like a straight road from ancient drinking to modern drinking and more like a huge, messy map.
Mulchandani's achievement is to persuade you to keep looking at the map.
What makes alcohol such an unusual historical narrator?
Think about the objects historians normally use to tell the story of a civilisation.
Kings.
Battles.
Treaties.
Temples.
Coins.
Manuscripts.
Fortresses.
Now imagine replacing all of them with a drink.
Suddenly the story gets intimate.
You are no longer only asking what a ruler ordered.
You are asking what he drank.
You are no longer only asking what merchants traded.
You are asking what they carried in their ships.
You are no longer only asking what a colonial administration taxed.
You are asking what people were buying.
This is one reason the book's subject works so well.
Alcohol is simultaneously material and symbolic.
It has to be grown, fermented, distilled, transported and sold. Yet humans immediately surround it with stories.
It can represent celebration.
It can represent adulthood.
It can represent masculinity.
It can represent hospitality.
It can represent rebellion.
It can represent spiritual transformation.
And sometimes it simply represents the desperate desire to forget that tomorrow is Monday.
That final use probably requires no historian at all.
What do Vedic traditions tell us about India's complicated relationship with alcohol?
One of the book's most important corrections to simplistic assumptions is that alcohol is not a foreign arrival in Indian history.
That needs saying clearly.
Indian traditions contain a long and complicated history of alcoholic beverages, intoxication, ritual use, social drinking, medicine and abstinence.
James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions, published by Oxford University Press, provides an important scholarly companion here. McHugh examines alcoholic beverages and drinking practices in premodern India, including their links with religion, medicine and social life.
This context makes Mulchandani's historical approach particularly valuable.
The old stereotype of an eternally abstinent India encountering alcohol through Europeans is simply too crude.
So is the opposite stereotype of an India where everyone always drank.
History is rarely kind enough to provide such convenient extremes.
Instead, you encounter contradictions.
There are traditions of drinking.
There are traditions of abstinence.
There are sacred contexts.
There are social restrictions.
There are medicinal uses.
There are celebrations.
There are condemnations.
And sometimes the same society accommodates several of these attitudes at once.
That tension is one of the book's most fertile subjects.
How does the book turn a drink into a story about power?
Here the book becomes more than a history of beverages.
It becomes a history of control.
Who gets to brew?
Who gets to sell?
Who gets to drink?
Who gets to decide what is respectable?
Who collects the tax?
Who imposes the prohibition?
Who breaks it?
And who gets punished?
Those questions take alcohol away from the dinner table and put it into the machinery of society.
This is where the book's phrase about alcohol being a “tool of power” becomes particularly useful.
A government may dislike drinking but enjoy its revenue.
A religious movement may condemn alcohol but create its own social boundaries around purity and discipline.
An empire may portray itself as bringing civilisation while commercialising intoxicants.
A wealthy consumer may experience alcohol as leisure while a producer experiences it as labour.
The same bottle can therefore contain very different histories depending on where you stand.
That is a lovely idea for a book.
It is also a useful warning for the reader.
When you read about alcohol, you are not simply reading about taste.
You are reading about access.
What happens when the Portuguese arrive with Madeira and feni?
This is where the historical narrative becomes particularly tasty, in every sense of the word.
An excerpt from Toddy to Tequila published by Scroll examines Portuguese influence on India's alcohol preferences, including Madeira and the development of feni from cashew fruit in Goa.
The story is fascinating because it demonstrates that cultural exchange rarely works like a simple delivery service.
Europeans did not merely arrive with a suitcase labelled “European alcohol”.
Existing Indian environments, ingredients and habits altered what arrived.
The cashew itself is an excellent example.
Native to Brazil, it was introduced into India by the Portuguese. The cashew fruit subsequently became an important source for distillation in Goa, helping produce feni.
There is something almost wonderfully Indian about that transformation.
An imported plant enters a new environment.
People experiment with it.
Local knowledge takes over.
A new drink emerges.
And eventually that drink becomes part of the cultural identity of a place.
That is not simply the history of alcohol.
That is the history of cultural adaptation.
What does Madeira reveal about colonial trade?
The Madeira episode is one of the book's more memorable examples because it connects taste with economics.
According to the excerpt published by Scroll, imports rose from 100 pipes of Madeira to 6,400 pipes by the end of the seventeenth century, with Madeira accounting for 40 per cent of liquor sales in Madras according to Mulchandani's account.
Numbers like these are useful because they prevent colonial history from becoming a vague story about “influence”.
Influence has to travel through systems.
Ships.
Contracts.
Ports.
Factories.
Merchants.
Customers.
Money.
And, yes, drinking habits.
That is one of the strengths of the book's narrative method. It can take something that initially looks trivial, such as a preference for one kind of wine, and reveal a network of international commerce underneath it.
Suddenly your drink has a shipping history.
It has a labour history.
It has an imperial history.
It may even have a bankruptcy story.
History is full of such surprises.
How did the East India Company change the drinking story?
The East India Company provides another crucial turning point.
The Scroll excerpt describes the connection between the East India Company and alcoholic beverages including claret, port and Madeira, while also discussing the drinking habits of Company personnel and the development of India Pale Ale for the colonial environment.
This is where alcohol and empire become inseparable.
The Company was not merely transporting goods.
It was constructing commercial networks and political power.
Alcohol travelled through those networks.
And the preferences of colonial officials, soldiers and merchants helped create demand.
This is why the book's colonial chapters deserve attention even from readers who think they have no particular interest in drinking history.
They are not simply chapters about gin, beer and whisky.
They are chapters about how empires normalise consumption.
The drink becomes familiar.
The familiar becomes desirable.
The desirable becomes profitable.
And the profitable becomes institutionalised.
You can almost watch the machinery turning.
What does gin and tonic have to do with empire?
Quite a lot.
The familiar gin and tonic carries an unexpectedly complicated history involving malaria, quinine and British colonial administration.
Mulchandani's published excerpt explains how quinine, derived from cinchona bark, was used against malaria and how British soldiers added lime, sugar and water to make the bitter quinine more palatable. Gin subsequently became associated with tonic water in colonial India.
The story is compelling because it demonstrates how medicine and pleasure can become entangled.
The drink has a medical origin story.
Then a military story.
Then an imperial story.
Then a social story.
Eventually it becomes a fashionable cocktail.
There is something almost absurd about the journey.
A bitter medicinal compound intended to combat malaria ends up helping produce one of the world's most recognisable drinks.
History occasionally writes better jokes than novelists.
The famous Winston Churchill quotation about gin and tonic appears in the published excerpt, but Mulchandani herself notes that the attribution is uncertain.
That qualification is important.
A good book review should not repeat attractive historical anecdotes simply because they are attractive.
And a good history should encourage readers to ask exactly that question.
How do we know this is true?
That question will remain important throughout this review.
What if the history of India could be read through a glass? In Toddy to Tequila, Sandhya Mulchandani turns alcohol into an unexpected historical guide, moving from Vedic rituals and indigenous brews to Mughal courts, colonial trade and modern distilleries. Her subject is never simply drinking. It is faith, pleasure, prohibition, commerce, class, power and the people caught between them.
Have you ever wondered how a drink becomes part of a country’s history?
You probably have not.
Most of us think about alcohol in much smaller terms. We think about what is being served at a wedding, what somebody orders after work, what our parents approve of, what a doctor warns against, or what a government decides to tax. We rarely look at a glass and wonder what happened centuries before that liquid reached it.
Sandhya Mulchandani wants you to make that connection.
Her book, Toddy to Tequila: The Story of Alcohol in India, published by Juggernaut in January 2026, takes something familiar and gives it an unexpectedly long memory. The book moves through Vedic references to Soma and surā, mythology, medicine, royal courts, indigenous brewing traditions, European trade, British colonial rule, prohibition, cinema and the contemporary alcohol market. The official description presents alcohol not merely as a beverage but as a ritual, taboo, temptation, source of revenue and instrument of power.
That broad canvas is what makes the book appealing, but it also creates its central challenge. India has never had one drinking culture, so a history of alcohol in India cannot be reduced to a neat sequence of drinks. The subject is regional, religious, social and economic, and the meaning attached to alcohol has changed repeatedly according to who was drinking, who was watching and who was making the rules.
Mulchandani understands that complexity well enough to make the journey worthwhile.
Her greatest achievement is not that she tells you Indians drank alcohol in ancient times, during the Mughal period or under British rule. That would hardly be a revelation. Her achievement is that she places drinking inside the larger story of how Indian society has understood pleasure, discipline, commerce, status, spirituality and authority.
That is why the book's central proposition is so effective: India's history of alcohol is ultimately a history of India itself.
Once you accept that premise, the subject becomes much larger than the bottle.
Who is Sandhya Mulchandani, and what does her earlier work bring to this book?
Sandhya Mulchandani is an author and researcher whose interests have frequently taken her towards subjects that sit at the intersection of mythology, desire, literature and Indian cultural history. Her published work includes For the Love of God, The Indian Man, Love and Lust, The Five Arrows of Kama and Kama Sutra for Women. She has also produced a modern translation of Muddupalani's Radhika Santawanam, and her work has appeared in documentaries. Juggernaut notes her continuing interest in Hindu philosophy, mythology and music.
That background helps explain the book's instinct to treat alcohol as a cultural subject rather than simply an economic one.
She is interested in the stories that gather around a substance. A drink can acquire a divine association, a moral reputation, a medicinal purpose, a social function or a political meaning. Those associations are often more revealing than the drink itself.
The result is a book that asks you to move between mythology and history without assuming that one cancels the other.
This is particularly useful when the discussion reaches figures such as Varuni, associated in Hindu tradition with wine and intoxication. The appearance of a goddess connected with divine liquor immediately complicates any simple assumption that Indian culture has always regarded alcohol as either sacred or sinful. The historical record contains competing attitudes, and Mulchandani uses those contradictions to build a more textured account.
The book therefore arrives at an interesting moment in Mulchandani's career. Her earlier writing has often examined the intimate and symbolic dimensions of Indian culture, while Toddy to Tequila expands that curiosity into a broad social history.
The subject may be alcohol, but the questions are recognisably her own: what do people desire, what do they fear, what do they celebrate, and who gets to decide whether a private pleasure is socially acceptable?
How does the book move from Soma and surā to modern drinking culture?
One of the most useful features of Toddy to Tequila is its broadly linear structure.
That may sound like a small organisational choice, but it makes a large subject easier to follow. You begin with early traditions surrounding Soma and surā, move through mythology and changing social attitudes, encounter royal and imperial drinking cultures, then reach European trade, colonial rule and the modern Indian alcohol industry.
A reader who knows very little about the history of alcohol can therefore follow the chronological movement without constantly having to reconstruct where an episode belongs.
An independent review of the book also singled out this structure, noting that the chapters present different aspects of alcohol while maintaining a progression from Soma and surā towards contemporary blends. The same review highlighted the book's discussion of Varuni, references to drinking during the Mughal period and the time of Alexander, and its final treatment of alcohol in Indian cinema and the growing Indian market.
That structure also gives the book a subtle narrative advantage.
You begin with something that feels distant and almost mythological. As the chapters progress, the subject becomes increasingly familiar. Drinks, brands, commercial systems, colonial institutions, cinema and modern consumer culture begin to resemble the world you recognise.
The effect is that history gradually comes closer to the reader.
By the time the book reaches contemporary drinking culture, you are no longer looking at alcohol as an isolated historical curiosity. You have watched its meanings change over centuries.
That is a much more satisfying journey than a simple list of beverages.
What do Soma, surā and Varuni reveal about India's early relationship with intoxication?
The ancient sections are essential because they immediately challenge one of the easiest misconceptions about Indian drinking history.
Alcohol did not arrive in India with the Portuguese, the British or the modern liquor industry.
The history is far older and considerably more complicated.
James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions, published by Oxford University Press, is an important scholarly companion because it examines alcoholic drinks and drinking practices in premodern India, including their connections with religion, medicine, ritual and social life. His work reinforces the point that Indian attitudes towards intoxicants cannot be reduced to a single cultural position.
Mulchandani's use of mythology makes this history accessible to readers who might otherwise find ancient textual traditions intimidating.
Varuni is a particularly effective example because the very existence of a goddess associated with wine and intoxication complicates the familiar modern assumption that Indian tradition has always treated alcohol as morally suspect.
Yet the presence of divine or ritual drinking does not mean that ancient Indian society was uniformly permissive. The more interesting story lies in the coexistence of acceptance and restraint.
Some traditions valued intoxication in particular settings.
Others praised abstinence.
Certain beverages had ritual or medicinal associations.
Social attitudes varied according to community and circumstance.
The result is not a clean moral story in which India once celebrated drinking and later rejected it. It is a long argument between competing ideas of pleasure, discipline and social order.
That argument continues into the present.
Why do the book's historical quotations add so much to the narrative?
Mulchandani frequently brings historical voices into the discussion rather than asking the reader to rely entirely on her interpretation.
That technique gives the book a useful sense of immediacy.
A statement about drinking customs can remain abstract when it is presented only as a historian's conclusion. A quotation from a period source can make the same point feel inhabited by actual people.
The independent review of Toddy to Tequila specifically praised the extracts from references because they allow readers to encounter the language of the period being discussed rather than receiving only a modern paraphrase.
This is one of the places where Mulchandani's literary instincts serve the history well.
She understands that readers remember people and stories more easily than they remember an uninterrupted sequence of dates.
The book's use of historical voices also creates a useful tension. Readers can see how people described drinking in their own time, while Mulchandani provides the context required to understand what those descriptions meant.
That method is particularly effective in a subject where modern assumptions can easily distort the past.
A modern reader may see a particular drink as a symbol of leisure.
A historical source may reveal that the same drink was associated with medicine, ritual, status or military life.
The gap between those meanings is where the history becomes interesting.
How did Mughal courts and foreign travellers describe drinking in India?
The Mughal sections offer another opportunity to resist easy stereotypes.
Royal drinking cultures were not simply about excess. Alcohol could signal hospitality, status, courtly refinement, masculinity, sociability and access to power. The book's historical references to Mughal drinking customs and to accounts associated with Alexander broaden the story beyond the assumption that intoxication belonged only to marginal or underground spaces.
This is one of the recurring strengths of Mulchandani's approach. She keeps moving alcohol away from the narrow category of “vice” and asks what it represented in different historical settings.
A drink consumed by a king does not have the same social meaning as a drink consumed by a labourer.
A beverage offered at court operates differently from one sold in a village.
A foreign traveller describing Indian drinking practices brings another perspective, complete with the prejudices and assumptions of the traveller's own culture.
The reader therefore has to resist the temptation to treat every historical account as neutral evidence.
That is an important lesson for popular history.
Sources do not simply tell you what happened. They also tell you who was looking, what that person considered unusual and what they expected their readers to find interesting.
What does colonial trade reveal about changing Indian drinking habits?
The colonial chapters are among the most naturally readable sections because they connect alcohol to ships, trade routes, military life and commercial ambition.
An excerpt from the book published by Scroll focuses on Madeira, Portuguese trade, cashew and feni before moving into the East India Company's role in importing and trading alcoholic beverages. It also discusses the emergence of India Pale Ale and the colonial popularity of gin.
The Madeira episode is especially revealing.
According to the published excerpt, imports grew from 100 pipes to 6,400 pipes by the end of the seventeenth century, and Madeira accounted for 40 per cent of liquor sales in Madras in Mulchandani's account.
Those figures transform what could otherwise sound like a vague statement about European influence.
Trade is not an idea. Trade is measurable.
It requires ships, contracts, merchants, customers, storage, taxation and distribution.
Alcohol travelled through those same networks, and the preferences of colonial communities helped create commercial demand.
The book is at its strongest when it allows you to see that machinery without losing sight of the human beings inside it.
A bottle of Madeira can therefore tell a story about Portugal, Madras, maritime trade and changing consumer tastes all at once.
That is an impressive amount of history for something that can sit quietly on a table.
Did colonialism introduce alcohol to India, or did it change the way alcohol circulated?
This is where the review needs to be precise.
It would be historically misleading to suggest that colonial powers introduced alcohol to a previously abstinent India. The ancient and medieval record makes that impossible to sustain.
What colonialism did was more complicated.
European powers entered existing societies with their own beverages, commercial systems and drinking practices. They created new markets, altered patterns of production and distribution, encouraged particular forms of consumption, and tied alcohol more closely to taxation, military administration and imperial commerce.
Mulchandani's account of Madeira, feni, the East India Company, India Pale Ale and gin and tonic works best when understood through that lens.
The important story is therefore not “Europe taught India to drink”.
The important story is that colonial power changed the commercial and institutional environment in which different kinds of alcohol circulated and acquired status.
That is a subtler argument, and a more convincing one.
It also makes the book relevant to readers interested in the history of globalisation.
Before globalisation became a fashionable business word, goods were already crossing oceans, changing local tastes and creating new commercial relationships.
Alcohol simply happens to provide a particularly vivid way of watching the process.
What does gin and tonic reveal about medicine and empire?
Few drinks offer a better example of historical entanglement than gin and tonic.
Mulchandani connects gin, quinine, malaria and British colonial life in India. The published excerpt describes how quinine's bitterness led British soldiers to combine it with lime, sugar and water, creating the basis for tonic water as it became associated with gin.
The story becomes even more interesting when read alongside Lucile Brockway's scholarship on cinchona and colonial expansion, which Mulchandani cites in the excerpt.
Medicine, military survival and imperial administration became intertwined.
The drink that later acquired a glamorous reputation had a far less glamorous background.
It was connected to disease.
It was connected to colonial anxiety.
It was connected to the practical problem of making medicine palatable.
And eventually it became part of the social culture of the Raj.
That journey captures one of the book's larger ideas particularly well: the meaning of a drink can change even when the liquid itself does not.
The reader who encounters gin and tonic on a modern menu may see sophistication.
The historian can see quinine.
The colonial administrator could see protection against malaria.
The soldier could see survival.
The bartender sees a familiar order.
All of those readings can coexist.
Where does Toddy to Tequila become more than a history of beverages?
It becomes more ambitious whenever it asks who gets to define respectable drinking.
This is where questions of class and gender enter the story.
The publisher describes the book's cast as including gods and ascetics, kings and soldiers, women distillers and reformers.
That description is important because histories of alcohol can easily become histories of powerful men drinking expensive things.
Mulchandani's wider framing attempts to correct that imbalance by paying attention to producers, women and reformers alongside rulers and consumers.
The distinction between drinking and producing is particularly significant.
Someone who drinks a spirit at a colonial club experiences alcohol very differently from someone whose livelihood depends on making or selling it.
Someone who consumes alcohol as a symbol of status has a different relationship with it from someone who depends on seasonal fermentation for income.
Once those differences enter the story, “Indian drinking culture” stops sounding like a single category.
It becomes a collection of communities, occupations, rituals, prejudices and economic relationships.
That is one of the book's most valuable contributions.
Where does the book fall short?
The ambition that makes Toddy to Tequila enjoyable also creates its limitations.
India's alcohol history is too large for any single volume to give equal attention to every region, community and beverage. A chronological overview necessarily compresses some stories while allowing others more room.
Vikram Doctor identified one concrete omission in The Times of India: Goan urrak does not receive attention in the book, despite being an important seasonal spirit made from cashew fruit. Doctor contrasts this omission with Biula A Cruz e Pereira's One for the Road, a detailed study of feni in Goan life.
That criticism is useful because it points to a broader issue.
When a book promises a history of alcohol in India, readers naturally begin looking for their own regions and traditions.
Someone from Goa may ask where urrak is.
Someone from another region may wonder why a particular local brew receives limited attention.
Someone familiar with tribal brewing traditions may want more space devoted to the communities that developed them.
The book cannot possibly satisfy every such demand within 256 pages, but that limitation should be acknowledged rather than hidden beneath praise.
There is another challenge as well. The further back a historical narrative travels, the more carefully the reader has to distinguish textual evidence from evidence about ordinary life.
Ancient literature can tell us that a beverage existed or that a certain attitude was expressed, but it does not automatically tell us how widespread that practice was among every social group.
This is where scholarly works such as McHugh's An Unholy Brew provide a useful companion because they confront the methodological problems involved in reconstructing premodern drinking cultures.
For a general reader, however, Mulchandani's accessibility may be precisely the reason to begin with her book.
You can start with the story and then move towards the scholarship.
That is not a weakness.
It is often how curiosity begins.
How does alcohol become a cultural artefact?
One of the pleasures of reading Toddy to Tequila is that you gradually stop thinking about alcohol as something that belongs behind a bar counter. Mulchandani asks you to look at it as a cultural artefact, something that has travelled through religion, medicine, literature, trade, politics and ordinary social life. The drink changes, the vessel changes and the people holding the vessel change, but the questions surrounding intoxication remain remarkably familiar. Who is allowed to drink? When is drinking sacred? When does pleasure become excess? Who gets to decide?
Those questions take the story back to ancient India, where alcohol was hardly an invisible presence. Soma and Sura occupy very different places in the old textual imagination, yet both show how closely intoxicating substances could be connected with ideas of ritual, power and human desire. Soma is associated with Vedic ritual and divine energy, while Sura appears as an intoxicating drink with a more complicated social and moral reputation. Once you begin looking for these references, the old texts seem less distant from modern life than you might expect.
You can almost imagine yourself sitting beside a Vedic fire, watching the ritual unfold and wondering what exactly is being poured, consumed and invoked. The answer is not simply a recipe. A drink can carry an entire belief system with it. Soma, in particular, becomes part of a world in which intoxication, inspiration and divine power overlap. Indra is associated with Soma and heroic strength, while Agni occupies the centre of Vedic ritual as the fire that carries offerings towards the gods. Alcoholic drinks therefore enter a symbolic universe in which consumption can be connected with sacrifice, vitality and communion with the divine.
The idea becomes even more intriguing when the drink itself acquires a personality. Varuni, associated with wine and intoxicating liquor, gives alcohol a feminine divine presence within Hindu cosmology. Suddenly, what looks from a modern perspective like an everyday substance becomes part of a much larger imaginative landscape. You are no longer reading only about what ancient Indians drank. You are reading about what they believed drinking could mean.
That is one of the strongest aspects of Mulchandani's approach. She does not treat ancient references to alcohol as amusing curiosities that can be collected for a modern reader's entertainment. Instead, she uses them to show how the meaning of drinking depended upon context. A substance could have ritual value in one setting, medicinal value in another and dangerous consequences somewhere else. The same broad human appetite could be interpreted through religion, ethics or medicine depending upon who was doing the interpreting.
The Buddhist tradition adds another layer to this complicated picture. Where intoxicants could be connected with ritual and divine stories in other traditions, Buddhist teachings place much greater emphasis on the dangers of intoxication. Alcohol could interfere with mindfulness and judgement, making it difficult to maintain the clarity expected from a disciplined life. The contrast is revealing because it reminds you that there was never one Indian attitude towards alcohol. There were arguments, disagreements and competing ideas about pleasure, self control and responsibility.
Ayurvedic traditions complicate the picture further. Classical Indian medicine could recognise alcohol as something with medicinal uses while also acknowledging its risks. That dual role feels surprisingly contemporary. We are accustomed to thinking about substances in categories such as medicine, pleasure and danger, as though those categories have always been neatly separated. The older traditions suggest something messier and more interesting. A substance could heal under one set of conditions and harm under another, with dosage, circumstance and the condition of the person consuming it all influencing the outcome.
As you move through these accounts, the book quietly dismantles the lazy assumption that India has either always been a country of abstainers or has always celebrated drinking. Neither description survives close inspection. The evidence points instead to a culture that has spent centuries negotiating with alcohol. Religious texts praised it in some contexts and warned against it in others. Medical traditions considered its practical uses while recognising excess. Later moral and legal texts increasingly became concerned with the social consequences of drinking.
This is also why the book's larger argument reaches beyond alcohol. If you have ever enjoyed a book because it used one apparently ordinary subject to open a much larger conversation about human behaviour, you will recognise the appeal here. I found a similar pleasure while writing my [Did You Ever Love Me? book review], where an apparently intimate subject opened into questions about emotion, memory and the stories we tell ourselves. In Toddy to Tequila, the doorway happens to be a glass, a cup, a fermented drink or a spirit, but the room beyond it is enormous.
The historical journey becomes particularly revealing once colonial rule enters the picture. The British did not simply introduce new drinks into India. Colonial administration altered the framework around alcohol by connecting drinking with taxation, licensing, trade, legality and surveillance. Alcohol became something the state could regulate and profit from, while ideas about respectable and disreputable drinking became increasingly entangled with colonial attitudes towards Indian society.
This change is crucial because it shifts the story from intoxication to power. Once governments can tax alcohol, license its sale and punish its production, drinking stops being only a private or religious matter. It becomes an administrative question. Who may manufacture it? Who may sell it? Which drinks are legal? Which communities are targeted? How much revenue can the state collect? The bottle now has a bureaucratic life as well as a social one.
Mulchandani's history is strongest when these worlds overlap. A toddy seller, a priest, a physician, a soldier, a colonial official and a modern consumer may appear to have very little in common, yet alcohol places them within the same long historical conversation. Each person encounters it through a different set of expectations. One sees ritual, another medicine, another livelihood, another temptation, another revenue and another pleasure.
That is why the book's central claim, that India's history of alcohol is ultimately a history of India itself, becomes more convincing as you read. Alcohol provides an unusual route into questions of faith, class, gender, commerce, empire and authority. You begin with a drink and end up thinking about the society that decides what the drink means.
The book does not ask you to applaud drinking, condemn it or adopt a particular moral position. Its greater strength lies in allowing the contradictions to remain visible. India has worshipped alcohol, restricted it, traded it, taxed it, celebrated it and feared it. Those contradictions are not a flaw in the historical record. They are part of the record.
And perhaps that is what surprised me most while reading these early chapters. I expected a history of beverages. I found a history of ideas, with alcohol moving from the altar to the medicine cabinet, from the royal court to the tavern and eventually into the machinery of the modern state. Once you see that movement, it becomes difficult to look at a drink in quite the same uncomplicated way again.
How did colonial rule change India's relationship with alcohol?
If ancient India gives alcohol a religious and medicinal vocabulary, the colonial period gives it a bureaucratic one. This is where Toddy to Tequila becomes more than a history of drinks and starts looking like a history of administration, commerce and power. The British did not simply arrive with their own preferences and add a few new bottles to an existing cupboard. Colonial rule changed the economic and legal environment in which alcohol was produced, sold and consumed.
That change becomes easier to understand when you remember how closely alcohol was tied to revenue. A government that could regulate production and sale could also tax it, and colonial authorities soon recognised the financial possibilities. What might once have been made locally, sold within a community or consumed as part of a customary practice could now become part of a formal system of licences, duties and regulated trade.
For the reader, this is one of the book's most revealing shifts. You move from asking what people drank to asking who controlled the drink. That is a very different question, and it takes you straight into the politics of empire.
Toddy provides a particularly interesting example because it was already deeply rooted in local drinking cultures. It came from trees, local knowledge and established practices of fermentation. Yet under colonial administration, the toddy shop could become part of a regulated commercial network. The drink itself had not suddenly become foreign, but the rules surrounding it had changed.
The historical image of a toddy shop in Madras, reproduced in connection with the book's colonial history, captures something that a list of laws cannot quite convey. You can imagine the shop as a working social space rather than an abstract unit of government revenue. People entered, drank, talked and went about their lives, while somewhere beyond that everyday scene stood an expanding colonial apparatus interested in licensing, taxation and control.
The story becomes even more interesting when imported alcohol enters the picture. Colonial trade brought European drinking preferences into closer contact with Indian markets, and the flow was not one way. Ships carried drinks into India, but India also became part of a wider commercial world in which ingredients, techniques and tastes travelled between continents.
Madeira is a striking example discussed in the historical material surrounding the book. Large quantities of the fortified Portuguese wine were imported into Madras, where it became part of the drinking culture of the colonial establishment. The scale of the trade tells you something important. Alcohol was no longer simply a local substance with local meanings. It had become part of an international commercial system connecting producers, merchants, ships, soldiers, administrators and consumers.
The same story can be told through feni. Cashew cultivation in Goa became associated with a spirit that developed its own regional identity, while Portuguese influence altered the landscape of distillation and consumption. What makes this fascinating is the way local practice and foreign intervention become impossible to separate neatly. Colonial history was not simply a matter of Europeans bringing everything with them. Indian ingredients, skills and drinking traditions entered new networks and acquired new economic possibilities.
Then comes beer, and with it one of those historical details that makes you pause over the page. India became closely associated with India Pale Ale, the strong, highly hopped beer developed for the long journey from Britain to its colonial destinations. Beer had to survive the voyage, and the conditions of empire helped shape what eventually became a recognisable style.
There is something almost comic about this if you look at it from the distance of the twenty first century. A modern beer style that can now appear perfectly ordinary was once shaped by the practical demands of a colonial shipping route. A drink's character could be influenced by distance, climate, storage and empire before it ever reached the glass.
Gin and tonic take the colonial story into even stranger territory. Tonic water containing quinine became associated with the prevention of malaria, while gin helped make the bitter medicinal mixture more palatable to British residents in India. The familiar combination therefore acquired a practical association with colonial life, disease and the tropical environment.
You may know the drink as a fashionable bar order today. The colonial history makes it harder to see it merely as one. Behind that glass is a story involving medicine, military life, climate, empire and the search for ways to make an unpleasant substance easier to swallow.
This is one of the pleasures of Mulchandani's method. She repeatedly takes something familiar and moves it backwards through time until its apparent simplicity disappears. A drink that seems obvious in the present turns out to have a complicated ancestry.
Colonialism also changed the moral vocabulary around drinking. Regulation was never only about money. It was also about deciding which forms of behaviour were acceptable, which communities were considered troublesome and which kinds of drinking required supervision. Once alcohol entered official systems of licensing and taxation, the state gained a new role in defining respectable consumption.
That tension continued long after colonial rule ended. Modern India inherited a patchwork of alcohol laws, state controls and different regional attitudes towards drinking. Some states developed prohibition policies, some permitted alcohol under strict regulation and others relied heavily on alcohol revenue. The relationship between moral reform and government income therefore remained complicated.
You can see why alcohol becomes such a useful subject for studying Indian politics. Few everyday commodities sit so comfortably between personal choice and public policy. Governments may warn people about the social and health consequences of drinking while simultaneously depending upon excise revenue from alcohol sales. Citizens may regard drinking as a private matter, while the state treats it as an economic and regulatory concern.
This contradiction gives the later chapters of Toddy to Tequila much of their energy. The book is not interested in giving you a tidy verdict. It shows you the competing forces and lets you recognise the uncomfortable overlap for yourself.
There is also a broader cultural transformation taking place. Imported spirits, European styles of drinking and colonial social spaces gradually became part of India's changing urban culture, while indigenous drinks continued to survive alongside them. The result was not a simple replacement of Indian alcohol with British alcohol. It was a crowded and sometimes contradictory drinking landscape in which toddy, country liquor, regional spirits, imported wines, beer and distilled spirits could occupy very different social positions.
That patchwork is important because it pushes against the idea that there is one thing called Indian drinking culture. There never has been. A drink consumed in a village, a royal court, a military cantonment, a colonial club or a modern cocktail bar may have little in common beyond the presence of alcohol.
The book's title captures that enormous journey with pleasing simplicity. Toddy and tequila stand at opposite ends of an imagined spectrum. One evokes local fermentation, trees, regional traditions and old forms of consumption. The other evokes globalisation, modern branding, imported ingredients and the contemporary cocktail culture. Yet Mulchandani's history suggests that the distance between them is not as large as it first appears.
Both belong to the same long Indian story.
That is perhaps the point at which you begin to understand why the book refuses to glorify or condemn alcohol. If you approach it expecting an argument for drinking, you will not find one. If you expect a moral warning disguised as history, you will not find that either. Instead, you get a succession of encounters between alcohol and society, with each period imposing its own expectations upon the drink.
Ancient texts could treat intoxicants through ritual, medicine and morality. Medieval courts could associate drinking with pleasure, prestige and political life. Colonial authorities could turn alcohol into a source of revenue and an object of regulation. Modern governments could inherit those tensions while adding public health, prohibition and consumer culture to the conversation.
The drink changes, but the argument continues.
And that is why this book is more interesting than its subject might initially suggest. You may pick it up expecting stories about what people drank. Before long, you find yourself thinking about who had power over those drinks, who profited from them, who was permitted to consume them and who was judged for doing so.
A glass, in Mulchandani's hands, becomes a surprisingly useful historical document.
Who are the protagonists in a history of alcohol?
One of the more interesting things about Toddy to Tequila is that it does not have a conventional protagonist. There is no fictional hero whose fortunes you follow from the first chapter to the last. Instead, the book gives you a changing cast of historical characters, communities and institutions, all connected by the same deceptively simple subject.
The gods come first, followed by kings, soldiers, physicians, traders, distillers, reformers, colonial officials and ordinary drinkers. Women who made or sold alcoholic drinks enter the story too, which is important because histories of alcohol can easily become histories of men drinking in public while the people who produced the drink remain somewhere in the background.
Here, the bottle, cup or earthen pot becomes a way of bringing those people into the same conversation.
You encounter rulers who could use drinking as part of courtly culture, soldiers for whom alcohol could become part of military life, merchants who saw opportunity in changing tastes and governments that discovered how profitable a regulated drink could be. You also encounter people whose relationship with alcohol was defined by abstinence, reform or anxiety about its social consequences.
This makes the book's cast feel unusually broad. The history belongs neither to the drinker nor to the abstainer alone.
The Mughal period adds another fascinating layer because alcohol could exist alongside elaborate court culture, religious restrictions and the practical realities of political life. The imperial court was a place where food, fragrance, clothing, poetry and drinking could all become expressions of status. A goblet was not merely a vessel. In the right setting, it could become part of a performance of wealth and refinement.
That does not mean everyone in the period shared the same attitude. Religious and moral objections remained significant, and the tension between pleasure and prohibition was never absent. The courtly world could celebrate sophistication while religious traditions questioned intoxication. The resulting contradiction is precisely the sort of thing that makes cultural history worth reading.
You begin to see that the question is not simply whether people drank. The more revealing question is what drinking signified.
For a ruler, it could suggest abundance and power. For a soldier, it could provide companionship or escape. For a merchant, it could represent a valuable commodity. For a physician, it could have medicinal applications. For a reformer, it could become evidence of social decline. For a colonial administrator, it could become a taxable source of revenue. For a modern consumer, it may simply be a drink ordered after work.
The substance may be chemically altered by fermentation or distillation, but the social meaning surrounding it changes constantly.
That is why the idea that alcohol books are rarely only about alcohol feels particularly apt here. Once you start following the drink, you inevitably follow the people around it. You follow the farmer growing the crop, the woman or man fermenting it, the trader transporting it, the government taxing it, the customer buying it and the community deciding whether the practice is respectable.
The journey becomes even more revealing when you look at gender.
Alcohol production in South Asia has often depended upon forms of local knowledge that did not belong exclusively to the men who later wrote histories of drinking. Fermentation, toddy collection and other forms of beverage production could be part of household and community economies. Women distillers and sellers therefore deserve a place in the story, particularly because their labour complicates the familiar image of alcohol as a male preserve.
This is one reason I prefer thinking of the historical figures in the book as its protagonists. They are not there merely to decorate a chronology. Their lives and choices show how alcohol could create opportunity for some people while exposing others to stigma, regulation or exploitation.
The same applies to communities whose traditional drinks survived despite the arrival of imported spirits. A local drink carries knowledge about crops, climate, fermentation and custom. When such a drink disappears, what disappears with it is not merely a beverage. A small piece of local history goes with it.
You can therefore read the book as a kind of social biography of alcohol, although the phrase sounds more grand than the experience of reading it. The personality of the subject changes depending upon who is holding the glass.
There is also something appealing about the book's refusal to make everyone fit neatly into a moral category. Historical figures do not arrive labelled as heroes or villains. A ruler who drank could also be a patron of art and learning. A reformer who opposed alcohol could be responding to genuine social suffering while also participating in a wider moral movement. A colonial administrator could be enforcing an unpopular tax while operating within an economic system that made such revenue attractive to the state.
People are complicated. Historical systems are complicated too.
This is where the book's storytelling has an advantage over a purely economic history. Numbers can tell you how much alcohol was imported or taxed, but individual lives tell you what those figures meant on the ground.
The colonial liquor trade, for example, becomes easier to understand when you imagine the people caught at different points in the chain. A merchant sees an expanding market. A government sees excise revenue. A drinker sees a new product. A local producer may see competition. A reformer sees a social problem. None of them is necessarily looking at the same thing.
They are all looking at alcohol, but they are seeing different histories.
That is also why the book's use of quotations and extracts from historical sources is valuable. When an old text speaks in its own voice, the distance between the present reader and the historical subject becomes slightly smaller. You are not being given only a modern interpretation of an ancient attitude. You get a glimpse of how people themselves described drinking, pleasure, excess or restraint.
The effect is particularly useful in a book covering such a large period because the danger of a sweeping history is always simplification. The bigger the canvas, the easier it is to turn complicated societies into a few convenient labels. References and quotations help resist that tendency.
They remind you that India has never possessed one uniform drinking culture.
There are many Indias in this story.
There is the India of Vedic ritual and the India of Buddhist restraint. There is the India of Ayurvedic medicine and the India of moral anxiety. There is the India of royal courts and village distillers, colonial clubs and toddy shops, prohibition campaigns and modern cocktail bars. There is the India of people who drink socially and people who avoid alcohol altogether.
Put them together and you get something far closer to the country itself than you would get from a simple account of famous beverages.
This is also where the book's title becomes more meaningful. Toddy to Tequila sounds playful, even slightly mischievous, but the two drinks suggest an enormous cultural distance. Toddy points towards indigenous traditions and local production. Tequila belongs to a globalised world of international spirits, modern hospitality and cross cultural consumption.
Yet the people drinking them are not separated by such a clean historical line.
Modern India contains ancient practices alongside global trends. A regional drink can sit beside an imported spirit on the same menu. A traditional fermentation technique can inspire a contemporary cocktail. A drink once associated with a particular community can become a fashionable discovery among consumers looking for something new.
The journey from toddy to tequila is therefore not a straight road from old to new. It is a crowded road, with older traditions continuing, disappearing, returning and sometimes being reinvented.
That is one of the reasons I would recommend approaching this book with curiosity rather than with a fixed opinion about alcohol. You do not need to be a drinker to find the history fascinating, just as you do not need to know your spirits from your fermented beverages before beginning.
The book is ultimately interested in people.
Alcohol simply happens to be the substance that brings them together.
How does Mulchandani tell such a vast history without losing the reader?
A book that attempts to travel from Vedic ritual to contemporary Indian spirits has an obvious problem before you even reach the first chapter: there is an enormous amount of ground to cover. Thousands of years, several religious traditions, changing political systems, regional drinking practices, colonial trade, medical knowledge, taxation, prohibition and the modern alcohol industry could easily become an exhausting catalogue.
Mulchandani largely avoids that trap by treating alcohol as the thread that connects otherwise very different periods of Indian history. Instead of asking you to memorise a parade of dates, she keeps returning to the substance itself and asking what it meant to the people encountering it.
The structure is broadly chronological, which helps. You begin with ancient traditions and move through medieval India, the Mughal period and British rule before arriving at the contemporary world. For a subject this large, that straightforward movement is useful because you always have some sense of where you are in the historical journey.
It also gives the book a quiet sense of discovery. At the beginning, you may think you are reading about ancient beverages. A few chapters later, you are thinking about taxation. Then medicine appears. Then trade. Then colonial social life. Then prohibition. Then modern brands and changing consumer tastes.
The subject keeps expanding.
The best historical nonfiction often works this way. It takes one familiar object and makes you look at it from several angles until the object itself begins to seem unfamiliar. Here, a glass of alcohol can be religious, medicinal, political, commercial and social depending upon the period and the person holding it.
Mulchandani also makes use of a wide range of historical sources. The Vedas, Puranas, Dharmashastra traditions, Ayurvedic texts and later historical accounts all contribute to the larger picture. That range is one of the reasons the book feels more substantial than its subject might initially suggest.
While reading, I found myself repeatedly surprised by how deeply questions surrounding alcohol appear in Indian textual traditions. You may start with the assumption that drinking is mainly a modern social issue, particularly because so much contemporary discussion focuses on addiction, public health, prohibition and the alcohol industry. The older material complicates that assumption considerably.
Alcohol was already being discussed through questions of ritual, pleasure, medicine, morality and social behaviour.
The book's use of historical quotations is particularly helpful here. When a modern writer summarises an ancient or medieval attitude, there is always a risk that the past begins to sound suspiciously like the present. Direct extracts provide a little resistance to that. They let the historical material retain some of its own character.
That technique also helps with the more entertaining passages. Historical writing about alcohol naturally contains stories of excess, unusual customs, royal indulgence and curious drinking practices, but Mulchandani generally places those details within a wider context rather than presenting them simply as historical gossip.
This is important because alcohol is an unusually easy subject to sensationalise.
You could make an entire book out of outrageous drinking stories. Ancient gods drank. Kings drank. Soldiers drank. Europeans drank. Indians drank. Someone somewhere inevitably drank too much. The material is almost begging to be turned into a collection of amusing anecdotes.
That is not what makes Toddy to Tequila interesting.
The more valuable question is why these stories exist and what they tell you about the society around them.
The book's approach therefore works best when the historical anecdote becomes evidence rather than entertainment. A reference to a drink can tell you something about religious practice. A tax can tell you something about government. A prohibition law can reveal moral anxiety. A new imported spirit can tell you about trade and class. A modern cocktail can reveal changing consumer tastes.
The drink is the clue.
The society is the subject.
That broad approach also explains why the book can occasionally feel dense. There is a great deal of information packed into a relatively compact volume. If you come to it expecting a breezy collection of drinking stories, some sections may ask more patience from you. There are moments when the historical detail accumulates faster than the narrative momentum.
I do not regard that as a fatal weakness. In fact, it is partly the price of ambition. A book covering such a long period cannot give every era the space it deserves. Some readers will want more detail about particular drinks or regions, while others may prefer the wider historical sweep.
This is where your own interests will influence the experience.
If you are fascinated by ancient Indian texts, you may find yourself wishing the early chapters were longer. If colonial history is your interest, the sections on taxation, imported drinks and changing drinking practices may be the ones you remember. If you are interested in contemporary India, you may be most curious about the final movement towards cinema, modern brands and the expanding alcohol market.
The book cannot be equally detailed about everything, because no single volume could reasonably do that.
There is another useful narrative choice in the way the book moves between elite and everyday drinking. Alcohol appears in sacred texts and royal settings, but it also belongs to ordinary social and economic life. That movement prevents the history from becoming solely a story of emperors and famous men.
The humble toddy shop can tell you something that a palace cannot.
A local drink can reveal a relationship between agriculture, climate and community. A tavern can reveal patterns of work and leisure. A tax register can reveal the state's interest in consumption. A medical text can reveal changing ideas about the body. A cocktail menu can reveal a modern appetite for novelty.
Each source provides a different window.
The result is almost anthropological in its curiosity, although the book remains accessible rather than turning itself into an academic monograph. You are encouraged to notice not only what people consumed but how they talked about consumption.
Language is important because societies reveal their anxieties through words.
When drinking is described as sacred, it belongs to one moral universe. When it is described as medicine, it belongs to another. When it is described as vice, disorder or social danger, the emphasis has shifted again. When it becomes a luxury product or lifestyle choice, the vocabulary changes once more.
Alcohol remains present, but the story surrounding it keeps changing.
That is perhaps the most effective narrative device in the book. Instead of treating history as a series of isolated periods, Mulchandani lets the meaning of alcohol evolve as Indian society evolves.
This also makes the book surprisingly relevant to the present. The reader can recognise old arguments in new clothes. Questions about moderation, morality, regulation, social status and personal freedom have not disappeared. They have simply acquired new settings.
The modern cocktail bar may look very different from a historical tavern, yet both raise questions about who drinks, why they drink and what the surrounding society thinks about it.
The same is true of medicine. Historical references to alcoholic preparations in Ayurveda remind you that the boundary between beverage and medicinal substance has never been quite as clean as modern categories might suggest. Arishtams and asavas are an interesting example because alcohol can be produced naturally through fermentation and incorporated into traditional preparations.
The recent popularity of such Ayurvedic preparations during periods when people were seeking traditional remedies also shows how complicated the conversation can become. It would be too simplistic to place every alcohol containing preparation in the same category as recreational drinking. Their intended use, formulation and cultural setting are different.
That complexity suits the book.
Mulchandani does not need alcohol to be either hero or villain for the story to work. The history is interesting precisely because the same substance can acquire different meanings depending upon its context.
There is also a pleasing geographical breadth to the story. India is not treated as one uniform drinking culture, even though the enormous subject sometimes makes regional differences difficult to explore at length. Toddy, feni, country liquor, imported wines, beer, whisky and contemporary spirits belong to different histories, and their journeys are shaped by different communities and landscapes.
That variety is essential to the title itself. Toddy and tequila are not merely two drinks chosen because they sound good together. They suggest the distance between local traditions and a global spirits culture while also showing how those worlds can now meet.
By the end, you have travelled a long way from Soma.
The journey has taken you through gods and physicians, courts and soldiers, merchants and colonial officials, reformers and modern consumers. What began as a question about intoxication has become a study of changing ideas about society itself.
That is the book's central narrative achievement.
It gives you enough history to understand the subject without pretending that one volume can settle every question. It offers evidence without turning the reader into a student sitting for an examination. Most importantly, it leaves room for contradiction.
Alcohol can be sacred and dangerous.
It can be medicine and intoxicant.
It can be a source of pleasure and a source of suffering.
It can generate tax revenue while provoking moral campaigns against its consumption.
It can belong to an ancient local tradition and become part of a modern global industry.
The book works because it allows these apparently conflicting truths to sit beside one another.
You finish a chapter with one impression of alcohol and begin the next with another. Gradually, the simple object you thought you knew becomes a complicated historical character in its own right.
That is a good trick for any historian to pull off.
And in this case, it leaves you looking at the glass before you quite differently.
What does alcohol reveal about modern India?
By the time Toddy to Tequila reaches modern India, you have already travelled through rituals, medical texts, royal courts, colonial markets and systems of taxation. It would be easy to assume that the story should become simpler once you arrive in the present. Instead, the contradictions become more visible.
Modern India has inherited almost every argument that came before it. Alcohol can be a source of government revenue and a subject of prohibition. It can be associated with celebration and addiction, sophistication and social stigma, personal freedom and public regulation. It can sit comfortably on the shelves of an expensive urban bar while remaining deeply controversial in the political and social life of the country.
That contradiction is central to understanding the modern chapters.
Prohibition is perhaps the clearest example. India has never had a single national attitude towards alcohol. Different states have taken different approaches, and those policies have often reflected a mixture of political ideology, religious sentiment, social reform, public health concerns and economic calculation. A government can condemn excessive drinking while also relying on excise revenue generated by alcohol sales. That is not a small contradiction. It sits at the heart of the relationship between the state and the drinker.
Once you recognise that tension, alcohol becomes an unusually revealing political subject.
A bottle can be taxed.
A bottle can be banned.
A bottle can be licensed.
A bottle can be smuggled.
The object remains the same while its legal identity changes according to the place and the political climate.
This is one reason the modern story cannot be separated from questions of class. Drinking has never carried exactly the same social meaning for everyone. The expensive imported spirit consumed in an elite setting and the locally produced drink associated with poorer communities may contain alcohol, but society often judges the two very differently.
The difference can be seen in language as well as behaviour. Some forms of drinking are described as refined, fashionable or cosmopolitan. Others are described as crude, dangerous or socially disruptive. The drink itself may not explain the difference. Class, location and social status often do.
That is an important thread running through the book because it prevents the reader from treating alcohol as a purely personal choice. Consumption takes place inside a social world. People bring expectations about gender, respectability, wealth and community with them to the glass.
Gender adds another complication.
For much of recorded history, public drinking has often been associated with men, while women have occupied less visible positions as consumers even when they participated in production and trade. Modern urban India has changed some of those expectations, particularly among younger consumers and in metropolitan settings, but the old social judgements have not vanished.
A woman drinking in one setting may be viewed as independent and cosmopolitan, while the same behaviour in another setting may attract criticism. Men can face their own expectations, especially the cultural pressure to tolerate or even celebrate heavy drinking as a sign of masculinity.
Alcohol therefore becomes part of the performance of identity.
Who you are can influence what you drink, where you drink it, who you drink with and how other people interpret the act.
The arrival of modern consumer culture adds another layer. Alcohol is no longer only something produced locally or imported for a relatively small elite. It is now part of a sophisticated commercial landscape involving advertising, hospitality, branding, packaging and lifestyle.
The language surrounding spirits has changed accordingly.
A drink can be described through its ingredients, origin, ageing process, craftsmanship, food pairing or place in cocktail culture. Distilleries can present themselves as expressions of Indian identity while also drawing upon international techniques and global trends.
This is where the title Toddy to Tequila becomes particularly clever. The journey does not end with India abandoning its traditional drinks and embracing foreign ones. Instead, the contemporary industry increasingly plays with both sides of the equation.
Indian producers can take local ingredients and techniques and present them to a global audience. Regional drinks that were once regarded as ordinary can be rediscovered as heritage products. Whisky made in India can compete for international attention. Modern bartenders can take ingredients familiar from Indian kitchens and use them in contemporary cocktails.
Tradition and innovation no longer have to sit at opposite ends of the bar.
The story of Indian alcohol has therefore entered a period of reinvention.
This is also where the book's discussion of contemporary spirits becomes useful. The emergence of Indian brands with international ambitions suggests that the old colonial assumption that sophistication must arrive from elsewhere is gradually being challenged. Indian distillers are not simply copying foreign models. Increasingly, they are asking what an Indian spirit can taste like, how it can be made and how it can be presented to the world.
That shift has cultural significance beyond the drinks industry.
For generations, imported goods could carry a certain prestige precisely because they were imported. A modern Indian spirit winning recognition outside the country changes that equation. The bottle becomes a small statement about confidence, craftsmanship and changing ideas of what India can produce.
The story also reaches popular culture, particularly cinema.
Indian films have spent decades using alcohol as shorthand for particular emotions and personalities. The drunk hero, the glamorous party, the lonely drinker, the comic drunkard and the wealthy socialite have all appeared in different forms. Alcohol can represent heartbreak, rebellion, masculinity, despair, celebration or excess, depending upon the story being told.
Cinema therefore does something similar to the historical texts discussed earlier in the book. It tells you not only that people drink, but what society imagines drinking to mean.
A glass held by a character in a film can tell the audience something about that character before the character says a word.
That makes the inclusion of popular culture a logical part of the historical journey rather than an ornamental final chapter. The cultural meaning of alcohol does not disappear when people leave the pages of ancient texts. It simply moves into new forms of storytelling.
There is a pleasing continuity here.
The Vedas could connect intoxicating drinks with gods and ritual.
Courtly literature could connect drinking with pleasure and status.
Colonial writing could connect alcohol with race, class, administration and empire.
Modern cinema can connect it with romance, masculinity, wealth, loneliness and rebellion.
The medium changes, but people continue to use alcohol to tell stories about themselves.
That may be the most enduring theme in the entire book.
There is also a contemporary health conversation that cannot be ignored. Modern knowledge has made the risks of excessive alcohol consumption much more visible, while public campaigns, medical advice and social reform movements continue to influence attitudes towards drinking.
This creates another curious historical overlap. Ancient and medieval societies already had concerns about intoxication and loss of self control. Modern medicine gives those concerns a different vocabulary, but the basic human problem has not disappeared.
The present therefore does not replace the past.
It carries the past around with it.
Even the fashionable cocktail bar can contain traces of much older histories. Ingredients may have travelled across continents because of colonial trade. A spirit may have evolved from local fermentation practices. A medicinal ingredient may have become associated with a drink. A regional technique may be revived by a contemporary distiller.
You can order a drink in a modern Indian city without knowing any of this, of course. That is part of what makes the history so enjoyable. Everyday objects are often carrying stories that their users never notice.
One criticism that can reasonably be made of a sweeping history like this is that its breadth sometimes leaves you wanting more. A subject as geographically and culturally varied as India could support entire books on individual drinks, regions, communities or periods. Readers who become fascinated by a particular thread may find themselves wishing Mulchandani had paused longer before moving onwards.
That is a genuine limitation, but it is also difficult to avoid when the ambition is to tell the story from ancient India to the present.
There are other places where the book's broad canvas invites questions about what receives attention and what remains outside the frame. Vikram Doctor, writing about Goan urrak, has pointed out that this distinctive seasonal cashew spirit is not covered in Toddy to Tequila. That omission is worth noting precisely because the book's central argument is about the extraordinary variety of India's drinking traditions. A reader interested in regional spirits will inevitably notice the absences as well as the inclusions.
The omission does not invalidate the book. If anything, it reveals the difficulty of the project. Once you attempt to tell the history of alcohol across an entire country and thousands of years, every choice about what to include becomes significant.
You finish one story and immediately discover another waiting outside the frame.
That is perhaps the best kind of weakness for a historical book to have.
It leaves you curious.
And curiosity is one of the strongest feelings Toddy to Tequila creates. You may begin by knowing only the drinks familiar from your own life. By the end, you are likely to wonder about regional spirits, forgotten brewing traditions, old medical preparations and the history of your own state's alcohol laws.
The book changes the questions you ask.
Instead of asking, “What do Indians drink?” you begin asking, “Why do different Indians drink different things?”
Instead of asking whether India is a drinking country, you begin asking how religion, class, gender, politics, geography and economics have shaped the answer.
Instead of asking whether alcohol is good or bad, you begin asking why societies have spent so much time deciding when it is acceptable, who may consume it and under what conditions.
And they take us back to the book's central idea: alcohol is not standing outside Indian history, observing it from a safe distance. It has been travelling through that history alongside everyone else.
From Soma to modern whisky, from toddy shops to cocktail bars, from medicinal preparations to mass market spirits, the story keeps changing shape.
The glass is still there. The country around it has changed.
What does Toddy to Tequila do especially well?
The easiest compliment to give Toddy to Tequila is that it made me curious about something I thought I already understood.
That is harder to achieve than it sounds.
Most of us know alcohol through a handful of familiar associations. Perhaps you think of whisky at a family gathering, beer with friends, wine at a restaurant, a celebratory toast, a prohibition debate or the occasional warning from a doctor. We tend to encounter the subject in fragments. Mulchandani gathers those fragments and places them inside a much longer Indian story.
The result is a book that changes the scale of the subject.
Alcohol is no longer just something people consume. It becomes evidence of changing ideas about religion, medicine, morality, trade, class and government. Once you start seeing it that way, even a familiar bottle can feel like a historical object.
The research is one of the book's strongest qualities. Mulchandani draws on a wide range of textual and historical material, including the Vedas, Puranas, Dharmashastra traditions, Ayurveda and later accounts of Indian society. That gives the narrative a useful depth because the argument does not rest entirely upon modern commentary.
You can see the effort behind the book.
The historical references are not there simply to make the prose look scholarly. They help demonstrate how attitudes towards alcohol have changed and, just as importantly, how inconsistent those attitudes have always been.
One text may associate an intoxicating drink with ritual or divine power. Another may warn about its effects on judgement. A medical tradition may recognise a practical use while warning about excess. A government may restrict consumption while collecting revenue from it.
The contradictions are part of the evidence.
I also liked the book's refusal to take the easy moral route. A subject such as alcohol practically invites the writer to choose a camp. You can celebrate drinking as pleasure and sophistication, or you can focus entirely on addiction, social damage and public health. Both approaches have their place, but neither would have produced the historical picture Mulchandani is trying to construct.
Instead, she observes.
That allows the reader to form an opinion without being pushed towards one.
This was particularly refreshing because the history of alcohol is full of material that could easily become sensational. There are enough gods, kings, colonial officers, soldiers, taverns, scandals and unusual drinks to produce a much louder book. Mulchandani generally chooses context over spectacle.
That restraint strengthens the argument.
The book also benefits from its chronological structure. With such a vast subject, a completely thematic arrangement could have become confusing. The broad movement from ancient India through later periods, colonial rule and modern times gives you a historical map.
You know where you are going.
More importantly, you can see what has changed.
Ancient ritual becomes one point of comparison for later ideas about intoxication. Colonial taxation provides context for modern regulation. Traditional beverages sit alongside imported spirits. Older moral arguments reappear in modern debates in altered forms.
The book therefore encourages you to think about continuity as well as change.
Another strength is its geographical and cultural ambition. India is too large and diverse for a single drinking tradition, and the book's subject repeatedly demonstrates that. Toddy, feni, fermented beverages, imported wines, beer, whisky and newer spirits all belong to different histories.
That variety makes the title work.
Toddy to Tequila is a playful title, but there is a serious historical idea underneath it. Toddy suggests indigenous knowledge, local production and regional practice. Tequila suggests a modern world in which spirits cross borders, markets become global and Indian consumers encounter an extraordinary range of international products.
Yet the relationship between those two worlds is not simply one of replacement.
Old drinks survive.
New drinks arrive.
Some disappear.
Some return in fashionable new forms.
Others are absorbed into a wider Indian drinking culture.
That is a much more interesting story than a simple march from tradition to modernity.
The book is also at its best when it makes you reconsider familiar drinks. The history of gin and tonic is a good example. What is now a familiar combination of gin, tonic and perhaps a slice of lime has a colonial history involving quinine and malaria. The medicinal context does not tell the whole story of the drink, but it gives the familiar cocktail an unexpected historical dimension.
You may never look at the combination quite so casually again.
The same is true of beer, imported wines and regional spirits. Their presence in India is connected to trade, climate, technology, colonialism and changing tastes. The drink becomes a small record of movement between cultures.
That is one reason the book should appeal even to readers who are not especially interested in alcohol.
You do not have to care about spirits to care about history.
You only have to be curious about people.
And people are everywhere in this book.
Kings and soldiers, priests and physicians, traders and distillers, colonial administrators and reformers all encounter alcohol differently. The book's historical protagonists are therefore not heroes in the conventional literary sense. Their importance comes from what their relationship with alcohol reveals about their world.
This gives the book an unusual human dimension.
A tax policy tells you what a government wanted.
A drinking habit tells you something about how people actually lived.
The two together tell you much more.
The book also succeeds because it leaves you with questions. Good historical nonfiction does not have to make you feel that you have mastered the subject. Sometimes its greater achievement is making you realise how much you never knew.
I came away from the ancient sections particularly surprised by the depth of references to alcohol in Indian textual traditions. Before reading the book, it would have been easy to imagine the history of Indian drinking as a relatively small subject. The evidence presented here makes that assumption difficult to maintain.
Alcohol has been discussed through ritual, medicine, morality, law, commerce and social behaviour for centuries.
That is quite a story to hide inside a glass.
Where does Toddy to Tequila fall short?
The book's greatest strength is also its biggest challenge: ambition.
Trying to tell the story of alcohol across India and across such a long historical period inevitably means that some subjects receive less attention than a curious reader might want. Just as you become interested in one drink, region or period, the narrative often has to move onwards.
That can occasionally make the book feel dense.
There is a substantial amount of information packed into its 256 pages, and readers looking for a light, anecdotal history may find themselves needing more concentration than they expected. This is not a criticism of the research. It is a comment on the balance between breadth and depth.
You are being shown a very large landscape through a relatively compact book.
Naturally, some corners receive only a glance.
Regional omissions are another issue worth acknowledging. Vikram Doctor's discussion of Goan urrak provides a useful example. Urrak, a seasonal spirit made from cashew fruit, represents precisely the kind of regional drinking tradition that makes India's alcohol history so varied, yet it is not discussed in Toddy to Tequila.
For a book with such a sweeping geographical ambition, omissions like this are noticeable.
They do not undermine the central argument, but they remind you that no single history can contain every Indian drinking tradition. If anything, the omission may send a curious reader looking for more.
There is also a slight tension between the book's enormous historical canvas and the reader's desire to linger. Ancient religion, Ayurveda, Mughal culture, colonial trade, prohibition and modern spirits could each sustain a much longer study. The book has to keep moving because its purpose is to connect them.
That means some readers will inevitably find particular periods too brief.
I did too, at moments.
But I would rather have a book that leaves me wishing for another chapter than one that spends fifty pages explaining something I understood ten pages earlier.
The other limitation comes from the nature of historical evidence itself. Alcohol is an everyday substance, but the surviving records are not an even representation of everyday life. Religious texts, royal accounts, medical works, legal documents and colonial records preserve certain voices more readily than others.
That makes it difficult to reconstruct the drinking habits of ordinary people with the same confidence that we can discuss the practices of courts or institutions.
Mulchandani works with the evidence available to her, but the reader should remember that a history of alcohol is necessarily also a history of surviving records.
This is where the book invites further reading rather than pretending to be the final word.
If the ancient material fascinates you, James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions offers a much more specialised scholarly treatment of alcohol in premodern India. If you become fascinated by the history of Indian drinking itself, Magandeep Singh's The Indian Spirit provides another route into the subject.
In other words, one of Toddy to Tequila's weaknesses is also evidence that it has done its job.
What themes stay with you after reading the book?
The most interesting books about food and drink eventually stop being about consumption and start being about identity. Toddy to Tequila belongs in that category. Its subject may be alcohol, but the themes underneath it are much wider.
The first is power.
Who controls a drink often tells you something about who controls society. A priest can determine its ritual meaning. A ruler can incorporate it into court culture. A merchant can turn it into a commodity. A colonial government can tax it. A modern state can prohibit or regulate it. A corporation can turn it into a global brand.
The drink travels through all these systems without ever becoming politically neutral.
The second major theme is morality.
India's long relationship with alcohol is full of arguments about pleasure and restraint. Some traditions make space for intoxication in particular ritual or cultural contexts, while others regard intoxication as an obstacle to discipline and clear thought. Later reform movements add their own concerns about family life, poverty, public order and social welfare.
What makes the subject fascinating is that these arguments never settle permanently.
Every generation seems to reopen the discussion.
The third theme is class. Drinking has rarely meant the same thing across social boundaries. A premium whisky served in an expensive restaurant can carry an entirely different social meaning from locally produced alcohol consumed in a poorer community. The contrast tells you something about status, taste and the ways societies decide which forms of consumption are respectable.
Then there is gender, which deserves attention because the history of drinking is often told through male consumers. Looking beyond the obvious drinkers reveals producers, sellers and workers whose contribution can disappear from conventional accounts. Bringing women into this history makes the picture more complete and also raises questions about why some forms of labour become invisible once the finished product reaches the consumer.
Another theme is globalisation.
The journey from toddy to tequila is also a journey through trade. Ingredients, recipes, technologies and drinking habits have crossed borders for centuries. Colonialism accelerated some of those movements, while modern commerce has made them even more extensive.
Yet globalisation has not erased local identity.
Instead, it has created strange and fascinating combinations. A traditional Indian ingredient can find its way into a modern cocktail. A regional spirit can be rediscovered as a heritage product. An Indian whisky can compete in an international market. A drink that once belonged to a particular community can become fashionable among an entirely different group of consumers.
Tradition, in other words, is not always something that sits quietly in the past.
Sometimes it comes back wearing better packaging.
The theme I found most compelling, however, is contradiction.
India's relationship with alcohol cannot be reduced to either acceptance or rejection. It contains both. The country has produced intoxicating drinks for centuries while also producing powerful traditions of abstinence. Governments have restricted alcohol while benefiting from its taxation. Medicine has recognised some alcohol based preparations while moral traditions have warned about intoxication. Modern consumers can enjoy international spirits while rediscovering regional Indian drinks.
The contradictions do not make the history untidy.
They make it believable.
Human beings are contradictory creatures, and our relationship with alcohol is a particularly good example. We can celebrate with it, worry about it, make money from it, regulate it and condemn it, sometimes within the same society and sometimes within the same family.
That is why I would resist reading Toddy to Tequila as a book that tells you whether alcohol is good or bad.
It is asking a more interesting question.
What does our relationship with alcohol tell us about ourselves?
The answer changes depending on the century, the region, the social class and the person asking the question.
Which books should you read alongside Toddy to Tequila?
If Toddy to Tequila leaves you wanting to explore further, there are several rewarding directions you can take. These are not substitutes for Mulchandani's book. Each one approaches alcohol from a different angle.
An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions by James McHugh
If the ancient Indian material fascinates you most, this is the obvious companion. McHugh's scholarly study focuses on alcohol in premodern India and draws upon a remarkable range of religious, medical, literary and legal sources. It goes much deeper into the textual history of drinks, drinking practices, abstinence and attitudes towards intoxication.
The Indian Spirit: The Untold Story of Alcohol in India by Magandeep Singh
This is perhaps the closest companion in terms of subject. Singh traces the history of alcohol in India from ancient traditions through later developments and examines the country's relationship with different drinks. If Mulchandani leaves you wondering about the broader story of Indian drinking culture, this is a natural book to pick up next.
A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
Standage takes the idea of using beverages to understand civilisation and expands it to world history. Beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Coca Cola become routes into politics, religion, trade and social change. It makes an enjoyable companion because it demonstrates just how much history can be hidden inside something people drink every day.
Uncorking the Past by Patrick E. McGovern
McGovern approaches alcoholic beverages through archaeology, chemistry and ancient evidence. His work moves across cultures and periods, examining how fermented drinks developed and what they can reveal about early societies. It is particularly appealing if the scientific and archaeological side of beverage history interests you.
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland
Slingerland takes the conversation in a different direction, combining anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary thinking to ask why humans drink at all. It is less specifically about India, but it makes an excellent follow up if Mulchandani's larger question about the social role of alcohol has made you curious about the human impulse behind drinking.
Taken together, these books make an interesting little library. One takes you deeper into ancient India, another stays closer to India's drinking history, while the others widen the lens towards world history, archaeology and human behaviour.
That is perhaps the best way to approach Toddy to Tequila too. Read it as a doorway rather than a final destination.
Who will enjoy Toddy to Tequila?
You do not need to be someone who knows the difference between a single malt and a blended whisky to enjoy this book. You do not even need to drink alcohol.
What you need is some curiosity about how ordinary things acquire extraordinary histories.
If you enjoy Indian history, you will find plenty here to keep you turning pages. If religion and mythology interest you, the references to Soma, Sura and Varuni open an unexpected route into familiar traditions. If colonial history is your preference, the chapters on trade, taxation and imported drinking habits provide another reason to stay with it. Readers interested in medicine will find the Ayurvedic material intriguing, while anyone curious about modern Indian society will recognise many of the arguments around regulation, prohibition, class and changing lifestyles.
It is also a good choice for readers who enjoy books that take one apparently narrow subject and use it to tell a much larger story.
That approach has become one of my favourite ways of reading history. A book about salt can become a book about empire. A book about food can become a book about migration. A book about money can become a book about human ambition. Here, a book about alcohol becomes a book about India.
And that is the real appeal.
You start with a drink.
You end up thinking about civilisation.
The book would also suit a reader who prefers accessible historical nonfiction rather than heavily academic writing. There is serious research behind it, but the purpose is not to bury you under scholarly terminology. The broad chronology gives you a clear route through the subject, while the stories and historical references provide enough variety to keep the journey moving.
There are, however, moments when you will need patience. The information can become dense, particularly when several historical threads arrive close together. This is not the sort of book I would recommend if you are looking for a very light weekend read that requires no concentration.
But if you are willing to slow down occasionally, the rewards are considerable.
I would particularly recommend it to readers who have an uncomplicated idea of India's relationship with alcohol. Perhaps you grew up hearing that Indians traditionally avoided alcohol, or perhaps you have encountered the opposite stereotype that drinking has always been deeply embedded in Indian society. The book complicates both assumptions.
India has contained many attitudes towards alcohol.
That is a much more interesting answer.
I would also recommend it to readers interested in the intersection of religion and everyday life. The ancient material demonstrates how substances we now categorise as beverages could once occupy ritual, symbolic and medicinal roles that do not fit neatly into modern categories.
And if you enjoy tracing the unexpected origins of familiar things, keep this one nearby. The history of tonic water and gin, for example, shows how medicine, disease, empire and leisure could become entangled inside something that now seems perfectly ordinary.
In short, you do not have to love alcohol to love the history. You simply have to enjoy a good historical surprise.
Would I recommend Toddy to Tequila?
Yes, I would.
I would recommend it not because it celebrates alcohol, and certainly not because it tries to persuade anyone to drink. I would recommend it because it makes a familiar subject historically unfamiliar.
That is a valuable quality in nonfiction.
The book's biggest strength is its breadth. Mulchandani takes a subject that could easily have been reduced to a history of beverages and instead connects it with religion, medicine, commerce, colonialism, politics, class, gender and popular culture. The research gives the story substance, while the chronological structure prevents the enormous historical range from becoming completely overwhelming.
I also appreciate the book's neutrality. It does not spend its pages telling you what you should think about alcohol. It presents a complicated historical record and allows the reader to sit with the contradictions.
That approach feels particularly appropriate for this subject.
The main weakness is the same feature that makes the book ambitious. There is simply too much history to fit comfortably into a relatively compact volume. Some readers will want more attention to particular regions, drinks or periods. Others may occasionally find the accumulation of information dense.
I also think the absence of certain regional traditions, such as Goan urrak, is worth noticing. A book attempting such a broad account of Indian alcohol will inevitably leave some things outside its frame. That does not diminish its usefulness, but it does show how much more remains to be explored.
So I would give Toddy to Tequila 4 out of 5 stars.
The four stars are for the research, ambition, breadth and sheer ability to make me look at a familiar subject differently. The missing star belongs to the moments when the enormous amount of material makes the narrative feel slightly compressed and to the regional gaps that become more noticeable precisely because the book has made you curious about India's extraordinary diversity.
Would I read another book on the subject?
Absolutely.
Would I now look at a traditional Indian drink and wonder where its story began?
Almost certainly.
And that, for me, is a successful history book.
You close it with more questions than you had when you opened it.
Toddy to Tequila ultimately makes a persuasive case for its most memorable idea: “India’s history of alcohol is ultimately a history of India itself.”
That sentence stays with you because, after travelling from ancient ritual to modern spirits, it no longer sounds like a clever tagline. It feels earned.
Alcohol has been worshipped and restricted, produced and taxed, celebrated and condemned. It has passed through temples, courts, kitchens, pharmacies, taverns, colonial offices, cinemas and modern bars. It has created livelihoods, generated government revenue, provoked reform movements and become part of countless private celebrations and struggles.
The glass has never been just a glass.
It has carried the values, anxieties and ambitions of the society around it.
And perhaps that is why Toddy to Tequila is ultimately not a book about getting drunk.
It is a book about understanding what a civilisation chooses to drink, what it chooses to forbid, what it chooses to profit from and what it chooses to remember.
For that reason, I am glad I read it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Sandhya Mulchandani?
Sandhya Mulchandani approaches history with the curiosity of someone who knows that the most revealing stories are often hiding in ordinary habits. Her work has frequently explored the relationship between Indian culture, mythology, society and the everyday lives of people, which gives her a useful perspective for a book about alcohol. A subject such as this could easily become either a dry catalogue of beverages or a celebration of drinking culture. Mulchandani avoids both traps by treating alcohol as a cultural clue.
In Toddy to Tequila, she brings together material from religious texts, historical accounts, medicine, trade, colonial records and popular culture. That range is one of the book's defining characteristics. Rather than presenting alcohol as an isolated subject, she uses it to examine changing ideas about pleasure, morality, health, commerce, status and authority.
Her method also explains why the book feels broader than its title initially suggests. You may pick it up expecting stories about drinks, yet you soon find yourself reading about kings, gods, traders, physicians, soldiers, colonial administrators, distillers, reformers and communities whose traditions have survived alongside India's changing political and social landscape.
What is Toddy to Tequila about?
Toddy to Tequila: The Story of Alcohol in India is a cultural and historical account of drinking in India, tracing alcoholic beverages from ancient traditions to the contemporary Indian spirits industry.
The book considers drinks such as Soma and Sura, traditional fermented beverages, toddy, feni and later European spirits. Along the way, it examines religious rituals, Ayurveda, royal courts, colonial trade, taxation, prohibition, social customs and modern consumer culture.
The larger argument is more interesting than a simple chronology of drinks. Alcohol provides Mulchandani with a way of examining India itself. The changing status of a beverage can reveal who held power, which communities were respected or marginalised, what governments wanted to regulate and how ideas about morality changed over time.
Does the book say that ancient Indians drank alcohol?
Yes, and this is one of the areas where the book challenges simplistic assumptions about Indian history.
Ancient Indian texts contain references to intoxicating beverages and drinking practices, although the evidence is complicated and varies considerably between texts, communities and periods. Soma and Sura occupy different places within this history, while later religious and philosophical traditions produced their own attitudes towards intoxication.
The important point is that there was never one single Indian attitude towards alcohol. Some traditions associated particular drinks with ritual or medicine, while other traditions criticised intoxication or promoted abstinence.
That contradiction continues throughout the book. India has repeatedly managed to regard alcohol as sacred, dangerous, pleasurable, medicinal, immoral, profitable and politically inconvenient, sometimes within the same broad historical period.
What role does Ayurveda play in the story?
Ayurveda adds another fascinating layer because alcohol was not viewed solely through the modern categories of “drink” and “intoxicant”.
Certain fermented preparations became part of traditional medical practice, including preparations such as arishta and asava. Their alcohol content was connected with the preparation and preservation of medicinal compounds, rather than simply with recreational drinking.
This complicates the familiar argument that alcohol has always belonged neatly on one side of a moral divide. Throughout Indian history, the same substance could occupy different roles depending upon its context, purpose and social meaning.
Mulchandani uses these examples to show how difficult it can be to impose modern assumptions upon older societies.
Does the book focus only on North Indian drinking traditions?
No, although the sheer scale of Indian history means that no book of this length can give every region equal attention.
One of its pleasures is the movement between different parts of the country and different drinking trad
itions. Toddy, feni and other regional beverages remind you that India's alcohol culture has never been a single national story.
At the same time, the book's breadth creates one of its weaknesses. Some regional traditions receive more attention than others, and readers with a particular interest in India's local drinks may finish the book wishing that certain stories had been explored at greater length.
That is less a failure of research than the inevitable consequence of attempting to tell such a large story within a compact volume.
Does Toddy to Tequila glorify alcohol?
No. The book is much more interested in explaining alcohol than persuading you to drink it.
That distinction is important because the subject can easily become sensational. Mulchandani instead examines alcohol as a historical substance whose meaning changes according to circumstances. A drink can be part of a religious ceremony, a royal feast, a medicinal preparation, a colonial trading system, a political campaign or a contemporary consumer market.
The book also leaves room for the darker side of drinking culture, including questions of regulation, social control, addiction, inequality and public health.
You are therefore unlikely to finish the book thinking that its message is simply “India has always loved alcohol”. The more complicated conclusion is that India has always had arguments about alcohol.
Is Toddy to Tequila difficult to read?
For most general readers, the book is accessible, although some passages become information heavy.
The chronological structure helps considerably. You can follow the movement from ancient traditions through medieval and Mughal India, colonial rule and the modern period without constantly having to reconstruct the historical timeline yourself.
There are moments when the quantity of information slows the pace. Readers who prefer narrative history built around a small number of personalities may find sections of the book denser than expected.
Yet that density also reflects the book's ambition. Mulchandani is trying to show how many different worlds have intersected through alcohol, and occasionally the research naturally takes centre stage.
What is the most memorable idea in the book?
The line that best captures the book's central idea is:
“India’s history of alcohol is ultimately a history of India itself.”
It works because the book spends its pages proving the argument rather than merely announcing it.
Once you start looking at alcohol through that lens, familiar subjects begin to appear differently. Colonial taxation becomes part of drinking history. Religious ideas become part of drinking history. Trade routes, medicine, social hierarchy, women's work, cinema and modern consumerism all become part of the same larger story.
That is the book's cleverest move. It takes something that can appear trivial and uses it to ask much larger questions about society.
Would this make a good gift for a reader?
It would suit someone who enjoys books that turn an apparently narrow subject into a wider cultural investigation.
If your friend likes Indian history, mythology, food and drink writing, anthropology, social history or books about the unexpected stories behind familiar things, Toddy to Tequila could make an enjoyable choice. It would also suit the reader who likes discovering that an everyday object has a surprisingly complicated past.
I would not choose it for someone looking for a light drinking guide or a collection of cocktail recipes. This is history first, with alcohol providing the route through which the history is explored.
What should you read after Toddy to Tequila?
If Mulchandani's book leaves you wanting to continue the conversation, there are several excellent directions you can take.
An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions by James McHugh takes a more scholarly route through the history of alcohol in premodern India. It is particularly useful if the ancient and religious material in Mulchandani's book catches your attention and you want to investigate those subjects in greater depth.
The Indian Spirit: The Untold Story of Alcohol in India by Magandeep Singh offers another Indian perspective, moving through the history of fermented drinks, foreign spirits and drinking traditions. It makes a natural companion because it approaches some of the same broad territory from a different angle.
Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses widens the lens considerably. Instead of concentrating on India, it uses six beverages to explore major developments in world history. It is an especially good follow up if you enjoy the basic idea behind Mulchandani's approach, namely that drinks can tell us much more about civilisation than we might expect.
Patrick E. McGovern's Uncorking the Past takes the story much further back into the archaeology and science of alcoholic beverages. It will appeal to readers who become fascinated by the origins of fermentation and the relationship between ancient societies and intoxicating drinks.
Edward Slingerland's Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization takes a more provocative route, asking why humans developed such a persistent relationship with intoxication. It brings anthropology, psychology, history and philosophy into the discussion.
Together, these books show just how large the subject can become once you stop thinking of alcohol merely as something in a glass.
Toddy to Tequila sits comfortably within that larger conversation, but its strongest contribution is distinctly Indian. It reminds you that the history of drinking here cannot be reduced to either ancient ritual or modern nightlife. Between those two points lies a long, messy, fascinating history of people making, regulating, sharing, fearing, enjoying and arguing about alcohol.
What are you reading right now?
Now I want to hear from you.
Have you read Toddy to Tequila: The Story of Alcohol in India? Did it change the way you think about India's drinking traditions, or did you come away with a completely different impression of the book?
Tell me what you thought about its treatment of history, religion, colonialism, regional traditions and modern drinking culture. I am especially curious to know whether you found the research fascinating or occasionally a little dense.
And if you have not read it, what are you reading at the moment?
Share the title in the comments and tell me what you are enjoying about it. You might introduce someone else to their next favourite book.
If you have a friend who enjoys history, Indian culture, food, mythology or unusual stories about everyday life, tag them too. Book conversations are much more fun when more than one person brings a favourite page to the table.
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