Harking Back: Lahore and the ancient art of distillation

Just last month during a visit to the Mian Mir ‘quarters’ of a former employee, I noticed that people kept coming, peeping in, and seeing me leave quickly. “What the hell is going on?” I eventually asked. Nothing, they are searching for ‘water’. Now ‘water’ of a special sort has been distilled in the different ‘mohallahs’ of Lahore, as in almost every village of Punjab, in every village of Pakistan and beyond from time immemorial. My take is that it is a universal pastime. It is a subject that is not discussed in the normal discourse of Pakistani life. Piety has taken over.

This piece is being written not to upset pious readers, but to bring to the fore just one small aspect of life as archaeologists constantly uncover our true heritage. We live in times where life continues as it did in the past, but we deliberately fib to ourselves about our piety. The manufacture of liquor is as old as time, and once man learnt how to fend for himself, he took to the two basic pastimes for pleasure.

If you read the accounts of the historians of Alexander the Greek, you will see a deep admiration for the Indian technique of distilling alcohol. If you read Book 17 by Diodorus Siculus, the Sicilian historian, you will be amazed at the details provided about distillation in Punjab. As I research the history of ancient Punjab it was a shock discovery that the great Prof F Raymond Allchin of the University of Cambridge had written a small booklet on: ‘India: The Ancient Home of Distillation’. He had proven beyond doubt that it were not the Greeks or the Arabs or the Europeans who understood the science of distillation, but the people of the Indus Valley, more so the Harappa Civilisation, where excavations had unearthed entire distilleries.

The science and art of controlling alcohol levels from sugar bases, mostly for medicinal purposes, is well over 5,000 years old and as far back as time goes in our amazing land. As I read Prof Allchin’s paper the mention of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s ‘horse-kick wine’ manufactured in Lahore’s Landa Bazaar from grape-based products had become famous in British India before the Punjab was overcome. Sir Alexander Burnes (1834) mentions him as being ‘immoderately fond’ of his wine. It was even smuggled to British officers stationed to the east. “It was smooth, slightly sweet, and what a kick it has” wrote Lord Roberts of India.

The earliest mention of distillation is in the Vedas where it is mentioned as ‘Mritasanjivani Sura – the spirit to raise the dead’. The Arthasastra, compiled approximately 2,500 years ago, provides actual recipes for distillation from different fruits and vegetables, with suggestions on how to control its strength. But then all these are mentioned in a medicinal mode. In Pakistan even today brandy is officially allowed for ‘medicinal purposes’.

During the excavations at Taxila by Sir John Marshall in 1951 they discovered an iron tripod and a set of four earthen vessels with a few terracotta vessels inside, which in his opinion consisted of a complete distillation plant. Further evidence of this configuration of distillation was uncovered by the Cambridge-Peshawar universities joint excavations at Shaikhan Dhari in Charsada in 1963. The great Prof Dani has written extensively about this configuration. The terracotta vessels were, much to everyone’s surprise, very similar to the discovery of fragments in the Lahore Fort excavation in 1956.

Recently, a new ‘Diwan-e-Aam’ has been discovered near the excavation site under the present one. Just what details of discoveries have been made I am not aware of yet, but they should be very interesting. But then some of the wine jugs that have been discovered all over the Punjab, and near Lahore, as also in two sites in Mohallah Maullian inside Lohari Gate, probably the oldest portion of the old walled city, do clearly show the present-day Pakistan being a reasonably sophisticated society considerably dependent on ‘distilled’ products.

After the Greeks were pushed out by the Kushans, we see their coins with monograms of such vessels. It had become a royal insignia and stamped pottery reflected the auspicious state of affairs. Prof Allchin in his paper has suggested that pottery predating those found at Shaikhan Dheri, in Taxila and in other sites like the Lahore Fort suggest that the science of distillation could well be a gift to the West by the land of our ancestors.

The Vedas tell us about the basic raw materials used, they being cane sugar, rice, palm juice and numerous flowers, the most popular being from the ‘mahua’ tree (Bassia Latifolia). From the ancient Vedas we know that the ruling classes guarded their distillation methods, while the ‘tribals’ – people like my former employee - used earthen pots with a hole to one side and a bamboo pipe receiving the vapours in another after a boiling process. It is a very simple process this distillation based on steam-cooking. The details are being left out for understandable reasons. But we must learn more about these important archaeological discoveries as they keep popping up.

If you happen to visit the Lahore Fort, just opposite the Royal Kitchen are a set of rooms. These were once the still rooms of the Emperor Akbar. Amazingly, Dr Joseph Needham, that brilliant British biochemist, historian and Sinologist came to Lahore and identified one set of Mughal-era distillation pottery as being of Chinese origin. But his work on China, to everyone’s utter shock in China, identified a distillation set as being of Harappa origin.

Dr. Needham took back to Cambridge samples of yogurt from Lahore and worked on them to produce what he called an ancient alcohol source. He was particularly fascinated by sweet ‘lassi’. So we have in our land two major regular distillation plants, one being inside the Lahore Fort and the other at Shaikhan Dheri in Charsada. These are known ones and verifiable. Surely there must have been others all over our ancient land, which if they are mentioned in the Vedas provide us clues to the world’s very first distillation process undertaking.

The very fact that Sanskrit words have been used to describe straining, trickling and filtering speaks for themselves. Even today their variables are used by European distillers and winery concerns which speak volumes of the origin and contribution of our ancient land. Words like ‘paris-ravana’ or ‘paris-rut’ speak for themselves.

We tend to forget than these beverages are still used in metallurgy, in medicines, and even in religious rites like the Cakra ‘Puja’. That the upright still-heads are today still called Gandhara type is evidence of an ancient distillation design that changed the world as we see it today. Pretty cheerful lot our ancestors.