Grape wine in ancient and early Medieval India: The view from the centre

Introducing Wine

The basic ancient Indian understanding of this drink probably differs from our own, so let us first consider two texts that define wine or explain how it is made.

In the Arthaśāstra, there is a chapter on the Superintendent of Surā. ¹ Here, surā is no doubt used in the broader, generic sense of ‘liquor’, as various drinks are described in the chapter. Patrick Olivelle suggests the sources for the earlier parts of the text, which include the following quoted lines, date from between the middle of the first century BCE and the middle of the first century CE. ² This section was probably composed in North India, and we may tentatively place it around today’s Gujarat and northern Maharashtra. ³ In addition to describing the regulation of drink sales and drinking houses, the chapter contains a list of six types of alcoholic drink that were apparently of economic importance. For the first five drinks, lists of ingredients are provided along with quantities, presumably to regulate production standards, and also to align these products with the rest of the economy. Grape wine, however, is different:

‘Madhu’ is grape juice (mṛdvīkārasa). Its name according to its place of origin is Kāpiśāyana and Hārahūraka. ⁴

The lines are mostly about words, not about measurements of ingredients, no doubt because those using the text are assumed to have little interest in exactly how people make wine because it is an imported drink. First, the drink called madhu is defined as made from grape juice (and vice versa). Then, we learn that there are imported varieties called after their place of origin. The Sanskrit word madhu, which refers to wine in the aforementioned line, can also refer to honey and nectar. Madhu also means sweet, and as with most Sanskrit nouns, it means a lot of other things. Given that madhu is such a common and possibly vague word, it is not surprising to see this usage explained here, something we also see in the section on the storehouse: ‘madhu is honey (kṣaudraṃ) and wine (“the thing from grapes” mārdvīkaṃ)’. ⁵ I return to this evidently novel usage of madhu in the following paragraph.

Unlike the other drinks in the Arthaśāstra, wine apparently consists of a single ingredient, yet there is no other information about its production, and, instead, we learn that it comes in named varieties, called after their places of origin. Where production of types of grain surā intersects with the local economy of grains, spices and measurements, wine arrives in the country already manufactured, so the writer and reader of the Arthaśāstra need not worry about production (though the Arthaśāstra does elsewhere mention the cultivation of grapes). ⁶ Perhaps this is why wine is last in the main list of drinks here—it is simply not like the other drinks at all.

Where are these wines from? One of the named wines is from Kapiśa (Kāpiśāyana), so near Begram in modern Afghanistan. ⁷ The origin of the other wine, called Hārahūraka, is harder to identify, but it is possibly an area considered to be in the Northwest. ⁸ Although these wine varieties are effectively ‘appellations d’origine’, the terms are probably not like the modern legalistic language used to demarcate Bordeaux. What counted as Kāpiśāyana wine might have been vague in terms of a precise origin, perhaps more like English ‘hock’, implying a general region and style.

Even where we do learn more about how wine was made, it is still unlike most other alcoholic drinks. There is a recipe for what is effectively grape wine in the South Indian Delight of the Mind (Mānasollāsa), from approximately 1131 CE, composed by/attributed to the South Indian Kalyāṇa Cāḷukya King Someśvara III ⁹ :

Press grape juice (mṛdvīkārasa), ferment it [some] days: this is grape āsava (drākṣāsava), which is pleasant, the favorite of young ladies. ¹⁰

Note there are no additives here, not even the dhātakī flowers (Woodfordia fruticosa [L.] Kurz) used in so many of the other drink recipes in the Mānasollāsa in this same section (palm toddy being the only other one-ingredient liquor there). This recipe could be a schematic account of how people knew grape wine to be made, though it is possible that people were producing grape wine in South India, from fresh grapes or from hydrated raisins. Although the wine in the Arthaśāstra is imported, we also only learn of a single ingredient there, as we do in another source, I consider later in this chapter, where the simplicity even assumes a theological significance.

There are few descriptions of how wine is made in early Indic texts, so these are some of our more important sources. From this initial glimpse, we learn that wine was sometimes described in Indian texts as an import. Also, the other major drinks of ancient India were made of multiple ingredients—indeed, saṃdhāna ‘putting together’ is the common Sanskrit term for fermentation. ¹¹ At least in the sources aforementioned wine was said to be different, made of one substance and fermenting with no additions.

The Earliest References to Grapes and Wine in South Asia

At a certain point, wine and grapes were new introductions in much of South Asia. Yet wine was by no means the first alcoholic drink in the region. Prior to the appearance of references to grape wine, there is plenty of evidence in Indian texts of a complex, thriving drink culture. A grain-based drink called surā is the most ancient drink, mentioned in the Vedas, and types of surā were made until at least the early second millennium CE. ¹² Grape wine is nowhere mentioned in the Vedas, nor do we hear of the drink in the epics, where drinks made from sugarcane products, for instance, sīdhu and maireya are dominant, along with a category of drink called the āsava, evidently a mixed, sugar-based drink. ¹³ An āsava in the Arthaśāstra, for example, consists of fruit, sugarcane syrup and honey. ¹⁴ Thus, when grape wine appears in the textual record, there is clearly a well-established drinking culture quite distinctive to the region, where people enjoyed a number of named types of alcoholic drinks made from grains, sugarcane and honey, along with additions of fruits, herbs and spices. Thus, people had plenty of words for alcoholic drinks, but not for this new grape-based drink.

When do we see the earliest references to wine or grapes in Indian texts? This question is hard to answer. First, this is not the same question as to when wine and grapes (including raisins) first appeared in India, and, of course, wine and grapes might not have appeared everywhere, spatially and textually, at the same time. Also, when grapes and wine did appear in practice, traditions of textual composition that used stock lists and lexical memorisation may have taken some time to incorporate these materials and may not have always done so evenly. It is even conceivable that some people may have been using texts that mentioned wine and grapes in a context where they were not actually available. Another problem with identifying wine in texts lies in the ambiguity of the word madhu and some other words in the sense of wine (see later). And, finally, answering the question as to when wine and grapes appear in texts depends on the often uncertain dates of texts, and it, thus, becomes a worrying house of cards. Yet, arguably, we possess enough varied sources, dated by various different criteria, to come to some decent conclusions. Indeed, occurrences of words for such things as types of liquor and imported fruits may even sometimes be of some use in ascertaining the dates of certain texts (none of which are usually dated with reference to liquor words, so this is not circular reasoning). ¹⁵

It is a good idea to start with a reference that is quite solid. The passage from the Arthaśāstra mentioned earlier, from roughly around the turn of the Common Era, is a clear reference to grape wine. There it is called madhu, and this may well be the earliest attestation of the word in that sense. ¹⁶ Some other references to wine and grapes are probably earlier. There is a reference to a drink made from grapes (muddikāpāna) in a list of drinks permitted to monks in the Pāli Vinaya, possibly from before 250 BCE. ¹⁷ Given that this drink is permitted, presumably it is a fresh, unfermented drink or something similarly non-intoxicating made from a syrup or using raisins. In another early Pali text, the grape seed is listed along with sugarcane seed and rice seed as seeds that produce a sweet crop. ¹⁸ The exact dates of these two texts are uncertain and debated, but for our purposes, they are very early, probably a few centuries before the Common Era. Grapes (mṛdvikā) are mentioned in Patañjali’s commentary on Pāṇini, probably from the second century BCE. ¹⁹ Note that these early references to grapes and grape drinks use words of the form muddikā/mṛdvīkā, as does a Jain text from a similarly early period (muddiyā). ²⁰ This is also the form that is used to explain the word madhu in the Arthaśāstra—apparently, this word was more familiar. Observe how many of these early references are to drinks made from grapes.

There are also references to grapes (or raisins—it is hard to know) ²¹ in Sanskrit, in Caraka’s Compendium and Suśruta’s Compendium, both texts for which it is hard to date particular sections, some centuries BCE to several centuries CE. ²² A list of fermented drinks in Suśruta’s Compendium begins with grape wine (mārdvīkam), ²³ a strikingly prominent placement of this drink, given the conceptual, canonical importance of (grain) surā, which heads the analogous list of drinks in the Carakasaṃhitā (grain drinks also head the list of liquors in the Arthaśāstra). ²⁴

Another, rather later reference to making a grape juice drink is found in the prose of the Pali Jātakas. ²⁵ Here, some horses, tired from battle, are given a grape drink (muddikapānaṃ). They are given what appears to be the best part of the grape drink, the fragrant drink (gandhapānaṃ), ²⁶ and being respectable war horses, they do not get drunk but remain calm in the stable. There are also some dregs (or maybe pomace) left to which water is added. This mixture is kneaded, strained with a cloth, and this second drink is given to the donkeys, who being of a lowly nature, get drunk and frolic around. Are these (fermented) grapes being crushed, and the remaining pomace made into a drink with water (like the drink called piquette), or are the lees being made into the watery drink? Significantly, the grapes are only mentioned in the prose section of this Jātaka, which took its final form around the fifth or sixth century CE. ²⁷ The older verse in this passage contains no reference to grapes, and the donkeys’ drink in the verse, called ‘hair-sieve water’ (vālodakaṃ) could easily apply to all sorts of drinks, including grain surā. It seems that the older verse, maybe about surā, is being updated to incorporate grape and wine terminology.

Vagaries of dating aside, we now have enough references to grapes and wine to state they appear in the Indic textual record a few centuries BCE. The words most commonly used in this period are of the mṛdvīkā form, and, typically, grape drinks are mentioned.

The Origins and History of Words for Grapes and Wine

Before continuing, we should look closer at some other words for grapes and wine in Sanskrit and related languages, for we need to be sure that a word refers to wine or grapes, in order to track these materials in our sources. In the Arthaśāstra, what is clearly grape wine is called madhu. In other early texts, where the context is ambiguous, it is hard to know exactly what drink madhu refers to, but when madhu is referring to an alcoholic drink in texts from the start of the Common Era onwards, very approximately speaking, this word may well mean wine (though an Indo-European ‘mead’ connection might make a honey-related translation tempting to some scholars, and ‘mead’ also evokes ‘ancient times’ in a Tolkeinesque manner). A term such as drākṣāsava (‘grape āsava’) is far less ambiguous than madhu, though some versions of that drink, an āsava, might have involved ingredients like jaggery. ²⁸

When examining Sanskrit texts for references to wine, things get even more confusing in honey-, grape- or liquor-related contexts when we encounter a constellation of words related to madhu and mṛdvīkā along with other words that are phonetically somewhat similar: mādhvī, mādhavī, mādhava, madhūka, mādhvīka, mārdvīka and mṛdvīkā to give just some examples. Sometimes, the ambiguities of such words were of great importance: mādhvī is a key word in many Hindu legal texts when they deal with drinking because The Law Code of Manu defines surā as threefold, and one type of surā according to Manu is ‘based on madhu’ = mādhvī. ²⁹ Yet, it is unclear whether that word means honey-based or grape wine, or even mahua-flower-based liquor (and commentators raise all these possibilities). Also, it is by no means the case that grapes or honey are always implied by such words. Madhūka is a tree (Madhuka longifolia) that produces sugary mahua flowers. The word derived from that, mādhvīka, can refer to the alcoholic drink made from these flowers, as well as to a drink made from honey (madhu), and also to grape wine.

The word mādhvīka in the sense of grape wine might have a confused connection in some texts or manuscripts with another word that is important for us here: mārdvīka. ³⁰ The word is formed from the Sanskrit word mṛdvīkā (or vice versa), which is one of the words we saw earlier in the earliest Indic references to grapes and wine. Where are this word and its apparently cognate forms from? The origin of mṛdvīkā/mārdvīka and of related forms in Middle-Indic languages is somewhat uncertain, though it has been suggested that mṛdvīkā is a hyper-Sanskritisation of an Iranian *madu̯ī derived from *madu- (= Skt. mádhu; cf. Aves. maδu-). ³¹

Madhu, however, is most definitely a Sanskrit word with an old pedigree. With a well-attested word for ‘grape-related thing’ (i.e., wine) already in place, why was the ancient Sanskrit word madhu chosen to have the sense of wine—an old, evidently ambiguous word for a relatively new thing that already had a distinctive, unambiguous name? As we shall see later, some wine was imported from the Iranian cultural areas to India, so Iranian wine, broadly speaking, had appeared in South Asia. As noted, one common early Indic word for grape, mṛdvīkā, along with its cognate forms, may be based on an Iranian loan word. Iranian wine words are not limited to the drinks: a common word for a drinking cup (caṣaka), attested from approximately the mid-first millennium CE in scenes of luxurious drinking, may also be based on an Iranian word. ³² So, could the usage of Sanskrit madhu in the sense of wine, probably first attested in Arthaśāstra and as also seen in Kālidāsa (see later), also be connected to or somehow influenced by Iranian words for wine? As Harold Bailey wrote of wine, this often traded product is ‘the most favourable ground for a loan word’, ³³ and perhaps the common Sanskrit word madhu was the best choice for rendering or updating forms ultimately derived, possibly indirectly, from Iranian *madu? ³⁴ In this hypothetical scenario, an ancient, respectable Sanskrit word was chosen around the turn of the Common Era as a (linguistically related) folk etymology for a relative newcomer drink. ³⁵ Certainly, the Iranian *madu word is related to many grape- and wine-related words in other languages in Central and East Asia. ³⁶ If Sanskrit madhu-as-wine is, indeed, a folk-etymological naturalisation of an Iranian or intermediate word, then this Indian word, along with mṛdvīkā and related forms (assuming they are based on Iranian loan words), joins a constellation of Iranian-derived *madu-wine words in Asia’s east and north of Iran, with the woinos wine words to the West.

Finally, why are there so many related wine, honey and mead words (honey, wine, mahua liquor), all of which descend from the Proto-Indo-European *médhu-? ³⁷ Sweet liquids and alcoholic liquids went hand in hand in the ancient world, where there was no refrigeration and pasteurisation. To be sweet is to become intoxicating, and to be intoxicating is to be sweet, and this may well involve ‘honey’ or connections to honey-words when that is your principal or most valued sweet substance, or was at some point in the linguistic past.

Other Early Indic Representations of Wine and Grapes

Can we learn anything from other representations of grapes and wine from these early periods? Two early Indian visual representations of ‘foreigners’ carrying grapes, from the Buddhist stūpas at Sanchi and Bharhut dating from around 50 BCE and the mid-second century BCE, respectively, correlate to some of the earlier textual references in terms of dates, and the notion of the ‘foreign grape’. ³⁸ These images are not just incidental depictions of grapes, but, here, the grape is evidently displayed to signify the foreign.

There is a revealing passage about grapes in the Mūlasārvāstivāda Vinaya. This text probably dates from the first half of the second century CE. ³⁹ Here, some monks travel in the Northwest and a type of being called a yakṣa presents them with some grapes, which are said to be from Kashmir and are apparently a great novelty. ⁴⁰ Thus, the Buddha needs to explain what to do with them and their permissibility for monks. He explains they can be eaten after purifying them with a burning ember, and that people can also make juice/syrup from them. By contrast, it is worth noting that grapes are not highlighted as exotic fruit in the earlier Pali texts I mentioned earlier. Were grapes (or raisins) more familiar in the cultural world where those texts were composed or redacted?

If wine was marked as foreign in much of South Asia, then what was the wine/grape environment around South Asia in the approximate period these references occur? Chinese sources attest the consumption of wine in Central Asia and Persia, with an early reference to wine in Fergana from 128 BCE. ⁴¹ Texts from Old Nisa in Parthia, in modern Turkmenistan, reveal an important economy of wine there in the first century BCE. ⁴² Texts found at Niya in the Tarim Basin in Central Asia show that wine was an important and regulated commodity in the third century CE. ⁴³

Grape wine is long attested in ancient Persia. ⁴⁴ One Sasanian text lists several varieties of wine appreciated in Persia around, or just after, the mid-first millennium CE. ⁴⁵ Here, the best varieties are from Khorasan to the north-east of Persia, up towards Bactria, but the very best type is from the Middle East. ⁴⁶ This wine was to be perfumed and accompanied with delicious foods. ⁴⁷ That grapes and wine were long located at the West and Northwest in some Indic texts fits the pattern of prehistoric archaeological finds of Vitis vinifera in Baluchistan, Iran, Kashmir and Punjab. ⁴⁸ As I discuss later in the chapter, a wine culture inflected by Hellenism thrived in northwestern regions in the early centuries CE. Both in representations and practice, for people living within most parts of South Asia, from an early period, the realm of grapes and wine was outside, or in geographically peripheral regions.

Thus, within India, the poet Kālidāsa, writing in the Gupta period, is aware of the pleasures of wine and associates the drink with Persia. In the Raghuvaṃśa, during King Raghu’s ‘conquest of the quarters’, he takes a land route to conquer the Persians (Pārasīkān), where the Yavana (‘Greek’) ⁴⁹ women have faces intoxicated with wine (madhumadaṃ) ⁵⁰ and where:

His soldiers removed the fatigue of victory, with wines (madhubhir) in spots that were encircled with grape vines (drākṣā-), spread with the best hides. ⁵¹

The grapes and wine, here, are a literary–conventional feature of the region over which they assert their domination. Yet this is still a lavish fantasy, one with a cosmopolitan flavour to fit the contemporary urbane tastes of the Gupta period. Presumably, Persian wine was by no means a regular drink for soldiers on the march in this period—Raghu’s conquest is a spectacular event for all concerned.

India was hemmed in towards the northwest and west by grape and wine cultures, and somewhat like England, where wine production has never been enormously important, the interior of the region was an importer and consumer of wine. We might speculate whether Indian wine consumption and commerce contributed to the development areas of production elsewhere, in the closest trade-accessible areas with good climatic vinification conditions along with traditions of growing grapes and making wine. This is what we see with English wine consumption of the early Middle Ages and production around Paris, or with the thriving trade in the wines of Shiraz in the early modern period, which supplied European consumers to the East, in the ‘Indies’. ⁵²

Foreign Sources and Archaeology

Imported wine apparently came to India via two main routes: over the western Indian Ocean to port cities from where it was transported overland and overland from regions in the Northwest. I shall now briefly review the evidence from non-Indic texts and archaeology. The archaeological evidence for wine in South Asia has been re-evaluated in recent years, and some scholars may not be aware of these developments.

The Periplus Maris Erythraei is a well-known handbook for Greek merchants trading in Egypt, East Africa, Arabia and India, a guide to the Indian Ocean composed by an Egyptian Greek in the middle of the first century CE. ⁵³ The author did not list alcoholic drinks as one of the commodities available to traders reaching the ports of India, but India did import wine, vintage wine and Arabian wine, as well as silverware and glassware that could have been used for drinking it. We read that ‘Both ports of trade (of Persis: Apologos and Omana) ⁵⁴ export to Barygaza [Bhārukaccha, modern Broach on the northwest coast of India] … wine, dates in quantity ….’ ⁵⁵ Casson comments that wine, ‘including varieties from three different areas, stands at the head of the list of Barygaza’s imports [on the northwest Coast] … but is low on the list at Muziris/Nelkynda [on the southwest coast]; there is no indication of the import of different varieties [there]’. ⁵⁶ The author of the Periplus writes that the wine imported to Barygaza was: ‘principally Italian but also Laodicean ⁵⁷ and Arabian’ ⁵⁸ along with ‘fine wine’ specifically for the king. ⁵⁹

Other classical sources attest to the presence of wine and grapes in the Northwest, for example, the wines of the province of Arachosia, centred on the Arghandab valley in modern Afghanistan. ⁶⁰ Though with classical sources in European languages, as with more recent scholarship, what got reported as ‘wine’ may not have always been grape wine, and there might also have been a reflex to locate grapevines in India, a land associated with Dionysus. There is an interesting reference to an Indian king, Aśoka’s predecessor Bindusāra, requesting dried figs and grape syrup (or perhaps sweet wine, we only have a substantive adjective—‘sweet’) from the Hellenistic King Antiochus. ⁶¹ We might, however, be cautious in assuming the details here are realistic. This exchange is part of a charming, witty anecdote: the Indians request figs, wine and a philosopher, and the Hellenistic king politely refuses to provide the final item on the list. But it is possible that the figs and wine, here, may simply stand for excellent products that the Greeks possess that foreigners do not. In Herodotus’ Persian Wars (Book I, 71), a certain Lydian counsels Croesus that the Persians ‘use no wine, but are water-drinkers, nor have they figs to eat … Now if you conquer them, of what will you deprive them, seeing that they have nothing?’ ⁶² Is it possible then that ‘people who lack figs and wine’ sometimes stood for people who lack the nice things (‘sugar and spice’) in Greek texts (‘we can send those unfortunates figs and wine, but not a philosopher!’), and that we should not therefore read too much into the details of the anecdote about Bindusāra?

Famously, archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler excavated Roman artefacts at the site of Arikamedu south of Puducherry on the south-east coast of India. In a recent review article on Indian Ocean archaeology, Eivind Heldass Seland writes that Wheeler’s excavation and publications ‘soon centered on artifacts of Mediterranean origin … which also were seen as evidence of Mediterranean presence’, establishing a research agenda for such archaeology summed up by the title of Wheeler’s book Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers. ⁶³

Some wine did come from Rome or regions that had adopted aspects of Hellenised culture, but we should take care to avoid assuming from the outset that wine (and alcohol, in general) in India was a Hellenistic or Mediterranean phenomenon. That is not to say that wine did not come from abroad—that is essential to wine in India. And the Gandhāra region definitely did have a Hellenised wine culture, at least in terms of visual iconography. But elsewhere, wine, though appreciated as foreign, was assimilated alongside other older, local drinks and assigned a place in Indian legal, aesthetic, ritual and medical systems. Indic wine culture was not the result of cultural colonisation, but it was the deliberate adoption of one exotic beverage (probably) by an elite stratum of society, along with some, but by no means all, of the trappings that went with that drink, be these Hellenistic or Iranian: maybe some forms of vessels, some iconography of drinkers and some vocabulary like the word caṣaka, ‘drinking cup’. Foreign wines joined other elite drinks like the spicy maireya that may have been a particularly esteemed liquor several centuries BCE. ⁶⁴ As with the ancient French response to Phoenician wine (see later), the Indians made wine their own. But unlike the French case, winemaking never thrived in early India (raisin āsavas excepted), possibly for practical/climatic reasons, since climate does not just affect grape cultivation but also vinification. Or maybe because as with real Champagne today, everyone involved wanted to keep this drink a costly imported delicacy.

Wheeler’s Roman amphoras are no doubt well known to scholars of early South Asia, but archaeologists have found many other such vessels since. ⁶⁵ And we now know that the amphoras found in India tell a far more complex story than simply ‘the Romans in India’. Archaeologist Roberta Tomber has reviewed a large number of ancient amphoras found in India, with surprising results: ‘… imported amphorae have been confirmed from 31 sites. However at approximately half these sites it was also discovered that amphora sherds thought to be Roman were actually Mesopotamian in origin. In 10 cases, the assemblage contained only Mesopotamian vessels, and Roman pottery was absent’. ⁶⁶

Such jars (torpedo jars) may well have contained wine produced in the Sasanian empire, ⁶⁷ and they were found in four main areas: Gujarat/Konkan coast, Deccan Plateau, South India and Sri Lanka. Some finds also date to the Islamic period. ⁶⁸ The Roman amphorae date from the early Roman period (late first century BCE–second/third centuries CE) to the late Roman period, up until the sixth century CE. Tomber writes that it ‘is notable that the majority of torpedo [jar] finds in north India lie within the territory, or the borders, of the Western Kshatrapas … Although they ruled between the first and early fifth century AD, during the Parthian period the Western Kshatrapas were under Pahlava (Parthian) suzerainty. Further to the north and north-east are the Kushanas, who were subordinated to the Sasanians from the mid-third century’. ⁶⁹ So from the evidence of amphoras, we see that wine in India is not just a product of contact with Hellenised cultures, and a strong Persian connection is in evidence in north India in the first centuries CE. A third or fourth century CE silver bowl (Figure 1) found in the far Northwest of South Asia is perhaps a visual manifestation of a wine culture of northwest South Asia that had both Hellenised and Iranian elements. ⁷⁰

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: British Museum 1937,0319.1.

The corpulent drinker in a vine bower (compare to the scene in Kālidāsa) has let fall his waist band, exposing himself, his phallus a visual echo of the spout of the wine skin he holds. Beside him, a woman offers a chalice-shaped vessel. Martha Carter writes of this dish that although probably not made in a Sasanian atelier, ‘it does bear the mark of a tradition contemporary with cultures within the Sasanian orbit which display dionysiac symbolism’. ⁷¹

My emphasis on Iranian wine culture and exports does not imply that there are no Roman amphorae in India, just the picture is more complicated than frequently assumed. Roman amphorae are sometimes found with these Mesopotamian jars, which suggest wine was traded via entrepôt ports in South Arabia, as we saw described in the Periplus earlier. Thus, these jars and words might have passed through many hands and mouths on the way to India. Scholars now know a lot more about the Roman amphorae of South Asia, too much to discuss here, but as an example, amphoras from the Bay of Naples have been found at the site of Nevasa in Maharashtra from around the turn of the Common Era. ⁷² The site of Pattanam in modern Kerala has an impressive assemblage of Roman amphoras and other sherds from the late first century BCE until the third century CE, the majority of which have the form of wine amphoras. ⁷³ Thus, foreign liquor was valued by people in the South too, and ancient Tamil literature contains a reference to the ‘fragrant wine carried here in their excellent ships by the Greeks’. ⁷⁴

What of the wine produced to the Northwest, where the famed Kāpiśāyana wine was likely made? ⁷⁵ From this region, in particular, from Gandhāra, we have considerable surviving art historical material and maybe also wine jars, depending on how we interpret certain vessels. ⁷⁶ This evidence, mostly carved stone reliefs from Buddhist contexts, depicts people making wine and enjoying it in a style that is inflected by Western, Hellenistic styles of visual representation.

Such ‘Dionysiac’ styles of imagery are also found quite early further within the subcontinent, at the site of Mathura, though people probably did not make wine there, at least as we understand Indian wine history from our textual and other sources. ⁷⁷

When considering these images, we should be wary of seeing these Hellenistic styles of depicting wine culture as implying that Indian drinking culture, or even grape wine culture, was a foreign import or influence. Especially outside of the Gandhāran cultural area, wine drinking might have been ‘Greek’ only in the way early European tea culture was Chinese: the drink and some associated practices/materials may have sometimes originated in Hellenised areas, but the drinking culture was probably local, as was the politics and economics that drove the adoption and assimilation of this drink. Michael Dielter has described the adoption of wine drinking in early Iron Age France, noting that the common explanation of this process has been in terms of ‘the somewhat nebulous concept known as “Hellenization”, a sort of progressive general emulation of “civilized” customs by “barbarians” as a natural and inevitable response to contact’. ⁷⁸ Not only is the Hellenisation concept vague, but Dietler writes that the concept ‘offers little insight into the processes of social change resulting from culture contact; and less benignly, it can actually obscure understanding under a haze of tacit assumptions’. ⁷⁹ In the French case, as no doubt also the Indian one, the ‘… situation (i.e., the import and adoption of wine drinking paraphernalia) was a result of consumer demand rather than being due simply to the range of goods commonly offered by traders’. ⁸⁰ If we reflect on the pre-existing Indic drinking culture, as well as the highly developed Persian wine culture, the notion of a simple Hellenistic influence on Indic drinking culture is considerably attenuated and complicated. Similarly, Asher writes of Mediterranean forms in the art of the Kushana period in India that ‘the import of ideas, even of artists, need not be conceived in customary colonialist terms. That is, one does not have to imagine foreign artists teaching the poor benighted Indians … Rather, one can imagine that with the establishment of empire, patrons everywhere could draw upon far greater resources to accomplish what they sought to do’. ⁸¹ The same applies to drinks, ways of drinking and even how to depict drinking in words and visual images.

We should differentiate the wine culture of the Northwest in situ from aspects of that culture in other parts of South Asia. It is not surprising that people surrounded by a Greco-Iranian wine culture depicted winemaking and wine drinking in the ways they did. Wine must have been common there, integrated into society and the economy, like in medieval France. But, as noted, some of this imagery is also found in Mathura, where the prevailing style of art was less thoroughly inflected by the Hellenistic style, and where wine was quite likely an import. For example, on the ‘dionysiac’ in the art of Mathura, Martha Carter writes that this imagery ‘presents a stylistic and iconographic amalgam, not a patent borrowing; and even when this does occur we may assume that some transformation of meaning has taken place. The most pertinent iconographic problem is thus not what motives were from classical sources, but rather why they were selected and for what purposes’. ⁸² And arguably, an Indic perspective on drinking is also key to dealing with this artistic phenomenon. Indeed, with regard to these images, I suggest that calling them Dionysiac or Bacchants clouds and biases our ways of seeing, given that those words evoke cultural and religious notions as well as iconographic styles. In Mathura, these ‘bacchants’ have now moved to quite another cultural realm. Consider how we talk of chinoiserie, but never of the ‘Buddhist iconography of Eighteenth Century Europe’. Again, Martha L. Carter expresses this well, writing that the appearance of this iconography represents choices by Indian sculptors ‘… for specific reasons … emphasizing exotic elements … the stylistic essence is Mathuran with a consciously exotic veneer’. ⁸³ These wine drinkers, as depicted within the subcontinent, are arguably self-conscious Indian ‘Grequeries’, to echo (clumsily) the Chinoiserie concept. These sculptures are perhaps the visual counterpart of the Yavanī (‘Greek’, or generally foreign/Northwestern) women with wine-flushed cheeks we see in later Sanskrit literature, where, for example, the ruddy rising moon is in one poem said to ‘be the hue of the cheeks of an intoxicated “Greek” (yavanī) woman’. ⁸⁴ And in Mathura, the choice to produce exotic images connected with cultures that drank grape wine is an especially pertinent artistic choice, for, as we have seen, grape wine stood out in ancient India as the exotic, prestigious alcoholic drink, and drinking was associated with the sensuous pursuits depicted in these images. A comparison with European drinking culture might again be helpful. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France wine culture was generally artistically represented as local, while tea and coffee imagery and material culture was given an exotic Oriental veneer. ⁸⁵ And even within Gandhāra, however, where wine was local, Falk suggests that the complex Hellenised aspects of drinking were also selectively assimilated, writing that with regard to the presentation of ‘Dionysiac’ scenes in Gandharan art ‘the real incentive was local and consisted of indigenous habits and festivals ….’ ⁸⁶ Likewise, Michele Minardi writes of the kingdom of Chorasmia in Central Asia, where wine was made and consumed, being a prestigious drink of the elite, consumed using styles of vessels made in styles introduced by the Achaemenids in the fourth century BCE. ⁸⁷ At a later period, in the first century BCE to second century CE, here too, we find the ‘selective reception’ of aspects of Hellenistic wine culture into this wine region, showing the Chorasmians’ ‘remarkable tendency to select foreign artistic/artisanal elements for its crafts, and to adopt/import alien status symbols shared by the elites of the Hellenised east’. ⁸⁸ Given the complexity of wine culture in areas like Gandhāra, the wine imagery at Mathura seems to lie at the end of a chain of more than one such selective receptions.

What about wine and religion, for much of the drinking imagery at Gandhāra was found in Buddhist contexts? Should we be surprised or shocked about this? I think not. As I explain elsewhere, Buddhist culture, especially as embedded in wider Indian literary and religious culture, admitted several contexts, realms of the universe, types of person and supernatural beings closely associated with drinking, so to find these images in Buddhist settings is not incongruous, no more unusual than finding an image of an attractive woman or a mithuna couple in a context associated with a community of celibate Buddhist monks (and, in many literary contexts, drinking and making love went hand in hand). ⁸⁹ Also, although both lay and monastics were supposed to abstain from drinking in Buddhism, abstinence was arguably a less constitutive feature of Buddhist religious identities than it was for the brahmin. ⁹⁰

The Gandhāran reliefs also include some images of the production of wine, though we should be cautious of viewing these images as an exact record of practice. No doubt artistic convention and tradition played a role in their creation, and a complex process was perhaps simplified and abbreviated. Fortunately for us, Harry Falk has written extensively of these images. ⁹¹

Before thinking about these images, we should briefly consider the basic outline of a wine-making process. First, grapes are a copious source of sugar that need processing when they ripen, or they will eventually rot. This might mean producing raisins, wine or cooked-down must. These storable forms of stabilised grape sugars are also suitable for trade. To make wine, you need grapes, fresh or sometimes partially dried, to increase sugar. It is also possible to dilute and ferment grape concentrate/syrup. It is also possible to use raisins that have been reconstituted in water. In making wine, grapes are first crushed producing a must. In the case of red wine, the skins are left in contact with the juice to infuse various pigments and tannins. The must is left to ferment, which can occur spontaneously from the yeasts present on the grape skins. Then, the fermented mass of skins and juice is pressed to extract the juice. It can require some force to extract all the juice, maybe involving a special press. It is also possible to do crushing and pressing at the same time, with less flavour and colour extracted from the skins, for example, if the free-run juice just pours out of the crushing trough to ferment in other vessels. The fermented wine can then be filtered again and stored, aged and transported in barrels (not, to my knowledge, used in ancient India), amphorae/jars, wineskins or, more recently, bottles. Before consuming wine, one might filter it again to remove sediment. Carefully sealed grape wine keeps well and did so in the ancient world, where people knew of aged wines with no recourse to pasteurisation, fortification or distillation. ⁹² The early wine writer André Jullien described the wines of Iran and Kashmir in 1815. ⁹³ These were no doubt made in a traditional manner and were not, apparently, fortified, though they were still in some cases ‘très spiritueux’. ⁹⁴ The best Shirazi wine, exported to India, was made with dried grapes, and Jullien compares this to a sweet Malmsey Madeira. He also compares Kashmiri wine to Madeira. Did some such controlled oxidation and maderisation (which involves exposure to heat) lend a degree of stability to much earlier wines transported to parts of India? ⁹⁵

The evidence of sculptures from Gandhāra documented by Falk suggests that the notable stages of the process were the following. First, there was crushing, together with pressing of the grapes by trampling in vats, the juice apparently being collected in a vessel as it ran out of a vat. It is not clear at what point fermentation took place, maybe in those collection vessels. Also, these images may abbreviate a more complex process of crushing, followed by later pressing/draining. But at some point, before or after fermentation, the must or wine was apparently filtered through a cloth bag suspended on a tripod frame. Wineskins are also depicted, probably used to store and transport the fermented wine (or even to ferment it?) And large vessels were used from which to serve the wine (maybe for filtration and/or mixing too), like a Greek krater. These krater-like vessels are also seen in an image from Mathura that Carter discusses. ⁹⁶ Was this just an imported motif (or artist) or evidence that wine was served in this manner at Mathura? Such are the methodological difficulties with our evidence. Falk also mentions a bronze sieve found at Gandhāra. ⁹⁷ Of course, the actual vinification process was possibly more complex than visually depicted, so wine professionals should not assume that this wine was a recently fermented, gritty, rather terrible wine. Nonetheless, this wine may have been very different to all modern wines, and we may never really know what it was like.

Roman wines, Iranian or Mesopotamian wines, Northwestern wines and exoticising references, visual and textual, to Persian and ‘Greek’ drinking were a part of wine culture in South Asia in the very early to mid-first millennium CE. Beyond certain wine-producing regions, grape wine was overtly assimilated-as-foreign in India, and this may well have contributed to the status of this drink, carefully brought from so far in heavy, clay vessels to a region that already had plenty of alcoholic drinks. Again, the situation with wine in England can help us understand the place of wine in drinking culture, as well as in literary and artistic culture. An early modern English humorous play contains the following exchange between the personifications of Wine and Beer:

Beere: …why whence come you pray?

Wine: From France, from Spaine, from Greece.

Beere: Though art a mad Greeke indeed. ⁹⁸

Here, wine is present in England, yet marked as foreign, where beer is not thus marked. Yet where in England this imported drink—wine—was also the drink of scripture and classical literature, that was not the case in India, where local grain surā was the ancient liquor of the Vedas.

Perhaps it is stating the obvious, but it is not as if these wines simply landed at random in India, for seafaring trade was complex, expensive and dangerous. Powerful, wealthy networks of people had to choose to export and import these wines for solid economic reasons—namely a demand for several types of good, foreign grape wine in India. Even in the seventeenth century, India was an important market for Persian, Shirazi wine, which was at that period shipped in bottles packed in straw in crates, a trade run on the Persian side by Jewish and Christian communities. ⁹⁹ This trade may have been a relatively recent development, related to the presence of Europeans in ‘the Indies’. It declined with the creation of the Suez Canal and improved transportation. It is possible that the origin of imported wines, likewise, varied in early periods because of all sorts of factors.

The Significance of Wine: A Sketch of Later Developments

Is the nature of wine as a presumably expensive, prestigious import that was conceptually somewhat unlike other (usually compounded) drinks, perceptible in its treatment in literary, legal or religious contexts? We do not have a vast amount of data here, and much of it is highly conventional in style, but I think there is some evidence that material and economic aspects of wine did, indeed, affect how it was viewed in other contexts, as one would expect by comparison to the representation and culture of imported wine in other world regions. In the following paragraph, I present just a few sources to give a sense of how we might proceed with the historicisation of drinking culture in the light of economic and regional factors.

First, it should now be clear that grape wine was often considered to be foreign, and it is possible that this drink with its foreign appellation may also have been deemed especially prestigious. In a story cycle called the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha, of uncertain date, probably in the first millennium CE, there is a particularly vivid account of a young man’s first experience of drinking. On the morning after his drinking bout, there is a discussion of whether his drinking was right or wrong, at which point another friend enters. This man is drunk, and he explains:

He said “Your father’s other wife called for me and in the presence of the king gave the order ‘Your brother has been indulging in drink at night so, having yourself tasted the drink that is tasting good from the drink house (pānagṛhāt), you should have that which you like the taste of sent to your brother. ¹⁰⁰ And both the queens … made me go to the drink-house (pānāgara), led by the superintendent of drink (pānādhyakṣa-). There, gradually tasting the various drinks (pāna), I, inebriated, sent you a succession [of drinks]. Therefore drink the Kāpiśāyana āsava free from concerns—you have been permitted to do so by your delighted parents, along with the ministers.”

Then I spent days indulging in drink with my beloved and my circle of friends, with a delighted retinue …. ¹⁰¹

Here, in a literary representation of a royal household, there is a special room devoted to storing liquor, with an officer allocated to this task. At least as imagined in this text, various drinks are stored here, and some are considered to taste better than others, and the Kāpiśāyana wine (of Begram) is apparently the best. Of course, the reference to that particular variety may well be a literary simplification, like a character in a popular novel drinking Chateau Lafite—an accessible signifier for ‘posh wine’—though, arguably, if that is, indeed, the case for the passage above it only demonstrates even more clearly the established, conventional prestige of imported wine.

As we have seen, in much of South Asia, grapes and grape wine arrived, probably along with some aspects of wine culture (words? practices? vessels?), from distant or peripheral areas. Yet in some regions, namely Gandhāra and Kashmir, wine and grapes were local products. ¹⁰² It is possible that people drinking and writing about wine in those regions may even have incorporated some aspects of the greater Indic grape wine culture into their ways of thinking (the ‘pizza effect’). Consider the locavore pride in products esteemed throughout the Sanskrit ‘Cosmopolis’ that is evident in the following verse by the eleventh-century poet Bilhaṇa, describing his home village in Kashmir:

One side of it yields saffron,

lovely by nature,

the other grapes, pale as the sweet cane

that grows alongside the Sarayu

(Bilhaṇa, Vikramāṅkadevacarita 18.72, trans. Whitney Cox) ¹⁰³

Bilhaṇa clearly enjoys flaunting the abundance of these commodities even in his village, substances so desired and valued elsewhere in the Indic cultural sphere. The grapes, here, are pale (-pāṇdu) and compared to sugarcane—a source of sweetness common in other regions of South Asia—but possibly far less exciting to many readers than the sweetness of abundant fresh grapes.

The Kashmiri polymath Abhinavagupta, writing of a particular Tantric ritual (the Kula ritual) that requires the use of liquor, explained the merits of the various types of liquor in a manner that echoes the much adopted and adapted definition of surā-as-threefold in the Law Code of Manu (11.95) from jaggery; from crushed grains; and from ‘madhu’, possibly meaning grapes, or honey, or mahua flowers. In his discussion of liquors, Abhinavagupta resolves the ambiguity of the word ‘madhu-based’ (mādhvī) in the Law Code of Manu, making it explicit that honey (-kṣaudra-) is implied, and he then mentions that there is a better type of liquor, superior to the three liquors (surās) that evoke the Law Code of Manu, possibly because those three are closely associated with the conceptual inhibitions of Brahmanical orthodoxy:

11. And in the blessed Brahmayāmala [Tantra] it is stated that surā is the externalised juice/elixir of Śiva. Without it there is no supernatural power or liberation. It is made with ground grain, honey, or jaggery (piṣṭakṣaudraguḍais tu sā).

…

12 cd. But the thing produced from grapes (drākṣotthaṃ) is the supreme light (tejas), Bhairava (bhairavaṃ), ¹⁰⁴ devoid of formation/differentiation (kalpanojjhitam).

(Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka 29.11, 12 cd).

The commentator Jayaratha on this passage explains, quoting other stanzas, that this means grape wine alone is special, since it is simple/natural/spontaneous (sahaja), unlike the other drinks that are manufactured/fabricated (kṛtrima). ¹⁰⁵

Now, liquor was largely excluded from the orthodox, Vedic sacrifice, and where it is used, grain surā is the drink of Vedic rituals. The sacred liquor privileged in this example of mature Kashmiri Śaiva Tantra is, however, entirely in line with the later culture of drinking. This is not the place to explore the Tantric background to the passage and all the theological material contained here, but I think it is reasonable to suggest grape wine is singled out here because of some of the factors I have discussed earlier. Unlike the other drinks, wine was, indeed, strikingly uncompounded and known to be spontaneously fermenting—conveniently, much like the uncompounded, self-existent Absolute. I also do not think it excessive to suggest that Abhinavagupta (and prior tradition) has elevated this drink ritually and theologically, in part, due to its general high status in Indian drinking culture. And in the case of the elite Kashmiri—Abhinavagupta—the established pride in the local grapes and wine may even play a part too.

I can give only a few examples here of how we might read texts from other genres and contexts in the light of what we now know about wine, though scholars referring to more such materials in other genres, different periods and other languages might develop a more complex picture of wine as well as other drinks. Right now, my comments are a preliminary and even crude attempt at the cultural historicisation of liquor references for premodern South Asia. And these examples give a mere taste of the possibilities for thinking about alcohol culture in South Asia, a region that is more closely associated in much scholarship and popular thought with drugs and religious altered states of consciousness: soma, cannabis, opium, yoga and mindfulness (with scatterings of Greek/Roman wine). ¹⁰⁶ However, it should now be quite clear that drinking culture in South Asia, in representation and no doubt also in practice, was every bit as complex and varied as drinking culture in other regions, like France.

Conclusions

In ancient India, grape wine was assimilated into a pre-existing, varied drinking culture. Unlike other drinks, wine was made elsewhere, and varieties were named after foreign sources. The high cost and exotic origins of some aromatics were a celebrated part of the allure of perfumes in early India. ¹⁰⁷ And no doubt, a precious caṣaka cup brimming with Kāpiśāyana wine was shared in the same sort of exotic prestige. Where some earlier scholars have centred on wine as produced in marginal regions of South Asia (marginal at least as patterns of liquor production go), when we provincialise wine, our analysis lines up with the dominant Indic discourse of wine-as-import. Yet wine gains in being provincialised, as the fortunate Kashmiris knew very well—the local drinks in most of the regions, those made at the centre (perhaps excepting maireya at very early periods), are less positively marked in many respects from the first millennium on. ¹⁰⁸

In literary creations of the Gupta period onwards, wine has consolidated its role as a prestigious drink, though, by then, wine had to share the stage with another new substance, betel. This was especially the case for public consumption and what Michael Dielter calls ‘commensal politics’—the ‘negotiation, projection, and contestation of power’ through patterns of consumption of substances. ¹⁰⁹ It is not clear whether a named wine like Kāpiśāyana as mentioned in much later texts implies that this type of wine was available, or whether this term has become literary shorthand for ‘the most delicious precious fragrant grape wine’ just as one sees with the famed Opimian vintage of ancient Rome. ¹¹⁰ Also, did the representation of certain types of wine as prestigious in literary texts ever feed a demand for the drink—the ‘pinot noir effect’ engendered by the film Sideways?

Given the nature of the trade in wine in early India, it was most likely not possible to indulge in the sort of micro-calibrated connoisseurship one finds today in wine culture, as most drinkers would probably never know the exact origin of the wine as they do today, and tasting/evaluating may have been a job for servants, as we saw earlier. Perhaps at certain periods, some people were aware that a wine was Persian, Roman or Kāpiśāyana, and maybe wines were associated with particular traders, though, as many containers were the same shape, they may have been hard to differentiate. ¹¹¹ By contrast, the fact that knowledge of the selection and evaluation of fine wine has for some time been a socially distinguishing trait of the wealthy in Europe seems rather odd by comparison—the bourgeois colonisation of the expertise of the kitchen and larder?

Wine lacked the ancient, canonical, religious and symbolic heritage of locally brewed grain surā, yet it was highly appreciated in South Asia. In this respect, South Asia was less like wine-producing regions, such as ancient Persia or the Mediterranean, and more like ancient Mesopotamia of which Bottéro could write of ‘wine in a civilisation of beer’. ¹¹² Yet this relative novelty left some cultural and legal space around wine such that the elite (at least those who drank) seem to have esteemed wine and been allowed it—it is perhaps no coincidence that for Hindus, it was subject to fewer prohibitions than surā. ¹¹³ We might again compare this to early modern England, where ‘upper’ classes drank wine in the tavern, and commoners drank ale in the alehouse. Here, the drink, the drinker, the drinking-place and the mode of drinking were tied together, with economic aspects of the drink (local vs. imported) playing an important part in this hierarchy. In the short, anonymous English play I mentioned earlier, Wine, Beere, Ale and Tobacco, ¹¹⁴ these four pleasures are personified and contend for superiority. Water cools their tempers, praising the three drinks for their prowess in different realms:

Water: Water shall allow each of you a singularitie. First, you Wine, shall be in most request among Courtiers, Gallands, Gentlemen, Poeticall wits …

You Beere, shall bee in most grace with the Citizens, as being a more stayed Liquor, fit for them that purpose retirement and gravitie, that with the Snaile carries the cares of a house and family with them, typed to the atendance of an illiberal profession …

You Ale I remit to the Countrie as more fit to live where you were bred: your credit shall not be inferiour, for people of all sorts shall desire your acquaintance, specially in the morning … bee allowed a Robin-hood or Mother Red-cap [sign], to hang at your doore … and if you come into the Citie, you may be drunke with pleasure, but never come into the fashion. ¹¹⁵

In addition to an association with consumption in by a certain class and in a certain place, wine’s foreign provenance is noted, as, later on, is his association with Bacchus and classical learning, though not at the expense of the ‘old Ale of England’. ¹¹⁶ Drinks in India were (and still are), likewise, associated with certain classes, places and origins. Social, geographic and economic associations no doubt developed in a complicated, dialectical manner with representations of drinks and drinking. Surā, for example, is the ‘filth of grains’, a local drink of the common people, yet this drink is also a goddess with relatively well-known mythology, and the drink has an ancient Vedic pedigree. Grape wine, on the other hand, has a far sparser ‘classical’ background, is foreign, yet is praised for its aesthetic qualities and is technically legally permitted to the non-brahmin varṇas. Compare the weekly batch of grain surā—tasty and well made but probably always more or less the same from the hands of a given maker—to a hefty imported torpedo jar of ‘Persian’ wine. Wine was like a nutmeg, and surā was like a bunch of mint, or even a loaf of bread. Like nutmeg, wine had fewer associations in the most ancient laws and scriptures, whereas surā, like bread in Europe, did have a place in those ancient canons. Seen in this manner, the legal and literary implications of the two drinks are easier to understand and seem almost predictable.

Yet these newcomers—betel and wine—were mentioned in works by Kālidāsa, for example, as well as in later dharmaśāstra. So, by the mid-first millennium CE, these substances too had become features of a ‘classical’, if not Vedic, world of consumables. As for later periods, wine and grape words are found in the early second millennium too, though it is hard to know when writers are acquainted with wine and grapes, in practice, or their knowledge comes from scholarly lists of substances, definitions of Sanskrit words and literary references to Kāpiśāyana wine. ¹¹⁷ Grape āsavas today are often made with rehydrated raisins, and when we read of grapes and even of wine in earlier periods, we must not assume we are always dealing with imported wine. Certainly, Jewish communities in South India made wine from raisins in the sixteenth century. ¹¹⁸ European sources from the seventeenth century mention wine imports to India from Europe, the Canary Islands, South Africa and Persia. ¹¹⁹ It is for the centuries around the turn of the second millennium CE that my presentation here is rather sparse for wine, but maybe work on more texts in vernacular languages from the early to mid-second millennium will improve the state of our knowledge.

Grape wine was literally an exceptional drink in ancient and early medieval India: unusually simple, yet exotic and prestigious, ultimately celebrated in Sanskrit poetry but absent from the Vedas and epics. A new classic of a drink. Yet wine culture was still hampered somewhat by complex attitudes towards drinking. Thus, as a prestigious item of consumption, wine had to cede the limelight to a far more universally acceptable substance, one that also possessed no ancient history, was subject to few legal restrictions and was even classified more as a perfume in early sources: the expensively perfumed betel quid. ¹²⁰

Abbreviations for Works Frequently Cited