2 Rdjendralala Mitra —Spirituous Drinks in Ancient India. [No. 1, 
more emphatically than the Prophet of Arabia, and yet there is no Muham¬ 
madan country where the consumption of wine is other than considerable, 
or as the great historian, Gibbon, has aptly expressed it, “ the wines of Shiraz 
have always prevailed over the laws of Muhammad.” 
The annals of the Indo-Aryans yield a no less remarkable illustration. 
The earliest Brahman settlers were a spirit-drinking race, and indulged largely 
both in Soma beer and strong spirits. To their gods the most acceptable and 
grateful offering was Soma beer, and wine or spirit (for in connexion with India 
the two words may he used synonymously, there never having been any 
such thing as pure wine,) was publicly sold in shops for the use of the 
community. In the Rig Veda Sanhita a hymn occurs which shows that 
wine was kept in leather bottles, # and freely sold to all comers. The said 
wine was, likewise, offered to the gods, and the Sautramani and the Vdjapaya 
rites, of which libations of strong arrack formed a prominent feature, were 
held in the highest esteem. Doubts have been entertained as to the nature 
of the Soma beverage, and people are not wanting who repudiate its in¬ 
toxicating nature; but none will venture to deny that the surd of the 
Sautramani and the Vdjapaya was other than arrack manufactured from 
rice-meal, and that will suffice to show that the Yedic Hindus did counten¬ 
ance the use of spirit. As to the Soma, if any reliance is to be placed in 
the directions given for its preparation, and on the Yedic descriptions of its 
effect on the gods, it is impossible to take it to have been other than a fer¬ 
mented intoxicating beverage. Of this, however, I shall treat lower down. 
In the hot plains of India, over-indulgence in spirituous drinks, however 
gradually bore its evil consequences, and among the thoughtful a revulsion 
of feeling was the result. The later Yedas accordingly proposed a compro¬ 
mise, and, leaving the rites intact, prohibited the use of spirit for the grati¬ 
fication of the senses, in language very similar to Sydney Smith’s u Think 
not, touch not, and taste not,” saying “ Wine is unfit to be drunk, unfit to 
be given, and unfit to be accepted,”! and denounced drinking to be heinous 
in the last degree, quite as bad as the murder of a Brahman. The Smritis, 
following in their wake, included the sin of wiuebibing among the five 
capital crimes or mahdpdtakas , and ordained the severest punishment against 
the offender. 
It is said that the prohibition was first promulgated by S'ukracharya, 
the high priest of the Asuras, who was disgusted by the remembrance of 
certain excesses to which he himself had been led by over-indulgence in 
strong drink. The Mahabharata has eupliuised the story in the 76th chapter 
* “ I deposit the poison in the solar orb, like a leather bottle in the house of a 
vendor of spirits.” Wilson’s Rig Yeda, II, p. 204. 
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