Alcohol Licensing Rules in India's Dry States

Alcohol Licensing Rules in India's Dry States make legal access to alcohol depend on being certified as an alcoholic. In Bombay, the rule does not end drinking; it creates a market in permits, which Ahmed Sinai expands by sending household workers to obtain them. The episode connects regulation to addiction and to the unequal exchange by which the poor sell pieces of their identity for liquor consumed by the wealthy.

The licensing system

Bombay has been declared a dry state, and the stated route to a drink is certification as an alcoholic. Doctors who provide such certification become a new professional category. Ahmed is introduced to Doctor Sharabi by Homi Catrack; each month, the two men and other respectable residents queue outside the doctor’s surgery and leave with small pink chitties certifying alcoholism.

The ration allowed under these permits is not enough for Ahmed. He sends servants, gardeners, bearers, and drivers to obtain more, extending the system beyond the drinkers who first queue for certification. Old Musa and Mary Pereira are among those enlisted. Ahmed then exchanges the additional permits at Vijay Stores on Gowalia Tank Road for brown paper bags containing green bottles of liquor.

How the rule shapes Ahmed’s drinking

The permits turn a legal restriction into a supply chain. Ahmed drinks liquor obtained through the identities of his employees, and the narrator describes the exchange in stark economic terms: poor people, with little else to sell, part with their identities on small pieces of pink paper, which Ahmed converts into drink. The rule therefore regulates access through certification while leaving the cost of satisfying his demand to people in his household.

The arrangement becomes part of a daily pattern. At six each evening, Ahmed enters what the narrator calls the world of the djinns; the following morning he arrives at breakfast unshaven, with red eyes and a throbbing head. Over the years, the good mood he once had before shaving gives way to irritability and exhaustion. The narrative presents the permits not as a cure or a check on drinking, but as the means by which his dependence is repeatedly supplied.

Narrative significance

The licensing rule is shown through its effects on a family and its workers rather than through a formal account of legislation. Ahmed’s access depends on a medical certificate, but his ability to exceed the permitted ration depends on recruiting others to secure more certificates. The contrast between respectable men waiting at Doctor Sharabi’s door and servants’ identities being converted into liquor exposes the unequal consequences of the same system.

The bottle also becomes a recurring image in the family’s account of Ahmed. When Saleem is seven, Ahmed tells him a story about a djinn in a bottle and stages a small demonstration with a dark green bottle and a lighter. Saleem later concludes that his father fights the bottle-bound spirits, but recognizes that Ahmed does not win. That childhood scene gives a fantastical shape to the drinking habit the licensing system enables, while the account of pink permits keeps its social and material cost in view.