India is losing the taste for toddy

One of the most alluring recipe openings I know is given in Katy Dalal’s Jamva Chaloji 2, her collection of lesser-known Parsi recipes, many of which are drawn from villages in Gujarat. The recipe for Tadi-no-Batervo, mutton cooked in toddy, calls for “2 kgs top quality mutton leg from a male goat/ 7 bottles toddy, should be on the sweeter side...”

Her son Kurush Dalal, an archaeologist and food scholar, confirms that the recipe is excellent and can be made with “two litres [of toddy] for half a kilo of good fatty goat meat and you are set”. But he notes sadly that good sweet toddy is harder to find these days. Toddy was clearly a favoured ingredient since the book also has a vegetarian recipe for drumsticks cooked in toddy and a drink of toddy warmed with garlic, pepper and jaggery.

In Goa it might be possible to try this someday. Stories in the media regularly bemoan the dwindling numbers of toddy tappers in the state, but there are still enough of them climbing tall coconut trees, incising the flower stalk and fixing pots to collect the sweet sap that drains out. This sap is then distilled into coconut feni, boiled down into palm jaggery, fermented into vinegar, used to make the leavened rice cakes called sannas, or to raise bread by a few bakers.

You can even drink it. Legality is a bit of a grey area, but it is not hard to get a bottle of the milky-white liquid, so full of sugars and natural yeasts that it is fizzing slightly. Toddy is around 4%-5% alcohol, which varies with the weather. In the so-called Goan winter, it is sweet and only mildly fermented by noon. In summer, by mid-morning it is already strong and souring, which makes you understand Dalal’s specification of “sweeter side”.

The stronger the toddy the stronger the smell. This can be rather unpleasant, yeasty and ammonia-tinged and that is why many people refuse to drink toddy. It helps to pinch your nose when taking the first swig. But even so, the drink itself tastes alive. Forget kombucha and all those probiotic drinks sold as being good for your gut. With toddy you can feel your inner bacteria bursting into celebration.

Thirsty ancestors

Toddy’s readiness to ferment might make it one of the oldest alcoholic drinks. Some form of the drink has been made across the tropics, in Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands and even Mexico, which got both coconut palms and the skill to tap them from the Philippines. As palm wine in West Africa, it is deeply woven into local rituals and traditions: drinking sessions there often start with spilling a little on the ground for thirsty ancestors.

Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), is now acknowledged as one of the classics of African literature. The narrator is deeply enamoured of palm wine, which is produced for him by an experienced tapper from an estate of 560,000 trees. When the tapper falls from a tree and dies, the narrator follows him into the land of the dead to get him back since no other tapper can make palm wine to his taste.

This underlines one of the central issues with the drink. It is extremely variable. What you get depends on the tree (since a range of palms can be tapped, such as coconut, palmyra, fishtail, date), the way the tapping is done, the time and season of the tapping and, above all, the skill of the tapper. Most palms are tapped with an incision below the spadix, the fleshy inflorescence at the top of the male palm, but some, like date palms, are cut lower down the trunk.

James McHugh, in An Unholy Brew, his study of alcohol in Indian history and religions, cautions that this variability means that it is hard to know when historical texts are talking about toddy. The confusion can stem from the fact that, aside from sap, alcohol can be made from dates, coconut water and palm jaggery dissolved in water, all obtained from palms. McHugh suggests that one legend, of Krishna’s brother Balarama being a great toddy lover, might come from the fact that Balarama’s banner displayed a palmyra tree. But this might be linked to another legend of how he defeated a demon by throwing him to the top of a palmyra tree, rather than drinking its toddy.

The one defining feature of toddy is that it involves climbing and cutting a palm tree. McHugh offers various texts from 1st millennium CE as possible references to toddy, but a clear description of its collection is given in the 12th century Manasollasa, which notes the importance of keeping the pots on the tree “for three watches [about nine hours total]”. Another reason why earlier references to toddy are rare is that palms grow best along the coastline, which has literally been marginalised by historians who focus on India’s interiors and river plains.

But the coast was where the British first encountered India, and toddy was part of their earliest interactions. British sailors and soldiers realised that the fermented sap was similar to beer and they took to drinking it with enthusiasm. Edward Terry, the chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador to the Mughal court, noted that it was a “very piercing and medicinable and inoffensive Drink” if taken early in the day but “heady, not so well relished and unwholesome” later on. Unfortunately, the latter is what the sailors liked.

Variable payoff

As the British started to take control of Indian coastal areas, they realised that coconut trees could be a source of revenue and a way to control toddy. Because toddy collection happened very visibly up the tree, it was harder to conceal than other kinds of liquor production. This started a system of control over palm tree tapping which has, in different ways, endured till today.

British regulation was usually followed by Indian prohibition. Mumbaikars might remember the roadside and railway platform stalls selling neera, the local term for the fresh sap. They were only open in the mornings, and prohibited you from taking the juice away in a bottle for fear that you might let it ferment into toddy. In states like Tamil Nadu, trees can be tapped, but the sap must be made into jaggery, known as karupatti in Tamil. Other kinds of alcohol are freely available in these states, but something as ancient as toddy is not allowed.

A few states like Goa and Kerala are relatively liberal in this regard, but it does not seem to be translating into greater availability of good, fresh toddy. Kerala has become famous for its Kallu (toddy) shops, places where toddy is sold alongside spicy snacks and more substantial dishes to whet your appetite and make you drink more. Kallu shop cuisine is emerging as a genre in itself, with restaurants and food festivals advertising kallu shop specialties. But the toddy itself seems to be taking a back seat.

In an essay on toddy shops, published in the book House Spirits, Samanth Subramaniam identifies the reason: toddy is not strong enough for Kerala’s dedicated drinkers. Toddy shop owners, he writes, “will ramp up the kick of the drink, pouring in cheap vodka or dubious arrack or country liquor. Some owners, I was told, powder dried marijuana leaves, tie them into a bundle of thin cotton cloth, and soak the bundles in toddy.” No one wants really good toddy, he is told.

In a sense the problem is toddy’s transitional nature. Non-drinkers spurn it because it is seen as alcoholic, while hard-core drinkers disdain it for not being strong enough. Its changeability seems so essential to it that bottling it like beer would seem like killing something essential. Fermented drinks like kombucha, Russian kvass and Mexican tepache are being embraced for their health benefits, but toddy’s connotations are perhaps too Indian and rural to be appreciated in the same way.

The second and greater problem comes with the collection. It is difficult work. Tapping typically requires three climbs a day, to keep the incision open and collect the liquid before it starts fermenting too much. A full-sized coconut tree, like Goa’s Benaulim variety, is 10-15 metres tall. A tapper often handles a grove of around 25-30 trees. Do the math and you will see that he – and with a few exceptions tappers are nearly all male – is climbing the equivalent of Mt Everest a couple of times a month.

Palm trees do not have convenient branches to hang onto, so tappers must scale them by hugging the trunks and inching their way up. Ropes make it easier and a chest guard helps, but it is still painful, dangerous work, especially when the winds make the trees sway. Indian inventors have come up with robots and mechanical aids to climb palm trees, but this is more of a help with the relatively simple task of coconut picking.

Toddy tapping requires far more skill. Care must be taken in fixing the pot. If it is too exposed, yeasts and other contaminants spoil the sap too early, and there is also the danger of animals, like bats, raiding the sweet, alluring liquid. (Alarmingly, it has been suggested that the Nipah virus might be transmitted by bats urinating in the pots). In One for the Road, Biula Cruz e Pereira’s study of alcohol in Goan life, she notes that experienced tappers also carry out a practice called matanne, which involves hammering the spadix to stimulate the sap flow.

One argument often advanced against toddy tapping is that it prevents coconut production. Miguel Braganza, Goa’s leading horticulturist and mentor to its farmers, comes from a coconut-cultivating family and easily debunks this theory. “The flowering will take place after the toddy tapping is stopped and the spathe-spadix complex is allowed to open, bloom, pollinate and set fruit,” he said. Tapping, in fact, benefits trees because it involves cleaning the areas around the spadix, which allows identification of potentially dangerous pests like beetles. “The infestation is detected fast enough to remedy,” he said.

Backbreaking work

But it is all a lot of work with risks and little returns. Toddy’s poor reputation means that people expect it to be cheap and even the value-added products from it, such as jaggery, rarely justify the work. In Nine Rupees An Hour, Aparna Karthikeyan’s book chronicling disappearing livelihoods in Tamil Nadu, one chapter sketches out the hard life of Anthony Rayappan and his family as they eke out a bare living from a palm grove in Rameshwaram district. Rayappan has to pay a fixed rate to the owner of the trees and sells the jaggery made from the toddy to a trader who makes the real profits from it. “There is a minimum of Rs10,000-Rs15,000 outstanding at the end of each season, and the family is constantly caught in a cycle of debt and loans,” writes Karthikeyan.

Since this is Tamil Nadu all the toddy must be made into karupatti. This is done by the tappers’ wives, and it is exacting work since the juice must be boiled carefully for hours over a wood fire. “Every minute she’s inside, bent over or crouched next to the wood fire, she’s breathing in fumes, her face is scorched and her eyes smart and tear up,” writes Karthikeyan. The juice can easily burn and turn bitter, so it has to be watched constantly. (For an unusual Bollywood depiction of this toil, check the early Amitach Bachchan film Saudagar, which is set in Bengal, but realistically shows the problems of palm tappers and their jaggery maker wives.)

The low status of toddy and the marginalisation of tappers have led to their communities receiving Scheduled Caste status in states like Goa and Kerala. This has been a welcome benefit, but it has not led to greater availability of toddy. Given the work involved, it is no surprise that community members prefer applying for more prestigious jobs. At the same time, there is a rumoured reluctance among them to let non-community members tap toddy.

One feni maker in Goa, who is a major buyer of toddy, tells me ruefully that the local tapping community came to an impasse on this issue, not ready to tap, nor letting others do it. This has an unexpected personal resonance since my mother comes from the Thiyya community of north Kerala, who were historically toddy tappers, but have long left this trade behind. Subramaniam notes this in his essay when a friend tells him that this is why there is less toddy tapping done in north Kerala, with most of the supply coming from south Kerala. There it is done by the Iravas (or Ezhavas), the equivalent community of the Thiyyas in the north.

Being called “toddy tappers” was somewhere between a joke and a veiled insult in my mother’s family. It leant towards a joke when done by family members, perhaps with some self-satisfaction because their current jobs, which tended to be bureaucratic and military, were nothing like the labour of climbing palm trees. It leant towards insults when this historical trade was mentioned by other community members, with an implied sneer.

What was entirely absent was actual toddy. No one I remember ever spoke of drinking or wanting it. The only place an echo remained was in the jewellery characteristic of the community made of gold coins threaded into necklaces or belts. The most valued coins were Venetian ducats, relics of the historical spice trade, which always depicted the Doge, the elected ruler of Venice, kneeling before St Mark, the city’s patron saint, with hands outstretched to receive the ring of authority.

The joke was that this coin was particularly valued because it showed the traditional position of a toddy tapper pouring toddy into the cupped hands of a drinker eager to consume it on the spot. One name for the coins was sanar-kaasu, where sanar referred to the toddy tapper. It was a vivid sign of the value created by toddy, in all the forms in which it was used, even as the actual beverage disappeared or was degraded in value.

Some of these forms are likely to continue. Palm jaggery, long valued in Bengal, is now being acknowledged as a delicious and relatively healthy form of sweetness in other parts of India. Sweet shops in Tamil Nadu now have karupatti versions of many regular sweets. The diamond-shaped kaju katli is a real revelation when made with palm jaggery, with a depth of taste lacking in the regular sugar-based version.

Chefs use vinegar made with toddy as an essential ingredient in Goan Catholic dishes. A few bakers in Goa have gone back to making bread with toddy and it is a delight. The natural yeasts help the dough rise, but the remaining sugars caramelise while baking to give a beautiful brown colour and complexity of flavour that is completely lacking in the regular pao and poi sold in markets. The last time I spoke to the feni maker he was hopeful that the toddy tapper’s association would come to an agreement that would allow non-community workers to produce toddy that could be used for feni.

What is missing is the most basic way of drinking toddy, fresh and fizzing slightly, just hours after being brought down from the tree. That ancient drink, with all its ritual uses and health benefits, as well as uses in cooking like in Dalal’s mighty recipe for mutton with toddy, seems likely to remain rare. I can only hope I still continue to get it occasionally in Goa, thanks to the grace of the tappers who still climb the trees.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.