Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
What happens when a democratic state—still in the process of formation—commits to banning a substance, especially one as controversial as alcohol? Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of alcohol prohibition in India, drawing on extensive archival research and rich vernacular sources to explain its surprising resilience over time. Since its inception, prohibition has served both as an ideal and a tool of state power—a dual role that has worked to shape its shifting trajectories. Each phase of enforcement has served to reaffirm prohibition's founding logic, thereby further embedding it in the machinery of governance—even as it has constrained its future implementation. Foregrounding intersections with caste and gender, the book illuminates how diverse social responses have made prohibition a deeply contested—sobering—yet enduring project. While prohibition may be a thing of the past in the West, history helps to keep it alive in India.
57:07•16 Sept 2026
Sober State: How India Turned Alcohol Policy into a Democratic Ideal
Episode Overview
- Prohibition in India grew from provincial experiments in Madras, linking alcohol control directly to the wider project of building a modern state.
- Archival material such as petitions and street songs reveals that working-class and marginalised groups engaged with prohibition in complex, often resistant ways.
- Comparisons with the United States highlight India’s unique decision to retain prohibition as a constitutional ideal rather than abandon it after policy failure.
- Caste, class and gender structured who was labelled a problematic drinker, with country liquor and subaltern drinkers bearing the brunt of restrictive policies.
- Article 47 embeds prohibition as a national goal while leaving implementation to individual states, creating ongoing tensions between moral aspiration and fiscal reality.
“"The bottle needs to be corked but there is a right time to cork the bottle."”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? This conversation asks that question on a national scale, looking at how India built a "sober state" through law, politics and everyday life. Rather than focusing on individual recovery stories, the episode follows historian Dr Dharani Alagarisamy as she talks through the origins of alcohol prohibition in India and why the policy still shapes debates about drinking today.
You'll hear how her fascination with history led to a major study of temperance and prohibition in the Madras presidency, which gradually turned into a wider story about state-building and power. Using petitions from fishermen and working-class women, street songs about favourite toddy shops, and dense policy documents, she shows how drinking was woven into daily routines and why banning alcohol was never a straightforward moral crusade.
The episode compares India with the United States, where prohibition collapsed after 13 years, and asks why India instead wrote alcohol control into its constitution as a democratic ideal. Class, caste and gender appear constantly: middle-class women petitioned to move liquor shops away from "respectable" neighbourhoods, while some working-class women argued that nearby shops actually limited harm because men spent less time and money drinking.
Dr Alagarisamy also explains how colonial officials and nationalist leaders divided drinkers into "responsible" and "irresponsible" groups and treated country liquor as the main problem, leaving room for more elite forms of alcohol to continue. The story carries through to independent India, where prohibition is framed as a national goal but handed to individual states to implement or roll back.
If you're curious how laws, stigma and social class shape the drinking landscape that people in India are still negotiating today, this episode gives you plenty to think about—how might these historical patterns be colouring current conversations about alcohol and recovery in your own context?
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