Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India
Abstract
This paper is based on our research in parts of Northeast India that have led us to think of women, work, and alcohol. In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Beyond being an honorific drink, rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region. Simultaneously, we see newer changes such as commercialisation as premium “heritage brews” and mass manufacturing of both rice wines and increasingly, fruit and tea wines. The leading concern then is the monetisation, commercialisation (or, penalisation) of rice beer, the gendered shifts/effects this process engenders and its removal from the entire gamut of relational work that indigenous women in northeastern India perform around their homestead and jhum lands. Is there, then, a quintessential idea of brewing as “women’s work”—what makes it such and what are the disruptions? What does it mean to brew or do wine work today? How are religion and morality, organic, wellness and sustainability discourses implicated in brewing work? We reflect on changing ideas about work looking at shifts in these discourses around heritage brews of Northeast India.
Citation: Goswami, Upasana and Abhishruti Sarma. “Women, Work and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/brewing [date of access]
(This paper was co-authored equally by Upasana Goswami and Abhishruti Sarma.)
Introduction
Festivals in many communities of the northeast of India are never complete without a traditional pour of locally made alcohol. This act of merry consumption brews in a rich geo-cultural history of the region. In regions of northeast India, where there is an abundance of rice, millet, and maize cultivation, local communities prepare drinks from the surplus left after the cultivation of these crops. These drinks—significant in the communities' ontological and cosmological worldviews—are used in marriages, festivals, meetings, mournings and as awards. Rice wine is known by different names in different communities—xaj paani among the Ahoms, apong among the Adis and the Misings, judima among the Dimasas, hor among the Karbis, zao among the Zeme Nagas and so on.
It is traditionally the work of women, a work that falls within the gamut of the household chore, to make rice wine. In this paper, we delve into the changes that have come about in this household work, when it becomes commercialised. What happens to the idea of women’s work when it shifts from the homes to factories—does it get formalised, alienated, or does it no longer remain the work of women? We look into the transition that heritage brews have gone through in the climate of liquor prohibition acts, the coming of the Indian-made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), changes in religion, and the increasing incentivisation of horticulture farms. This transition, of course, has been neither definite nor homogenous. Rather, it is the fluid networks of kinships, friendships, work, and leisure that have characterised the wine landscape of the region. To borrow from Arjun Appadurai (1996), the use of the suffix “-scape” allows us to think about the brewing and consumption of alcohol in a perspectival manner steeped in specific contexts of history, politics, language, and ecology differing across time and space. In this essay, we think about the winescape of the northeastern region that moves through the everyday practices of the homestead to international markets.
The Shergaon Story
Our first trip to the quaint little town of Shergaon(1) in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh was in April 2022. Our second was in November of the same year. On these different occasions and by different hosts, we were offered different honorific drinks: glasses of rice wine on our first visit and a fruit wine made from wild olives on our second. Both of these were prepared at home by women. The fruit wines in Shergaon are made from wild fruits plucked from community-owned forests nearby. These wines are made using different fruits depending on their seasonal availability. Rice wine, on the other hand, is a traditional drink made at home which is also significant in the Sherdukpen rituals—marriage, harvest festivals, hunting, and so on. Of course, these home-brews are not limited to rice alone, they are made also from maize, finger millets and buckwheat, known locally as phaak.
Shergaon, home to the Sherdukpen tribe, is predominantly a Buddhist village where ideas of conservation and sustainability shape day-to-day routines and behaviour. Dr. Lobsang Tashi Thungon, a botanist and teacher from the village, spoke to us about the manner in which the concept of “sustainable development” conflates Buddhist and indigenous ways of life. For instance, the local people go hunting or foraging only according to the Buddhist lunar calendar for the belief that no living beings must be hurt on the days that their religion does not permit them. These ideas are indicative of the shift to wild fruit wines in the region. In Shergaon, this shift occurs without depreciating the significance of the traditional or heritage brew—it occurs as a step towards familiarising native species and one’s environment to the younger generation in the times of a global market.
This transition, according to Dr. Tashi, has been the work of women in the village. They began by simply identifying edible wild fruits in their forests which had somewhat lost their place to packeted snacks. This transition can also be attributed to the shift to cash crops like potatoes, cabbages, tomatoes and so on, implying a lesser surplus of the labour-intensive paddy and plants that are used to brew the traditional drink. Traditional brews have, therefore, now been limited to festivities and ritualistic practices. However, as this village-town is gearing up its tourism sector, the community is also working toward limiting the sale of fruit wines such that they do not enter into market competition with other wines. There is a belief among the community members that the ‘affect’ and emotion that characterises the wine-making process among the women in the village is lost when mass manufactured in machines. As we will see in the next section, this affect and emotion are deeply tied to indigenous cosmologies.
The Shergaon vignette is worth thinking about because women’s work of making wine is relational. This work is embedded in the village’s understanding of sustainable futures, tourism, religion, and culture. Here, religion and culture are two distinct identities and modes of behaviour (Longkumer, 2016) for most communities of Northeast India that were majorly influenced by the coming of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the case of the Sherdukpens. This difference in the embodiment of both religion and culture shapes a community or precisely an individual’s attitude towards the consumption and production of heritage brews, as we will see later.
Cultures of Brewing
How do we begin to think about this transition to fruit wines and tea wines—what does it entail? How do we think of this shift away from traditional brews and their reframing as premium heritage brews targeted towards tourism, market consumption and distribution? Cultures of brewing in the northeastern region of India are deeply embedded in the historical complexities of migration, colonialism, liberal markets, militancy, and governmental policies. They are also embedded in local ecologies—the jhum fields, and surrounding community forests and plantations (Daulagupu & Kikon, 2023). The work surrounding rice wine brewing in the region, then, is also relational because brewing does not happen in isolation—it is always in relation to other work that women do in their homesteads, agricultural fields and forests and also the work that men do. For instance, before the advent of Christian missionaries in Mizoram, rice wine poured in a mithun (Bos frontalis) horn was awarded to the bravest warrior of the community. The work that goes into making wine, therefore, extends into the everyday practices and rituals of the communities, be it animal sacrifices, hunting, harvest festivals, and so on. The traditional rice wine then becomes more than just a celebratory drink—it becomes a product of purity, of sacrality, and of respect. Before consuming the freshly brewed wine a prayer is uttered to the gods and spirits; this is also true for when the drink is offered to guests among communities like the Misings and the Ahoms in Assam. Hunters (mostly men) across communities in the northeast of India take with them home-made brews to offer to spirits who in their cosmological worlds own the forests and animals—-thus creating a network of exchange with the otherworldly.
Affect, sensation, and emotion matter not just during consumption but also in the process of making the traditional rice wine. While the process may have variations across different communities, the preparation of the yeast starter cakes is considered to be sacred by many (cf. Daulagupu and Kikon, 2023). For the Aka tribe in Arunachal Pradesh’s West Kameng district, the preparation of the yeast cakes by women in their homes needs to be an extremely pure process. It is in the making of the yeast cakes that the woman transcends into the metaphysical realm of the spirits. The making of traditional brews then also acts as a medium of exchange between the human world and the world of the spirits, where the yeast cake becomes the path to it. Therefore, the Aka women must be in their completely “pure” selves, that is, not menstruating and must also make sure that nobody from outside enters their homes when they are preparing the starter cakes. There is indeed a strong emotional appeal in making heritage brews that come from the community’s or the individual’s association with their gods and spirits that explains its cultural and collective relevance. Affect, here, is of course tactile or gustatory, but also spiritual in that, through this practice, the woman transcends into the world of spirits where otherwise only priests are believed to have access.
Image 1: Rice wine being brewed and distilled in a whisky bottle in West Karbi Anglong, Assam. Photo by Upasana Goswami, 2021.
Changes in cultures of brewing and consumption have not been uniform in the region. First, these changes can be attributed to the advent of Christianity and conversions to the new religion among communities in the region. Questions of morality and civility came to be associated with traditional brews with the influence of colonial administrators, and later appropriated by the local people in the post-colonial state (Longkumer, 2016). Chaya (2023) writes, “Back in Nagaland it would only be available in poor neighbourhoods, from families struggling to make a living. Unless one were an alcoholic, one would not visit such a neighbourhood. In fact, even an alcoholic would not visit it unless they were short on money. Rice beer was a drink sold by the desperate, for the desperate”.
Second, the introduction of IMFL in these indigenous/ethnic landscapes has altered ritualistic practices. Among communities like the Mishmi or the Aka in Arunachal Pradesh, the priests had to be offered homemade brews which helped them in their spiritual dialogue with the divine. In many places now, one can see priests with widely available cans of Kingfisher or Tuborg (bought at considerably lesser prices) performing the same rituals. The easy access to store-bought beer as opposed to weeks, sometimes months, of brewing at home becomes a convenient choice for many.
Third, also an extension of the first, is the liquor prohibition act that encompasses states like Manipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram. When we think about local brews, we are also confronted with country liquor which again is locally made but different in that it is made by fermenting molasses —a byproduct of sugar-refining. Country liquor, like sulai in Assam, has more alcohol content than traditional rice beer. This makes it illicit as per the Excise departments of many of the northeastern states. Several alcohol deaths in Assam led to the ban of molasses in the state in 2019 (Saikia, 2019). The problem arises when molasses are either mixed with or substituted by methanol, an industrial solvent. Briefly put, there has been a conflict in understanding the cause of deaths in the region as they have been attributed largely to molasses and the mixing of “the spirit” and water. Although the discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, such conflicts lay the ground to better understand liquor prohibition acts and the shift to branding of heritage brews in the region. Akash Jyoti Gogoi, the person behind the bottling and branding of the traditional Ahom rice wine, Xaj, spoke to us about the adulteration that happens in the locally sold rice wines in the villages. “You can’t trust them, you never know what they mix”, he told us. This distrust stems from the number of deaths owing to country liquor in the region.
The Liquor Prohibition Act of 1991 in Manipur is significant to this discussion of women and wine. A group of women torchbearers and vigilantes called the Meira Paibis fought for it given the increasing misuse of alcohol and drugs in the state. The Act prohibits the purchase, sale, transportation, manufacture and import of liquor (Hanghal, 2022), but makes exceptions for traditional or heritage brews (Kamei, 2014). However, despite the ban, alcohol has been easily accessible in the state. The problem with ‘dry states’, as Francis Sailo the owner of Isabella wines in Mizoram (also a dry state), suggests is that it does not do much in terms of limiting alcohol consumption or exchange as the regulations have never been rigid. Rather, it hurts the government because it does not get the taxes from the sale of liquor that happens in the black market and renders brewers more vulnerable. Even in Mizoram, this exchange is a common occurrence and characteristically, a transnational activity as it shares its border with Myanmar. Sailo flippantly remarks that the mis-use of alcohol began only after Christian missionaries came into the region to begin the process of ‘civilisation’. Alcohol brewing in many parts of the region, we were told, was only a seasonal activity that happened during the harvest seasons. This is also why traditional brews still remain significant despite wide-scale bans and prohibitions in the region. Even though they have been substituted with tea (with heaps of sugar!) or cold drinks as welcome drinks among many, brewing rice wine remains a community activity during festivals of harvest. But what happens to this work of rice wine brewing when new forms of wines are introduced and ‘framed’ in these indigenous winescapes?
‘Reframing’ fruit wines, tea wines, rice wines
The harvest festival of the Aka tribe in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh is a big event, well planned and organised by the whole community in November. It is more than a weeklong event where people set up stalls in the host village. The common item in these numerous stalls is alcohol. Majority of the Aka people across villages converted to Christianity decades ago. As a result, rice beer or its variants are only made for sale in these festivals. Along with these traditional brews, all the stalls are also lined with bottled peach, kiwi and apple wines from Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh, beer cans of Kingfisher, Tuborg and other IMFL drinks. This is only one of the many festivals celebrated by different communities in the region and the trend is somewhat similar.
Image 2: Rice wine sold at the harvest festival of the Aka tribe in Buragaon, West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh. Photo by Abhishruti Sarma, 2022.
Amidst this changing landscape, there is an effort to reframe traditional or heritage brews (made of rice, millet and so on), along with newer varieties of fruit and tea wines in the region. While a smaller local and informal home-based traditional rice beer/wine economy continues today, this newer reframing is geared primarily towards middle and upper class consumption, finished with premium packaging, manufacturing and branding. Further, once past this nascent stage, heritage rice wine and fruit/tea wine makers also have their eyes set on export, and some have already started registration and marketing procedures targeting European markets. This shift towards premium heritage brews and fruit/tea wines comes from multiple pressures/factors: a will to preserve traditional brewing cultures, experiment with newer “modern” cultures of consumption that is closely associated with status and mobility, reformulate wine-making/consumption as cultural rather than religious (as noted earlier), the exigencies of neoliberal entrepreneurial innovation, incentivisation, and tourism—sustainable or otherwise.
Image 3: Home-brewed fruit wine, Zhurkhi, from Shergaon, Arunachal Pradesh. Photo by Abhishruti Sarma, 2022.
Today, the landscape of wines and wine-making in northeast India is eclectic—ranging from traditional home-based rice wine or fruit wine production to commercial manufacturing of premium rice wines (Akash Gogoi’s Xaj, Dipjyoti Duwori’s Luklao/Rohi), fruit wines (Tage Rita’s Naara Aaba wines, Mizoram’s Isabella wine) and tea wines (Alpana Saikia’s tea wine). Production of rice wines such as judima of the Dimasa community also happens through women’s cooperatives like the Judima Traditional Brewers’ Industrial Co-operative Society Ltd., and grape wines in Mizoram through co-operative societies and Farmer Producers Companies. This wine landscape underwent profound transformations over a decade with early research on preservation and experimentation with rice wine’s commercial production and tea wine starting around 2010 through partnerships with Assam Agricultural University, Tocklai Tea Research Institute etc., while grape wine in Mizoram was launched with the help of the Department of Horticulture by 2010. Meghalaya has recently started a wine incubation centre focused on fruit wines. In addition to wine production/distribution, this winescape also consists of wine tourism for domestic and international visitors in partnerships with resorts such as Kaziranga’s IORA (Assam) and Dirang’s Norphel (Arunachal Pradesh). Tage Rita’s ultimate vision for Naara Aaba is to expand into the sector of wine tourism, thus brewing wines that cater to the “foreigner’s palette”, as she claims in her interview with TV9 Bharatvarsh (Sharma 2021). One can tell the marked difference in the taste of the fruit wines made by Naara Aaba and those by Norphel that humour the sweet Arunachali palette.
Interestingly, brewers drew marked boundaries between rice wines, fruit wines, tea wines (in terms of its lineage, content and form of brewing) and further, between those brewed at home traditionally informally and those commercially produced. “Heritage brews are different from fruit wines and tea wines”, Xaj winemaker Akash Gogoi clarified. The idea of heritage brews, even in its premium forms, comes from ancestral knowledge passed through different generations of tribal communities in Northeast India. Alpana Saikia, the tea wine entrepreneur agrees. The lineage and inspiration of tea wine comes from Saikia’s time spent in Assam’s tea gardens, including from its club culture such as in the Mariani Planters’ Club. Moreover, heritage rice wines/beers are made using starter cakes while fruit and tea wines are made from wine yeast nutrient and fermentation times too are different.
Gogoi creates a mind map for us—tracing connections between xaj as made by Ahoms in Northeast India and rice wine as made in the Yunnan province of China from where Ahoms are believed to have migrated. His venture, he says, is to preserve the tradition of his ancestors—the Ahoms, whose assimilation into the Assamese fold creates existential pressures on customs such as rice wine brewing. Indeed, the website of Xaj claims that the tradition of rice wine brewing came to Northeast India from the practices of communities who migrated from Southeast Asia.
In his imagination, rice wine brewing even today is a cross-community, transborder phenomenon connecting spaces in Northeast India to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Here, Gogoi notes the interest in rice wines expressed by Japanese and Korean communities settled in Gurgaon. A similar sentiment was echoed by Francis Sailo, noting the everyday transborder linkages of grapes across the Mizoram-Myanmar border that come to be used in the making of wine in Mizoram.
Today, wine makers in Northeast India usually set up their plants in the government’s industrial areas and have ongoing work on product diversification and upgradation. They say that support from the government has been erratic and strained, including lack of adequate subsidies and tax exemptions for the first few years. This is important to our analysis of how women and women’s work figure in this transition. Who can engage in brewing wine commercially today and on what terms? Bathari (2020) points out that under current excise rules, it is only the “moneyed class” that stands to benefit from commercial wine-making. Yet, except the reduction in license fee and allotment of subsidised land for setting up of plants, the barriers to startup capital and bank collateral remain significant constraints even for this “moneyed class”. Notably, these constraints are even more pronounced for women entrepreneurs who struggle to obtain collateral in their name or use their savings if their husbands are not supportive. Wine entrepreneuralism today remains the venture of certain affluent sections within communities in Northeast India even as it contributes to rural livelihood generation.
Some, such as the women of Shergaon, are adamant to have wine-making remain community led without seeking much support from the government—advocating instead for limited sustainable home-based seasonal winemaking with “love” and “affect”, as we saw earlier. They are resistant to pressures to commercially produce rice/fruit wines, pressures which similarly also manifested in the homestay industry earlier. Here, the idea of sustainability becomes paramount.
Wellness, Organic, Sustainability
Traditional rice wines in Northeast India all come with their own origin stories —which the premium heritage brews today use in their branding/marketing. Such stories about traditional brews also talk about health benefits. For instance, the Karbi community of Assam believes that drinking hor increases life span and both the Karbis and Zemes believe that hor/zao can be used as medicine. As such, today heritage brews as well as tea wines/fruit wines regularly talk about wellness. Saikia discusses how black tea fermented with yeast accumulates nutritious vitamin A, B and C complexes and Sailo discusses the beneficial effects of grapes and grape wine on heart diseases.
Gogoi, too, is quick to delineate Xaj from other rice-based wines and fruit wines with high sugar content. While in soju, commercial yeast may be used, in commercially brewed Xaj, there is every effort to prepare the starter cakes traditionally with medicinal herbs such as manimuni, bonjaluk using dheki.(2) Here, it is important to note the inherent tension. Whereas Gogoi is hesitant to assert wellness benefits arguing that people do not drink rice wines for health benefits, he makes sure to claim xaj’s difference from illegal country liquor/hooch/sulai which has been the cause of numerous deaths in Assam’s tea gardens. This is also true for hard drinks and foreign liquor. He also differentiates his product from home-based xaj produce, which may be full of unwanted impurities and improperly regulated, as can be gathered from his apprehensive statement on locally sold rice wines earlier on. The focus is on making Xaj a premium experience. What interests us is also who the audience is for these premium products and what such framing does to perceptions of home-based rice wine.
Image 4: Xaj rice wine with Ahom motif. Credit: Xaj Heritage Rice Wine’s Instagram page (link here)
Relatedly, one of the main problems that Bathari (2020) had identified was the implications of standardisation of rice wines such as judima. Customarily, the taste has varied from village to village, household to household, depending on the time to fermentation, season during fermentation, quality of the rice used, number/kind of herbs, with recipes even kept secret and passed down orally. Gogoi stressed the importance of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) in this new moment, but emphasised that every bottle might taste a little different even though alcohol content is controlled.
However, there is some moral boundary work done with regard to commercially brewed and home-brewed rice wines, and through discourses of organic and sustainability. In the Shergaon story described earlier, Dr. Tashi underscores the importance of fruit wines in successfully making use of native and organic fruits which would otherwise go to waste. This is also true of Tage Rita’s use of kiwis in her wines. They talk about ‘thinking with’ Arunachal Pradesh’s forests and plantations—through popularisation of fruit wines, and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge about edible fruits and berries. They also talk about modelling a new economy based on organic fruit wines, in the process generating livelihood and income for the local farming community by sourcing fruits and berries from the forests or harvesting their own. Dr. Tashi mentioned that if one wants to clear the land for agriculture and sees autumn olives growing, often, one refrains from doing so—an example of a community-initiated conservation effort. Interviews of Tage Rita online suggest the same: winemaking is a manner of processing “discarded fruits” to preserve them. It is essentially “food processing”, she emphasizes (Sharma 2021).
Sailo, too, reiterates similarities in sustainability and prevention of wastage with regard to Mizoram’s grapes. Mizoram is still a dry state, with exemptions only for wines brewed from grapes grown in Mizoram to further sustainable use of fruits grown on the land. He also elucidates that “organic” is much more in rhetoric—only insofar as the fruits used are grown naturally without use of chemical fertilisers—because of the practical difficulties in obtaining organic certification and testing on land. Alpana Saikia highlights the importance of procuring tea from organic tea gardens in Assam, especially the importance of organicity and health benefits for export purposes. However, organic wine is a new concept that has not yet caught on elsewhere except in Arunachal Pradesh, where there has been a concerted government led effort towards organic certification of kiwis in 2021. Naara Aaba, in fact, prioritizes not only organic fruits (kiwis) but also organic certified wine yeast and sugar for their wines.
Image 5: Naara Aaba’s organic kiwi wine. Photo by Abhishruti Sarma, 2024
This reframing of winescapes in Northeast India, thus, traverses different nodes: heritage/tradition and its preservation, the transborder nature of community practices and work in Northeast Indian borderlands, rebranding/premium-ization of erstwhile traditional or heritage brews and associated delinking from indigenous faiths/customs/cosmologies, tensions in discourses of the organic and sustainable as understood by communities, entrepreneurs vis-a-vis the state and its use in branding, and lastly, its impacts on women’s work.
Gender, wine work, rural livelihoods, morality
Throughout, we are interested in the question of what the reframing of wines (premium heritage, fruit, tea wines) does to women’s work. Above, we see how women’s wine work, within the ambit of their households, has always been relational—encompassing associations to jhum, indigenous religion/faiths and customs, harvests and community feasts, ritualistic practices in weddings, births and deaths, and everyday honorifics offered to friends/guests at home. The transition now to commercial production of premium heritage wines, fruit wines and tea wines illustrates a few points.
One, it amplifies how tribal women in Northeast India are at the forefront of community led conservation efforts including in preservation of wild fruits, herbs and trees. Second, it lays out for us the complexities and contradictions of what this means for women of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Whereas some women are able to make use of the legal formalisation and commercialisation(3), there remain many who are unable to make use of such opportunities for reasons mentioned earlier. Women continue to be incorporated differentially. Chaya (2023) speaking from her experience of growing up in a mudu ghor (household selling rice beer), for instance, writes how housewives do not sell rice beer/wine because they value the art of brewing it, but as a final act of desperation to feed the family and meet immediate urgent expenses. She says “The present society views the sale of rice beer as acceptable only at its higher levels. The population that was forced to keep the art alive remains stuck in a vicious cycle of having to sell rice beer for a living, which in turn restricts them from seriously considering other means of securing a livelihood. In contrast, more prosperous people get to sell rice beer not only without the discrimination, but also as individuals preserving and promoting Naga culture”. Third, this work still continues to be associated with discourses and normative ideas about gender (womanhood/manhood) and issues of morality.
In wine work today, both individual work and group work through self-help groups (SHGs) come to play a significant role. The Heritage Liquor act of Assam mandates that 25% of the produce is to be sourced locally from SHGs. Gogoi mentioned procuring rice and herbs from women’s SHGs in Titabor. In Shergaon, we learnt that SHGs also make rhododendron wine in addition to activities such as weaving, but it is informal and small scale as there are issues with license procurement. Thus, women both supply and participate directly in commercial wine production. It is interesting to note, however, in what way they fit. In commercial wine-brewing, we find women working mostly in the traditional spheres of preparation of the starter cakes, whereas the work of processing, bottling, packaging, marketing, transporting—the “heavy-lifting” is predominated by men, reifying a connection between men, masculinities and machines (Bryant & Garnham, 2014). Unlike in traditional home-based brewing, here, women continue to be the minority even though they are employed in these spaces. They are also more likely to be casual employees as regular employees within plants are few and employment picks up more in the harvest season.
Our interlocutors shared their ideas of gender roles in home-based winemaking as somewhat rigid. It was highlighted to us that although women are primarily involved in brewing, there is no rule against men not participating. Sometimes, men help in collecting autumn olives due to its thorns while women are “better suited” to removing unwanted twigs and brewing. Women wine entrepreneurs stressed that they recognize the traditional role of women in wine brewing and thus, want to make their commercial wine enterprises more women-oriented. However, they also highlighted that the situation will decide how it pans out since casual employment is likely to be high albeit with fewer opportunities in the beginning and there are continuing stigmas associated with women working in wine brewing because of respectability politics that are socioeconomic [as Chaya (ibid) elaborates) and caste and religion related.
It led us to an encounter with a 99-year-old Songsarek(4) man, Wana Marak, who revealed to us the contradictions and pressures today on rice wine brewing as women’s work. Today, he is the last remaining practitioner of the indigenous faith in his village in East Garo Hills, and as such, the only remaining traditional rice wine brewer. As a much-loved elder and brewer whose popularity extends across religions, locales and age groups, he insists on the need to keep alive indigenous customs of brewing. He takes on proudly what has customarily been “women’s work”, sharing with us that he learnt brewing from his mother, sharing his process of brewing and his love for brews. There is an existential question here that goes beyond the discourse of whether this is “men’s work” or “women’s work”, an anxiety felt deeply by Akash Gogoi that drives his work with Xaj. But of course, this anxiety is multi-faceted. When we think about sustainability, we think more about raw materials than we think about labour and work. It is worth contemplating what happens to this relational work of wine-making when it moves to plants and becomes more automated. Tage Rita spoke to us about wanting to make the filling, capping, and labelling processes fully automatic soon—which from the entrepreneurial viewpoint would be extremely important if they want to think about further expansion.
All the wine brewers also discuss social stigma attached to wine production and consumption. They point to the still strong prohibition movements and highlight the gendered effects of these movements on women’s lives and specifically on women’s work. Wine brewers today underline, however, that problems of alcohol abuse did not stem from traditional rice wine/beer in the precolonial era, but from foreign liquor and from Christian missionary mores displacing the entire gamut of spiritual relational religio-cultural cosmologies that rice wine was embedded in (Longkumer, 2016). Rice wine’s “secularisation” resulted in proliferation of alcohol abuse and exacerbated violence against women. This becomes prominent in tea gardens with illegal country hooch. Meira Paibi’s movements against alcoholism and drug related unrest in Manipur also stems from such framings of alcoholism and domestic violence.
For women then, wine making has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was traditionally “women’s work”, as mentioned earlier, and women wine entrepreneurs such as Alpana Saikia too started brewing first from home. Indeed, Barman (2007) notes the often-subversive nature of women’s wine-making. There are readings of wine work as leisure instead of a chore, while also noting the oral history passed during foraging and winemaking, and the permissibility to transgress through acts such as eloping under the influence. On the other hand, its informal, fragmented nature in home-based production continues to render women vulnerable to exploitation. Women are at the receiving end of state violence as producers, violence from unruly customers and domestic violence from intimate partners, often also facing the brunt of prohibition activism. These ideas continue with commercialisation.
The case of Mizoram is significant here since as recently as 2022, a Mizo woman was reported to have died from psychological stress following the seizure of wines in Aizawl. The themes of death, violence, morality are significant ideological forces driving discourses around wines and wine work in Northeast India.
Conclusion
In discussing women’s wine work as relational, we aimed to explore it as part of peoples’ understandings of sustainable futures, local ecologies, religion, culture, and tourism. While traditional connections to brewing do not disappear, we discussed the shift towards ‘premiumization’ of heritage brews and commercialisation of newer fruit wines and tea wines, that target middle- and upper-class consumers, exports and wine tourism for domestic/international visitors. We discussed how organic, sustainability, and wellness as concepts are important in such reframings, including how conservation and preservation efforts are implicated in brewing and wine work. Most importantly, we discussed the gendered shifts of this transition, highlighting how women continue to be incorporated differentially and casually, still facing challenges due to moral and religious stigmatization, while also noting that women’s brewing work signifies different meanings, according to class, region, religion and so on.
We must also remind ourselves that we cannot look at ‘women’ as a group with similar lived experiences. These vignettes illustrate that wine-making is as variegated a process as is its taste. The experience of brewing and being with wine is different even for the women entrepreneurs that we speak of here, let alone for the host of local women brewers in their village homes. They are different owing to regional contexts and specificities of their lived experiences. For instance, Alpana Saikia could think about tea wine because there was a culture of experimenting with wines (that is distinct from the traditional rice brews) among the elite women of the tea estates. Similarly, Tage Rita could think about kiwi wine because Ziro’s landscape was laden with the wild fruit that gradually came into recognition over a decade by farmers’ efforts for organic certification (Agarwala, 2020). Apart from wild kiwis, there has been an increase in kiwi farms in certain parts of Arunachal Pradesh in the last decade owing to its fertile soil. Tage Rita believes that her winery has encouraged farmers to pick up the once-discarded fruit that found no market in the region. Now, with its resurgence, the fruit is sold in bulk to other states and online supermarkets (Karmakar, 2019). A recent conversation with our interlocutors in Arunachal Pradesh revealed that the fruits of these plantations are now being bought off by big businesses in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, thus, leaving very little for local people. It is interesting, therefore, to think about these shifts in landscapes from paddylands to plantations and who are profiting from them. This concerted shift in landscape manifests in the gradual shift in taste—from rice wines to fruit wines.
However, these contradictions become sharper in the approach of women involved in prohibition movements vis-a-vis women who brew and sell traditional wines at home informally, “illicitly”, remaining in the margins of the wine economy. These are contradictions wrought by the enduring encounter with colonial modernity—in religion, culture, indigenous cosmologies, livelihoods, patterns of production/consumption, ways of living. Contradictions that have engendered far-reaching shifts in what brewing, selling, partaking in traditional wines has come to signify in different contexts, with fissures among and within groups, including differences in class, caste, religion, socioeconomic status and so on. With shifts within the winescape now, there is a possibility of further change in the existing social, economic and spiritual relations that wine-brewing produced. More so, does this new wine work remain as relational and if not, what kind of relationships are being produced?
Acknowledgements
This paper would not have been possible without wonderful and insightful conversations with Dr. Lobsang Tashi Thungon, Akash Jyoti Gogoi, Francis Sailo, Anu Jebisow, Alpana Saikia, Dr. Meenal Tula, Tage Rita, Nimisha Thakur and many others who were kind enough to share their time and thoughts with us. We thank the two anonymous reviewers and Dr. Urmila Mohan for their patient engagement and constructive suggestions on our drafts.
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Endnotes
1. Indigenous faith of the Garo tribe.
2. This includes being able to platform their wines in spaces such as Shark Tank India with investments from venture capitalists and also support rural livelihoods
3. Manimuni (Hydrocotyle rotundifolia or Centella asiatica) and bonjaluk (Oldenlandia diffusa/Hedyotis diffusa/Oldenlandia corymbosa) are medicinal herbs widely used in Assam. Dheki is a wooden agricultural implement used for threshing or pounding rice.
4. The largest state horticulture farm in the state of Arunachal Pradesh is in Shergaon. Fruit trees like apple, walnut, chestnut, cherry, plum, and kiwi are harvested here. These are not used for the local fruit wines that households in the village-town brew.
