Drunkenness and culture

Daily newspaper reports remind us that alcohol-related violence is very prevalent in the Indian Guyanese community. The causes of this reality go back to our insertion into British Guiana as indentured labourers, and if we want to address its deleterious effects, we must appreciate that reality. Distilled alcoholic drinks like rum were not present in rural India in the 19th century when immigration flourished, and the fermented concoctions such as toddy and those from the Mahua flowers were quite mild in their effects. Ganja boiled in milk – bhang – was consumed during some religious festivals to induce a state of ecstasy but was not abused.
Rum, however, was deliberately introduced to the indentured Indians as a means of immiseration and control on the sugar plantations. In the logies of my village of Plantation Uitvlugt, by the 1940s, there were at least a dozen rum shops – primarily owned by Chinese and Portuguese since the 1860s – between the pay office and their hovels. These did not exist during slavery. What anthropological studies have shown is that cultures into which alcohol was forcibly introduced as a measure of control within a very compressed time had no time to evolve positive drinking norms. In fact, they imbibed the foisted notion that the alcohol was a precursor to “letting off steam”. This was the case with Indians in Guyana. “The major colonial powers exported to those areas of the globe that fell under their control not only models of drunken behaviour but also a host of beliefs about the effects of alcohol on human beings. It may be that the widespread belief in alcohol as a disinhibitor is nothing but an ethnocentric European folk belief foisted on subject peoples around the world during the heyday of colonialism.”
Alcoholism and violent behaviour are thus not only matters of high alcohol consumption. One study of Irish-Americans in Boston over a 40-year period found that they were “7 times as likely to develop alcohol dependence as Italian-Americans – this despite the Irish-Americans having a substantially higher abstinence rate.” The Irish have a history of being violently dominated by the English and took their heavy drinking from Ireland to the US. It suggests that alcohol abuse is not an individual idiosyncrasy and that socio-cultural factors are as crucial as physiological and psychological ones. “Ways of drinking and of thinking about drinking are learnt by individuals within the context in which they learn ways of doing other things and of thinking about them – that is, whatever else drinking may be, it is an aspect of culture about which patterns of belief and behaviour are modelled by a combination of example, exhortation, rewards, punishments, and the many other means, both formal and informal, that societies use for communicating norms, attitudes, and values.
In a nutshell, the reaction to alcohol is socially constructed. For Indians on the plantations, as we know, periodically, when they expressed their frustrations against the oppressive conditions, they were answered by the “leaden argument” of the police after the “Riot Act” was read. They were “persuaded” to express their quotidian frustrations by venting their anger violently on each other. Violence – especially against wives, friends and children – and alcoholism became a feature of Indian plantation life that continues into the present.
As pointed out above, aggression is not ineluctably linked to alcohol consumption, as is commonly accepted by Indian Guyanese. “The way people comport themselves when they are drunk is determined not by alcohol’s toxic assault upon the seat of moral judgement, conscience, or the like, but by what their society makes of and imparts to them concerning the state of drunkenness.”
“Cross-cultural evidence from diverse populations around the world shows that some have habitual drunkenness with little aggression, others show aggression only in specific drinking contexts or against selected categories of drinking companions, and so forth. Such widespread and diverse variation contradicts the view – shared by both ‘common sense’ and much scientific writing – that characterises alcohol as having a relatively direct pharmaconeurological effect in triggering aggression.”
To deal with the scourge of drunkenness and its associated violence in the Indian community, the authorities and Indian cultural and religious institutions have to investigate their cultural premises towards alcohol and introduce programmes that encourage more positive values and behavioural patterns.