The Secret Era of Bombay’s Aunty Bars

In the 1950s and 60s, newly independent India saw a blanket of prohibition laws, the most stringent of which were implemented in Bombay. What ensued was India’s very own speakeasy tradition. From the cover of their 500-square-foot homes, Bombay’s aunties began to vend their own moonshine.

Growing up in Matharpacady

It was 1962. Linken Fernandes, the youngest of five siblings, ran through the narrow gullies of Matharpacady, an East Indian village tucked away in the fishing neighbourhood of Mazgaon. Like every evening, he was making his way to the soda wallah. This was a time when refrigerators were uncommon and shops dedicated entirely to soft drinks and soda, and occasionally, lime juice, could still be found. Fernandes was the prime runner for his mummy’s drinking joint, one of three in the locality, and spent his evenings flitting between “shop and home, and shop and home,” when customers made requests. Fernandes ran back with the soda in glass bottles to his house, whose four-by-four-metre living hall served as a bar in the evenings. When Fernandes’ father passed away aged thirty-eight, possibly from cirrhosis of the liver, his mother, a first-generation migrant from Goa, started the small operation, in the hope of making ends meet.

Prohibition and the rise of Aunty Bars

Hers was among the many aunty bars that mushroomed across mid-century Bombay between the 1950s and 1960s. The Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949 brought the first experiment of prohibition laws to India. A Directive Principle in the newly written constitution called the State to move towards the prohibition of intoxicating drinks and drugs as a social measure. Anti-alcoholism was an essential tenet of Gandhism, which envisioned India as a country of only “innocent drinks” and “equally innocent amusements”. “I would rather have India without education if that is the price to be paid for making it dry,” Gandhi argued. 

In 1952, Morarji Desai, chief minister of Bombay state, as it was then known, enforced the act with the conviction of a teetotaller, banning all sale and consumption of alcohol in the city. It was only after an amendment the same year that cough syrup and cleaning agents containing alcohol became available again. The only way to get a drink in Bombay of this era was through a liquor permit granted for medical reasons, and then too, with great difficulty. Blitz, an infamous tabloid that voiced the modernising spirit of the city, called the illicit alcohol that was just as soon plying through its streets, “Morarjin” and “Morarjuice”. 

The suburbs of Bombay were as far as possible from the prohibition-riddled city on the surface. Middle-aged women from Catholic communities began running discreet aunty bars out of their homes in the bid to earn some extra, and often the only, income for their households, giving India its very own tradition of speakeasies. Before they spread across the city, these bars clustered in the neighbourhoods of Dhobi Talao, named after its washerman’s pond, a hub of Goan Catholics, and Bandra, home to the East Indian community. The local Catholics of Bombay took to calling themselves ‘East Indians’ after the British East India Company to differentiate themselves from the growing migration of Goan Catholics who settled in and around these neighbourhoods for the charm of their church squares. The parish served as a source of both community and celebration in their lives. These localities were a mixture of Indo-Portuguese and Koli architecture, with bright houses complete with slanted roofs, external staircases and ornate balconies, and soon developed sprawling Goan clubs or kudds, that doubled as basic living quarters.

Image credit: Deepak Rao

Image credit: Deepak Rao

Image credit: Deepak Rao

Alcohol was seen as an extension of, and not in contrast to, this religious life. It would have been ordinary to go to church with men who had been drinking in one’s living room the night before. “They were all very pious,” Fernandes says. “Very often, we lost business around eight, because mummy insisted on saying the rosary…but she wouldn’t break to serve them till it was done.”

The aunty bar was intimately attached to the privacy of the home. These weren’t elaborate drinking holes but dingy, run-down establishments that bore no signs that would distinguish them from their surroundings. Jane Borges, a Bombay-based journalist with Mid-Day, speaks of an acquaintance who ran a bar off of a three-seater outside her room in a chawl on Grant Road. “They would just sit for five-ten minutes, drink and leave. It all worked in a very closed, private space where nobody saw anybody. Everyone knew what was happening but no one disturbed them,” she explains. An average bar could accommodate not more than fifteen, and usually had between two to four customers at a time. These customers formed close friendships with aunties, turning into regulars who could be trusted for the following day’s business.

Moonshine and Cashew Feni

The aunty bar served moonshine, also known as white lightening for its liquid colour. Moonshine was country liquor made of old, fermented fruits and vegetables. Everything from rotten dates and sugarcane molasses to potato peels went in. Instead of yeast, a slug of ammonium chloride was used as fermenting agent to prepare the mash in a period of days. Later, as demand increased, the ammonium chloride was replaced by the carbonate powder found in car batteries which gave the distillate another name, battery acid. The mash was then boiled to distill the cheap country variety that eventually reached these bars. A New York Times report from 1964 joyfully called the product ‘snake juice’.

A much more delicious find at a Goan aunty’s bar was cashew feni, which came to Bombay from Goa where it was brought by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Portuguese colonists planted the cashew tree to control the erosion of topsoil in the coastal state, but soon its fruit began to be harvested to make the traditional, hand-crafted drink. Feni, from the Sanskrit word ‘pheni’, was named after the light froth that bubbles in the drink when poured. Making feni is a laborious process that begins with stomping orange-yellow cashew apples by foot. Once the pulp is extracted, it is left under a hilltop rock for the juice to collect in an earthen or copper vessel. Three distillations turn the juice from urrack to cazulo to finally, feni, which has a high alcohol content – somewhere between 42% to 46%. Its astringent smell can be caught from a mile away. Till date, feni is made in small batches using the conventional method, without employing electricity at any stage and mostly for personal consumption. While some aunties may have made cashew feni at home, most of it was bootlegged from outside the state through an extensive cross-border trafficking network.  

Boiled eggs and other snacks

Along with customers, an oasis of street food vendors, particularly hawkers of boiled egg, congregated around aunty bars where drinkers promised orders. Stowed away in a dark alleyway, these boiled egg vendors were signs that an aunty bar was close by and could offer directions if one wasn’t in the know. Besides eggs, one could find the occasional fish fry, roasted kaleji — liver — or with luck, a plate of Bombay duck. “It was an ancillary cottage industry, so to say, that thrived along with the aunty,” suggests Roland Francis, who grew up in the city. “If it was a weekend, you usually used these aunty bars twice, once before the occasion and once after,” he shares. The second trip would end at the nearest Irani restaurant whose early morning specialities included generous non-vegetarian dishes like keema pao and baida roti. “For four annas you could get yourself two loaves of bread and nice minced meat…we used to eat that and go directly to college,” Francis adds, recalling how he then slept through his morning lectures.

To differentiate their bars from the others, some aunties added a snack. In one bar not very far from Cavel, an aunty was popular for her bangda — mackerel — fry, which came stuffed with a preparation of recheado masala, a spicy Goan marinade that uses red chillies, garlic, ginger, vinegar and a little jaggery or sugar. “A lot of it was about what accompanied the alcohol…aunty’s Goa sausages where she boiled the sausages or maybe chakna or bhajiya, that was what helped them make money,” Borges says. She shares how her acquaintance separately sold roasted peanuts in a little bowl. If she had made fish fry for the family, it would be on offer for an extra charge. Another aunty who served boiled eggs out of her kitchen became popular as ‘Baide Wali Aunty’.

While bars were named after the women who ran them, this depended entirely on how they were seen by their exclusively male clientele. A fair-skinned aunty would acquire the title of ‘Chikni Aunty’, while another may be called ‘Gori Aunty’. Still others were remembered after where they were located.

Manufacture and Distribution

The liquor itself was manufactured in the city’s marshy outposts, in areas like Dharavi and Khar. In the 1960s, there were at least eighteen distillation black spots in Bombay’s suburbs. The alcohol was stored in drums that were frequently hidden in manholes or swamps to throw the police off the scent. Once ready, an intricately planned network of carriers could be relied on to transfer the alcohol across the city. Filled in rubber bicycle tires or football bladders, the contraband was carried by women who avoided suspicion by wearing it around their bodies to give the impression of pregnancy. Alternatively, it was transferred by individuals affected by Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy, who made excellent carriers. The prevailing stigma around the disease acted as cover – the police never searched them. The raw materials that went into brewing cost less than five rupees and sold for far more. As per one record, a gallon of country liquor cost thirty rupees to the aunty. While moonshine was being peddled deeper into the city on unassuming cycles and on foot, about forty per cent of illicit alcohol moved in stolen cars. “A car driver who was good at racing was the best choice to bring in this liquor,” Deepak Rao, a Bombay police historian says, “at the unearthly hour of three or four in the morning, there is no one on the road. The police did not have the mobility to track them.”

Naresh Fernandes, editor of Scroll.in, shares how barrels of hooch seized by the police were stored in a palm grove at the end of his street in Bandra. “They would empty out the barrels and store them in this dumping yard, but they still stank. That’s the thing about country liquor, it stank through high heaven.” 

Though police raids were common, they were often a matter of make-believe. Policemen had their own under-the-table agreements with aunties and secured hafta, a weekly commission in exchange for allowing a bar to run undisturbed. The women behind these bars acted on all fronts, negotiating with disgruntled police officers and bailing out customers the morning after a raid. At times, aunties were advised to keep a modest crowd ahead of a search. The message went “section garam hai,” Rao discloses, meaning the nearest police station was under pressure, or “hot”. Fernandes wonders how his mother, who spoke very little Hindi, let alone English, managed to float her joint through these hard times. “After every raid there used to be a break of a month or so, when there would be no business…it was a very erratically run operation,” he says. The aunty in Matharpacady shut shop at 9:30 in the evening, because all lights had to be switched off to keep the electricity bill under check.     

As breadwinners, aunties had to look beyond these challenges. They were women of steel and resolve who saw the bar as a way to provide for their families. In turn, these speakeasies initiated trends of upward mobility. Many an aunty’s daughter went on to become a doctor or lawyer, pursuits that would have otherwise been hard, if not unimaginable, given their economic position. A common joke was how fisherwomen just outside the city now drove Cadillacs. As the market grew, more professional operators entered the business. The profit from this illicit alcohol trade is believed to have led to the rise of Bombay’s infamous underworld, spawning a second, nebulous economy which had stakes in gambling, sex work and later, arms trafficking.

The End of Prohibition

Naturally, prohibition posed excessive costs for the State. While public discontent was growing, Maharashtra’s sugarcane lobby put its might behind anti-prohibitionist sentiment. An issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India from 1951 noted that the rule in Bombay was “Health, hospitals, education, schools and social welfare can wait. But rummy must come before rice. Prohibition before profiteering. Cuddling and kissing on the screen before clothes. Racing before roofs.” When V.P Naik took over as the Chief Minister in the mid-1960s, prohibition was relaxed. By 1972, the state of Maharashtra was under a permit system that continues to stand. In order to get a drink, a permit had to be secured from the Excise Station, a four-room office located in Chembur’s Sindhi Colony. After just enough tweaking, prohibition laws have all but vanished from the city’s unceasing life.

Five decades on, little other than memory survives of the aunty bar. Many old residents have migrated out of the quaint neighbourhoods that inspired this indecently little-known chapter in the city’s history and its lived accounts fade away with these last custodians. One cannot help but notice the ruefulness with which they speak of the odd skyscraper that is beginning to make its mark on these localities. Yet, returning to Bombay of the past is easy. One only has to look at a dilapidating building in a boulevard that opens in the middle of a neighbourhood, as if it was designed for a fountain, and imagine the life behind its closed doors – an aunty may have been serving local white hooch here in the 1950s, unbeknownst to those who liked to believe the city was under a dry spell. If you look closely, you might even catch a whiff of moonshine.

Nikita Biswal is a writer based in Delhi. Her stories locate people within culture and politics. You can follow her here.

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