When the British opened up the Nilgiris in 1820 what struck them as most unusual was that the native people, though semi-naked in the biting cold, never suffered from influenza and never knew of any intoxicant. ‘Liquors of an intoxicating quality are never distilled on the hills  nor drunk  by any of the castes’ noted Caption Macpherson who made the early roads to the hills.

When the British residents started producing beer from 1826 in a small way, the local Badagas took an immediate fancy for it. However, generally locally made liquors were unknown to them  till 1834. Only after breweries were established in Ooty, Kotagiri and Coonoor after 1850 that beer was freely available to them. Hard liquor which was available in departmental stores in the towns was also consumed by some. By 1847  Ootacamund was the capital  of ‘widespread and continuous drunkenness amongst low class natives’.

Lt.Co. John Ouchterlony, who first suggested the Wellington Barracks, recommended also brewing  on the hills ‘ to keep the ordinary soldiers away from spirits’. “ Independent of the importance, both in a moral and economic point of view, of supplying to the troops a liquor which, from its goodness and cheapness, will induce the majority to prefer it to ardent spirits”, he reasoned.

The Nilgiri Brewery Company (present YWCA Anandagiri, Ooty) was the oldest in South India which later passed into the hands of ‘Tonga’ Browne. It was followed by The Castle Brewery, Aravankadu ; Nilgiri Brewery, Ooty ; -Rose and Crown at Yellanhally and the British Brewery at Ooty. Samuel Honeywell  was the pioneer  professional beer-brewer in 1857 at his Castle Brewery. But when he started producing ‘stronger’ stuff, the government ruled in 1872 that no beer could contain over 8% alcohol. Later these and other breweries were bought to form the United Breweries. 

Opium intake and drinking habit among Nilgiri natives increased significantly in the second half of the last century when the mountain society came under basic changes. One, British legislations on land use brought serious restrictions on grazing and farming which were the traditional occupations of the natives. The native population was also growing rapidly during this period. There was also a heavy inflow of migrant labour  to work in plantations and public works. Secondly, unlike in the past the natives were subject to a series of natural calamities like famine, drought, epidemics (small pox, cholera, typhoid and plague) and even earthquakes.

Drinking became such a problem around 1900 that  in 1905 some Badagas near Kotagiri decided that their whole community was being ruined by drinking and pledged themselves to their goddess Hette to give it up and to excommunicate everyone who refuse to give up the habit.  

To control the problem the British government introduced partial prohibition in 1924. Sale of any kind of liquors to hill tribes was prohibited except on medical certificate. However, as a government report in 1928-29 showed, prohibition only encouraged the consumption of other intoxicants like denatured spirits. The report said hill tribes – at a rather higher cost- were able to get liquor through middlemen from the towns and adjoining districts. 127 cases were booked in that year. Demand increased for denatured spirit diluted with water and added with lime juice and sugar. The report concluded that it was doubtful if the hill tribes had benefitted from prohibitions.

–

Finally, total prohibition was imposed on October 1, 1937 when the first Congress government assumed office under Rajaji in the Madras Presidency. It lasted till 1971.

Nilgiri Documentation Centre

The experiments  were subsequently extended to Wellington where it was found that three and even four crops could be raised in a year. In 1847 Major Ouchterlony, a British plan­ter, in whose memory the Ouchter­lony Valley in Gudalur Taluk still exists, found that Ceylon (Srilanka)  offered a very good market for Nilgiri potatoes. Though the total area under potatoes was only 186 acres, the yield was phenomenal owing to the virgin soil.

The establishment of the Gov­ernment Botanical Gardens in Ootacamund in 1848 gave an impetus to potato cultivation, which began to attract the attention of the ryots, especially Badagas. They were pro­vided with facilities including the supply of seeds from the Botanical Gardens and, as a result, the area under potatoes expanded to 754 acres in 1876. The European settlers also started cultivating pota­toes on the lands around their houses. Thus the cultivation of po­tatoes established itself as a paying proposition among the inhabitants of the Nilgiris and grew into a re­gular industry among them  towards the be­ginning of the last  century. The possibilities of exporting the com­modity to Ceylon, Burma and Straits Settlements were explor­ed by the authorities and new va­rieties were imported and experi­mented upon at the Botanical Gar­dens from 1910 to 1914.

Mr. Fran­cis, (author of The Nilgiris Gazetteer), a very enthusiastic British Col­lector, who evinced a keen inter­est in the development of potato cultivation as a means of better­ing the economic lot of the people here, obtained permission from Government to import two tons of good seed potatoes from Australia for distribution among the native growers.

The question of expanding seed production in 1915-16 led to the es­tablishment of the Government Agricultural Research Station in 1917 at Nanjanad.  Work was origi­nally confined to the task of evolv­ing suitable varieties of potato for the Nilgiris from the seeds  im­ported from the UK and Australia. In the va­rietal sphere, 47 varieties are now under study at the station. After  35 years of trial, a variety called “Great Scot” has been found eminently suitable for the Nilgiris due its “early ma­turity, cosmopolitan habit, round medium tubers, smooth white skin, fleet eyes and hard flesh”.  Next came Royal  Kidney, which belonged to the species of Great Scot except for its shape. Bencruachan, Kerr’s Pink Edward, Golden Wonder and Bressie were other notables.  

In addition to research valuable work has been done on the manurial side also with the result that a brand of manure called the Nanjanad Mixture was evolved. This served as a standard for all manufactures of potato fertilisers.

After 1957, the responsibility of keeping the potato commercially viable rested with the Central Potato Re­search Institute at Muthorai.  It is this institute which is facing the threat of closure due to short sighted bureaucratic reasons.

Nilgiri Documentation Centre