India is the world's largest whisky market. India has four states under complete prohibition. Both are true. Both are India.

For three thousand years, Indian civilization has simultaneously celebrated and condemned alcohol—brewing sacred soma in Vedic rituals while banning surā in religious texts, hosting wine-soaked Mughal courts while preaching abstinence, generating billions in alcohol revenue while maintaining constitutional prohibition directives. This is the first complete history to document that contradiction.

India Uncorked traces the remarkable journey from ancient Ayurvedic theories of intoxication to contemporary craft cocktails, from Buddhist temperance movements to Bollywood's complex portrayal of drinking, from colonial-era distilleries to modern microbreweries revolutionizing Indian beer culture. Spanning across 1500 BCE to 2025 CE, this groundbreaking work reveals how India became the world's whisky capital while keeping drinking wrapped in shame.

The book uncovers the mystery of Vedic soma and ancient surā brewing techniques, explores how Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism shaped India's prohibition paradigm, and reveals the wine culture that flourished in medieval sultanates and the Mughal empire. It examines the British abkari system that created modern IMFL (Indian Made Foreign Liquor), traces Mahatma Gandhi's temperance crusade and its lasting impact, and celebrates regional drinking traditions from toddy and mahua to rice beer, feni, and arak across India's diverse landscapes.

The narrative follows the rise of Indian single malts winning international awards, documents women breaking centuries of drinking taboos, and explores Bangalore's craft beer revolution alongside Delhi's speakeasy cocktail culture. It explains why India has 36 different state alcohol laws creating a regulatory labyrinth, investigates the "plastic bag culture" that makes India's massive alcohol consumption invisible, and analyzes how Gen Z is transforming Indian drinking attitudes while navigating ancient contradictions.

Drawing on Sanskrit texts, Persian chronicles, colonial archives, and contemporary industry data, this meticulously researched narrative reveals patterns invisible in isolated examination. From Vedic priests to Mughal emperors, from colonial bureaucrats to craft distillers, from prohibition activists to celebrity bartenders, every era reinforces the same truth: India's contradictions about alcohol aren't problems to solve but permanent features of how Indian civilization works.

India Uncorked is essential reading for anyone interested in Indian history and culture, food and beverage studies, South Asian studies, policy and regulation, gender studies, craft spirits and cocktails, brewing and distillation, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and understanding modern India's fascinating contradictions. Written with scholarly rigor yet accessible to general readers, this is the definitive history of alcohol in the world's most populous democracy—a story of soma and whisky, saints and drinkers, prohibition and profit, shame and celebration spanning three millennia.

The pour began 3,000 years ago. It continues today. This is its story.