This is an Indian Army Rum
This isn’t a story confined to the boundaries of India. Nor is it a love letter to a flavourful rum called Old Monk and is more about the British-Indian drinkers who cherish it. This is in fact, a paean to desis, and aptly ‘desi’ refers to a group of people as well as a feeling.
Old Monk is a sweet-tasting rum celebrated by British-Indians of a certain vintage - middle aged and over. These desis (the first meaning: people, like me, who originate from South Asia but live here) have seen their identities change and their traditions ebb away as a tide of Western-ness swept over them.
The drink is an antidote to how British life changed Indians, a way they can reconnect with their younger selves and one sip of the butterscotch-flavoured spirit whisks them away to familial villages, to their parents’ hot kitchens, or to the bustling bars of Mumbai.
Old Monk is a reminder of a past that only makes sense to desis, and now perplexes the people they left behind. It means so much to British-Indians, yet its quirky charm has been lost on modern day Indian drinkers who aren’t looking to the past but to the West. They now raise glasses of Bacardi and Coke, toast their futures and associate ‘desi-ness’ with quaintness rather than authenticity.
over time it's easy to merge our past feelings with the reality of the present and maybe it also hints at the disconnect some of us encounter after being uprooted from Asia
While in Britain, the people who desis work, drink and socialise with remain ignorant of its cultural significance, and the important role it plays in their lives. In many ways it shows how British-Indians live separate lives to Brits as well as Indians.
Old Monk sums up this British-Indian experience. It shows what we - children of the British Empire - lost when our parents decided we should live in this country and how events like partition and globalisation made desis the sole custodians of an India they experienced growing up.
For Allahabad-born Steve Collis, it’s a way of reconnecting with his British-based family and how a bottle is always opened when they visit. For Bhavan Patel, it’s a reminder of a rites of passage trip to Mumbai when he was in his 20s.
And for Steve Sailopal the rum stirs memories of his ailing father who went back to Chandigarh, near the Shivalik Hills, and left him a bottle before he died telling him “this is an Indian Army rum”.
“I stayed with my dad for four months in 1986,” Sailopal, founder of Good Karma Beer Co, says. “After he had a stroke. A lot of my relatives drank it - they were in the police or military. One was part of Indira Gandhi’s security before she was shot [in 1984]”
“We were an hour’s drive from the town of Kasauli where a trek up the mountains would start. It had a peak people would call monkey point and you would have picnics. My dad always used to stop at that place where you’d see the Mohan Meakin distillery.
“I was 18 then. And I hadn’t even heard of Old Monk before.”
Fast forward 36 years and Sailopal will buy a bottle whenever he visits India and admits he’s still smitten by the rum’s ‘vanilla notes’ which he thinks could be attributed to the climate of that part of Northern India - the balance between the Punjab’s agricultural seasons and Himachal Pradesh’s coolness.
But these days Old Monk is made in the industrial town of Ghaziabad, 300-odd kilometres south of the hills of Kasaul, which is warmer (and has better transport links). It hasn’t stopped Sailopal loving it though - or even noticing a difference to the flavour.
Instead these recollections of the drink show how over time it's easy to merge our past feelings with the reality of the present and maybe it also hints at the disconnect some of us encounter after being uprooted from Asia.
What your identity is, is what you determine it
Patel, who now lives in Lewisham, south-east London after growing up in Australia, experienced this disconnect when he graduated from university and wanted to travel to less familiar places. But when his sister decided to have an Indian wedding, when he was aged 27, he fell back in love with his forebears’ birthplace.
He travelled to Mumbai just after the terrorist attacks in 2008, and spent some time before the wedding living in the city with his Dad’s cousin discovering palatial snooker and billiard halls – that even employed people to keep score.
But the drinks popular there were very Western - single malt whiskeys and Grey Goose for example. So he had to travel to find a version of authentic India and it was unearthed in South Mumbai, particularly Juhu.
“I went to bars,” he said. “I met hotel or bar workers and we would go to different roof terraces. They would call me a British-born desi but not confused unlike the film American Born Confused Desi.
“What your identity is, is what you determine it. And I was into anything that was ‘made in India’ - crisp white shirts - and this is where I came across Old Monk. And it became my go-to drink with Thums Up [cola] like my version of a Cuba Libre. But Indian.”
Patel then spent some time chilling in Goan beach shacks before he travelled to the wedding, and this period is synonymous for him with Old Monk. He admits that one taste of the rum will whisk him back to this care-free month and it’s not a feeling that gets diluted even when he spent a Christmas in Dubai drinking it.
Like Patel, Collis, aged 52, sees the drink as a link to his youth. He first tasted Old Monk when he was 16 years old and laughed when I asked him what he thought of it. “You’re just happy your wings are growing and you’re allowed a drop of alcohol!”
Collis, who now lives in Buckinghamshire, came to London three years after his first drop of rum and he loved the pubs that thronged with desis - particularly the Ballot Box in West London (now a Wacky Warehouse) and The Alpine Horn in North London (now demolished), which used to have Indian dancers (Mudras). The only rum then, though, was Captain Morgan.
“Old Monk,” he says. “Has a nostalgic effect. It takes me back to those open-style homes in India with a nice garden and orchard where fathers and uncles would get together. It just brings back happy memories.
“It has a bit of a butterscotch,” he adds. “And caramel edge to it.”
Photo by Jaikishan Patel
Collis, who adds a splash of water to his rum, describes his background as Anglo-Indian and supports the England cricket team like I do - I inherited this from my father. Therefore, it’s interesting to examine the language he uses to describe the rum’s flavour and it’s evident that the more a desi leans towards this country the more the language they use seems more British.
I’m browner in tone than the three people I interviewed, but my parents didn’t infuse me with any South Asian culture. My Malay mum hid her background from me and my dad, who was of Indian origin–and would say he was British. He grew up in Singapore with a father who would beat him if he ever spoke accented English.
So when I taste Old Monk I feel like I’m describing it wholly from a Western perspective and this fills me with guilt for not honouring a drink in the same way as Sailopal, Collis and Patel do. I almost think the way I’ve described Old Monk using comparisons to English food, such as butterscotch, could be deemed problematic and colonial.
“Of course,” says Natalya Watson, beer sommelier, Advanced Cicerone and founder of Virtual Beer School. “You’re going to use British cultural heritage because that’s how you’ve been taught how to describe what you’re experiencing. It is about your everyday flavour experiences and how you process them that determines what you’re experiencing.”
Perhaps I am being a bit hard on myself but I can’t help feeling jealous of the desi trio, who have a distinct Indian heritage they can tap into with one sip of a drink. When I taste Old Monk, I love it but the most overriding flavour is not vanilla but bittersweet because it reminds me of how I have been so robbed from my past by parents who never valued their own heritage.
I still am British-Indian - no one who has experienced as much racism as I have can ever be happy to be just ‘British’ - but when I taste Old Monk it can’t fill that Indian heritage-shaped gap inside me. Then I remember Patel explaining how your identity is determined by you, so with every sip of the Indian rum I intend to take back my rightful South Asian heritage.
In the future whenever I open a bottle I know I won’t be transported to Indian villages, snooker halls or tropical hills. But I may be reminded of the decision to own my identity.
