Empire State of Mind — Interrogating IPA’s Colonial Identity

Like most people of color in Britain, I hate being asked where I’m from. I’ve been posed this question by pub landlords, passersby, and, most awkwardly, my partner’s mother. I hear it most often when I venture from London into parts of England where there are fewer non-white faces. It can be asked innocently, passive aggressively, or with outright hostility. (Since Brexit, hostility has become more common.)

Whatever the tone, the underlying assumption behind the question is that I’m not British because I’m Brown. The question also reveals a lot about my inquisitor, about how Britain’s history is (or isn’t) taught in schools, and how that gap has fostered widespread ignorance about this country’s once-vast colonial empire. 

I never had the privilege of ignorance. My family has spent generations living as subjects of that empire. My father was born in Singapore, but called himself Anglo-Indian despite his Bengali bloodline. My mother is Malaysian—fiercely Malay, believing her people to be purer than the Chinese or Indian—but like my father revered the British. The white supremacist philosophy of the empire was drummed into them from an early age, and they yearned towards a hyphenate identity that began with that hallowed Anglo prefix.

Later, they were drawn to England by advertisements they saw when they were at school, designed by the government of Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, to entice commonwealth subjects to work in the motherland. Those ads painted a picture of a land of wealth, opportunity, and equity that could somehow be accessed by working long hours in a National Health Service hospital. 

When they arrived, my parents encountered a world far removed from the ads. They lived in a series of dormitory towns north of London in the late 1960s and early ’70s, their new life spent in a crammed caravan with another recently formed couple: a Chinese man called Bingo and an Irish woman called Mary. They—apart from Mary—struggled with the weather, and were woefully ill-equipped to deal with the racism that became a daily feature of their lives.

When faced with the reality that the English didn’t want them in their streets, hospital wards, or pubs, my parents reacted not by revolting but by becoming more reverential of white people. They had grown up being told that Britain was the greatest nation on earth, and if they were being treated with hostility, they assumed it was their fault. Years later, when I was at school, they reacted the same way when I told them about the racism I faced as the only non-white person in the classroom.

My father’s love of empire, and his belief that Britain was a civilizing force, was mirrored in the drink he called his own: the India Pale Ale. Of all of his beliefs, this one was particularly confused. His friends were Lager drinkers, and his adoption of IPA was a way of pretending to be refined in the days before the craft revolution had taken hold. But where he saw a drink that was emblematic of genteel, colonial India, I see something very different: Owing to the beer style’s association with the East India Company and its brutality, I can’t help but think of bloodshed, oppression, and enslavement.

COMPANY MEN

The East India Company committed the most “supreme act of corporate violence in world history” by pillaging the then-rich Bengal in northeast India, as historian William Dalrymple writes in The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. 

The East India Company was first created to “trade” in the Indian region by a group of merchants in 1599. In the early 1600s, when the EIC landed in the Subcontinent, India was the world’s economic powerhouse, home to a quarter of global manufacturing (by contrast, England was home to just 3% at the time) and a vast number of highly skilled merchants and weavers, who would later be displaced and impoverished by colonization. It soon became apparent why the EIC’s founding charter allowed it to wage war, and it took control of Bengal by military might, forcing Indian financiers and local rulers to trade with it. 

As the EIC expanded further into the Subcontinent, it used Bengal as its lucrative base. “They rung the neck of the Bengali goose that laid such astonishing golden eggs,” as Dalrymple notes, furnishing themselves with personal funds and money for more armed troops. In addition to setting up puppet governments by bribing local rulers, the EIC stole an enormous quantity of the country’s riches. By the 1760s, it taxed up to two million people in Bengal, gaining a yearly revenue of up to £315 million ($430 million) in today’s money. During the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, the East India Company continued with this policy, even though the population was starving. As Dalrymple writes, “They ate away at the economy of Bengal like an invasion of termites.” 

In addition to the horrors it perpetrated in the Subcontinent—including granting licences to allow any European company to plunder, and refusing to pay local tolls and duties while enforcing their own punitive taxes—the EIC, in its quest to control global trade, also set up opium factories in East Asia, leading to widespread addiction and violent conflict. 

By 1803, the East India Company commanded an army of 200,000—twice the size of the British army at the time. Robert Clive, the first governor of Bengal and major-general at the EIC, was so rich that his wife’s pet ferret had a diamond necklace worth £262,000 ($359,000) in today’s money. 

Though the EIC might have wanted to appear autonomous from the British government, that was hardly the case. In the 19th century, a quarter of Members of Parliament were stockholders, and used the profits to ensure they were elected using the rotten borough system. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “By the 1800s [the East India Company] had constructed much of London’s docklands and was responsible for nearly half of Britain’s trade; its annual spending in Britain alone equaled a quarter of total government expenditure.”

IPA’S LORE

It is against this backdrop that we are given the history of the IPA. Repeated credulously by family and multinational breweries, still recited today by contemporary craft beer businesses, the story goes that brewer George Hodgson, based in Bow, East London, made a new beer that could survive the long voyage to India, and called it an India Pale Ale. It was a turbocharged version of an English Pale Ale, brewed with greater quantities of hops (whose antimicrobial properties helped prevent spoilage), and a higher alcohol percentage to help it weather the time at sea. Today, that tale is so widely known that it has become a legend, the romantic origin story of craft’s favorite beer style. 

Unfortunately, that cozy fairy tale glosses over most of the realities of the era.

It is true that the EIC was involved in the shipping of beers to India for soldiers and colonial administrators, but that’s where the IPA’s connection to Indian identity ends. The British viewed Indians as their inferiors, and IPAs were not drunk by most locals—in any case, they were barred from many establishments where white people would drink. 

“Colonials living in these countries wanted a bit of the old home taste, whether it’s food or drink. Making beer [locally] would have been very difficult in terms of managing the process of the malting and the wort production,” says Sir Geoff Palmer, who was recently named one of the 100 Great Black Britons, and in April was made Chancellor of Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University. “Today, IPA is just a brand name which people use to sell them. It can’t be described as like those IPAs in terms of ingredients or raw material.”

The adoption of the beer by the EIC was just another way for the corporate entity to make money. At that time, beers—particularly Porters, and even Pale Ales—were already being shipped globally from various parts of the U.K. (historical evidence even shows that the era’s Porters survived well at sea, disrupting the idea that a brand new beer had to be created for such journeys). 

The EIC docks were in Blackwall, East London, conveniently close to Hodgson’s Brewery, which shipped its beer by barge, providing a sought-after product to India’s British contingent. Hodgson offered favorable credit to the EIC, which meant that his beers could be paid for after they arrived in India, which led to 4,000 barrels from the Bow brewery being shipped in one year (1813) under Hodgson’s son, Mark. Later, greed led to the end of the brewery’s lucrative deal, as George’s grandson, Frederick, and his partner Thomas Drane, tried to cut out the EIC middlemen and trade directly. The incensed EIC sought another contract with Burton-on-Trent brewer Samuel Allsopp, who successfully copied Hodgson’s recipe in 1822.  

Another point of clarification: As beer historian Martyn Cornell notes, the earliest evidence of beers marketed as “India Pale Ales” doesn’t appear until 1829. “We can guess that Hodgson quite likely knew of the opinion expressed in books on brewing written in the 1760s that it was a good idea to highly hop ales for export to warmer climes. But there is no evidence at all that Hodgson was the one to discover this,” Cornell writes. “Eventually that general knowledge about the need to hop beers for export to places like India apparently led to brewers to announce for sale something they called ‘Pale Ale prepared for the East and West India Climate’ and similar designations, which was eventually shortened or summarised as ‘India Pale Ale.’”

Those early IPA predecessors certainly wouldn’t be recognized as such by today’s drinkers. Cornell describes them as “something like the present bitter ales,” or similar to heavily hopped autumn stock beers.

“I think it was somewhere between a modern English IPA and a Barley Wine,” says London-based beer writer Pete Brown, who has written a book on the “beer that created the British Empire.” “It would have been about 7%, a bit sweeter than now, and when it would’ve been drunk all the aromatic hop character would’ve disappeared. It was more mellow, and people at the time compared it to Champagne. They didn’t know Burton water was so good and when Allsopp recreated the recipe it tasted way, way better. The hard water character of Burton water is what defines the style.”

FAUX PAST

The story of the IPA, then, is not the apolitical tale that so many beer businesses espouse uncritically. Nor is the beer style’s origin so singularly defined. Its real history is far muddier, and is inextricable from the horrors of empire.

While I’m embarrassed that my mum and dad would overlook these factors when enjoying their colonial trappings, I’m not the only British-Asian person who had such an upbringing. Steve Sailopal, founder of Good Karma Beer Co., was born in East London—ironically just around the corner from where Hodgson’s Brewery once stood—in a year symbolic for post-colonial triumph: 1966, the only time the English team has ever won the soccer World Cup (or any major tournament). Sailopal says that, despite his family history (his father was a tailor for senior officers in Calcutta, and was the first in his family to move away from a life of agriculture) he never did talk about empire with his parents.

“Maybe I should have been taught more about [empire] in school,” he says. “Because I wish I had the chance to discuss it in more detail when I was very young, before my father passed away. And now I read about it, it’s eye-opening.”

“So much imperial or colonial iconography in branding and marketing is tacitly accepted without any critical engagement with what’s going on. So the fact that you can sit there with your Maharaja IPA, and these kinds of post-industrial, slightly nostalgic, heritage-inspired settings, is something that needs to be cognized and critiqued, engaged with, because I think far too often, most people just kind of consume it without thinking it through.”

Sailopal speaks of the anger he feels hearing about the IPA’s legend—that during colonial days, ships containing stolen jewels, cotton, and natural resources were coming back to England to be replaced with products, like IPAs, for the EIC soldiers and expats. 

“If you go to Delhi, [British influence is] everywhere. It’s [shown in] the buildings—there are many similarities from Connaught Place in Delhi to Regent Street in London, especially the part up near Piccadilly Circus. Being a Londoner, you do double-take when you see this, and you can’t really put it aside. But I just hope that something like this never happens again.”  

Repeating history, though, seems to be on the agenda more than ever. Even as I write this article, I’m surrounded by colonial throwbacks. I’m in a pub decorated in the style of a Victorian gentlemen’s club, with plush leather armchairs and a faded, but elegant, wooden interior. There are 19th-century advertisements on the walls for OXO beef stock; customers are ordering Bombay Sapphire gin (established in 1986) with Indian tonic water; and I’m glancing at a catalogue selling plantation shutters, which are very popular in the gentrified area of South London where I live. I check my phone to see a former advisor of the prime minister—a man who is married to a descendant of the disgraced former governor of Kenya, who covered up colonial atrocities—is claiming that the U.K. didn’t follow other countries and shut down quickly enough during the first wave of the pandemic, as officials were saying, “Asians all do what they’re told so [lockdown] won’t work here.”

Meanwhile, I’m drinking a Maharaja IPA by West Berkshire Brewery. It’s marketed as the same drink that was sent over to India for indulgent colonials to enjoy. But as we now know, the IPA I am drinking, and the ones my dad loved, are nothing like the beers shipped over in colonial times. The IPA has warped and evolved so much since its inception that those bygone drinkers probably wouldn’t recognize the beer in my hand—making those anachronistic colonial trappings even less relevant.

The modern IPA is, like the plantation shutter or the Indian tonic water, part of a movement that Salman Rushdie described in the 1980s as “the Raj Revival.” In Imaginary Homelands, a collection of his essays written between 1981 to 1992, the writer (and former advertising executive) argues that British nostalgia for empire is embedded in racism, and bemoans how “the ideas of the past rot down into the earth and fertilize the present.”

The stereotypes that Rushdie laments, seen today on beer bottles like Fuller’s Bengal Lancer, are easy to shrug off “if yours isn’t the culture being ridiculed,” and if your culture “has the power to counter-punch against the stereotype,” as Rushdie notes. For Dr. Sam Goodman, principal academic in English & Communication at Bournemouth University, the Raj Revival hasn’t ended, and it’s something that those being stereotyped have every right to feel angry about.

“The identity crisis that Britain has been going through has lasted approximately 50 years or 60 years,” he says. “Britain sees itself as a country with an enormous legacy of heritage and history. And it’s continually asking itself, ‘Does the nation still live up to the weight of expectation that comes with that history?’ This desire for validation comes straight into the conversation around Brexit. And that sort of swashbuckling, buccaneering spirit that we’ve heard bandied around by various politicians in the last few years.”

I can see why the far-right in this country would reach for symbols of Britain’s white supremacist, imperial past, but I don’t see why colonial iconography is accepted by vast swathes of the mainstream population. On the street where I live in London, there are rows and rows of houses with plantation shutters and, confusingly, a lot of Black Lives Matter posters stuck to them.

“So much imperial or colonial iconography in branding and marketing is tacitly accepted without any critical engagement with what’s going on,” says Goodman. “So the fact that you can sit there with your Maharaja IPA, and these kinds of post-industrial, slightly nostalgic, heritage-inspired settings, is something that needs to be cognized and critiqued, engaged with, because I think far too often, most people just kind of consume it without thinking it through.”

Tacitly accepting exoticized, Indian-inflected marketing is something my dad frequently did. And that’s still very much happening, even among modern, highly educated British Asians. Sadiq Khan, when re-elected as London mayor earlier this year, recently chose to celebrate by visiting Dishoom, a restaurant chain that cultivates an ambiance of empire with its inescapable faux-colonial décor. Khan often plays up his “immigrant” heritage—he frequently gives speeches that mention that his father, Amanullah, was a bus driver—so it’s startling that he chose to eat at a restaurant that has become a symbol of colonial chic instead of having a dosa in his birthplace of Tooting in South London, a place nicknamed “curry mile” for its large South Asian population.

ROYAL MESS

Ultimately, I find it difficult to comprehend why anyone of color would tacitly accept any imperialist symbol. I have the utmost respect for Sir Geoff Palmer, for example, who has done so much to publicize the truth about racism during his extraordinary career, but I find the acceptance of knighthoods problematic because they were as much part of empire as the EIC was. I realize we are of very different generations—Palmer is 81 years old, and came to this country in the mid 1950s—and asking someone who has long been an antiracist activist why he accepted a Queen honor was difficult. Palmer, though, is happy to answer.

“I remember when I was getting my OBE. Just before my mother passed away. I told her there are people saying whether I should go to Buckingham Palace and take it. She said, ‘We are of slave descent. People gave us nothing. Why should you not take it—you made the empire.’”

“I remember when I was getting my OBE,” he says. “Just before my mother passed away. I told her there are people saying whether I should go to Buckingham Palace and take it. She said, ‘We are of slave descent. People gave us nothing. Why should you not take it—you made the empire.’”

But when we are told about empire, or shown images meant to represent our history, it’s never a Black person like Palmer who is celebrated. Britain’s acceptance of colonial falsehoods is ingrained in the way history is taught in schools. History is not a compulsory subject at GCSE (important exams taken when aged 14), and when it is taught, empire is not part of the obligatory national curriculum. It can be taught, alongside subjects like Black British history or migration history, but it’s very unlikely that the average schoolkid will learn much about it. They are just as unlikely to know about the Battle of Plassey (when the East India Company won a decisive victory against Bengali and French troops), or the ransacking of the kingdom of Mysore (when the learned Sultan Tipu was murdered; his incredible possessions were then stolen or destroyed, and Lord Wellesley raised a glass drinking “to the corpse of India”) or the fact that a Black musician performed in the court of Henry VII.

Not all who teach these whitewashed curriculums are complicit. Dan Lyndon-Cohen has campaigned for Black history to be included in syllabuses, and has fought for exam boards to recognize migration history as a GCSE topic. Wales has moved to include these changes after a long battle, but the rest of the U.K. is nowhere near as progressive. Lyndon-Cohen has also been part of a recent project to widen the history taught in National Trust properties, a collection of preserved historical buildings that are open to the public, a move attacked by the U.K.’s rightwing press and politicians.

“We’ve been stuck with a very Eurocentric, narrow curriculum,” he says. “Probably since the empire was at its height. You only need to look at the backlash at the National Trust. It’s a phony culture war, with a narrative that says we need to remember the good parts of the empire and forget the unsavory parts. [As if] ‘it’s not British’ to talk about that kind of stuff.”

My schooling in a small market town just outside of London was so white that I can remember only two occasions that it ventured into subjects that could be described as “empire.” In geography, we covered a famine in Bangladesh, which led to some kids calling me “Desh” to rhyme with the first part of my surname. And in GCSE English Literature we studied a book exploring the British-Asian experience called Sumitra’s Story by Rukshana Smith, which led to more taunts, but this time of a sexual nature.

“Empire is a sensitive topic,” Lyndon-Cohen says. “Teachers don’t want to step into it and are worrying about reactions in the classroom. So we’re trying to promote a similar model to the way Holocaust is taught, to try and address some of those concerns.”

PURE AND SIMPLE

If many brands and restaurants are actively playing into colonial tropes, others have attempted to stand apart by denigrating them. Recently, the London-headquartered Fourpure Brewing Co. ran an ad for an IPA with the tagline “Brewed nowhere near India” during a recent controversial rebrand. I called Fourpure about this, and the brewery’s response was surprising­—it apologized profusely and removed the ads. A spokesperson from Lion Little World Beverages said: “We were wrong on this occasion and are very sorry this was originally overlooked.”

I don’t see this as a victory. How did Fourpure get this so wrong when so many beer companies, craft breweries especially, still market IPA in terms of empire? You may think the next step is to call for IPAs to be canceled, but instead, I think we have an opportunity here to educate. 

“We’ve been stuck with a very Eurocentric, narrow curriculum. Probably since the empire was at its height. You only need to look at the backlash at the National Trust. It’s a phony culture war, with a narrative that says we need to remember the good parts of the Empire and forget the unsavory parts. [As if] ‘it’s not British’ to talk about that kind of stuff.”

I suggested to Fourpure that as an alternative to offending the craft community, it could take the lead on an actual antiracism project and market IPA differently to everyone else. Its IPAs could come with an explainer of the real context in which they were originally made, and with snippets of British-Indian history. Fourpure’s representatives said it was too tricky to do so at the moment from a “production perspective,” but that they would consider pursuing something like this in future. In any case, I hope other beer companies consider the apparently radical notion of telling the truth about Britain’s empire. If our schools aren’t doing it, then maybe our beers can.

Taking such steps to change labeling might seem a bit trivial at a time when death rates from the coronavirus are so high around the world, but Good Karma’s Sailopal believes the global pandemic has changed the way we look at such issues. “One thing we’ve learned from COVID is to be more compassionate,” he says.

I put the idea about updated IPA branding to Goodman, who has written a book that will be coming out at the end of the year called the Retrospective Raj. It stops him in his tracks, and he mentions a striking coincidence.

“That’s a really interesting idea,” he says. “A few years ago, I got some money to run a project with a design company around beer labels. And I wanted to see if it was possible to produce a post-colonial Pale Ale. And sadly, that project didn’t end up running due to the funding disappearing.”

I want to see a beer that is sold as an “India Pale Ale,” but which is advertised and marketed in a way that explains the legacy of Britain’s empire, and the blood that was shed in the process. Instead of brewed “nowhere near India,” how about a bottle or can label that tells the drinker about the EIC’s misdeeds and explains why these beers were shipped out to India in the first place? 

If we are really living in a post-colonial stage, and if craft beer is as diverse and inclusive as it says it is, then surely we can band together to change the prevailing narrative. We can use the tools at hand to educate drinkers, so they can better understand empire, migration, and racism. Because ultimately, if we don’t know where it’s from, then people will keep asking me where I’m from.

The truth is like the IPA: I’m from London.

Words by David Jesudason
Illustrations by Sinjin Li