In modern Mumbai, you have near-endless options when you’re in search of a drink. From dive bars to fancy cocktail lounges, the city is known for its vibrant nightlife. When the streets are still bustling well past midnight, it’s easy to forget that our access to alcohol was once so greatly limited. Enacted in 1949 and enforced until 1972, Bombay’s Prohibition Act was a post-independence attempt at achieving purity through the elimination of a vice. Through the 50s, alcohol consumption and distribution of any kind would leave you subject to arrest. However, as we all know, you can never truly rip a man away from his booze, bars and clubs be damned.
So where do you go when you can’t pop by the liquor store or a pub for a nightcap? For drinkers during prohibition, the answer was: an aunty’s living room.
Aunty bars were the speakeasies of Prohibition Bombay, run out of middle-aged women’s homes. Most of these women were Goan and would brew feni and moonshine in their homes to serve customers. Later, the aunties would grow savvy, bribing police and finding elaborate ways to transport and sneak bootleg alcohol into their homes for their customers. You could find out about Aunty Bars only through word of mouth, or if you were perceptive, by noticing an increased presence in street food stalls near certain apartments and homes.
Unlike the large-scale covert operations that were 1920s American speakeasies, Aunty Bars kept it simple. You enter a room, you sit, you drink. There was no glamour or elaborate schemes at play; just a woman and maybe her daughter if their bar gained enough popularity, serving you spirits. These secret bars were not places to party. Rather, they were a hideaway for taxi drivers and businessmen alike, drawing in people from all walks of life — except for one. It was rare to see a woman visit an Aunty Bar.
Consider the era: the 1950s were not a great time for women in India. We weren’t granted the right to vote until 1950, a full year after the Bombay Prohibition Act was passed. And while we could legally work, cultural norms limited our opportunities. In 1953, only 12.5% of women in urban areas participated in the labour force, a statistic that only increased by 1% by the end of prohibition.
It makes sense, then, that the majority of women running Aunty Bars were single or widowed, searching for economic stability and independence. Our low attendance at Aunty Bars could therefore be attributed to the expectation that women would take care of the home, and by that logic, not leave it for what was the supposedly male recreational act of drinking. Prohibition was also largely supported by Indian women, who hoped a ban on alcohol would prevent the abuse they experienced at the hands of their drunken husbands. In this way, Aunty Bars may have defied women’s wishes for the benefit of drinking men.
On one hand, the story of Aunty Bars sounds like epic feminist history, with women taking their destinies into their own hands by running independent criminal operations. On the other, Aunty Bars pose a tragic tale of women forced to go against their collective interests for the sake of their own survival.
As we look back on the era of Prohibition, we must remember Aunty Bars as more than just a fun historical fact. While, yes, they are a cool relic of our past, they also act as a reminder of the complex women’s stories that lay at the core of our history.
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