Selling the spirit of Goa

The ecological carrying capacity of desire

We spent our first two months in Goa in the village of Saligao, a bustling town just 12 km north of the capital city of Panjim (though the drive takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour thanks to the ubiquitous snarl of road construction.) Nearby was one of Goa’s famous “coconut roads”, a narrow lane lined with palm trees where tourists constantly block traffic to take selfies.

No traffic was blocked in the taking of this photo. Also, not a selfie.

I frequented that road with my camera out, but not to snap pics of myself. I was stalking the sole cashew tree in my neighborhood which was in flower when we first arrived. Over the next few weeks I watched the embryonic cashew nuts form first, and then eventually the stalk of the inflorescence began to fill out, suggesting the nascent fruit to come.

Flower to seed to fruit….almost

On our last day in Saligao I made one last visit to my tree to check on its progress and found the fruit still green and immature.

But I’ve been hearing that the urrak is starting to flow in some areas, and we decided to relocate to south Goa for the last month of our stay here in hopes of being a bit closer to the action.

I still haven’t seen a fully ripe cashew fruit, but on my first morning walk in our new village of Varca I saw tree after tree after tree, all with flowers and fruits in various stages of maturity. The distillers I have talked to say, in 5 days, in 10 days, we will begin. At a restaurant last Thursday night the owner told me, come back on Wednesday. We should get our first urrak that day. It almost feels like the count down to my birthday when I was a kid, though here I can visually watch the time pass as the fruits swell and gradually change from green to yellow to red.

I’m not the only one who is excited. The beginning of urrak season is big enough that there are memes about it.

One of my local interlocutors sent me these. I think he's excited too.

Soon urrak season will give way to feni, and from what locals have told me, you will be able to smell the distilleries driving down pretty much any village road in the state. It is a special time in a special place. Feni season is part of what it means to be Goan.

“Fish, Football, and Feni” is the state’s as-yet-unofficial slogan, a pleasantly alliterative claim to the cultural assets that make Goa unique in India. Fish curry is the state’s signature dish (so much so that last year the government made it mandatory for all beach shacks to feature it on their menu. It is delicious). Football is the official state sport as of 2012, despite the overwhelming popularity of cricket elsewhere in India. And of course feni, the famed cashew spirit, has recently been semantically (and politically) elevated from “country liquor” to “heritage spirit”. It’s no surprise, then, that this slogan is being promoted by the head of one of the largest and oldest commercial feni distillers in Goa.

I’ve been arguing throughout this project that homemade liquor is an enactment of cultural heritage, and Goa’s cultural heritage is also unique in India, a singular manifestation of the hybridity of Konkan and Portuguese histories, as I wrote in my last post, which produces, as writer Vivek Menezes calls it, a “many-layered syncretic Goan identity”.

Making hooch is a way for people to actively practice their traditions and reproduce the social ties that bind communities together. In Goa, that means (or meant, at one time) sending the kids up on the hill to collect fruit, crushing it underfoot, standing over the bhatti (still), manually pouring water hour after hour over the bamboo condenser tube that leads to the earthen collection vessel, which contains the once-distilled urrak. The bhaticar (distiller) then mixes the urrak with fermented juice and repeats the process once again, yielding the twice-distilled feni.

A traditional bhatti on display for tourists at a spice plantation

This is called the launi method, and is considered by some to yield a superior product to that produced in the “modern” way (copper or sometimes even stainless steel pot, copper condenser submerged in a cooling tank). I’ll have more to say about the different distillation methods once the season actually begins and I have the opportunity to visit some distillers, but what’s important is that launi feni is today considered a luxury product. It is so much more labor- and time-intensive to produce that most distillers have transitioned from crushing the fruit with their feet in earthen pits to mechanical grinders, and have traded earthenware pots and bamboo condensers for copper pots and coils. All this is to feed the growing demand for feni that is being driven by a government marketing campaign promoting feni as a central part of culinary and agro-tourism.

But today, despite the fact that India is the second largest producer of cashew nuts in the world, cashew trees are disappearing from the Goan landscape. In fact, Goa does not even make it to the list of the top 10 cashew-producing states in India. In 2021, it was responsible for just 4.3% of the country’s harvest. One may assume that this because of the state’s tiny size, but the yield per hectare in Goa is only about half the national average, and as countrywide yields are growing by 10% per year, yields in Goa are declining. This is partly due to climate change, but also, ironically, to the importance of feni in Goa.

In the rest of the country, farmers grow a variety of cashew tree that has been selected to maximize yield of the highly valuable cashew nut. As a result, the fruits are notably smaller and less juicy. In Goa, because of the importance of feni, most farmers still grow a traditional variety that has larger fruit. The trees are propagated by seed rather than by grafting cuttings onto existing rootstock, which means that they take much longer to yield and have lower productivity overall.

As the government relaxes zoning standards to allow for the development of more tourist infrastructure, less and less land is available for cashew trees, and the tree count is in decline. And because Goan farmers grow the late-maturing and lower-yielding landrace tree varieties, growers need secure land tenure, which the government seems unwilling to guarantee.   

All this is happening while the volume of feni produced in Goa is increasing steadily every year.

How is this possible? The answer comes from the neighboring states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, where over 300,000 tons of cashew nuts are produced every year but distilling liquor is prohibited. There are no duties or taxes levied on fruit transported across state lines, so increasingly, commercial feni producers are importing fruit that would have become organic waste in neighboring states, at extremely low prices.

Even the ubiquitous Goa Caju Outlet Wholesale Retail shops that line the roads leading to Goa’s famous beaches are reportedly fraudulent. Everyone I’ve talked to says of the ostentatiously huge and abundant bags of cashew nuts stacked several feet high: those cashews do not come from Goa. They are imported from Africa and sold as if they are grown here.

Lots of people are clearly still trading on the Goa-cashew connection. But what happens when the marketing becomes a threat to the tradition itself?

A perennial conundrum of landscape- and culture-based tourism development is whether it is possible to both preserve and market landscapes and cultures simultaneously. Isn’t there something inherently at odds between honoring traditions and commercializing them? As the Goan state facilitates the development of tourist infrastructure, it is also promoting feni as a major tourist draw, which was the impetus behind the creation of a Geographic Indicator tag for feni in 2009. As written in the 2021 Feni Policy from the state Department of Excise, “Feni distillation is a tradition and culture rather than a product. Feni is considered synonymous with Goa by tourists from across the world” (p. 1118).

But in fact, many distillers don’t feel that the government is doing enough to protect and promote the authentic product. There is no inspection process or enforcement mechanism to ensure that feni merchants are complying with the GI rules. As with the towering heaps of nuts in the beachside shops, many people I’ve talked to believe that the average bottle of feni for sale in a retail store is likely to be a neutral grain spirit with flavoring added. And while the state seems interested in increasing the status of feni around the world, they don’t seem to have a concrete strategy other than drafting policies that have no real impact for producers. When I visited the state excise office, one official asked me, “how do we promote feni in America? You need to tell us how to do this better.” But how much more feni can Goans produce without pushing up against the ecological limits of the land, which are being ever-eroded by fast-paced development.

As there are more resorts and villas, more bridges and highways, there is less and less room for cashew trees. Goan activists are fighting against blatant moves by the state to re-zone land from agriculture to development. In recent days activists have led candlelight vigils to protest the cutting of trees in the village of Siolim for a road-widening project.

These photographs were sent to me by Avertino Miranda, one of the activists involved in the Siolim protests.

At the same time, Goan farmers (and even some distillers) resent the state’s permissiveness in letting cashew fruit flow freely across the border.

While limited open space in the tiny state of Goa results in an inverse relationship between infrastructure development and land available for agriculture, the government’s aim is clear: more tourists and more feni. But what about feni being “a tradition and culture rather than a product”? What does it mean to be Goa’s “heritage spirit” when it isn’t being made with Goan fruit, or consumed by Goan people? Of course, Goans certainly still drink feni, and urrak, but as I learned with țuică in Romania, Goans are not buying bottles of feni from the liquor store. They’re drinking feni that they get from their “guy” who makes feni for himself, his neighbors, and the local tavern, or feni that they make themselves.

But unlike Romania, where it seems there will never be a shortage of plums, local feni distillers feel an existential threat to their tradition that comes from the very institutions and policies designed to promote it. While on the one hand the future of cashew in Goa seems uncertain, when I ask folks whether the tradition will ever disappear it seems unimaginable.

In Romania the existential threat to the tradition of home distilling comes from the out-migration of rural youth and the question of whether younger generations will continue the hard work of making țuică. In Goa, there seems to be no shortage of enthusiasm for making feni. The question is whether promoting feni tourism will spell the the disappearance of cashew trees and the land needed to grow them.