SHOP
Maria de Lourdes Fatima Fernandes Bravo da Costa has a PhD in history from Goa University and has written extensively on Goa. She retired as Assistant State Librarian, State Central Library, Goa.
Growing up, I was first acquainted with popular folklore about the coconut tree in a story I heard from my grandmother. When Joseph and Mary were fleeing from the soldiers of King Herod, she told me, they came to seek shelter under a banana tree. The tree was unwelcoming; it raised its leaves. Next, they tried a coconut tree. The tree spread its leaves, giving the family ample space to hide. In gratitude, Mary blessed it: the tree would bear fruit all year round, and none of its parts would go to waste.
According to the tale, her blessing explains why every part of the tree and fruit is valuable. The water found inside a tender coconut is a delicacy, a refreshing drink that has for generations been rehydrating those working under the sun. The kernel (what we often refer to as the “meat” of the coconut) can both be eaten as a fruit and used to prepare Goan curries, vegetables and sweets. From the dried kernel, oil is extracted, and used for cooking and frying fish, imparting a uniquely delicious flavour to the dishes. The oil is also considered medicinal, particularly for treating eczema and arthritis.
The leaves of the coconut tree—the same ones that grew to shelter Mary and her family in their time of need—are used to pad kutcha houses and shacks, providing an extra layer of protection. The veins of the leaves go towards making brooms while the stems are used for timber. The husks are used for generating fuel; the shells are good for the production of charcoal. The coconut fibre or coir extracted from the husk is used to make rope, floormats, bags and other items. The shell is utilised to make affordable utensils.
The sap, known as the toddy or ‘sur’ of the tree, creates diverse flavours. The coconut palm jaggery extracted from it is a sweetening agent; vinegar made from the same sap can be used to make food sour. Fresh toddy is used to leaven the batter of Goan pão and sannas or steamed rice bread; it plays a similar role in the batter used to make bol, a cake made of wheat, coconut and palm jaggery that is traditionally offered by the bride’s family to bridegroom’s and other guests at Goan weddings. The liquid sap in fermented form gives us the popular Goan spirit, coconut palm feni. This was one of the main revenue sources for the state in the colonial period, even after ore mining was started in full swing to counter the economic blockade imposed by the Indian Union (1955-1961).
Feni is more than a drink in Goa; it’s a part of the state’s ethos. Goan writer and advertising executive Frank Simoes recognised this when he wrote in his book Glad Seasons in Goa:
“Goans drink heroic quantities of feni. They drink it at births and wakes, solemnly on Maundy Thursday, never on Friday and joyfully at Easter; they toast the feast of their saints with it; they celebrate with generous portions when a favourite sow litters, they drink it before, with, and often after meals. Workers in the fields pause at the noon break to refresh themselves with a few quick copitos of feni (Glucose…Vitamin B...Iron!) they drink in all ages and conditions; babies are given a few drops dissolved in sugar to off the chill; it is rubbed in the joints for gout and rheumatism and generously imbibed by the patient immediately thereafter, recovery being swift and certain.”
Simoes was right. Both palm and cashew feni were and still are routinely used for medicinal purposes in Goa. The perceived benefits cover a wide spectrum from being used as an antiseptic on wounds or even during labour to being utilised as a paste to apply on troublesome joints to treating stomach disorders and even worms in children. When my father suffered from malaria in the late 1930s, he was recommended a small dose of palm feni by a well-known physician. This was to be taken before dinner in order to ward off any shivering, a symptom of the infection.
Today, if you’re out looking for feni in Goa, you’re much more likely to come across the kind extracted from cashew apples. But that wasn’t always the case—coconut palm feni very much dominated the area even sixty years ago
WHEN THE FRENCH traveller François Pyrard de Laval visited Goa in the seventeenth century, he found the coconut trees and palm liquor worthy of note. “There is a great number of palmeira or Orta, like our orchards here full of cocos trees planted close together…this is worth a good deal at Goa because of wine which is in great request,” (sic) he wrote.
Palm feni existed in Goa much before the arrival of the Portuguese; it was then known as orraqua or urraca. Portuguese physician, herbalist and naturalist Garcia de Orta published his work Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas da India in 1563, and talks about the production of palm feni:
“They have two kinds of palm plantations, one for fruit, and the other for çura, which is a rough wine, and when cooked is called Orraca. When the tree is wanted for çura they cut some ends and fasten small pots under the place whence the çura is drawn, and climb up the tree, fastening their feet to notches that have been made in the stem. They distil this çurãa into a kind of aguardiente, and it gives a wine like strong water, and they put a wet cloth into it, as they do with spirits. This is called fula, which means flower. The other kind is called orraque, a small quantity of the other being mixed with it.”
Other historical documents too refer to the existence of urraca in Goa. Christian priest Denis L Cottineau de Kloguen, who spent time in Goa around 1827, wrote that “the sura or toddy fermented and distilled into liquor is the only common drink of the majority of the inhabitants, besides water”.
After the conquest, the colonial Portuguese administrators taxed this spirit for their gain, naming the tax ‘renda de urracas’. The revenue accrued from toddy-tapping and related industries was one of the important incomes for the territory. After the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1878—an economic agreement between Portugal and the United Kingdom regarding trade between their colonies in the Indian subcontinent—the name of this tax was changed to abkari, which was the nomenclature in use in British India. The treaty ended in 1892, as the Portuguese were not keen to renew it—they felt it benefited British India more than them. However, the Portuguese government in Goa continued using the new abkari tariff as it was beneficial to them.
Historical sources contain little reference to the production of cashew feni in Goa. Garcia de Orta’s work, which details every plant he saw in Goa and its uses, too did not mention it at all. That the cashew tree was introduced to the region can be gleaned from the work of Cristovão da Costa, a Portuguese doctor and natural historian who was in India from 1568 to 1572. His Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales was published in 1578, and contains a description of the cashew tree. It is likely, then, that the cashew tree was first grown in the region between the publication of de Orta’s and da Costa’s works.
In the twentieth century, palm feni was one of the highest revenue-earners for the colonial government. Cashew feni production at the time was low, and proposals were made by civil society to the government to encourage its production and tap that revenue source. Between 1918 and 1922, figures quoted at the Sétimo Congresso Provincial da India Portuguesa, a biannual seminar organised by Goa’s intellectual elite between 1916 and 1931, show an increase in the production of both palm and cashew feni—but the amount of palm feni produced was more than seven times that of cashew feni. In 1918, for instance, 1,98,833 gallons of cashew feni were produced, compared to 15,65,907 gallons of palm feni. By 1922, the production of cashew feni had gone up to 2,15,980 gallons, while 1,9,02,550 gallons of palm feni were produced in the same year.
It is only to be expected, then, that coconut or palm feni production brought in far more revenue for the colonial state at the time than cashew feni could. For example, for the period between 1939 and 1941, the state collected 4,21,523 rupees as tax on licenses for extracting coconut toddy; the tax for distilling cashew spirit and sugarcane amounted to only Rs 78,900. To put it in context, even the tax collected from licences for the sale of local spirits in Goa’s taverns—87,495 rupees—was more than what was generated by cashew feni production.
The coconut feni tax was imposed on the tree—the toddy tapper had to pay a tax on each tree they were using for toddy extraction—as this was seen as the more profitable route for the government to take. Eighty-seven-year-old Francisco Afonso, a toddy tapper from Benaulim, said that the system followed was of tax collected every month on the trees used to collect toddy and annually on the spirit produced by the toddy tapper. Collecting toddy for making bread or coconut palm jaggery, though, was granted exemption from this tax. This afforded tappers a way to reduce their taxes; they would claim that they were using the toddy for these purposes rather than to produce alcohol.
These figures don’t resonate today; the tables have turned and the production of cashew feni far exceeds that of coconut palm feni. In the financial year 2022-23, state revenue from cashew liquor production was 4,38,390 rupees while the corresponding figure for coconut liquor, at 58,000 rupees, was about one-eight of that. The state also collected another 41,96,000 rupees that year from cashew zone auctions—the process by which different cashew-producing areas in the state are opened up in a public auction, and the highest bidder gets the right to set up pots to distil fermented cashew juice. On the other hand, the tax on coconut trees—at 2.73 paise per tree—is so low that the excise department doesn’t even publish data on how much revenue this tax generates.
EXTRACTING TODDY FROM a coconut tree is both tedious and dangerous. The toddy tapper usually climbs the tall trees three times a day—in the morning, afternoon and night. In the morning and at night, the climb is made to collect sap from the spikes of the tree; in the afternoon, it is for a process called applying cheu, during which the spike that is being tapped is taken care of to ensure that the flow of toddy continues. This has to be done, no matter what the weather is like, since earnings directly corelate to how much toddy can be collected.
Once the toddy has been extracted comes the long process of distilling the liquor. The author and scholar Maria Pia de Menezes Rodrigues, a former librarian in Goa, has detailed this process in her essay Taverna and its Socio-Economic Impact in Colonial Goa:
“The toddy is distilled in stills, known as batty. This was once a basic old device called a zontro, consisting of two large earthenware pots connected by a hollow bamboo tube. The larger round pot, known as the banna, is used as boiling apparatus and is kept on fire; the smaller pot is called the launy or colço. Nollo, a hollow tube serves to connect between the two pots. The codem, a sizable container with a wide mouth that is filled with water, is used to continuously cool the alcoholic fumes through cold water baths in order to condense them. The first product of distillation is urraca. It is of lesser alcoholic strength. By combining one part of urraca and two parts of toddy one gets casulo fechado or dobrado also known as glass feni or feni without froth which is a product of the second distillation. Feni, which produces froth, is the result of the third distillation. One part toddy and two parts casulo are distilled to produce this.” (sic)
Trying to understand why palm feni no longer enjoys the pride of place it once did throws up complex answers. Hansel Vaz, a former geologist who founded the brand Cazulo Premium Feni and goes by the moniker ‘feni doctor’, told me that the discriminatory social hierarchy of caste had a role to play. Today, tapping coconut trees is a tedious and risky job, one that was traditionally carried out by a rendeiro or render who was given coconut trees on lease to collect sap by the owner of the land. While the landlords were largely from ‘upper’-caste Brahmin and Chardo groups, renders were classified as a separate caste in post-independence India, and both Christian and Hindu renders (the latter come under the Bhandari caste) were brought under the Other Backward Classes list.
This system built a hierarchical and unequal relationship into the toddy-tapping process. While the landlords could create terms that suited them—deciding how many trees to use for coconut production and how many to lease out to renders, at what cost, and for how long—renders themselves often barely made enough to get by. Their business would usually involve the whole family. While the men would extract the toddy sap from the trees, the women would manage the feni-making process, including watching over the batty, the cauldron used to make feni, while it sat on the fire. Members of the family would also take the clay counso, or traditional feni container, to the nearest town or market to sell the feni. But the labour-intensive—and even dangerous—process that required time and energy from multiple members of the family throughout the year, Vaz said, did not translate into wages that could ensure a comfortable life. The government, on its part, imposes a small annual tax on the extraction of toddy and a monthly tax on the production of liquor, eating even further into the renders’ meagre earnings.
The children of toddy tappers have moved away from the profession over the years, often migrating to Mumbai or other cities to look for work that pays better, is less risky and comes without the caste stigma and discrimination that renders have witnessed. In 2022, the All-Goa Toddy Tappers Association said that less than 300 toddy tappers remained in the state. “A toddy tapper has to work amidst strong winds and rain and that’s why it is considered one of the toughest professions,” the association’s president, Remy Borges, told Mint Lounge. “Traditionally in Goa there were three main professions—fishing, farming and toddy-tapping. Eventually, in the course of time, many from the toddy-tapping community started working on ships abroad, migrating to foreign lands.”
Jose Fernandes, who is a toddy tapper and also owns a bar and restaurant in the South Goan district of Benaulim, told me that he and his brother continue to extract coconut toddy. Knowledge of how to get toddy from coconut trees was usually passed down in families; Fernandes said he used to accompany his father when he went to extract the sap early in the mornings, before he went to school. His own life has been proof of the dangers associated with the work. He once fell from a tree, and was only saved from a harsh fall because he managed to hang on to the branch of a nearby tree. Fernandes hasn’t taught his three children how to do this work, and says they have better economic prospects because of the education they’ve got.
Eighty-seven-year-old Francisco Afonso, who used to be a toddy tapper in Benaulim, says his son too is no longer engaged in the business. In his memory, in addition to the risks and low returns, one of the issues he faced was when the government placed restrictions on the direct sale of feni by household members, because they claimed it increased addiction to alcohol. “We have been stopped, but the number of taverns [serving alcohol] has only increased,” he said regretfully.
Both Fernandes and Afonso think it is unlikely, at this stage, that coconut feni will regain the status it once had. While there are some young people, not from the traditional render community, who have started to climb trees and extract toddy, their numbers are still small. The government, aided by an agricultural college, is trying to attract more such people, but interest in these efforts is yet to catch on. When I visited the Sanguem taluka, I saw that some landowners had begun to plant dwarf coconut trees, making toddy extraction easier. But even in those situations, it is likely that the trees will be used mostly to sell tender coconut, which is profitable but much less labour-intensive to harvest..
Loyal consumers of palm feni can still find it in the market, but quality feni is both limited and highly priced. Some have found a way to get direct supplies from toddy tappers who distil the drink themselves. In most Goan homes, though, this once-staple drink is no longer seen on the table. Whether efforts to revive the industry will bear fruit remains to be seen.
