It has been asserted by some of those who are fond of depreciating their own countrymen that intemperance in India is a vice due to foreign importation, and that the Hindus, before the conquest of the country by England, were a perfectly sober people. This was not the case in the Punjab or among the Sikhs. They were always a hard-drinking race. Take the time with which the last chapter is concerned, when the name of the English was unknown to the Sikhs. Rájá Amar Singh of Patiála died of intemperance in 1781, as had his father Sardul Singh in 1753, and his younger brother Lál Singh. Almost every great family had the same record. The sword and the bottle were equally destructive to the barons of the Khálsa.
The favourite liquor of the Mahárájá Ranjít was a fierce compound distilled from corn-brandy, mixed with the juice of meat, opium, musk and various herbs. Of this he drank large quantities in the evening and at night. Most of his courtiers, with the exception of the Muhammadan Fakírs, were ready to please him by joining in his drinking bouts and indeed were habitually as drunken as himself. But with all this hard drinking, which was the custom of his age and country and should not be regarded as anything unusual, the Mahárájá was always fit for business at the proper and assigned time. Every foreign visitor to his Court was struck with his intelligence, eager curiosity, and general information, and there was nothing of which he was fonder than to discuss the manners and constitutions of other
