[India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history. Now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation.]
By Mujib Mashal
But the sugary summer cooler Rooh
Afza, with a poetic name that means “soul refresher” and evokes the narrow
alleys of its birthplace
of Old Delhi, has long reached across the heated borders of South Asia to
quench the thirst of generations.
In Pakistan, the thick,
rose-colored syrup — called a sharbat or sherbet and poured from a distinctive
long-neck bottle — is mixed with milk and crushed almonds as an offering in
religious processions.
In Bangladesh, a new groom often
takes a bottle or two as a gift to his in-laws. Movies even invoke it as a
metaphor: In one film, the hero tells the heroine that she is beautiful
like Rooh
Afza.
And in Delhi,
where the summer temperatures often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the city
feels like a slow-burning oven, you can find it everywhere.
The chilled drink is served in the
plastic goblets of cold-drink vendors using new tricks to
compete for customers — how high and how fast they can throw the concentrate
from one glass to the next as they mix, how much of it they can drizzle onto
the cup’s rim.
The same old taste is also there in
new packaging to appeal to a new generation and to new drinkers: in the juice
boxes in children’s school bags, in cheap one-time sachets hanging at tobacco
stalls frequented by laborers, and in high-end restaurants where it’s whipped
into the latest ice cream offering.
As summer heat waves worsen, the
drink’s reputation as a natural, fruits-and-herbs cooler that lowers body
temperature and boosts energy — four-fifths of it is sugar — means that even a
brief interruption in manufacturing results in huge outcries over a shortage.
Behind the drink’s survival, through
decades of regional violence and turmoil since its invention, is the ambition
of a young herbalist who died early, and the foresight of his wife, the
family’s matriarch, to help her young sons turn the beverage into a sustainable
business.
The drink brings about $45 million
of profit a year in India alone, its manufacturer says, most of it going to a
trust that funds schools, universities and clinics.
“It might be that one ingredient or
couple of ingredients have changed because of availability, but by and large
the formula has remained the same,” said Hamid Ahmed, a member of the fourth
generation of the family who runs the expanded food wing of Hamdard
Laboratories, which produces the drink.
In the summer of 1907 in Old Delhi,
still under British rule, the young herbalist, Hakim Abdul Majid, sought a
potion that could help ease many of the complications that come with the
country’s unbearable heat — heat strokes, dehydration, diarrhea.
What he discovered, in mixing sugar
and extracts from herbs and flowers, was less medicine and more a refreshing
sherbet. It was a hit. The bottles, glass then and plastic now, would fly off
the shelves of his small medicine store, which he named Hamdard.
Mr. Majid died 15 years later, at
the age of 34. He was survived by his wife, Rabea Begum, and two sons; one was
14, and the other a toddler. Ms. Begum made a decision that turned Hamdard into
an enduring force and set a blueprint for keeping it profitable for its welfare
efforts at a time when politics would tear the country asunder.
She declared Hamdard a trust, with
her and her two young sons as the trustees. The profits would go not to the
family but largely to public welfare.
The company’s biggest test came
with India’s bloody partition after independence from the British in 1947. The
Muslim nation of Pakistan was broken out of India. Millions of people endured
an arduous trek, on foot and in packed trains, to get on the right side of the
border. Somewhere between one million and two million people died, and families
— including Ms. Begum’s — were split up.
Hakim Abdul Hamid, the older son,
stayed in India. He became a celebrated academic and oversaw Hamdard India.
Hakim Mohamad Said, the younger
son, moved to the newly formed Pakistan. He gave up his role in Hamdard India
to start Hamdard Pakistan and produce Rooh Afza there. He rose to become the
governor of Pakistan’s Sindh Province but was assassinated in 1998.
When in 1971 Pakistan was
also split in half, with Bangladesh emerging
as another country, the facilities producing Rooh Afza in those territories
formed their own trust: Hamdard Bangladesh.
All three businesses are
independent, run by extended members, or friends, of the young herbalist’s
family. But what they offer is largely the same taste, with slight variations
if the climate in some regions affecting the herbs differently.
The drink sells well during summer,
but there is particularly high demand in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
Around the dinner table, or in the bazaars at the end of a day, a glass or two
of chilled Rooh Afza — the smack of its sugar and flavors — can inject life.
“During the summer, after a long
and hot day of fasting, one becomes more thirsty than hungry,” said Faqir
Muhammad, 55, a porter in Karachi, Pakistan. “To break the fast, I directly
drink a glass of Rooh Afza after eating a piece of date to gain some energy.”
In Bangladesh, the brand’s
marketing goes beyond flavor and refreshments and into the realms of the
unlikely and the metaphysical.
“Our experts say Rooh Afza helps
Covid-19-infected patients, helps remove their physical and mental weakness,”
Amirul Momenin Manik, the deputy director of Hamdard Bangladesh, said without
offering any scientific evidence. “Many people in Bangladesh get heavenly
feelings when they drink Rooh Afza, because we brand this as a halal drink.”
During a visit to Rooh Afza’s India
factory in April, which coincided with Ramadan, workers in full protective
gowns churned out 270,000 bottles a day. The sugar, boiled inside huge tanks,
was mixed with fruit juices and the distillation of more than a dozen herbs and
flowers, including chicory, rose, white water lily, sandalwood and wild mint.
At the loading dock in the back,
from dawn to dusk, two trucks at a time were loaded with more than a 1,000
bottles each and sent off to warehouses and markets across India.
Mr. Ahmed — who runs Hamdard’s food
division, for which Rooh Afza remains the central product — is trying to
broaden a mature brand with offshoots to attract consumers who have moved away
from the sherbet in their teenage and young adult years. New products include
juice boxes that mix Rooh Afza with fruit juice, a Rooh Afza yogurt drink and a
Rooh Afza milkshake.
One survey the company conducted
showed that half of Rooh Afza in Indian households was consumed as a flavor in
milk, the rest in cold drinks.
“We did our twist of milkshake,”
Mr. Ahmed said, “which is Rooh Afza, milk and vanilla.”
The milkshake “has done extremely
well,” Mr. Ahmed said. But he is proud of two products in particular. One is a
sugar-free version of the original Rooh Afza, 15 years in the making as the
company looked for the right substitute for sugar. More than twice the price of
the original, it caters to a more affluent segment.
“There is growing market, for runners,
athletes, those who watch what they eat and drink,” said Mr. Ahmed, who is
himself a runner.
The other product comes from a
realization that the original Rooh Afza, with all its sugar and flavor, still
has vast untapped potential in India’s huge market. He is targeting those who
can’t afford the 750-milliliter bottle, which sells for $2, offering one-time
sachets that sell for 15 cents — a strategy that revolutionized the reach of
shampoo brands in India.
In vast parts of India, the reality
of malnutrition is such that sugar is welcome.
“The people in India in fact want
sugar,” Mr. Ahmed said. “It’s only the metros that knows what diabetes is.”
