Rooh Afza and the Making of a Subcontinental Memory

A Hakim's Cure for the Delhi Summer

Around 1907, in the old city of a Delhi still under British rule, a young Unani physician named Hakeem Abdul Majeed was mixing preparations in his dispensary, or dawakhana, which he had named Hamdard. He was trying to formulate something for the ailments that arrived every year with the north Indian summer: dehydration, fatigue, heatstroke. Working with flowers, fruits and herbs, Abdul Majeed arrived at a ruby-coloured concoction with a distinctive fragrance, which he called Rooh Afza, roughly "replenisher of the soul." It found favour quickly among visitors to his dawakhana, and what began as a clinical remedy grew into a defined commercial product.

A Label That Outlasted Its Maker

As demand grew, Abdul Majeed commissioned an artist, Mirza Nur Ahmed, in 1910 to design a label for the bottle. The artwork was sent to Bombay to be printed at the Bolton Press. More than a century on, the label has barely changed from that original drawing; the packaging that has moved with the times is the bottle itself, from glass to modern plastic. Abdul Majeed did not live to see Rooh Afza's later success. He died in the 1920s, while Hamdard was still establishing itself, leaving behind a wife, children, and an unfinished enterprise.

A Widow's Decision, and a Trust

His widow, Rabia Begum, took over the business and made a decision that would shape its structure for the century to follow: she declared Hamdard a waqf, an Islamic charitable trust, under which profits would be directed largely toward public welfare rather than private accumulation. That single choice, rooted in the Islamic tradition of charitable endowment, is the reason Hamdard today operates not as a conventional company but as a tax-exempt trust.

Partition Splits a Family, Not the Formula

Partition, in 1947, split the subcontinent, and it split Rabia Begum's family along with it. Of her two surviving sons, the elder, Hakim Abdul Hamid, chose to remain in Delhi and continued running Hamdard in India. The younger, Hakim Mohammed Said, moved to the newly formed Pakistan and built Hamdard there; a separate Hamdard establishment later took root in Bangladesh after 1971. Three companies now operate under three flags, yet the syrup and its label layout have stayed close to identical across all of them. Rooh Afza came to be advertised as "Mashroob-e-Mashriq," the drink of the East, in copy said to have been written by Hakim Said himself. As the film notes, the drink "remains a summer memory that, much like the summer itself, stretches across the borders" with little regard for the lines partition drew.

From Dawakhana to Factory Floor

The film also visits a present-day Hamdard production line, where an executive interviewed for the film walks through how little the process has changed. "More or less the composition has remained the same for the last 120 years," the executive says. A sugar-and-water syrup base is blended with distilled herbal arks and fruit juices, chiefly pineapple and orange, along with approved colourings and flavourings. By the executive's account, close to 99 percent of the mix is natural, built around eleven Unani herbs and flowers that include rose, mint, chicory, sandalwood and watermelon, among others, sourced and distilled much as they were in Abdul Majeed's own formulation.

The scale is now industrial. A single flagship plant runs roughly 21 batches a day, each yielding about 11,400 bottles, for close to 240,000 bottles daily; a comparable plant in Aurangabad brings the Indian total to somewhere near 440,000 to 450,000 bottles a day. "It's bread and butter to Hamdard," the executive says of Rooh Afza, calling it the trust's biggest product by far.

Charity as Business Model

That scale of production matters because of what happens to its proceeds. As a registered trust, Hamdard is legally required to direct 85 percent of its profits into charitable activity, concentrated in three areas: healthcare, education and skill development, extended, the executive says, "irrespective of any caste, creed," to the general public. It is a direct institutional descendant of Rabia Begum's founding decision: a bottled soft drink still functioning, on paper, as an engine for a century-old waqf.

A Taste That Crossed Borders

What the film ultimately traces is not just the biography of a product but the persistence of a particular kind of memory. Rooh Afza is manufactured today in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, three nations shaped by a single Partition that could easily have fractured a single family business into unrelated, competing enterprises. Instead, the recipe, the label and even the founding ethos of charity travelled largely intact across every new border. The film closes by invoking a verse from the poet Silvi on the fragrance that lingers, the narration says, "long after the glass is empty," a fitting close to a story about a syrup that has outlived its founder, survived the splitting of a subcontinent, and still shows up, ruby-red, at gatherings across the region every summer.