India Gave the World the Word 'Sugar.' Now It Consumes More of It Than Any Other Country.

In 647 CE, the twenty-first year of the Zhenguan era, the Tang court in China filed an entry about sugar. The emperor Taizong, according to the New Book of Tang, had sent envoys to India to fetch sugar-making skills. A second Tang-era text, the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks, says what the party under Wang Xuance did next. It went to the Mahabodhi monastery in Magadha, the part of what is now Bihar around Bodh Gaya, and came away with “two craftsmen, together with eight monks.”

Zhang Yuan translates both passages in a 2015 paper in the Delhi University Journal of the Humanities & Social Sciences. The craftsmen were set to work in China on Chinese cane, and the annals record the result with some satisfaction: the sugar was “much better even than Indian sugar in both color and taste.” Zhang dates the envoys’ arrival in India to the start of 644, so the mission itself belongs to the 640s, while the annals file the sugar under 647.

Sugar was one errand among several. Zhang writes that Taizong’s second mission to India escorted home the envoys of King Harsha, carried lavish gifts, and was also meant to visit the places where the Buddha had lived. The Old Book of Tang, which Zhang quotes, says Harsha sent his ministers out of the city to welcome the Chinese party and that citizens crowded the road to watch.

Gravel, pebble, sugar

The English word took the same route west. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces sugar through Old French sucre, Medieval Latin succarum, Arabic sukkar and Persian shakar to the Sanskrit sharkara, which it glosses as “ground or candied sugar,” originally “grit, gravel.” It dates the word in English to the late 13th century. The same dictionary says candy is “probably” from the Sanskrit khanda, “piece (of sugar),” and adds “perhaps” from Dravidian, comparing the Tamil kantu.

The plant came from further east. Seamus Higgins, a food process engineer at the University of Nottingham, writes in The Conversation that sugarcane was “first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC” and was at first chewed for its juice. Higgins places the first methods for boiling cane juice into crystals in India, around 500 BC. What India added was a way to turn juice into a solid that keeps and travels.

Greek accounts from Alexander’s campaign in India in the 320s BCE noticed the reed. Strabo’s Geography passes on a report that the reeds “produce honey, although there are no bees.”

Five kinds of sugar

The Arthashastra, the Sanskrit handbook of statecraft attributed to Kautilya, names the products of cane in its chapter on the superintendent of the storehouse. Wisdomlib’s entry on one of them, matsyandika, which it translates as sugar candy and cites to Arthashastra 2.15.15, gives the full set: phanita (thickened cane juice), guda (jaggery), khanda (raw sugar), matsyandika and sharkara (sugar).

That is five named grades, from sticky syrup to crystal. The text took its present form in layers over several centuries around the start of the Common Era, and scholars still argue about the dates, so this article does not pin the list to a single king or century.

The food historian Michael Krondl, writing for Sahapedia, says that by the Gupta era (300 to 550 CE) commercial cultivation of cane had spread across the Ganges plain.

West to Persia, east to the Tang

Just when cane started moving west from the subcontinent “is a little unclear,” Krondl writes, “but it was definitively established in Persia by 600 CE.” References to its cultivation then multiply in the early expansion of Islam, he adds, in Egypt, Palestine and Syria in the seventh century and soon afterwards in the western Mediterranean.

Europe met the product last. Higgins notes that it reached medieval Europe only along trade routes, “extremely expensive and used more like a spice,” and that Crusaders returning home in the 11th century talked of a “new spice.” The same continent was about to send ships round Africa and across the Atlantic in search of India’s pepper and cinnamon.

Nearer home, Krondl writes that in the 16th and 17th centuries “west of Malacca it was Bengali sugar that furnished the needs of South Asia as well as western India, Persia and beyond.” Akbar’s vizier Abul Fazl, in Krondl’s account, calculated that “white sugar cost about three times the price of rice.” Krondl does not reproduce the original table from the Ain-i-Akbari, and neither does this article.

East India sugar, not made by slaves

In 1791 the pamphleteer William Fox called on his fellow citizens to stop buying “blood sugar,” the produce of West Indian slave plantations. “If we purchase the commodity, we participate in the crime,” he wrote in his Address to the People of Great Britain. Patricia A. Matthew, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, reports that by 1795 some 400,000 British people had given it up, on the account of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. The Victoria and Albert Museum puts the number who joined the boycotts at about 300,000.

Shops sold a substitute. A sugar bowl dated 1825, catalogued by the Understanding Slavery Initiative, carries the inscription “East India Sugar not made By Slaves. By Six Families using East India, instead of West India Sugar, one Slave less is required.”

The inscription left something out. Matthew writes that “East India” sugar “was also the product of slavery,” a fact that troubled abolitionists less, in part because the fortunes of some of them were tied to East Indies trade. Slaveholding in India, she notes, was not banned until 1862.

Indian sugar-making also stalled. Karolina Hutkova studied European entrepreneurs who tried to bring new sugar technology to Bihar in the 1830s and 1840s. Her abstract says India, for all its long tradition of sugar-making, was slow to adopt modern methods, and that investment in new technology “was hindered by British trade policies.” Imperial policies “gave preference to the welfare of the British consumer,” she writes, and “did not create a beneficial environment for long-run investment projects.”

The Hesperus and 1.3 million contracts

Parliament abolished slavery in 1833, and the empire still had sugar colonies to run. Purba Hossain of the Royal Historical Society records that the planter John Gladstone, who owned sugar estates in the West Indies and was the father of a future prime minister, began negotiating in 1836 with Indian merchant companies and British parliamentarians to let planters procure Indian labourers. Parliament then passed an act sanctioning the sailing of two ships to the West Indies.

On 29 January 1838 the Hesperus sailed for British Guiana with Indian labourers, and the Whitby followed the same month. Hossain calls the two sailings “the beginning of a centralised system of labour migration from British India to colonial sugar plantations.” Newspapers of the day, she notes, chastised Gladstone’s venture as a revival of the slave trade, while planters and merchants pointed to the contracts as proof that the labour was free.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Hossain writes, around 1.3 million Indian indentured labourers had gone to colonies including Mauritius, British Guiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Fiji and Natal, as well as French and Dutch colonies. Other counts run higher, and our piece on the girmit ships sets out the range, how the contracts worked and how historians weigh them. In 1974 Hugh Tinker gave his history of the system the title A New System of Slavery.

Hossain describes a venture that began with two ships and “expanded to a vast network of migration creating Indian diaspora communities across the globe.”

Gur gives way to white

Within India, the factory era came late. Satish Kansal reports in a 1997 paper for the Food and Agriculture Organization that by 1930 to 1931 there were 29 sugar factories producing just 100,000 tonnes. The Sugar Industry (Protection) Act of 1932 followed, and within four years, by 1935, the country was self-sufficient in sugar.

Most Indians still sweetened their food with gur, the unrefined brown cane sugar also called jaggery, or with khandsari, a less refined sugar. Kansal gives the proportions. In 1960 the average Indian ate about 20 kg of sweetener a year, of which white sugar was 4.8 kg, which he puts at 25 percent. The other 15.2 kg was gur and khandsari. By 1980 white sugar was 8.2 kg, or 42 percent.

The Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) has a later series, published through ChiniMandi. In 1996 to 1997 the average Indian ate 14.6 kg of white sugar and 12.2 kg of gur and khandsari, 26.8 kg in all. In 2023 to 2024 the figures were 20.1 kg and 5.4 kg, 25.5 kg in all. By our arithmetic from those figures, white sugar’s share of the sweetener total rose from about 54 percent to about 79 percent while the total fell by 1.3 kg. The two series come from different sources and should not be spliced together.

Tea sweetened the shift. The campaign to make Indians tea drinkers, told in our article on how Britain taught India to drink tea, met a public that made it their own way. Mohona Kanjilal writes in Taste of Time that the majority of locals made tea “by boiling the leaves with milk, sugar and spices,” which “horrified the British.”

The state handled the cheap end of the trade. Kansal wrote that 40 percent of production, 33 percent in effect, went at a fixed price through the public distribution system as levy sugar.

Thirty-one million tonnes of raw sugar

The US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, in its May 2026 sugar report, forecasts India’s human consumption of sugar in 2026/27 at 31.0 million tonnes, raw value. China is next at 16.75 million, then the European Union at 15.9 million and the United States at 11.1 million, out of a world total of about 180 million. The same report calls India the world’s second-largest producer behind Brazil, with output forecast to recover by 3.6 million tonnes to 33.6 million, and says Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka account for nearly 60 percent of it. India also exports, a forecast 3.6 million tonnes in 2026/27 with Sudan, Libya and Somalia among the top destinations, and the report says the government provides highly subsidised sugar to the poorest households.

ISMA’s estimates run lower, and the two series use different units. The USDA converts refined sugar to raw value, multiplying by 1.07 for refined cane sugar in its conversion table, so the series are not directly comparable. This article uses the USDA series for the international comparison and ISMA’s for domestic detail. ISMA projected 28 million tonnes for 2024 to 2025, about 1.5 million tonnes below the year before, and Business Standard reported that the drop was largely attributed to “the absence of major events like the 2024 General Elections.” In April 2026 ISMA’s director general, Deepak Ballani, said consumption could fall by almost 400,000 tonnes in 2025 to 2026, to 27.7 million tonnes, because of an LPG shortage linked to the war in West Asia and a cooler than usual March.

India leads in total because of its population. ISMA’s table puts white sugar at 20.1 kg a head in 2023 to 2024, for 1,441 million people. The OECD and FAO project a world average of 23.1 kg a person by 2034 and 21.2 kg for Asia. The measures differ, but the comparison gives no sign that the average Indian eats more sugar than the average person elsewhere.

Where the sugar goes has shifted. An ISMA study reported by Business Standard in September 2025 found that institutional buyers took 60 to 65 percent of India’s sugar in 2023 to 2024, up from 50 to 55 percent in 2018 to 2019, with retail taking the rest. Non-alcoholic beverages (35 to 40 percent of institutional use) and confectionery (15 to 18 percent) were the largest segments.

A Nature Medicine study of 18,090 adults from the ICMR-INDIAB survey found added sugar above the recommended 5 percent of energy in 19 states plus Delhi and Puducherry. Haryana, Delhi, Karnataka, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh were above 10 percent.

What children eat

On 14 May 2025 the Central Board of Secondary Education sent circular Acad-26/2025 to every school affiliated to it. The circular states that “sugar constitutes 13% of daily calorie intake for children aged 4 to 10 years, and 15% for those aged 11 to 18 years, substantially exceeding the recommended limit of 5%.” It asks schools to set up “Sugar Boards” showing the recommended daily intake and the sugar content of common foods. The circular says only “Studies indicate” and cites none, so the figures stand as CBSE’s. It also says type 2 diabetes among children has increased significantly over the past decade, which it attributes largely to high sugar intake and the easy availability of sugary snacks, drinks and processed food in school environments. Schools were asked to send a short report with photographs by 15 July 2025. The health consequences are covered in our piece on India’s diet and diabetes.

The World Health Organization’s 2015 guideline recommends that adults and children reduce free sugars to less than 10 percent of total energy, and says a further cut “to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (6 teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.” The Dietary Guidelines for Indians 2024, from the Indian Council of Medical Research, set added sugar at “5-10 per cent of total calories or 23-30 g/day,” as tabulated in the Indian Journal of Medical Research.

WHO defines free sugars as sugars “added to foods and drinks by the manufacturer, cook or consumer,” along with those in honey, syrups and fruit juices. By that wording, jaggery stirred into a pot by a cook counts as well.

What three addiction studies found

Nicole Avena, Pedro Rada and Bartley Hoebel reviewed the animal evidence in 2008. Rats given intermittent, excessive access to sugar showed bingeing, withdrawal, craving and cross-sensitization, and the authors concluded that “under certain circumstances rats can become sugar dependent.” They added that this “may translate to some human conditions as suggested by the literature on eating disorders and obesity.”

Westwater, Fletcher and Ziauddeen, all at the University of Cambridge, reviewed both animal and human work in 2016. “We find little evidence to support sugar addiction in humans,” they wrote, adding that the addiction-like behaviours seen in animals occur “only in the context of intermittent access to sugar.” Those behaviours, they say, “likely arise from intermittent access to sweet tasting or highly palatable foods, not the neurochemical effects of sugar.”

The newer argument concerns ultra-processed food. A 2023 analysis in the BMJ led by Ashley Gearhardt, covering 281 studies from 36 countries, estimated that ultra-processed food addiction occurs in 14 percent of adults and 12 percent of children, as ScienceDaily summarised it.

None of the three papers shows that sugar addicts people as a drug does. The WHO’s 10 percent limit is aimed at the risks of overweight, obesity and tooth decay, and does not depend on an addiction finding.

A red hexagon on the packet

The Supreme Court has been hearing a case on front-of-pack warning labels for food. In 3S and Our Health Society v. Union of India, a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran heard submissions on 13 August 2026 that warning labels could significantly affect the sector. LawBeat reports that the bench replied, “Why? You don’t want people of this country to remain healthy? More particularly growing children?” It gave the Union two weeks to record its final decision and added, “This is your last chance. Next time we will dictate the judgment.”

By 10 September FSSAI, the food regulator, had proposed warnings for fat, sugar and salt in the form of red hexagons. The bench asked “Considering that an average Indian consumer is habituated into associating the colour red with non-veg ingredients, would it be necessary for the FSSAI to revisit the choice of colour for the FoPL?”

By 28 September FSSAI had told the court it would roll the labels out in a single phase, taking four months to finalise draft regulations and then allowing a 365-day voluntary implementation period. Justice Pardiwala asked, “Why voluntary compliance for a year? Why do you need so much time?” The court gave the parties three days to file written submissions of up to three pages and reserved judgment on 28 September 2026.