How the Taste of Rooh Afza Circa 1907 Still Lingers

The ruby red syrup Rooh Afza that is said to have first arrived to the Indian subcontinent with the Mughals has a lingering appeal that is not going away in a hurry no matter how many Colas, Pepsis and Frooties are served at the party.

The Rooh Afza we know is all thanks to one Unani herb doctor, Hakim Abdul Majeed, who started the company “Hamdard’’ in Delhi in the year 1906, and went on to create a medicinal drink which became the much-loved summer Sharbat. From that moment on, the sticky red drink stuck close to the subcontinent’s history. With India’s partition in 1947, the company also split – one brother stayed on in India while another left to form Hamdard Laboratories, Pakistan, in Karachi. Later, with the formation of Bangladesh, the Dhaka branch became Hamdard Laboratories Bangladesh in 1971.