Banta

For other uses, see Banta (disambiguation).

Banta (marble) is a lemon or orange-flavoured drink popular in India.

It is available in a Codd-neck bottle, a heavy glass bottle in which a round marble seals the mouth of the bottle by the pressure of the contents, instead of a cap. The distinctive bottle has led to the drink also being called goli soda in some regions (goli = marble).

Banta is the colloquial term for a peculiar kind of lemon soda sold in the city—packed in distinctive, green-tinged, Codd-neck bottles locked in place by a marble, and embellished with ice of dubious origin and generous quantities of black salt. Banta stalls are a common sight in Delhi’s suburbs—an operation consisting of lines of bottles with lemons perched on them, a thermocol icebox and a crate of glass tumblers.

The banta supply chain, so to speak, supports a number of interconnected cottage industries. The story starts, strangely enough, in London in 1872. That year, a British engineer named Hiram Codd patented a kind of bottle designed specially for lemonade and other fizzy drinks. The bottle dispensed with the need for a cork or cap by enclosing a marble in the bottleneck. The effervescence generated by the fizzy drink forced the marble up the neck, locking it against a rubber gasket to form an effective seal. Opening the bottle, a remarkably satisfying process, involves pressing down on the marble, which releases a jet of soda and liquid and a sound like an implosion. These bottles, prized as collector items, can now be found only in two places—in India, for banta, and in Japan, for a curiously similar lemon drink called Ramune. Delhi’s ‘banta’ lemon soda has a history as effervescent as the drink

See also

• Ramune