Goli soda, banta, ramune: one bottle, three names

Ask for a marble soda in three places and you will be handed the same bottle under three names. The glass is the same shape, the marble sits in the same neck, and the sound when it opens is the same. What changes is what people do with it.

Goli soda

In much of India the drink is named after its marble: goli. It has been sold since the late nineteenth century, usually lemon or orange, from carts and small shops where the seller opens the bottle for you. Generations in India grew up on it: cheap, local and bottled in the next street.

Banta

In Delhi and across the north it is banta. The classic serving is not drunk straight from the bottle: the soda is poured over crushed ice with lemon juice and a pinch of black salt and spice. It is a drink of hot afternoons, and of the stalls outside colleges and markets.

Ramune

Japan met the bottle in the 1880s, in the port of Kobe. The word ramune is how “lemonade” sounded to Japanese ears. Today the drink belongs to summer: festivals, fireworks and the small ceremony of pushing the marble in with the plastic plunger that comes in the cap.

Nearly lost, and back

In India the bottle came close to disappearing. From the 1990s, large international brands, plastic bottles and cans took over the shelves, and many small soda makers closed. What survived was memory, and a few bottlers who kept going.

On 23 March 2025 the Government of India announced that goli soda was returning to world markets under a new name, Goli Pop Soda, with trial shipments to the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Gulf. The bottle that left England in the 1870s was on its way back, from India.