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Wilson 428 herbarium specimen, Western Hupeh (1907)
Wilson 428 is a herbarium accession of Cannabis sativa collected in western Hubei (then Hupeh), China, in September 1907 by E. H. Wilson on the Arnold Arboretum's expedition to China of 1907–1909. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh holds the sheet as E01459307.
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Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India (1975)
"Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India" is a chapter by Khwaja A. Hasan, an Indian medical anthropologist, published in Vera Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (Mouton, The Hague, 1975, pp. 235–246). Drawing on fieldwork in a village near Lucknow, it describes the place of cannabis in the social and religious life of Hindu village society in north India, and contrasts the social acceptance of hemp drugs with the disapproval of alcohol.
Hasan distinguishes the three Indian preparations of cannabis (ganja from the flowering tops, bhang from the leaves and charas from the resin) and argues that their use carried religious sanction through an association with the god Shiva, whereas the use of alcohol was governed by caste prohibition. He documents how the preparations were made and consumed, the part played by the bhagat or devotee, and concludes from his village survey that regular use and dependence were rare.
Khwaja A. Hasan was an Indian medical anthropologist whose fieldwork centred on villages of north India. His monograph The Cultural Frontier of Health in Village India: Case Study of a North Indian Village (Manaktalas, 1967) and a related study of Hindu dietary practice examined health, ritual and caste in the same region from which the present chapter draws its data.
Hasan opens with a sketch of intoxicants in Indian history. He recalls the Vedic soma and its substitutes, and notes that the Dharmasutras condemned the drinking of sura (liquor) by a Brahman while saying little of hemp, so that liquor came to be associated with the lower castes. He traces the fluctuating fortunes of intoxicants through the Buddhist prohibition, the revival of Brahmanism and the medieval period, when some rulers drank and others, such as Aurangzeb, abstained. …
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