West Bengal

West Bengal
পশ্চিমবঙ্গ
State
General
Coordinates	22.986800, 87.855000
Country	India
Region	East India
Previously	Bengal Province
Formed	15 August 1947(by bifurcation)
Administration
Capital	Kolkata
Largest metro	Kolkata Metropolitan Region
Districts	0(5 divisions)
Demographics
Population(2026 est.)
Total	Increase~106,031,000
Rank	4th
Density	1,194/km² (3,090/sq mi)
Urban	31.87%
Rural	68.13%
Demonym	Bengali
Geography
Area
Total	88,752 km² (34,267 sq mi)
Rank	13th
Dimensions
Length	320 km (200 mi)
Width	623 km (387 mi)
Highest elevation(Sandakphu)	3,636 m (11,929 ft)
Lowest elevation(Bay of Bengal)	0 m (0 ft)
Language
Official	Bengali, English
Additional official	Nepali, Urdu, Hindi, Odia, Santali, Punjabi, Kamtapuri, Rajbanshi, Kurmali, Kurukh, Telugu
Official script	Bengali–Assamese script
Cannabis documentation
	⛶
Growing regions	3
Growing areas	11
Appellations	0
Accessions	101
Eradication campaigns	0
News items	0
Research items	0

West Bengal (পশ্চিমবঙ্গ, Pashchimbanga) is a state in eastern India. It had a population of over 91 million within an area of 88,752 km² (34,267 sq mi) as of the 2011 Census and is the fourth-most populous and thirteenth-largest state in India.^[1] The state borders Bangladesh to the east, Nepal and Bhutan to the north and the Indian states of Sikkim, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. The state capital is Kolkata, the third-largest urban agglomeration in India.^[2] West Bengal extends from the Darjeeling Himalaya in the north through the Dooars piedmont and the Gangetic deltaic plain to the Sundarbans and the Bay of Bengal.^[3] The state's main ethnic group are the Bengalis, with substantial Rajbanshi, Nepali, Santal, Oraon, Munda and Bodo communities concentrated in the northern and western districts.^[4]^[5] At the time of writing, three landrace cannabis growing regions in the state are documented on this wiki: the Eastern Himalayas, The Dooars and the North Bengal Plains.

The earliest irrefutable Indian medical attestation of cannabis as an ingestible intoxicant is in the Cikitsāsārasaṃgraha of Vaṅgasena, a Bengali physician working in the late 11th century.^[6] Bengali Śākta Tantric traditions codified between the 11th and 18th centuries integrated vijayā into ritual through texts including the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, while the wandering Bāul-Fakir minstrel tradition documented from the 18th century consolidated gāñjā use within a syncretic Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā and Sufi-Fakir devotional frame.^[7] Bengal entered European observation as a cannabis-using region through Garcia da Orta's 1563 Colóquios dos simples and Linschoten's 1596 Itinerario, with subsequent reports from Bowrey, Bernier, Tavernier and Manucci attesting bhāṅ, post and maʿjūn at the Mughal court and in the Nawabi towns of the Bengal sūbah.^[8]^[9]

Under British colonial rule, the Bengal Presidency was the administrative and commercial centre of the Indian cannabis economy.^[10] Regulation XXXIV of 1793, part of the Cornwallis Code, required a licence from the district collector for the manufacture or sale of bhang, ganja and charas, the first formal British excise framework for cannabis in India.^[11] By the 1850s licensed cultivation had been consolidated into the Ganja Mahal, a tract centred on Naogaon in Rajshahi which operated under a three-circle rotation under the supervision of the Bengal Excise Department.^[12] The princely state of Cooch Behar operated a parallel excise regime under the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, procuring its ganja by import from Naogaon and distributing it through state-run golahs.^[13] The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-94 was seated in Calcutta; Volume IV of the seven-volume report is devoted to Bengal and Assam witnesses, the densest body of named Bengali testimony in any colonial-era source on cannabis. The Commission found that the moderate use of hemp drugs produced no injurious effect and rejected prohibition.^[14]

The Radcliffe Line of 1947 placed the entire licensed Ganja Mahal in East Pakistan, severing the chasi cultivator tradition from the territory that became West Bengal.^[15] The state retained the consumption markets, the urban vending infrastructure and the cultivator-descendant population of the Indian portion of the colonial cannabis economy but lost the licensed cultivation belt itself.^[16] Cooch Behar State acceded to India in 1949 and merged into West Bengal as a district in 1950. Licensed retail of ganja, charas and bhang continued in the state under the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 until 11 December 1989, when state cannabis licensing ceased following the implementation of the NDPS Act of 1985.^[17] The licit cannabis economy in West Bengal is now confined to bhang preparations, sold seasonally through long-established sharbat houses in central and North Kolkata.^[18]^[19] Surviving cannabis cultivation occurs across two regionally distinct belts: the sub-Himalayan plains household belt across Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar, worked predominantly by Bengalis and Rajbanshi people; and the southwestern jungle belt across Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram and parts of Paschim Medinipur and Birbhum, drawn from the Santal, Munda and Bengali Hindu agrarian populations.^[20]

Geography

West Bengal is on the eastern bottleneck of India, stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south. The state has a total area of 88,752 km² (34,267 sq mi).^[1] The Darjeeling Himalaya in the northern extreme of the state is part of the eastern Himalaya range and contains Sandakphu (3,636 m), the highest point in the state.^[21] The narrow Terai and Dooars belt separates the hills from the North Bengal Plains, which in turn transition into the Ganges Delta in the south. The lateritic Rarh intervenes between the delta in the east and the western plateau and highlands on the Chota Nagpur plateau fringe. A small coastal plain runs along the Purba Medinipur shoreline, while the Sundarbans mangrove forests form the seaward edge of the delta.^[3] The Padma-Ganga and lower Bhagirathi floodplains, in Murshidabad, Malda, Nadia and the northern fringe of North 24 Parganas, supplied the agronomic foundation of the historical Bengal ganja economy (see History below).^{[original research?]}

The main river is the Ganga, which divides into two branches at the Farakka Barrage. One branch enters Bangladesh as the Padma, while the other flows through West Bengal as the Bhagirathi and Hooghly River through Kolkata and Haldia to the Bay of Bengal.^[3] Himalayan rivers including the Teesta, Torsa, Jaldhaka and Mahananda drain the northern districts. Peninsular rivers including the Damodar, Ajay and Kangsabati drain the Rarh. The Ganga delta and Sundarbans area carry a dense network of distributaries and tidal creeks.

West Bengal's climate varies from tropical wet-and-dry in the south to humid subtropical in the centre and subtropical highland in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills.^[22] Four seasons are recognised: winter (December to February), pre-monsoon (March to May, with Kalbaishakhi or Nor'wester thunderstorms in the south), the southwest monsoon (June to September) and the retreating monsoon (October to November). The Bay of Bengal supplies the moisture and the Himalayas force orographic uplift, so rainfall increases northward and into the foothills; seventy-five to eighty per cent of annual rainfall falls during the southwest monsoon.^[22] Tropical cyclones including Aila (2009), Amphan (2020) and Yaas (2021) periodically affect the deltaic and coastal districts.^{[citation needed]}

Administrative subdivisions

West Bengal is administratively divided into 23 districts grouped under 5 divisions (Presidency, Burdwan, Medinipur, Malda and Jalpaiguri).^{[citation needed]}

Currently documented on the wiki:

No districts documented yet.

Demographics

West Bengal's population spans Indo-Aryan, Austroasiatic, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman linguistic communities and Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist religious populations. Bengali Hindu and Bengali Muslim communities dominate; substantial Adivasi populations occupy the southwestern plateau and the Dooars tea belt; indigenous Tibeto-Burman peoples and a Nepali (Gorkha) majority occupy the Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills. The 1947 Partition transformed both the religious balance of the state and the relationship between the state and the colonial cannabis cultivation belt.

Population

Nepali man holding a wooden chillum with a background of cannabis plants in Alipurduar District

At the 2011 Census, West Bengal had a population of 91,276,115 in 88,752 km², a density of 1,028 persons per km² and the second highest among Indian states.^[1]^{[clarification needed]} The state was 68.13 per cent rural and 31.87 per cent urban. Decadal growth from 2001 to 2011 was 13.84 per cent, below the national figure of 17.64 per cent. Census 2021 was deferred; mid-decade projections place the 2024–26 population at around 100 million.^{[citation needed]}

Languages

The mother-tongue distribution was Bengali 86.22 per cent, Hindi 5.00 per cent, Santali 2.66 per cent, Urdu 1.82 per cent and Nepali 1.26 per cent.^[4] Nepali is co-official in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts.^{[citation needed]} Hindi, Odia, Punjabi, Santali (in Ol Chiki script) and Urdu were added by the 2012 amendment to the Official Languages Act; Kamtapuri, Kurmali and Rajbanshi by the 2018 amendment; and Telugu by Act VIII of 2021.^{[citation needed]} The 2018 recognition of Rajbanshi and Kamtapuri followed long-running Koch-Rajbanshi linguistic mobilisation in north Bengal, led politically by the Kamtapur People's Party (founded 1996).^{[citation needed]}

Religion

Feral cannabis growing next to a Shiva mandir on the banks of the Torsha river in West Bengal, India — Feral cannabis growing next to a Shiva mandir on the banks of the Torsha river near Madarihat

The 2011 religious profile was Hindu 70.54 per cent, Muslim 27.01 per cent, Christian 0.72 per cent, Buddhist 0.31 per cent, Sikh and Jain 0.14 per cent combined and Other Religions and Persuasions (predominantly Sarna and Sari Dharma) 1.03 per cent.^[23] Shakta worship of Durga, Kali and Tara is prominent in Bengali Hinduism alongside Vaishnava lineages descending from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) and a smaller Shaiva tradition.^{[citation needed]} The Muslim population is the second-largest of any Indian state in absolute terms and the third-highest in share after Assam and Kerala. About 90 per cent are ethnic Bengali Muslims, Sunni-majority with substantial Sufi presence including the Chishti, Qadiri and indigenous Furfura Sharif Pir lineages;^{[citation needed]} an Urdu-speaking minority of about 1.6 to 2.6 million of UP and Bihar descent is concentrated in Kolkata, Asansol and the Islampur subdivision of Uttar Dinajpur.^{[citation needed]} Muslims form a majority in Murshidabad (66.27 per cent) and Malda (51.27 per cent) and a plurality in Uttar Dinajpur (49.92 per cent) and Birbhum (37.06 per cent).^{[citation needed]} Christians cluster in the Darjeeling-Kalimpong hills and in Adivasi communities of the Dooars and the southwestern plateau; Buddhists, 260,000 of the state total of 282,898, are concentrated in Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri and include indigenous Bhutia, Sherpa, Tamang and Yolmo populations alongside a Tibetan refugee community resident since 1959.^{[citation needed]}

Caste

In Bengali Hindu society, Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha populations occupy a disproportionate share of urban professional and cultural positions, above a long roll of cultivator, artisan and Scheduled Caste jatis.^{[editorialising?]}^[24] The Scheduled Caste population of 21,463,270 in 2011 constituted 23.51 per cent of the state, one of the largest SC shares of any Indian state.^[25] The largest SCs are the Namasudra (concentrated in Nadia and the 24 Parganas following post-1947 settlement), Rajbanshi, Bagdi, Bauri, Pod (Paundra Kshatriya) and Jalia Kaibarta.^{[citation needed]} Bengali Muslim society is conventionally divided by colonial ethnography (Risley 1891) into Ashraf, Atrap and Arzal strata; the contemporary West Bengal Muslim population is overwhelmingly Atrap in origin and rural in residence.^[26]

Scheduled Tribes

Entrance to Totopara tribal zone and village in West Bengal, India — Entrance to Totopara tribal zone and village in Alipurduar District

Scheduled Tribes constituted 5.80 per cent of the state's population at the 2011 Census, with 5,296,953 persons in 40 notified communities.^[5] The dominant groups are the Santal (about 52 per cent of the ST population), Oraon (14 per cent), Munda (7.8 per cent), Bhumij (7.6 per cent) and Kora (3.2 per cent), concentrated in the southwestern plateau-fringe districts (Purulia, Bankura, Jhargram and Paschim Medinipur) and in the Dooars tea-garden belt (Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar), where many were brought as indentured labour from the Chota Nagpur plateau in the late nineteenth century.^{[citation needed]} Other communities include the Lodha and Kheria of Jhargram and Paschim Medinipur (notified PVTG); the Toto of Totopara in Alipurduar (notified PVTG; 1,387 individuals at the 2011 Census, rising to about 1,600 by 2022);^{[citation needed]} the Birhor of Purulia (notified PVTG); the Rabha, Mech and Garo of the Dooars and Terai; the Lepcha, Bhutia, Sherpa, Tamang and Limbu of the Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills; and the Rajbanshi of the North Bengal plains, registered linguistically under the Kamtapuri/Rajbanshi heading and as a Scheduled Caste in West Bengal. The Gorkha (Nepali) community of the Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills is not Scheduled but is the majority of the two hill districts (about 748,000 Nepali first-language speakers in 2011) and has shaped the political and administrative history of the hill region through long-standing autonomous-region claims.^{[citation needed]}

Communities with cannabis relationships

Landrace Cannabis cultivation in a small Rajbanshi homestead in West Bengal

Bengali man smoking a chillum — Bengali man smoking an Italian clay chillum made by 'Ma De' with local Cooch Behar landrace ganja

Several communities figure in the colonial and ethnographic literature as having cannabis in their cultural or economic practice. The Bauls (বাউল) and Fakirs (ফকির), a syncretic Vaishnava-Sahajiya and Sufi-Fakir minstrel tradition, are concentrated in Birbhum (especially Joydev-Kenduli, Bolpur and Tarapith), Nadia, Murshidabad and Bankura. Neither a caste nor a tribe, the lineage is recruited across Hindu and Muslim renunciate boundaries and is not separately enumerated by the Census.^[7] The Koch-Rajbanshi of Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the two Dinajpurs are demographically the largest Scheduled Caste community of West Bengal and the historical agrarian population of the sub-Himalayan north Bengal cannabis belt, where household-level and field-edge cultivation has operated outside the colonial regulated tract from the pre-colonial period to the present. Colonial-era enumeration recorded 482,498 Kochh in Rangpur and 407,923 in Dinajpur in 1881, with a further 299,458 in Cooch Behar State; Jalpaiguri's Rajbansi population reached 321,170 at the 1901 census, more than two-fifths of the district total.^[26]^[27] The licensed Ganja Mahal at Naogaon lay south-west of the Rajbanshi heartland in present-day Rajshahi Division, Bangladesh and was worked predominantly by Bengali Muslim cultivators; the Rajbanshi tradition is the more direct cultural-agronomic antecedent of the contemporary feral and smallholder populations documented under Cultivation below.^{[original research?]} Distinctive Rajbanshi folk Shaiva and Shakta ritual at the Jalpesh Temple and in the Madankam, Hudum Deo and related festival complexes is treated under Religious and Cultural Use. Bengali Muslim cultivator communities of Murshidabad, Malda and the Dinajpurs are the West Bengal fragment of the colonial Ganja Mahal cultivator population, the bulk of which moved to East Pakistan after 1947.^{[citation needed]} The Adivasi tea-garden labour population of the Dooars is a mixed Santal, Oraon, Munda, Kharia, Bhumij and Lohra community descended from nineteenth-century Chhota Nagpur indenture and today constitutes about 80 per cent of the regional tea labour force.^[28] The Santal community is the most extensively recorded of these in colonial and post-colonial ethnographies of Bengal ganja, with Santal women's role in the post-harvest processing of the Naogaon Ganja Mahal documented by Rahman et al. (2023).^[12]

Partition and migration

Partition severed the colonial cannabis cultivation belt from West Bengal. The 1947 transfer brought approximately 2.6 million Hindus from East Pakistan to West Bengal and 700,000 Muslims in the opposite direction; cumulative Hindu inflows from East Pakistan to West Bengal between 1946 and 1970 reached between 4.1 and 5.8 million.^[16]^[29] The Muslim share of the state population fell from 29.5 per cent in 1941 to 19.85 per cent in 1951 before climbing back to 27.01 per cent by 2011.^[16] The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War prompted a further wave of refugee migration to West Bengal, concentrated in Nadia and the 24 Parganas. West Bengal retained the consumption markets, the urban vending infrastructure and the cultivator-descendant population of the Indian portion of the colonial cannabis economy, but not the licensed cultivation belt itself, which lay mostly east of the Radcliffe Line (see History below).

Agriculture

Agriculture is the principal economic activity in rural West Bengal, employing about half of the state's workforce and contributing roughly one-fifth of gross state domestic product.^{[citation needed]} The state's productive capacity reflects its physiographic diversity: temperate orchard and tea cultivation in the Darjeeling Himalaya, a rice-jute-potato-vegetable belt across the Gangetic plain, lateritic single-crop rice and pulses in the Rarh, and salt-tolerant rice with brackish aquaculture in the Sundarbans.^[30] Six agro-climatic zones are recognised, corresponding to the hill, Terai-Teesta alluvial, old alluvial, new alluvial, red-and-laterite and coastal-saline divisions of the state.^[30]

West Bengal is the largest producer of rice and jute in India and the second-largest producer of potato.^[30]^[31]^[32] Rice production runs to about 16 to 17 million tonnes per annum on roughly 5.4 million hectares across three seasons: aus (pre-monsoon), aman (the principal kharif crop sown with the southwest monsoon) and the irrigated dry-season boro (December to May), whose post-1980s expansion accounts for most of the state's gain in rice production.^[30] Salt-tolerant landrace varieties including Talmugur, Patnai and Hamilton continue to be cultivated in the Sundarbans.^{[citation needed]} Jute is concentrated in Nadia, Murshidabad, North 24 Parganas, Hooghly, the Bardhaman districts, Cooch Behar and the Dinajpurs, with the principal Indian jute milling industry running along the Hooghly between Howrah and Bansberia.^{[citation needed]} Potato output of 11 to 12 million tonnes per annum is concentrated in Hooghly, the Bardhaman districts, Bankura, Birbhum, Paschim Medinipur and the Dinajpurs.^[32]

Tea is the principal plantation crop and West Bengal is the second-largest tea-producing state in India after Assam. Two production belts operate.^[33] Darjeeling tea is produced on 87 gardens covering about 17,500 hectares between 600 m and 2,000 m on the Darjeeling Himalayan slopes, predominantly using the China-jat (Camellia sinensis var. sinensis); Darjeeling holds the first geographical indication registered in India for an agricultural product (2004).^{[citation needed]} The Dooars and Terai gardens of Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the Darjeeling foothills produce a higher-volume CTC tea on piedmont alluvial soils using the Assam-jat, with about 154 gardens employing approximately 350,000 permanent workers, the largest single agricultural enterprise in the state.^{[citation needed]} The 2002 to 2004 plantation crisis, in which at least 22 Jalpaiguri gardens closed affecting 21,000 permanent workers, exposed the structural fragility of the Dooars labour economy and has been linked to subsequent smallholder cash-crop alternatives including cannabis on garden margins.^[28]^{[original research?]}

Beyond rice, jute, potato and tea, the state is the largest Indian producer of vegetables by volume and a major producer of mango (notably Fazli and Himsagar varieties from Malda and Murshidabad), lychee, betel leaf and mulberry silk.^[30] Inland fisheries support the second-largest production of any Indian state, with brackish-water shrimp and prawn aquaculture in the Sundarbans, freshwater pond aquaculture of Indian major carp statewide and a seasonal marine and estuarine hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha) fishery on the Hooghly-Bhagirathi system.^[30] The Black Bengal goat, native to the eastern districts, is among the most widely distributed Indian goat breeds. Cannabis was a regulated commercial crop on the Padma-Ganga floodplains under the Bengal Presidency from 1793 to 1947 and continued under West Bengal state excise until the cessation of cannabis licensing on 11 December 1989, since when no licit cultivation has operated in the state (see Cannabis in West Bengal below).

Cannabis in West Bengal

Cannabis use in West Bengal is documented across four chronological horizons of differing evidentiary weight: Sanskrit medical writing from the 11th century onwards; Bengali Śākta Tantric ritual codified between the 11th and 18th centuries; early-modern European traveller accounts from 1563 onwards; and the dense colonial documentary record of the Bengal Presidency from 1790 to 1947, anchored by the seven-volume Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC) report of 1894.^[34]^[6] The territory of the present-day state was the Calcutta-centred administrative, commercial and scholarly headquarters of the colonial Indian cannabis economy, but the licensed cultivation tract that the Excise Department regulated lay entirely north of the Ganges in what is now Bangladesh and was severed from West Bengal by Partition in 1947. A separate sub-Himalayan tradition of household and field-edge cultivation, worked by the Rajbanshi peasantry across Cooch Behar State, Jalpaiguri and the two Dinajpurs, straddled the eventual border and persisted in the Indian portion of the former Cooch Behar territory after Partition.

History

The earliest irrefutable Sanskrit medical attestation of cannabis as an ingestible intoxicating medicament is the Cikitsāsārasaṃgraha of the late 11th-century Bengali physician Vaṅgasena, whose name itself encodes Bengali origin (vaṅga = Bengal); the work prescribes bhaṅgā as a digestive, includes it in the powdered formula jātīphalādi cūrṇa for rājayakṣma and gives a rejuvenative recipe of daily indrāśana with milk and sugar.^[35]^[6] Bengali Śākta Tantric integration of vijayā is codified in the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra and adjacent texts between the 11th and 18th centuries. The earliest European description of bhang in Bengal specifically is in Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario (1596), followed by Thomas Bowrey at Balasore in 1669-1679, François Bernier at Dhaka and Hooghly in 1665-66, and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Niccolao Manucci at the Mughal Bengal court.^[36]

Under British colonial rule the Bengal Presidency administered the Indian cannabis economy from Calcutta. Regulation XXXIV of 1793, part of the Cornwallis Code, required a licence from the district collector for the manufacture or sale of bhang, ganja and charas. By the 1850s licensed cultivation had been consolidated into the Ganja Mahal, a 16-mile-radius tract centred on Naogaon in Rajshahi Division, with a three-circle rotation, the IHDC-documented chasi cultivator tradition and from 1917 the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society.^[15] Cooch Behar State operated a parallel state-direct golah system under the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, procuring its ganja by import from the Naogaon Mahal under section 41 of the Act as revised in 1891-92, distributing through sub-divisional golahs at Sudder, Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekliganj, and explicitly prohibiting in-state cultivation.^[13] The 1947 Radcliffe Line placed the entire licensed Mahal in East Pakistan; West Bengal retained the consumption markets, the Calcutta wholesale infrastructure and the urban vending network but not the cultivation belt. Cooch Behar acceded to India in 1949 and merged into West Bengal as a district in 1950. The NDPS Act of 1985 criminalised ganja and charas at the central level; bhang, defined by the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 as the leaf preparation, was preserved within state excise jurisdiction. State retail licences for all three intoxicants were terminated on 11 December 1989, after which licensing for ganja and charas was not resumed and the licit cannabis economy contracted to bhang preparations.^[37]

Cultivation

Cannabis cultivation in the territory of present-day West Bengal is recorded across three colonial-era regimes: the licensed Ganja Mahal of the Bengal Presidency, lying entirely east of the Radcliffe Line and now in Bangladesh; the Cooch Behar State excise apparatus, which prohibited in-state cultivation and procured its ganja by import; and the household and field-edge tradition of the wider sub-Himalayan plains across Rangpur, the Dinajpurs, Jalpaiguri and the territory of Cooch Behar State, worked by the Rajbanshi peasantry and undocumented in any colonial revenue table.^[14] The licensed Bengal landrace was a dioecious annual processed into three product types: flat ganja (chyapta) trodden underfoot on the chatar floor; round ganja (gol) rolled by hand between bars; and chur ganja recovered from the chatar surface after a flat or round batch. Bengal did not produce charas; resin-rubbed product circulating in Calcutta was imported from Yarkand and the Punjab.^[38]IHDC1894-IX

Surviving cannabis cultivation in West Bengal occurs across two regionally distinct belts. The sub-Himalayan plains household belt encompasses Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar with smaller extensions into Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur and into the Dooars-Terai margin; cultivation here is small-scale, often at homestead or kitchen-garden plot dimensions, embedded within a wider matrix of feral and semi-feral populations along river beds, field margins and roadside verges. The Zomia Collective WEB01 expedition of 2025 documented populations across this belt, with the Upper Jaldhaka Valley populations recorded as the Haldibari-format reference accessions ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250030 and ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250031.^[39] The cultivator community is predominantly Rajbanshi and Nepali rather than Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim. The southwestern jungle belt extends across Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram and parts of Paschim Medinipur and Birbhum on the lateritic margin of the Chota Nagpur plateau, worked by Santal, Munda and Bengali Hindu agrarian populations.^[20] The agronomic relationship between the two belts is not currently established.

Preparations and Consumption

Three principal Bengali cannabis preparations were formalised for colonial excise purposes and consistently distinguished across the witness questions of the IHDC.^[11] Ganja (গাঁজা), the flowering tops of the female plant, was smoked in a cilam and prepared under colonial licensing in flat, round and chur types as described under Cultivation above. Bhang (ভাং), the leaves and seeds, was drunk as siddhi (সিদ্ধি) ground on a stone slab with sugar, milk and the ṭhāṇḍāi spice matrix, and worked into the sweet confection majoon (মজুন) inherited from Persian-Mughal pharmacy. Charas (চরস), collected resin, was never produced commercially in Bengal but imported from Yarkand and the Punjab under the same excise framework. The licit bhang trade in Kolkata now operates through long-established sharbat houses in Burrabazar, Sovabazar, Manicktala-Hedua, Bowbazar and Jagubazar, with demand peaking on Dol Yātrā, Maha Śivarātri and the Charak-Gajan festival of Chaitra Saṅkrānti.

Religious and Cultural Use

Cannabis use in Bengal is documented across multiple religious traditions, with the densest evidence in volume IV of the IHDC (1894) and in chapter IX of volume I, which collected sworn evidence on social and religious customs.^[40] Bengali Śākta Tantric ritual integrates the consecration of vijayā from the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra forward, with cannabis functioning as a substitute or adjunct to madya (wine) in the pañcamakāra scheme of the vāmācāra tradition.^[41] The Bengali Śākta pilgrimage circuit (Kālīghāṭ, Bakreśwar, Kankalitala and especially Tārāpīṭha in Birbhum district on the Dvārakā river) constitutes the canonical setting for Tantric cannabis offerings, with gāñjā smoked in the cilam and siddhi consumed as drink at the cremation-ground sādhanā. Tārāpīṭha's modern identity is anchored in the figure of Bāmākhepā (1837–1911), whose sādhanā at the Mahāśmaśāna integrated gāñjā smoking with the consumption of ritually transgressive substances; the cremation ground continues to host a population of Aghorī and Śākta sādhus.^[42]

Śaiva offering of bhāṅ and gāñjā is normative at the major Bengali pilgrimage centres, conspicuously at Tārakeśwar in Hooghly on Śivarātri and through the Śrāvaṇa Yātrā, when saffron-clad devotees carry Gaṅgā water from the Nimai Tirtha Ghat at Baidyabati to pour over the Śiva liṅga. The IHDC found the Bijoyā Daśamī siddhi offering to be almost universal in Bengal in 1894, though the practice has narrowed in middle-class urban use since. Dol Yātrā at Phālgun pūrṇimā remains the principal occasion at which bhang ṭhāṇḍāi, bhang laḍḍū and bhang lassi circulate as festive items; on Kālī Pūjā at the Kārtik new moon, Tantric celebrants at the śmaśāna sites of Tārāpīṭha, Nimtala and Keoṛatala include bhāṅ and gāñjā in their ritual offerings; and the Gajan and Charak Pūjā cycle of late Caitra retains the Gajan sannyāsī tradition of cannabis-accompanied bodily austerity.

The Bāul-Fakir lineage, a syncretic Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā and Sufi-Fakir minstrel tradition concentrated in Murshidabad, Birbhum and Nadia, treats gāñjā, bhāṅ and siddhi as sādhanā-adjuncts; its principal annual gathering in West Bengal is the Joydev-Kenduli Melā at the birthplace of the twelfth-century poet Jayadeva around Makar Saṅkrānti in mid-January, with the Pauṣ Melā at Śāntiniketan in late December a secondary node.^[7] Bāul songs were inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.^[43] The wider category of the gā̃jākhor covers Śaiva sādhus, bairāgīs, nāgā ascetics, aghorīs, fakirs and jaṭā-sporting wanderers passing through Bengal en route to Puri, Tārāpīṭha, the annual Gaṅgāsāgar Melā at Sagar Island, Kāmākhyā or Hardwar; supplying gāñjā to such mendicants was treated by Bengali householders as a routine act of religious charity.^[40] The Trinātha cult of east Bengal (now surviving principally in the Barak Valley and north-eastern Bangladesh) made an offering of three pice each of gāñjā, oil and betel-nut to a syncretic deity, with a Hindu-Muslim parallel under the name Tinlakh Pīr.^[40] The Koch-Rajbanshi folk Śaiva and Śākta complex of Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the two Dinajpurs, including the Jalpesh Temple near Maynaguri (founded 1524 by Bishwa Singha) and the Madankam Puja of the Dooars and Terai, situates north Bengal devotion within the wider regional Śaiva framework in which cannabis offering is normative.^[44] The Santal, Munda and Oraon populations of western Bengal maintain their own ethnobotanical relations to cannabis, with Santal medicinal uses for epilepsy, tetanus, paralysis and fever-delirium reflecting traditions reaching into the pre-colonial period.^[45]

Trade and Commerce

The Bengal cannabis trade has two structurally distinct phases. The colonial phase, in which Calcutta was the financial and wholesale back-end of a Bengal Presidency licensed cannabis economy supplying the Indian subcontinent, indentured-labour destinations across the British Empire and the medical Cannabis indica preparations of British and American pharmaceutical houses, ran from 1793 to 1947.^[10]^[15] Retail distribution of the Naogaon product across Bengal was concentrated in the Gandhabanik caste, the trader-druggist community whose pansari shops carried up to three hundred and sixty indigenous drug ingredients, with Hindu shop-leaseholders typically delegating direct ritual contact with the commodity to a Muslim or Sunri manager.^[26] Cooch Behar State operated its own parallel licensed system under the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, distributing through state golahs rather than caste-managed retail.^[13]

The contemporary phase, since the cessation of the colonial regulatory regime between 1985 and 1989, operates partly under the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 and partly outside any regulatory framework. The licit segment is the seasonal Kolkata bhang trade, carried on through long-established sharbat houses in Burrabazar, Sovabazar, Manicktala-Hedua, Bowbazar and Jagubazar, with demand peaking on Dol Yātrā, Maha Śivarātri and the Charak-Gajan festival of Chaitra Saṅkrānti.^[18] The Calcutta High Court in Promodh Jha v. State of West Bengal (22 January 2008) reaffirmed that bhang falls outside NDPS Act section 8 prohibition and remains within state excise jurisdiction.^[46] West Bengal has not joined the small group of Indian states (Uttarakhand 2018, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh 2024, Himachal Pradesh) with industrial hemp policies and operates no state-specific medical cannabis policy.

The illicit cannabis trade draws on three loose in-state production belts (Dooars, Bankura-Purulia, southern delta) but moves the largest volumes of product brought into West Bengal from Odisha, Tripura, Manipur and Andhra Pradesh to Kolkata and onward to Bangladesh. The Siliguri Corridor is the structural chokepoint through which all Northeast-origin cannabis enters mainland India, giving the state a transit role disproportionate to its in-state production.^[47] The West Bengal portion of the India–Bangladesh border, the longest of any Indian state at 2,216.7 km, is a high-volume smuggling theatre supplying Bangladeshi demand that the 1987-89 closure of the Naogaon licensed system left unsatisfied.^[48] Urban Kolkata retail has shifted decisively since approximately 2018 to encrypted-messaging-app dealer networks operating on Telegram and Instagram, with order placement by direct message, payment by UPI and motorcycle delivery within the urban core.^[49] Internal economics follow the wider South Asian landrace pattern in which the cultivator captures one to three per cent of the eventual retail value, broadly mirroring the colonial structure that Hem Chunder Kerr recorded for the licensed chasi cultivator of the Ganja Mahal in 1877.^[50]^{[original research?]}

Legal Status

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Growing Regions

Landrace Cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki:

Region	Has conservation status
Eastern Himalayas
North Bengal Plains
The Dooars	Vulnerable

Growing Areas