West Bengal
More actions
| West Bengal | |
|---|---|
| পশ্চিমবঙ্গ | |
| Administration | |
| Type | State |
| Country | India |
| Capital | Kolkata |
| Area | 88,752 km² |
| Documentation | |
| Growing Regions | 3 |
| Growing Areas | 11 |
| Accessions | 0 |
West Bengal (পশ্চিমবঙ্গ, Pashchimbanga) is a state in eastern India, bordering Bangladesh to the east, Nepal and Bhutan to the north and the Indian states of Sikkim, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. The state extends from the Himalayan foothills in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south, encompassing three of the wiki's documented growing regions: the Eastern Himalayas, The Dooars and the North Bengal Plains. It is the most extensively surveyed Indian state on the wiki, with all current Indian accessions originating from the 2025 WEB01 expedition across its northern districts.citation needed
Geography
West Bengal spans roughly 88,752 km² across three principal topographic zones: the Eastern Himalayan ranges of Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts in the far north, the alluvial Terai and Dooars foothills along the Bhutan frontier and the Gangetic deltaic plain extending south to the Sundarbans. The state's documented cannabis populations are concentrated in the northern districts (Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and Cooch Behar), spanning all three of the state's growing regions.citation needed
Cannabis in West Bengal
History
Pre-Colonial Period
Pre-colonial Bengali cannabis culture is documented across four chronological horizons whose evidentiary weight differs substantially. The Vedic and Sanskrit-lexicographic mentions of bhaṅga from c. 1200 BCE onwards are genuinely ambiguous in their botanical identification; the classical Āyurvedic compendia in their earliest layers do not securely attest cannabis as a medicine or intoxicant; the first irrefutable Indian medical attestation appears in an 11th-century Bengali text; and the dense documentary record of Bengali devotional, sectarian and culinary cannabis use consolidates only under the Sultanate, Mughal and early Nawabi regimes between c. 1500 and 1790.[1][2][3] The popular framing of cannabis as a "5,000-year-old" Indian sacrament collapses these horizons, and the present section follows Meulenbeld (1989), Wujastyk (2002) and Sauthoff (2024) in keeping them distinct.
Sanskrit textual and medical tradition
The earliest text routinely cited as evidence for ancient Indian cannabis is Atharvaveda 11.6.15 (conventionally c. 1200–1000 BCE), which names bhaṅga among five auspicious herbs said to release the worshipper from anxiety.[4] The 14th-century commentator Sāyaṇa glosses bhaṅga here as a kind of wild grass rather than Cannabis sativa specifically and modern scholarship treats the Atharvavedic reference as etymologically related to but botanically distinct from the later cannabis identification.[1][2] Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 4th century BCE) and the Amarakoṣa (c. 5th–6th century CE) contain the form bhaṅgā without botanical specification; identification with cannabis in these lexical sources requires reading later certainty back into them.[1]
The widely repeated claim that the Suśruta Saṃhitā (c. 3rd–4th century CE in its standard recension) prescribes cannabis as an antiphlegmatic derives from G.A. Grierson's note prepared for the IHDC.[5] Grierson himself, however, observed that vijayā in the relevant Suśruta passages was probably haritakī (yellow myrobalan) rather than hemp; Meulenbeld's 1989 study established that the cannabis passages in Suśruta and Caraka belong to disputed later strata of those texts and cannot bear the evidentiary weight assigned them.[1][5]
The earliest irrefutable Sanskrit medical attestation of cannabis as an ingestible intoxicating medicament is a Bengali text. The Cikitsāsārasaṃgraha of Vaṅgasena, a physician working in Bengal in the late 11th century CE whose name itself encodes Bengali origin (vaṅga = Bengal), recommends bhaṅgā as a digestive and appetiser, includes it in the powdered formula jātīphalādi cūrṇa for rājayakṣma (tuberculosis/consumption) and gives a rejuvenative recipe in which one who daily consumes indrāśana ("Indra's food," i.e. cannabis) with milk and sugar becomes free from all diseases and long-lived.[6][2] The compendium circulated widely in the Pāla–Sena and post-Sena Bengali medical milieu and represents the first secure point at which cannabis enters the Indian medical record.
A near-contemporary Bengali figure, Cakrapāṇidatta of the Pāla court of Nayapāla (mid-11th century), compiled the medical vocabulary Śabdacandrikā listing for cannabis the synonyms vijayā ("the victorious"), trailokyavijayā ("victorious in the three worlds"), bhaṅgā, indrāśana and jayā. The semantic field of this synonym set was the earliest in the Indian record strongly to imply that the intoxicating use of the plant was already recognised.[5][2] The Ānandakanda, a Sanskrit rasaśāstra–Tantric alchemical work dated to the 12th–13th century, devotes most of its chapter 15 (some 186 verses) to vijayā, covering cultivation, sowing and harvest mantras, male and female plants, purification, nine stages of intoxication and an elaborate rejuvenation treatment (kuṭīpraveśika rasāyana) involving prolonged consumption in a specially constructed hut.[3] The Śārṅgadhara Saṃhitā (c. late 13th–early 14th century) became the first classical compendium to classify bhaṅgā as vyavāyin (a quick-acting drug that pervades the body before being absorbed) and to pair it explicitly with ahiphena (opium).[7] Later compendia and nighaṇṭus, including the Dhanvantari Nighaṇṭu, Madanapāla Nighaṇṭu (1374), Rāja Nighaṇṭu of Narahari Paṇḍita (14th century) and the Bhāvaprakāśa of Bhāvamiśra (16th century), extend the synonym lists and indications and were the standard reference works of Bengali kavirājas by the late medieval period.[8]
Tantric textual emergence
Bengal was the heartland of Vajrayāna Buddhism under the Pāla dynasty (c. 750–1174 CE), which patronised the great monastic universities of Nālandā, Vikramaśīla, Odantapurī, Somapura (Pāhāḍpur) and Jagaddala. The wandering mahāsiddhas of this milieu composed the Caryāpada (চর্যাপদ), the oldest extant corpus of Old Bengali verse, datable to between the 8th and 12th centuries; forty-seven verses survive in the palm-leaf manuscript recovered by Haraprasad Shastri from the Nepal Royal Court Library in 1907.[9] The Caryāpadas are composed in sandhābhāṣā (intentional language). Although their imagery includes brewing and intoxication, no extant verse explicitly names cannabis: the substance consistently invoked is madya (liquor). Cannabis use among Bengali tantric adepts is, however, securely attested in other Pāla-era and immediately post-Pāla sources: Nāgārjuna's Yogaratnamālā (12th century) recommends cannabis smoke in tantric ritual contexts[1] and the Tārā Tantra edited by Akshay Kumar Maitra references its tantric use directly.[10] Aldrich (1977) traces continuous Indian tantric cannabis use to roughly this horizon, which represents the first secure rather than speculative attestation.[11]
The Bengali Śākta Tantric tradition was codified between the 11th and 18th centuries in the Mahānirvāṇa, Kulārṇava, Niruttara, Tārā, Kāmākhyā and other Tantras, several of which integrate cannabis directly into prescribed ritual. The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, a Bengal text whose extant recension is generally treated as late 18th- or early 19th-century, was first published by the Adi-Brahma-Samaj in 1798 Śakābda (1876 CE) with the commentary of Hariharānanda Bhāratī.[12]
Early-modern documentation and Mughal context
The earliest detailed European description of bhang in South Asia is in Garcia da Orta's Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia (Goa, 1563), in the dialogue "Do bangue, Cannabis," which distinguishes the substance from European hemp and describes preparation of the leaf and seed into a powder mixed into drink with optional additions of areca, opium, cloves and nutmeg.[13] Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1596) explicitly identifies bhang use in Bengal.[14] Thomas Bowrey's A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669–1679 is widely regarded as the earliest detailed English-language account of cannabis use in coastal Bengal, describing East India Company sailors at Bālāsore experimenting with bangue.[15] Niccolao Manucci's Storia do Mogor, François Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire (covering his 1665–66 journey to Bengal) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's Voyages (covering Dhaka and Hooghly) attest post (cold opium infusion), bhāṅ and maʿjūn at the Mughal court and in Bengal sūbah towns.[16][17]
Abu'l-Faẓl's Āʾīn-i Akbarī (c. 1590) refers to bhāṅ, post and opium among recreational intoxicants and gives the rent-roll of Bengal's nineteen sarkārs, but does not itemise a separate gāñjā or bhang revenue line.[18] Mughal and Nawabi intoxicant taxation in Bengal sūbah was subsumed within the catch-all sāyer (miscellaneous non-agrarian) revenue and the ābkārī (literally "distiller's") tradition, administered by local zamindars and ijāradārs under broad farming-out arrangements that the 1793 Cornwallis-era licensing inherited directly.[19] Raja Soshi Sikhareshwar Roy of Tahirpur (Rajshahi), in his note of dissent to the IHDC, argued explicitly that under Mughal rule the hemp drugs had never before been taxed as a separate excise.[19] By the late 18th century the tract that the British would formalise as the Ganja Mahal, covering parts of Naogaon, Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur with secondary nodes in Jamalpur, Netrokona and the hilly Chittagong tract, was already the principal Bengali production zone.[20]
Cultivation in pre-colonial Bengal was concentrated on the alluvial flats of the lower Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and the Padma-Atrai basins of northern Bengal, the future Ganja Mahal. Consumption was densest in (a) the urban-mercantile centres of Murshidabad, Dhaka, Hooghly and, after 1690, Calcutta, where Mughal-Nawabi court use of maʿjūn, post and bhāṅ set patterns subsequently adopted by Bengali bhadralok households; (b) the Śākta pilgrimage circuit of Tārāpīṭha, Kālīghāṭ, Bakreśwar and the śmaśāna-shrines of the Rāḍh region; (c) the Śaiva centres, especially Tārakeśwar and Baidyanāth; and (d) the rural countryside of Birbhum, Murshidabad, Nadia, Kushtia and Faridpur, the historic Bāul-Fakir heartland. Riverine ghat-side preparation of bhang and siddhi, pounding on a stone slab beside the river, was a near-universal pre-colonial practice across the delta. The wild Himalayan plant of the upland north had little role in pre-colonial Bengali culture, which depended throughout on cultivated lowland material.
Distinguishing secure from speculative attestation
For the purposes of citation discipline, pre-colonial Bengali cannabis claims fall into three classes. Securely attested by primary sources before 1790: Sanskrit medical use from the 11th-century Bengali physician Vaṅgasena onwards; Bengali Tantric Śākta consecration of vijayā in the Mahānirvāṇa and related Tantras; European traveller reports of bhang in Bengal (Linschoten 1596; Bowrey 1669–1679; Bernier; Tavernier; Manucci); Mughal court familiarity with bhāṅ, post and maʿjūn (Āʾīn-i Akbarī, c. 1590); and cultivation in the future Ganja Mahal tract by the late 17th–18th century. Securely attested only in 19th-century retrospective documentation, but with strong continuity arguments to the pre-1790 period: the Bijoyā Daśamī siddhi offering as universal Bengali household custom; Śivarātri bhang at Tārakeśwar; Bāul-Fakir cannabis use; the figure of the gā̃jākhor in Bengali folklore; and the term siddhi as the name for the drinkable preparation. Speculative or back-projected: the Atharvaveda-as-proof-of-Vedic-cannabis reading, which depends on a botanical identification Sāyaṇa himself did not make; the Suśruta Saṃhitā as a confident early cannabis source, which Grierson and Meulenbeld both rejected on textual-strata grounds; and "5,000-year-old timeless Hindu cannabis sacrament" narratives, which are largely 20th-century reframings of textually unstable evidence.[1][2][3]
Colonial Period
Under British colonial rule, the Bengal Presidency (which at various points included present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Odisha and Assam) was the administrative, commercial and scholarly centre of the Indian cannabis economy. Calcutta, the Presidency capital, housed the Excise Department that regulated the trade; the Bengal Secretariat Press that published its foundational documents; the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Calcutta Botanic Garden where its scientific study was conducted; and the wholesale and financial infrastructure through which the trade passed. The licensed cultivation belt, however, lay entirely north of the Ganges in what is now Bangladesh and was severed from West Bengal by the Partition of 1947.
The first formal British taxation came in 1790, when duties on alcohol and intoxicants were levied on landlords across the Presidency.[21] Regulation XXXIV of 1793, part of the Cornwallis Code, required a licence from the district collector for the manufacture or sale of bhang, ganja, charas and other intoxicating drugs.[21] Pre-monopoly cultivation was scattered across zamindari estates, with the Jessore tract in the southern Presidency reportedly producing some 2,000–2,400 tons annually before its suppression in 1875 and the consolidation of licensed cultivation northward to the Naogaon area of Rajshahi district.[20]
By the 1850s licensed cultivation had been consolidated into the Ganja Mahal, a small geographical zone astride the Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts of the northern Presidency, with its headquarters at Naogaon. The Mahal was worked under a three-circle rotation in which each circle was permitted to grow ganja once every three years, with manufactured product held in licensed warehouses (golas) under Excise Department supervision and duty levied at point of issue.[22] The administrative foundation of the system was Hem Chunder Kerr's Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganja in Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877), and the cultivators were organised from 1917 as the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Cooperative Society Limited.
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC) was appointed by Resolution of 3 July 1893 following a question in the House of Commons by William Sproston Caine MP requesting an enquiry into the cultivation and trade of hemp drugs in Bengal specifically.[23] The seven-member Commission first met in Calcutta on 3 August 1893 and conducted much of its work from the Presidency capital; one of its three Indian members was Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur, a major zamindar in the Rajshahi cultivation belt.[24] Volume IV of the seven-volume report is devoted to the evidence of Bengal and Assam witnesses and constitutes 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 on the mind, rejected prohibition and recommended that the Bengal regulatory model be extended to other provinces.
The Radcliffe Line of 1947 placed the entirety of the cultivation tract, together with the Ganja Society's Naogaon headquarters, in East Pakistan. West Bengal retained the consumption markets, the Calcutta wholesale infrastructure, the urban retail vending network and the Bengal Cooperative Bank deposits of the Naogaon Society, but lost the licensed cultivation belt entirely.[25]
Post-Independence
Cultivation
Preparations and Consumption
By the period when documentation becomes dense (16th–18th centuries) three distinct Bengali cannabis preparations are clearly differentiated. These categories were subsequently formalised for colonial excise purposes and consistently distinguished across the witness questions of the IHDC.[24]
Ganja (গাঁজা) was the flowering tops of the female plant. In pre-colonial Bengal the "rolled or Bengal type" was regarded as of higher quality than the "trodden or Bombay type" and was preferred for medicinal use, smoked in a cilam often with the invocation of Śiva.[26] Under the colonial excise system the Ganja Mahal manufactured ganja in three product types. Flat ganja (chyapta, চ্যাপ্টা) was produced by pressing cut tops flat under foot on the manufacturing platform (chatar, চাতার). Round ganja (gol ganja, গোল গাঁজা; long and short-stalked) was rolled between the hands or under the foot into cylindrical or oblong form, with long-stalked round ganja commanding the highest price. Chur ganja (চুর গাঁজা) was the resinous fragments and debris collected from the chatar floor.[27]
Bhang (ভাং) was the leaves and seeds of the plant, ground and consumed as a drink (known in Bengali as siddhi, সিদ্ধি) or worked into the sweet confection majoon (majun, মজুন). The pre-colonial drinkable preparation was produced by soaking dried leaves and flowering tops, grinding them on a stone slab with sugar, milk and the ṭhāṇḍāi spice matrix (black pepper, cardamom, fennel, cucumber seed, almond, rose petals) and straining the mixture into milk. The dry leaf material itself was also called siddhi and was sold at Bengali Hindu ritual-supply shops (daśakarmā-bhāṇḍār). No securely pre-1790 Bengali manuscript using the exact word siddhi in the drinkable cannabis sense has yet been published in translation, but the practice itself is plainly implied by Vaṅgasena's 11th-century milk-and-sugar recipes.[6] Majoon, the sweetened cannabis confection inherited from Persian-Mughal pharmacy, combined bhang paste with ghee, flour, sugar, often poppy seed and at times opium, nutmeg or Datura metel. It was sold widely "at festivals and other great gatherings of the brethren."[21] Under the colonial excise system bhang was sold through licensed government bhang shops, a vending category that has continued in West Bengal into the present day.
Charas (চরস) was collected resin. Its manufacture and sale was prohibited in 1800 "as being of a most noxious quality" but the restriction was rescinded in 1824 on the ground that the drug was "not more prejudicial to health than ganja or other intoxicating drugs."[21] Charas was never produced in Bengal in commercial quantity but was imported from the northwest (principally Yarkand and Punjab) and sold under the same excise framework.
Religious and Cultural Use
Cannabis use in Bengal is documented across multiple religious traditions in colonial-era sources, with the densest evidence in Volume IV of the IHDC (1894). The Commission's seventy standardised witness questions included extensive enquiry into religious and ritual use and the Bengal evidence covered Shaiva and Shakta worship in the Shiva–Kali–Durga complex; charanamrita and prasad offerings at temple sites; and use among Vaishnava bairagi and Baul mendicants.[24] The clearest pre-colonial documentation is reconstructed from late 18th- and 19th-century sources looking back and from IHDC chapter IX, which collected sworn evidence on customs whose roots witnesses described as immemorial.[28]
Tantric ritual practice. The Bengali Śākta Tantric tradition codified between the 11th and 18th centuries in the Mahānirvāṇa, Kulārṇava, Niruttara, Tārā, Kāmākhyā and other Tantras integrated cannabis directly into ritual. The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra explicitly directs the sādhaka to consecrate vijayā before consumption, with the vijayā-consecration mantra invoking ambrosia and the favour of Kālikā.[12] The pun between siddhi as yogic attainment and siddhi as cannabis preparation is structural in Bengali Śākta usage. In the formal scheme of the pañcamakāra of the Bengali Śākta vāmācāra tradition (madya or wine, māṃsa or meat, matsya or fish, mudrā or parched grain and maithuna or sexual union), cannabis is not one of the canonical five but functions as a substitute or adjunct to madya in many kaula and bhairavī-cakra lineages.[29] White (2003) treats this substitution as continuous with the older soma-offering pattern reinterpreted in tantric idiom.[30] The Sahajiyā lineages, comprising the older Buddhist sahaja-siddha tradition and the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā that emerged from Caitanyaite milieus after the 16th century, inherited the emphasis on deha-tattva ("body-truth") and on intoxicants as adjuncts to sādhanā, though explicit textual record of cannabis use among Sahajiyās before 1790 is thin and is reconstructed largely from later Bāul songs and from ethnographic continuity arguments.[31]
Devotional and festival use. On Bijoyā Daśamī, the tenth day of Durgā Pūjā, the IHDC found that the custom of offering an infusion of hemp leaves to every guest and household member was common in Bengal and "may almost be said to be universal."[28] Witnesses including Mahāmahopādhyāya Maheśa Chandra Nyāyaratna, Principal of the Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta; Maharaja Sir Jyotīndramohan Tagore, K.C.S.I.; and Raja Piari Mohan Mukharji, C.S.I., attested its prevalence and its association with the religious devotions of the people. After the household consigned the goddess's image to the river, the bijoyā siddhi-cup was passed and bhang-laced sweetmeats were distributed.[28] On Śivarātri the Commission established that the hemp plant, especially gāñjā, was most strongly associated with the worship of Śiva, in popular belief a favourite of the god. Siddhi was offered to the Śiva image at Benares, Baidyanāth, Tārakeśwar and elsewhere.[28] At Tārakeśwar in Hooghly district, the major Bengali Śaiva pilgrimage centre whose temple in its present form was established in 1729 by Raja Bharamalla Rao,[32] pouring bhang-water over the liṅga on Śivarātri night was the normative ritual act. Cannabis at the spring festival of Dol Yātrā / Holi is attested across Bengal in IHDC testimony, paired in the Bengali calendar with the Vaiṣṇava swing-festival of Caitanya's birthday on Phālgun pūrṇimā.[28]
The Śākta pilgrimage circuit. The Bengali Śākta circuit comprising Kālīghāṭ (one of the fifty-one śakti pīṭhas, in present-day Kolkata), Bakreśwar, Kankalitala and especially Tārāpīṭha in Birbhum district on the Dvārakā river (one of the principal śmaśāna-Tārā shrines of Bengal) constituted the canonical pre-colonial setting for Tantric cannabis offerings, with gāñjā smoked in the cilam and siddhi consumed as drink by sādhakas at the cremation-ground sādhanā.
Folk and mendicant traditions. The Bāul-Fakir lineage, a syncretic Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā / Sufi-Fakir minstrel tradition concentrated in Kushtia and Shilaidaha in East Bengal and in Murshidabad, Birbhum and Nadia in West Bengal, emerges into the textual record from the 15th century, though as an organised sect it is securely documented only from the 18th. Bāuls and Fakirs treated gā̃jā, bhāṅ and siddhi as sādhanā-adjuncts in a usage structurally identical to their Tantric Śākta deployment.[33][34] The Bāul association with cannabis is most famously linked to Lālan Fakir (Lālan Śāh, 1774–1890), but the pattern predates him in the 17th- and 18th-century Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā poetic corpus. The wider category of the gā̃jākhor ("gañjā-eater" or "gañjā-smoker") in Bengali folklore covers Śaiva sādhus, bairāgīs, nāgā ascetics, aghorīs, fakirs and jaṭā-sporting wanderers passing through Bengal en route to Puri, Tārāpīṭha, Kāmākhyā or Hardwar. The Commission found that supplying gañjā to such mendicants was treated by Bengali householders as a routine act of religious charity.[28] The Sāntal, Munda, Oraon and other ādivāsi populations of western Bengal (Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and the Chota Nagpur fringe) had their own distinct ethnobotanical relations to cannabis, with Sāntal medicinal uses for epilepsy, tetanus, paralysis and fever-delirium reflecting traditions reaching back into the pre-colonial period.[35]
Trade and Commerce
Calcutta was the financial and wholesale back-end of the colonial Bengal cannabis economy. Wholesale dealers (mahajans) converged on the Ganja Mahal during the January–April marketing season to buy product directly at the gola, taking dispatches under transport permit by river, by road and (from the 1870s) by the Eastern Bengal Railway. Distribution centres across the Presidency included Dhaka, Pabna, Khulna, Jessore, Chittagong, Comilla, Mymensingh, Barishal and Sylhet, with overland routes to the United Provinces, Bihar and the Central Provinces.[20] Smuggling into Lower Burma, where cultivation, sale and possession had been prohibited under the Burma Excise Act of 1873, was a continuing concern of the colonial excise administration. Smaller export movements to indentured-labour destinations (Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Natal) and to British and American pharmaceutical houses for medical Cannabis indica preparations are documented in the India Office Records.[19]
The Naogaon Ganja Society maintained pre-Partition assets in Calcutta, including a deposit at the Bengal Cooperative Bank that has never been recovered.[25]
Scholarship
Calcutta was the centre of colonial-era scientific and administrative scholarship on Indian cannabis. The Calcutta Botanic Garden under William Roxburgh conducted experimental trials of European fibre hemp on the Bengal plain from the 1790s through the 1810s, documented in Roxburgh's Further Extracts of Correspondence Relating to Indian Hemp; Between W. Roxburgh and R. C. Plowden (Calcutta, 1810). The trials were unsuccessful for fibre purposes but established the Garden's role as a centre for cannabis botany.
The pharmacological introduction of Cannabis indica to Western medicine was conducted in Calcutta by the Irish physician William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, Professor of Chemistry at the Medical College of Bengal, whose 1839 paper "On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah" (Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bengal, Calcutta) and 1843 monograph established the medical use of cannabis tinctures in British and American pharmacy through the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta published botanical, ethnographic and pharmacological work on cannabis throughout the nineteenth century in its Journal and Proceedings. George Watt's Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1885–93, 6 vols), of which the cannabis entry occupies vol. II, pp. 103–149, drew extensively on Asiatic Society material and on Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 report and was itself laid before Parliament in 1893 as a foundational document for the IHDC enquiry.
The Bengal Secretariat Press in Calcutta published Kerr's 1877 report, all of the Bengal District Gazetteers (including L.S.S. O'Malley's Rajshahi volume of 1916 with its dedicated chapter on the Ganja Mahal) and successive editions of the Memorandum on Excise Administration in India so far as it is concerned with Hemp Drugs. The IHDC first met in Calcutta on 3 August 1893 and its Secretary, H.J. McIntosh, was Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal in the Financial and Municipal Departments.[24]
Conservation Status
Post-Independence
Modern Cultivation
Legal Status
Districts
No districts documented yet.
Growing Regions
| Region | Has conservation status |
|---|---|
| Eastern Himalayas | |
| North Bengal Plains | |
| The Dooars | Vulnerable |
Growing Areas
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Priority | Collected | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250012 | Lataguri General Population 2024 | High | 7 December 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250013 | Lataguri 'Neori Nadi' General Population 2024 | High | 7 December 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250014 | Lataguri 'Kajaldighi' General Population 2024 | High | 7 December 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250011 | Lataguri Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 7 December 2025 | Gorumara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250015 | Baulbari General Population 2025 | High | 7 December 2025 | Maynaguri |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250010 | Siliguri General Population 2024 | High | 7 November 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250005 | Jalpaiguri General Population #8 2024 | High | 7 October 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250009 | Baikar Gourgram General Population 2024 | High | 7 October 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250007 | Panishala 'Mandir' Selection 2024 | High | 7 September 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250006 | Paschim Harmati General Population 2024 | High | 7 September 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250008 | Panishala General Population 2024 | High | 7 September 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-UTT-0820250001 | Siliguri General Population 2024 | 22 August 2025 | ||
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250003 | Jalpesh General Population 2024 | High | 7 August 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250001 | Jalpesh 'Madhabdanga' General Population 2024 | High | 7 August 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250004 | Jalpaiguri 'Pat Kata' Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 7 August 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250002 | Jalpesh 'Jalpesh Mandir' General Population 2024 | High | 7 August 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250021 | Baneswar General Population 2024 | High | 31 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250023 | Dinhata General Population 2024 | High | 31 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250022 | Baneswar 'Sarkar's' Selection 2024 | High | 31 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250024 | Dinhata Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 31 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250020 | Cooch Behar 'Khagrabari' General Population 2025 | 26 July 2025 | ||
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250018 | Gopalpur General Population #1 2024 | High | 24 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250019 | Gopalpur 'Bhutani' General Population 2024 | High | 24 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250017 | Gopalpur General Population #2 2024 | High | 24 July 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250046 | Simlabari General Population #3 2024 | High | 22 July 2025 | Chilapata |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250049 | Patlakhawa General Population 2024 | High | 22 July 2025 | Chilapata |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250048 | Simlabari General Population #1 2024 | High | 22 July 2025 | Chilapata |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250047 | Simlabari General Population #2 2024 | High | 22 July 2025 | Chilapata |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250016 | Fulkardabri Sujan's Selection #2 2024 | High | 17 July 2025 | Mekliganj |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250013 | Haldibari Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 14 July 2025 | Mekliganj |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250072 | Jaldapara 'Hollong' General Population 2024 | High | 28 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250071 | Jaldapara 'Kauchandpara' General Population #2 2024 | High | 28 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250075 | Suripara Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 28 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250073 | Salkumar 'Mondalpara' Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 28 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250074 | Bhandani General Population 2024 | High | 28 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250068 | Makrapara General Population 2025 | High | 27 June 2025 | Chamurchi-Laxmi Duar |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250069 | Jaldapara 'Purba Madarihat' #2 Selection 2025 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250065 | Deogaon General Population #1 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Khairbari-Deogaon |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250066 | Deogaon General Population #2 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Khairbari-Deogaon |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250064 | Jaldapara 'Kauchandpara' General Population 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250060 | Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #1 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250062 | Jaldapara 'Badaitari' Selection #1 2025 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250067 | Deogaon General Population #3 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Khairbari-Deogaon |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250061 | Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #2 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250063 | Jaldapara 'Badaitari' Selection #2 2025 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250070 | Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #3 2024 | High | 26 June 2025 | Jaldapara |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250057 | Hamiltonganj 'Giant Stank' Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 25 June 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250058 | Hamiltonganj 'Candy Orange' Feral Selection 2025 | Medium | 25 June 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250054 | Hamiltonganj Feral Selection #1 2025 | Medium | 25 June 2025 | |
| ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250055 | Hamiltonganj Feral Selection #2 2025 | Medium | 25 June 2025 | |
| ... further results | ||||
Conservation Status
Recent News
| Article | Date | District | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| News:2026-01-15/Enforcement/alipurduar-district-police-destroy-illegally-cultivated-cannabis-plants-in-purba-narathali-kumargram | 15 January 2026 | Alipurduar | Enforcement |
| News:2025-09-24/Enforcement/cooch-behar-district-police-destroy-marijuana-cultivation-across-multiple-locations-in-coordinated-operation-2 | 24 September 2025 | Cooch Behar | Enforcement |
See Also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Meulenbeld, G.J., "The search for clues to the chronology of Sanskrit medical texts as illustrated by the history of bhaṅgā," Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 15, 1989, pp. 59–70.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Wujastyk, Dominik, "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Herbal Medicine," in A. Salema (ed.), Ayurveda at the Crossroads of Care and Cure, Lisboa: Centro de História de Além-Mar, 2002, pp. 45–73.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Sauthoff, Patricia, "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Alchemy," in Suhṛdayasaṃhitā: A Compendium of Studies on South Asian Culture, Philosophy, and Religion. Dedicated to Dominik Wujastyk, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2024.
- ↑ Whitney, William Dwight & Lanman, Charles Rockwell, Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā, Harvard Oriental Series, vols. 7–8, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1905, ad loc.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Grierson, George Abraham, "Note on References to the Hemp Plant Occurring in Sanskrit and Hindi Literature," in Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. III, Appendix I.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Vaṅgasena, Cikitsāsārasaṃgraha, ed. Nirmal Saxena, Chaukhambha Sanskrit Series, Varanasi, 2004, Rasāyanādhikāra v. 142.
- ↑ Śārṅgadhara, Saṃhitā, ed. and trans. K.R. Srikanthamurthy, Chaukhambha Orientalia, Varanasi, 1984, Pūrva-khaṇḍa 4.19.
- ↑ Meulenbeld, G.J., A History of Indian Medical Literature, 5 vols, Groningen: E. Forsten, 1999–2002.
- ↑ Shastri, Haraprasad (ed.), Hājār Bacharer Purano Bāṅgālā Bhāṣāy Bauddhagān o Dohā, Calcutta: Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, 1916.
- ↑ Tārā Tantra, ed. Akshay Kumar Maitra, Rajshahi: Varendra Research Society, 1983.
- ↑ Aldrich, Michael R., "Tantric Cannabis Use in India," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 9(3), 1977, pp. 227–233.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Woodroffe, John (Arthur Avalon, trans.), The Great Liberation: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, London: Luzac & Co., 1913, Introduction.
- ↑ Orta, Garcia da, Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia, Goa, 1563; English trans. Sir Clements Markham, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, London: Henry Sotheran, 1913, pp. 369–374.
- ↑ van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen, Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1596, ch. 79 "Van 't bangue."
- ↑ Bowrey, Thomas, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669–1679, ed. Sir Richard Carnac Temple, Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1905.
- ↑ Bernier, François, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668, trans. Archibald Constable, London: Archibald Constable, 1891 [orig. Paris, 1670].
- ↑ Manucci, Niccolao, Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India 1653–1708, trans. William Irvine, 4 vols, London: John Murray, 1907–1908.
- ↑ Abu'l-Faẓl ʿAllāmī, Āʾīn-i Akbarī, trans. H. Blochmann, vol. I, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, Bibliotheca Indica, 1873; trans. H.S. Jarrett, vols. II–III, 1891–1894.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Mills, James H., Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, ch. 3 and ch. 6.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Rahman, A.M., Nemoto, K., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B. & Sarwar, A.K.M.G., "A History of Cannabis (Ganja) as an Economic Crop in Bangladesh from the Late 18th Century to 1989," Tropical Agriculture and Development 66(1), 2022, pp. 21–32.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 21.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894, Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1894, vol. III, Appendices, Miscellaneous, p. 16.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M.D., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B., Sarwar, A.K.M.G. & Nemoto, K., "Traditional Cultivation and the Production System of Cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh," Tropical Agriculture and Development 67(4), 2023, pp. 99–109, DOI 10.11248/jsta.67.99.
- ↑ Hansard, House of Commons, 2 March 1893, vol. 9, c. 822.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. I.
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 "British-era Naogaon cannabis society still basks in huge wealth," The Business Standard, Dhaka, 2022.
- ↑ Touw, Mia, "The Religious and Medicinal Uses of Cannabis in China, India and Tibet," Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 13(1), 1981, pp. 23–34.
- ↑ O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1916, ch. XII, pp. 134–144.
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 28.2 28.3 28.4 28.5 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IX, "Social and Religious Customs," §§430–446.
- ↑ Banerji, Sures Chandra, Tantra in Bengal: A Study in its Origin, Development and Influence, 2nd edn., New Delhi: Manohar, 1992.
- ↑ White, David Gordon, Kiss of the Yoginī: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 83–85.
- ↑ McDaniel, June, The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- ↑ Government of West Bengal, "Historical Significance," Tarakeswar Shrabani Mela official portal, https://tarakeswarshrabanimela.wb.gov.in, accessed 2026.
- ↑ Openshaw, Jeanne, Seeking Bāuls of Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- ↑ Capwell, Charles H., "The Esoteric Belief of the Bauls of Bengal," Journal of Asian Studies 33(2), 1974, pp. 255–264.
- ↑ Jain, S.K. & Tarafder, C.R., "Medicinal Plant-lore of the Santals," Economic Botany 24, 1970, pp. 241–278.