Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas (1910)
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| Author | L. S. S. O'Malley(1874–1941) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Composed | c. 1909–1910 |
| Published | 1910 |
| Publisher | The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot |
| Place | Calcutta |
| Volumes | 1 (Vol. XXII of the Bengal District Gazetteers series) |
| Pages | 150–151, 165–166, 235 |
|---|---|
| Preparations | Ganja |
| Uses documented | Religious and ascetic; consumption |
| Digital facsimile | View on BHL |
|---|---|
| Original held at | National Library of India, Kolkata |
The Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas is a district gazetteer compiled by the Indian Civil Service officer L. S. S. O'Malley and published at Calcutta in 1910. It is the twenty-second volume of the Bengal District Gazetteers, the standardised provincial reference series issued under the authority of the Government of Bengal. The volume describes the Santal Parganas, a district constituted in 1855 in the aftermath of the Santal Hul and administered as a non-regulation district; the territory lay in the Bhagalpur Division of Bengal Presidency at the time of writing, passed to Bihar and Orissa in 1912, and today forms part of Jharkhand.
The gazetteer is not a cannabis source in the manner of the cultivation surveys of the Bengal lowlands. Its relevance to the documentation of South Asian cannabis is incidental but specific: it records the use of ganja by a religious-reform sect among the Santals, the consumption-side excise economy of an aboriginal-majority district and a fibre crop returned as "hemp" whose botanical identity the source does not resolve. The ethnographic chapters draw substantially on field notes contributed by the Norwegian missionary P. O. Bodding, whose own monograph on Santal medicine is the fuller record of Santal cannabis use.
Composition and publication
O'Malley (1874–1941) compiled the greater part of the Bengal District Gazetteers between 1906 and 1913 and is the most prolific author of the series. The Santal Parganas volume was prepared from the existing administrative record supplemented by material gathered for the contemporaneous land settlement. In the preface O'Malley acknowledges R. H. McPherson of the Indian Civil Service, Director of Land Records, who supplied a proof copy of his report on the survey and settlement operations in the district; the Reverend P. O. Bodding, "for the valuable notes on the Santals which he contributed"; and H. W. P. Scroope and H. Ll. L. Allanson, the Deputy Commissioner and Settlement Officer respectively, who revised the proofs and supplied material.[1]
Bodding's contribution is consequential for the volume's value as an ethnographic record. By 1910 Bodding had spent two decades in the field with the Norwegian Santal Mission, and the gazetteer's chapter on the Santals reproduces his observations on Santal religion, the *ojha* and *jan* (the medicine-man and the diviner), the *bonga* spirits and the reform movements. The same body of fieldwork underlies his later *Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore* (1925–1940), which is the more developed account of Santal cannabis use.
Structure and content
The volume follows the fixed plan of the Bengal District Gazetteers. The 1910 first edition runs to a text of some 290 pages arranged in chapters covering Physical Aspects, History, The People, The Santals, Public Health, Agriculture, Natural Calamities, Forests, Rents, Wages and Prices, Mines, Manufactures and Trade, Means of Communication and the General Administration of the district, followed by a place-by-place gazetteer and an index.[1]
Two of these chapters carry the volume's cannabis-relevant material. The chapter on The Santals, the longest in the book, sets out Santal religion and society on the basis of Bodding's notes and is the location of the account of the Kharwar reform movement. The chapter on General Administration contains the excise subsection, where the district's intoxicant revenue is tabulated. A fibre crop returned as "hemp" appears in the agricultural statistics. The district is not part of the ganja cultivation tract of the Bengal lowlands, and the volume contains no cultivation account comparable to the dedicated chapter in O'Malley's later Rajshahi gazetteer.
Cannabis in the text
The Sapha Har and the Kharwar movement
The volume's most distinctive cannabis reference is its account of the Kharwar movement, a recurring religious reform tendency among the Santals which O'Malley, following Bodding, describes as periodically reviving in times of famine or scarcity and as inclining towards Hinduism. Of its early adherents the gazetteer records:
Its early followers called themselves Sapha Har, i.e., the pure men, and eschewed fowls, pigs and intoxicating liquor, but took ganja. One still meets Santals who call themselves Sapha Har, wear their hair in long matted tresses, and claim that they worship Mahadeo and never kill animals except as a sacrifice.
The passage records ganja use set deliberately apart from alcohol within an ascetic and Hinduising frame: the Sapha Har ("pure men") renounced meat and "intoxicating liquor" while retaining ganja, adopted the matted hair of the Śaiva ascetic and worshipped Mahadeo, that is Shiva.[1] The association of ganja with Śaiva devotion and asceticism is the general pattern in Bengal religious life recorded elsewhere in the colonial literature; the gazetteer attests its appearance in a specifically Santal reform context.
Excise and consumption
The excise subsection of the General Administration chapter tabulates the district's intoxicant revenue for the year 1907–08. The greater part of the excise revenue, Rs 2,78,000 of a total of Rs 4,58,000, came from country spirit distilled from the flower of the mahua tree (*Bassia latifolia*); the receipts from *pachwai*, the rice beer that the gazetteer calls "the national drink of the aboriginals", came to Rs 58,000, and those from the fermented liquor *tári* to Rs 20,000.[1] Of the remainder, the duty and licence fees on ganja are recorded as the larger part:
The greater part (Rs. 79,000) is derived from the duty and license fees levied on ganja, i.e., the dried flowering tops of the cultivated female hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) and the resinous exudation on them.
The gazetteer gives the per-head incidence of hemp-drug expenditure in the district as Rs 447 per 10,000 of the population, "as compared with the average of Rs. 548 in the whole of Bengal", and the incidence of opium expenditure as Rs 113 per 10,000 against a provincial average of Rs 516.[1] Both figures place the district below the Bengal and provincial averages, consistent with a population whose principal intoxicants were rice beer and mahua spirit and for whom ganja was a minority practice.
A fibre crop returned as "hemp"
The agricultural statistics return 1,190 acres under "hemp", alongside 1,512 acres of jute and figures for sugarcane, tobacco, opium poppy (20 acres) and indigo.[1] The entry sits in a list of fibre and cash crops and does not state whether the plant is *Cannabis sativa* grown for fibre or sunn hemp (*Crotalaria juncea*), the unrelated fibre legume frequently returned as "hemp" or "san" in colonial Bengal crop statistics. The figure is therefore not evidence of drug-cannabis cultivation, and the same ambiguity attaches to it as to the "wild hemp" (*bir son*) of Bodding's medical vocabulary.
Religious topography
The volume describes the district's principal Śaiva pilgrimage centre, the shrine of Vaidyanath at Deoghar, "worshipped by people from all quarters", and narrates at length the *Śiva Purāṇa* legend of its foundation.[1] Major Śaiva pilgrimage centres are characteristic sites of sadhu and devotee ganja use elsewhere in eastern India, but the gazetteer records no cannabis practice at Deoghar; the Vaidyanath material is religious topography, not a cannabis attestation.
Reception and afterlife
The Bengal District Gazetteers became, in their compilers' intention and in subsequent use, the standard administrative description of each district, and O'Malley's volumes are routinely cited as primary descriptions of early-twentieth-century rural Bengal. The Santal Parganas volume has remained the reference account of the district for the colonial period; its standing is reflected in its republication in 1999 by the West Bengal District Gazetteers under the Department of Higher Education, which reproduces the 1910 text with a prefatory note and reset pagination.[1] The administrative reorganisations that followed publication, the transfer of the district to Bihar and Orissa in 1912 and ultimately to Jharkhand in 2000, do not affect the gazetteer's value as a record of the district as it stood in 1910.
Editions and availability
The work was first published in 1910 by the Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, as the twenty-second volume of the Bengal District Gazetteers. It was reprinted in 1999 by the West Bengal District Gazetteers. Several scans of the 1910 first edition are held by the Internet Archive through the Digital Library of India and the National Library of India, of which dli.ministry.07432 is the copy whose pagination is followed in this article; full-text transcriptions of cognate scans are also available.
Significance for landrace documentation
The gazetteer's value to the documentation of South Asian cannabis lies in its ethnographic and consumption-side record rather than in any account of cultivation. The Sapha Har passage is an independent attestation of Santal cannabis use in a religious-reform and ascetic register, complementing the two registers recorded in Bodding's *Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore*: the medicinal use of *gãjã* as a prescription ingredient and its appearance as a solicited offering in the *ojha* possession séance. The Santal materia medica that includes cannabis is independently documented by Jain and Tarafder's revival of Bodding's plant lore.[2] Taken together these sources document Santal cannabis use across medicine, possession ritual and ascetic religious practice.
The excise figures provide a quantified consumption-side comparator for an aboriginal-majority district on the western edge of the Bengal cannabis world, where per-head ganja and opium expenditure ran below the Bengal and provincial averages. This stands in contrast to the cultivation tract of the Bengal lowlands documented in O'Malley's Rajshahi gazetteer, the only Bengal District Gazetteer to give ganja a chapter of its own,[3] and in the foundational cultivation survey of Hem Chunder Kerr.[4]
See also
- Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore – P. O. Bodding's monograph on Santal medicine, the fuller record of Santal cannabis use
- Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (Kerr 1877) – the foundational survey of Bengal ganja cultivation
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission – the 1893–94 colonial inquiry into hemp drugs
- Ganja Mahal – the licensed ganja cultivation tract of the Bengal lowlands
- Cannabis in West Bengal – the regional cannabis overview
- Santal people – the community whose cannabis use the gazetteer records [clarification needed]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1910, preface. Santal ethnography drawing on notes contributed by the Rev. P. O. Bodding. Page references in this article follow the 1910 first edition (Internet Archive dli.ministry.07432); the 1999 West Bengal District Gazetteers reprint repaginates the text.
- ↑ Jain, S.K. and Tarafder, C.R., "Medicinal plant-lore of the Santals (A revival of P.O. Bodding's work)", Economic Botany Vol. 24 (1970), pp. 241–278. doi:10.1007/BF02860661
- ↑ O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1916, ch. XII, "The Ganja Mahal," pp. 134–144, and ch. II, p. 45.
- ↑ Kerr, Hem Chunder, Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1877. Reprinted as a Parliamentary Paper, House of Commons, 1893.
Further reading
- O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1916.
- Bodding, P. O., Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 10, Calcutta, 1925–1940.
External links
- Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas – 1910 first edition, Internet Archive (Digital Library of India)
- Alternative scan – National Library of India copy