Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview (1975)
More actions
| Author | James F. Fisher |
|---|---|
| Volume editor | Vera Rubin |
| Publisher | Mouton |
| Place | The Hague |
| Published | 1975 |
| Pages | 247–256 |
| Language | English |
| Regions documented | Nepal (the Terai lowlands and the middle hills; the main producing districts Bara, Parsa, Siraha, Dhanusa and Mahottari) |
|---|---|
| Preparations | Ganja and charas smoked in a clay pipe (chilam); bhang; Ayurvedic compound medicines; seed pressed for cooking oil (Dolpa) |
| Uses documented | Religious and ascetic, medicinal (human and veterinary), recreational, culinary (seed oil), fibre, fodder |
| DOI | 10.1515/9783110812060.247 |
|---|
"Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview" is a chapter by James F. Fisher, an American anthropologist of Nepal at Carleton College, published in Vera Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (Mouton, The Hague, 1975, pp. 247–256).[1] Fisher offers it as a brief overview rather than a systematic study, noting that the cultivation and preparation of cannabis in Nepal are much as in the rest of the Indian subcontinent and are already recorded by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and by Hasan's chapter in the same volume.
He surveys where cannabis grows, the traditional uses that a settled society had "learned to accommodate, regulate and restrict" – as a meditation aid for wandering ascetics tied to the worship of Shiva, as a mark of devotional fellowship at bhajan gatherings, in Ayurvedic medicine for people and animals, and as a pastime of the old – and the abrupt prohibition of 1973, brought on by the disruption of the "hippie" years and by pressure from the United States and the United Nations.[1]
Author
James F. Fisher is an American anthropologist who was professor of anthropology at Carleton College for some thirty-eight years. His fieldwork in Nepal included a study of the economy and ecology of a Magar community in the mountains of the north-west, published as Trans-Himalayan Traders: Economy, Society, and Culture in Northwest Nepal (1986), on which the chapter's account of the Dolpa district draws.[2] He acknowledged the assistance of Khem Bahadur Bista, J. Gabriel Campbell and Michael Stern in gathering the data.[1]
Distribution and origin
Fisher stresses Nepal's compression of ecological zones, from the tropical Terai plain on the southern border to the high Himalaya within about a hundred miles. Cannabis, he writes, grows in most of the country and only in the extreme north not at all: wild and cultivated in the middle hills, and cultivated but not wild in the Terai. Although it was commonly held that the higher the altitude the better the plant, he notes that most of the crop came from the more productive Terai, where the bulk of the excise was collected and where the five main producing districts (Bara, Parsa, Siraha, Dhanusa and Mahottari) all lay. Beyond the psychoactive uses, he records that cannabis was in wide use in the hills as cattle fodder and as fibre.[1]
On origins Fisher is tentative. Geographical evidence, he argues, suggests the plant reached Nepal from India rather than directly from China, its ultimate source, since it was absent along the Tibetan marches but grown in the bordering parts of north India; it may have arrived long ago or with the waves of migration from India from the 12th century onward, which would fit its being more widespread in the west than the east.[1]
Traditional uses
Fisher observes that the proportion of people who used cannabis for psychotropic purposes was small, that users tended to be male and older, and that Nepal did not follow the neat caste pattern G. Morris Carstairs had reported for Rajasthan, where cannabis was linked to Brahmins and alcohol to the Chhetri: in Nepal the highest and the lowest castes alike used cannabis.[1]
Ascetics and the worship of Shiva
The most conspicuous traditional use, Fisher says, was not strictly Nepalese but Indian: the sadhus or Hindu mendicant holy men, many of them pilgrims drawn to the Himalayan shrines of Shiva such as Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, who used cannabis as an aid to meditation and to endure the cold and discomfort of ascetic life. Because Shiva was traditionally associated with the plant, smoking it was for Shaivites a way of offering it to the god, but Fisher found from interviews at Pashupatinath that cannabis use was not confined to Shaivite sects and extended across a wide range of Hindu orders. He notes an extreme case in the aghori ascetics, who under its influence undertook practices such as eating corpse flesh, and cites Agehananda Bharati's account of cannabis as a disinhibiting agent in Tantric ritual. It was held an act of merit to give cannabis to a sadhu, and Fisher records that many households kept a few plants for the purpose.[1]
Devotional fellowship
A second use was at bhajans, Hindu devotional song meetings associated with bhakti devotion, where ganja was passed round in a chilam among the singers as a symbol of fellowship. In Kathmandu, Fisher writes, half a dozen or so public bhajans were held each night, attended by the same men, farmers or traders by day, who came to share the singing. Participants belonged to various castes, though sharing the pipe excluded the lowest, and women seldom smoked. The use was public knowledge but conferred no special regard, and a layman known as a ganjari, an excessive user, was regarded as mildly disreputable.[1]
Medicine
The third traditional use was medicinal. Indigenous systems, above all Ayurveda, used cannabis widely to treat both people and animals, as an ingredient in compounds against diarrhoea, cholera, tetanus, rheumatism and insomnia and as a cough suppressant, digestive, appetite stimulant, soporific, aphrodisiac and antimalarial for hill people descending to the Terai. It was never given alone: a diarrhoea and cholera compound Fisher describes ran to some fifteen ingredients, including dried ginger, black pepper, sea salt, opium, cannabis and the ashes of a clam shell, the cannabis first washed seven times in a cloth. It was even used, mixed with sweets, to quiet children while a mother worked, though Ayurvedic practitioners held that overindulgence, like too much alcohol, could bring on madness, weight loss and a decrease of semen.[1]
Finally, Fisher notes, cannabis was used by old people of many castes simply to pass the time and ease their aches once they were too old to work in the fields, and on festive occasions such as Shivaratri, when pilgrims brought cannabis as prasad for the sadhus, and Krishna's birthday, when in at least one locality schoolboys' use was sponsored by the school itself.[1]
Regional variation: the Dolpa Magars
Fisher sets against this picture the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Magars of Dolpa district in the north-west, among whom cannabis was used neither ritually nor socially nor medicinally. Though extensively cultivated, it was never taken as an intoxicant; instead the seed was pressed into a dough and worked on a slanted board to yield the district's main cooking oil, without which, he says, cooking would have been impossible. The Magars avoided smoking ganja and charas, Fisher explains, because it was the practice of the low-status artisan kami and so a mark to shun, whereas in other parts of the west, such as Jumla, high and low castes both smoked.[1]
The hippie era and the 1973 ban
This regulated order, Fisher argues, was upset in the mid-1960s when what he calls the "hippie" arrival made cannabis and hashish cheaply and openly available to a resident colony of foreign travellers in Kathmandu. The retail price of charas rose from about 15 to about 70 US dollars a kilogram, smuggling into India grew until, on one estimate, more was exported than consumed, and the attitudes of young middle-class Nepalis shifted so that open use became a mark of sophistication rather than a furtive youthful habit. His Majesty's Government had regulated cultivation and sale by licence under the Intoxicants Act of 1961 and its rules of 1962, taxing the trade and the licensed shops that served the foreign clientele.[1]
On 16 July 1973 the government revoked all licences to cultivate, buy and sell cannabis, making trafficking illegal while leaving possession and use lawful. Fisher attributes the change to three pressures: middle-class alarm that Nepali youth were being corrupted through foreign influence, United States narcotics policy, and the United Nations, whose International Narcotics Control Board had condemned Nepal in its 1972 report. He draws out the ironies, that Nepal was abandoning governmental control of production and distribution just as Western states were moving toward it, and that a trade created by Western demand was being closed in response to a different Western demand. The government lost the licence revenue and the hill farmers of the west lost a small but important cash crop, yet there was little public protest. Fisher closes with the belief of one sadhu that the burning of the Singha Durbar secretariat soon after the decision was Shiva's revenge for the ban on his special plant.[1]
Significance
Fisher's chapter is an early overview of cannabis in Nepal and one of the sources bearing on Cannabis in Nepal. Its value lies less in new cultivation data, which it defers to the Indian record, than in its account of the plant's place in Nepali religious and social life on the eve of prohibition: the ascetic and devotional uses, the exception of the oil-pressing Magars of Dolpa, and a first-hand record of the 1973 ban and the foreign pressures behind it. The chapter uses some ethnographic and racial vocabulary of its period (for instance "Mongoloid" for the hill peoples, and "hippie"); in this article such terms are given in current form or attributed to Fisher.[1]
See also
- Cannabis and Culture (1975) – the parent volume
- Cannabis in Nepal
- Nepal – country page
- Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India (1975) – the companion Indian chapter Fisher defers to
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission – the 1894 report to which the chapter refers the cultivation detail
References
External links
- "Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview" – De Gruyter (publisher page)
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Fisher, James F. (1975). "Cannabis in Nepal: an overview". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 247–256. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.247.
- ↑ Fisher, James F. (1986). Trans-Himalayan Traders: Economy, Society, and Culture in Northwest Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05375-3.