Ahmednagar
More actions
| Ahmednagar | |
|---|---|
| Nagar | |
| HistoricalGrown here in the past; no recent record either way | |
| |
| Treading ganja at Ahmednagar, 27 November 1893: a plate in the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission | |
| Hierarchy | |
| Gene Pool | South Asian Gene Pool |
| Geography | |
| Country | India |
| Province/State | Maharashtra |
| District | Ahilyanagar District |
| Coordinates | 19.04, 74.75 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 3,800 km² |
| Terrain | Approximately the Nagar, Rahuri and Newasa talukas; the 1890s cultivation lay mostly on the Balaghat hills of the Nagar taluka |
| Climate | |
| Seasons | Sown from June to the end of July, cut from November |
| Growing history | |
| Grown | 1881[1]–1939[2] |
| Earlier names | Ahmednagar district, Bombay Presidency |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Ahmednagar is a historical landrace cannabis growing area in Maharashtra, India, mapped on the Nagar, Rahuri and Newasa talukas of Ahilyanagar District. In the reports of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 the Ahmednagar district and the Satara district are the two districts of the Bombay Presidency where the regular cultivation of hemp for ganja was principally carried on. Its area fell from 1,030 acres in 1885–86 to 382 acres in 1892–93.[3] The Commission recorded that the seed generally preferred in the Deccan and the Southern Maratha Country was the seed from Ahmednagar.[4]
The tract
E. J. Ebden, the Collector of Ahmednagar, told the Commission that the plant was sparsely grown in every taluka of the district except Akola and Jamkhed, and that it was most common in the Nagar taluka, at an elevation of about 2,500 feet with an average rainfall of 26 inches, and in the Rahuri and Newasa talukas.[5]: 5 In his oral evidence he placed more than half of the district's cultivation in the Nagar taluka and the rest in small patches over eight other talukas, the greater part of it on the Balaghat hills, which he believed carried the crop to a considerable extent where the range continued into the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The village he named as producing the best ganja was Mehekri.[5]: 9
In a letter appended to his evidence, Ebden gave the district's average area under the crop over the thirteen years from 1881–82 to 1893–94 as 577 acres. The taluka averages were 217 acres in Ahmednagar, 169 in Newasa and 89 in Rahuri, with 26 or fewer in each of Shrigonda, Parner, Kopargaon, Karjat, Sheogaon and Sangamner, and none in Jamkhed and Akola. On these figures he widened the area he would have allowed the crop, from the Ahmednagar taluka alone to the Newasa and Rahuri talukas too, where cultivation had been "fairly regular and of considerable extent".[5]: 9
Dadabhai Burjorjee Guzder, the District Abkari Inspector, gave the reason the two talukas without the crop stood apart: Jamkhed and Akola were too hilly for a deep-rooted plant, and Akola had too much rain.[6]: 101 H. Kennedy, the District Superintendent of Police, reported that at Maka, in the Newasa taluka, and at Kamargaon, in the Nagar taluka, the plant was grown for seed.[7]
History
The Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency volume for Ahmadnagar, published in 1884, counted 1,146 acres under hemp for ganja in the district in 1881–82 and reported that more than 2,000 maunds of ganja were exported from the district every year.[1]: 246, 568 The Commissioner of Abkari's memorandum for the Commission names Ahmednagar among the districts of the presidency where hemp was grown, with an average of 660 acres over ten years, more than any other district in its table. The cultivation was not prohibited by law; a grower needed no licence, but could not dispose of his crop without a permit, and the village officers noted and watched it.[8]: 89
The Commission's own figures for Ahmednagar run from 1,030 acres in 1885–86 to 268 acres in 1888–89 and 830 in 1889–90, then down to 382 acres in 1892–93. For the presidency as a whole it found that the area had fallen steadily since 1889–90, and it reported witnesses' statements that the conditions the excise system imposed made the crop unpopular, though no direct tax or licence fell on it. Khandesh, which adjoins the Nimar district of the Central Provinces, grew 311 acres in 1885–86 but only 9 and 10 acres in the two years before the inquiry; the Commission thought the Central Provinces' excise system had probably checked it.[3] The Government of India's resolution on the report, in March 1895, still described regular cultivation as carried on in the Ahmednagar and Satara districts.[9] The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya writes that cultivation in the presidency was confined to the Ahmednagar and Satara districts, where growers could obtain permits without paying a fee until 1896.[10]: 100
From 1 August 1901, under the Bombay Act V of 1901, cultivation of hemp for ganja in the presidency proper was confined to the Ahmednagar and Satara districts and carried on under licence; growers had to harvest under official supervision and store the produce in warehouses near the places of manufacture.[11] In the excise report for 1916–17 the area was five villages in the Nagar taluka and one in the Khanapur taluka of Satara; the department then abolished the cultivation at Lengre, in Satara, and wrote that the Nagar taluka would in future be the only area in the presidency where hemp was grown, so as to secure more complete control over the manufacture of the drugs and the trade in them.[12] By 1939–40 the licensed cultivation was restricted to the single village of Mehekari, where 30 licensed growers raised 929 maunds of ganja on 75 acres, against 149 acres the year before.[2]
Cultivation
Ebden's description of the crop was the one the Commission quoted in its report. Grown for ganja, the plant needed a rich, friable soil, and land near a village site was often chosen for the manure it held; irrigated (bagait) land was preferred in case the rain failed, while a crop grown only for seed or for bhang did well enough on good dry-crop (jirait) land.[4][5]: 4 The seed was sown about the end of July in straight rows, about one seer to the acre. Some six weeks after sowing an expert was taken on, at 8 or 9 rupees a month for two or three acres, to root out the male and bisexual plants; his work thinned out about half the crop. Ebden recorded the local names bhangira or dhatura for the male plant, tik for the bisexual plant, and morai for a female plant partly gone to seed, which was left in the field and "simply regarded with regret".[5]: 5 Guzder, writing of the same district, put the sowing at the beginning of June and the growing season at five months.[6]: 101
The crop was judged ripe in three to four months by the stickiness of its tops, and Ebden put the yield of ganja at 4½ to 7½ maunds an acre. The tops were heaped on a floor and trodden for three or four days; Ebden watched a treading in which a line of eight or ten men danced sideways over the heap in a spiral to the beat of a tom-tom.[5]: 5 Only flat ganja was made in the district.[6]: 100 Kennedy noted that ganja grown on the rain alone, without well water, was known as ran ganja.[7]: 117
Seed and trade
Ahmednagar seed was also used outside the district. In the Satara district, the Huzur Deputy Collector reported, ganja seed was generally brought from Nagar, and the Administrator of the Jath State said that the Khanapur cultivators of Satara, who supplied his own state's seed, fetched theirs from Ahmednagar, whose seed was considered the best.[13]: 57–58[14]: 68 A report from the Bijapur district, appended to the Abkari memorandum, said the seed for the ganja farm at Bijapur came from Ahmednagar and from Indore.[8]: 92
Ebden believed that the largest export of Nagar ganja went to Kolaba, and he had been told that some was sent to Europe.[5]: 9 Kennedy also said that ganja dust was exported to Europe.[7]: 117
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Campbell, James M., ed. (1884). Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. Vol. XVII: Ahmadnagar – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Excise Department, Bombay (1941). Report on the Administration of the Excise Department in the Province of Bombay for the Year 1939–40 (Report). Bombay: Government Central Press. para. 33 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 125–127, pp. 48–49 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. V, "Methods of cultivation and matters connected therewith", paras. 196–199, pp. 74–78 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. E. J. Ebden, Collector, Ahmednagar". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bombay witness no. 5, pp. 4–9 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Dadabhai Burjorjee Guzder, Parsi, District Abkari Inspector, Ahmednagar". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bombay witness no. 47, pp. 100–105 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. H. Kennedy, District Superintendent of Police, Ahmednagar". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bombay witness no. 54, pp. 117–119 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum on hemp drugs in Bombay, by the Hon'ble T. D. Mackenzie, Commissioner of Customs, Salt, Opium and Abkari". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 88–102 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). I. Cultivation, paras. 3–14, pp. 2–5 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ Excise Department, Bombay (1904). Report on the Administration of Excise Department (Abkari and Opium) in the Bombay Presidency, Sind, and Aden for the Financial Year 1903–1904 (Report). Bombay: Government Central Press – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Excise Department, Bombay. Report on the Administration of the Excise Department in the Bombay Presidency, Sind, and Aden for the Year 1916–1917 (Report). Bombay: Government Central Press. para. 41 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Rao Bahadur Bapuji Mahipat Kharkar, Kayasth, Huzur Deputy Collector and Magistrate, 1st Class, Satara". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bombay witness no. 30, pp. 57–60 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Rao Bahadur Ramchandra Rajaram Mulé, Deshastha Brahmin, Administrator of Jath, in Southern Mahratta Country". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. pp. 67–68 – via Internet Archive.