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 the new province of Bihar and Orissa in 1912 and today forms part of Jharkhand.[1][2]
The gazetteer is not a cultivation source in the manner of the lowland Bengal ganja surveys. Its cannabis-relevant content is confined to three passages: the chapter on The Santals records the use of ganja by the Sapha Har, a Santal religious-reform sect (pp. 150–151); the chapter on General Administration tabulates the district's ganja excise (p. 235); and the agricultural statistics return acreage under "hemp" (pp. 165–166) without identifying the plant.[1] The ethnographic chapters draw substantially on field notes contributed by the Norwegian missionary P. O. Bodding, whose monograph on Santal medicine separately documents the medicinal and ritual cannabis use of the community.
Composition and publication
O'Malley (1874–1941) wrote thirty of the thirty-eight volumes in the revised Bengal District Gazetteers series he superintended, most of them published between 1906 and 1911.[2] The Santal Parganas volume was prepared from the existing administrative record, supplemented by material gathered for the contemporaneous land settlement.[1] 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]
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.[1][3] The same body of fieldwork underlies his later Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (1925–1940), which documents the medicinal and ritual cannabis use of the Santals.[4][5]
Structure and content
The volume follows the standardised chapter scheme shared by the majority of the Bengal District Gazetteers, including a chapter on the people of the district and ethnographic sketches of its principal castes and tribes that drew on earlier handbooks such as Risley's.[2] 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 contains the account of the Kharwar reform movement (pp. 150–151).[1] The chapter on General Administration contains the excise subsection, where the district's intoxicant revenue is tabulated (p. 235).[1] The Agriculture chapter returns acreage under "hemp" among the district's fibre and cash crops (pp. 165–166).[1] The volume treats cannabis incidentally rather than as a cultivation subject: unlike O'Malley's later Rajshahi gazetteer, which gives the ganja mahal a chapter of its own, it carries no dedicated cultivation account.[6]
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, drawing on Bodding, describes as reviving periodically in times of famine or scarcity, its later phases marked by a movement towards Hindu practice.[1][7] 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;[8] the gazetteer attests its appearance in a specifically Santal reform context.[1]
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.[1]
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 acreage is therefore not in itself evidence of drug-cannabis cultivation.
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,[8] but the gazetteer records no such use at Deoghar; its account of the shrine is topographical and devotional.
Reception and afterlife
The Bengal District Gazetteers were intended as, and became, the standard administrative description of each district, and O'Malley's volumes are used as descriptions of early-twentieth-century rural Bengal.[2] The Santal Parganas volume has remained the reference account of the district for the colonial period; it was republished in 1999 by the West Bengal District Gazetteers, which reproduces the 1910 text with a fresh prefatory note and reset pagination.[9]
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.[9] 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 the 1999 reprint are also available on the Internet Archive.[9]
Significance for landrace documentation
The gazetteer's value to the documentation of South Asian cannabis is ethnographic and consumption-side rather than agricultural. The Sapha Har passage attests Santal ganja use in an ascetic and religious-reform register, alongside the medicinal and ritual registers recorded in Bodding's Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore and in Jain and Tarafder's revival of his plant lore.[5][4][10] The excise figures give a quantified consumption-side comparator for an aboriginal-majority district on the western margin of the Bengal cannabis world, where per-head ganja and opium expenditure ran below the provincial averages; the lowland cultivation tract is documented separately in O'Malley's Rajshahi gazetteer[6] and in Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 cultivation survey.[11]
See also
- Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore – P. O. Bodding's monograph on Santal medicine and folklore
- Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (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
References
- ↑ 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 1.14 1.15 1.16 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1910. 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.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Fuller, C.J., "An Anthropologist and Historian Ahead of His Time: L. S. S. O'Malley in British India", BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris, 2023.
- ↑ National Library of Norway, "Santali manuscripts and cultural heritage", research feature (accessed 2026).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Bodding, P. O., Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 10, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1925–1940. Part 2, Santal medicine (1927), the gã̄jã (Cannabis sativa) prescriptions at pp. 229, 231, 235–237, 241, 246, 264 and 341 (index nos. 101, 103, 110, 111, 113, 123, 136, 173, 250, 251).
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Bodding, P. O., Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 10, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1925–1940. Part 1, The Santals and disease (1925), p. 53.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 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.
- ↑ Verma, D.N., "Reform and Resistance for Freedom: Tribes Against the British Rule in India", in M.C. Behera (ed.), Tribe, Space and Mobilisation, Springer, Singapore, 2022, pp. 365–397. doi:10.1007/978-981-19-0059-4_20
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IX, "Social and Religious Customs," §§430–446.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 O'Malley, L.S.S., West Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas, West Bengal District Gazetteers, Government of West Bengal, Calcutta, 1999 (1910 text reprinted with a new prefatory note by K. R. Biswas, "The Kingdom of Dobru Panna"); a cognate full-text scan is at in.ernet.dli.2015.23163.
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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