Cannabis in Cooch Behar State

The history of cannabis in Cooch Behar State covers the cultivation, consumption, trade and regulation of cannabis in the princely state of Cooch Behar, a feudatory state of British India in the north Bengal sub-Himalaya, from the later nineteenth century until the state's merger into West Bengal in 1950. The state regulated cannabis under its own Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, operating a licensed excise system that drew its structure from the Bengal Presidency model but distributed ganja through state-run warehouses, the golahs, rather than through the caste-managed contractor system used in the directly administered districts.

Cannabis grew wild across the territory as a weed of the sub-Himalayan belt, and ganja and bhang were in customary use among the Rajbanshi cultivating community and the Bengali Muslim settlers of the southern parganas. Commercial cultivation was prohibited within the state, which procured its ganja by import from the Bengal Presidency Ganja Mahal in neighbouring Rajshahi and issued it for retail from the sub-divisional golahs. The system tracked the Bengal Presidency on rates and procedure, returned a steady minor revenue and operated for some seven decades without significant public-order disturbance.

Cooch Behar acceded to the Indian Union in 1949 and merged into West Bengal as Cooch Behar district in 1950, when its excise law was assimilated to the Bengal-derived Indian framework and the 1878 Act was superseded. The simple homestead agronomy of the state's cultivator population is the substrate from which the surviving landrace cannabis populations of the present Cooch Behar district descend.

Background

Cooch Behar emerged from the partition of the Kamata kingdom of the Koch dynasty after the death of Nara Narayan in 1586, and the western successor state weathered Mughal pressure in the seventeenth century and Bhutanese incursions in the eighteenth. In 1772 Bhutanese forces captured the raja and installed a regent, and the Nazir Deo applied to the East India Company for military assistance. A defensive treaty concluded on 5 April 1773 extinguished Bhutanese suzerainty and reduced Cooch Behar to a feudatory state of the Company. Internal administration, including taxation, law and excise, remained with the maharaja, while external affairs and defence passed to the Company and later to the Crown, mediated from 1865 by a Political Agent who was ex officio the Commissioner of the Rajshahi Division.

Two features of this inheritance bear on the cannabis question. The territory sat within the sub-Himalayan belt where Cannabis sativa grows spontaneously as a vigorous weed of disturbed ground around homesteads, river banks and cattle stands, a placement the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893 to 1894 recorded without qualification. The cultivating population, dominated by the Rajbanshi community alongside Bengali Muslim settlers in the southern parganas adjoining Rangpur, used ganja and bhang as part of the wider north Bengal cultural complex described by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in his survey of Rangpur of 1809 to 1810 and reproduced in Hunter's statistical account. No record survives of a formal pre-1773 Koch monopoly on cannabis; consumption was governed by custom, by sectarian use among the Shaiva mendicants attached to the Madan Mohan and Baneshwar shrines and by routine household use of bhang at festivals.

The Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878

The state's cannabis regime rested on the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, enacted as Cooch Behar Act VIII of 1878 and cited in the state's records as "Act VIII B.C. of 1878". It was promulgated during the minority of Maharaja Nripendra Narayan, who had succeeded as an infant in 1863 and assumed ruling powers in 1883. The Act was drafted under the British commissioner then administering the state on his behalf, Colonel J. C. Haughton, who also oversaw the land revenue resettlement. It drew its structure closely from the Bengal Excise Act of 1878 (Bengal Council Act VII of 1878), from which it is nonetheless to be distinguished, and was subsequently revised by Cooch Behar Act I of 1883 to align enforcement with the Bengal reforms of that year.

No printed full text of the Act has been located in the digitised public collections, and its provisions are reconstructed from the operational references in the state's annual administration reports, from the Bengal Excise Act parallels and from the schedule of surviving Cooch Behar Acts catalogued at merger. The Act defined the excisable articles to include country spirit, foreign liquor, opium, ganja, bhang or siddhi and charas on the Bengal model; provided for state licensing of the manufacture, possession, transport and retail sale of those articles, with state-direct rather than caste-managed wholesale; and established the system of state golahs for the storage and issue of ganja. Duty was set by notification rather than by the primary text, which allowed the maharaja in council to harmonise rates with British India: the state's ganja duty was raised in step with the Bengal increase from 3 February 1894. A notification modelled on section 17A of the Bengal Act prohibited the import of any excisable article into the state without an authorised licence, a measure aimed at the spirit and ganja smuggling that ran with the neighbouring British districts. After the 1883 revision, section 41 of the Act vested the state's police with the powers of excise officers, a provision the 1891-92 administration report records being brought into effect that year. The Act remained the operative excise law of the state until 1949.

The state golah system

The distinguishing structural feature of the Cooch Behar system was its state-direct wholesale through state golahs. The Bengal Presidency excise system ran on a licensed wholesale model in which ganja from the central Naogaon golah was released to district gola-walla contractors who held the wholesale right by auction, the retail layer drawing predominantly on specific trading communities. Cooch Behar did not auction wholesale rights to private contractors. Its golahs were state-run warehouses managed by the sub-divisional Naib Ahilkars under the Dewan, with the Fouzdary Ahilkar holding magisterial excise jurisdiction, and retail was licensed at the level of the individual shop while the state retained the wholesale margin directly.

By the 1880s the state was divided into four revenue and excise sub-divisions, the Sudder headquarters at Cooch Behar town, Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekliganj, each operating a golah for ganja storage and issue; Tufanganj was added later as a fifth, and Sitalkuchi, Sitai and Haldibari operated as outlying retail points dependent on the sub-divisional golahs. The administration reports record the routine management of the system: the 1891-92 report sanctions the writing-off of ganja found short in the golahs across the sub-divisions and the destruction of refuse ganja found unfit for use, and it lists the Ganja Golah at the Sudder among the state's buildings.

Because cultivation was prohibited within the state, the golahs were supplied by import. The state procured its ganja from the Bengal Presidency Ganja Mahal in Rajshahi through its import-licensing regime and stored it at the sub-divisional golahs for retail issue, the wild and homestead growth so prevalent in the territory being suppressed, imperfectly, by the excise establishment. Because the licence-holder was any qualified subject who could pay the fee rather than a member of a contractor caste, the state-direct system left more room for Rajbanshi and Bengali Muslim retail licensees than the contractor-managed trade of the adjoining British districts of Jalpaiguri and Rangpur.

Cultivation and the cultivator population

Cooch Behar did not licence the cultivation of ganja as a commercial crop. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission recorded the position plainly:

Cultivation of the hemp plant is prohibited in the State of Kuch Behar, and it is probable that secret cultivation is only carried on to the same extent as in the surrounding British territory.

The state's own memorandum to the Commission described the corresponding wild growth, the Commission summarising it to the effect that wild hemp grew spontaneously in most parts of the state, which lay within the belt of sub-Himalayan growth.

The state was overwhelmingly agrarian, the 1901 census recording some 567,000 persons and the 1941 census some 641,000, more than ninety-five per cent of them rural. The Rajbanshi community was the historic cultivating community of the Koch heartland and remained the largest single group, with Bengali Muslim cultivators concentrated in the southern parganas. The Rajbanshi were not licensed ganja cultivators, since cultivation was prohibited, but they were the principal consumers of state-issued ganja and bhang and the principal source of the unlicensed homestead growth the excise establishment had to suppress. The chasi cultivator community of the Rajshahi Ganja Mahal was a distinct Bengali Muslim group of the Naogaon area and did not form a meaningful element of the Cooch Behar cultivator base, so that where unlicensed cultivation occurred in the state it followed not the intensively staked and pruned commercial chasi method of Rajshahi but the simple homestead-plot agronomy of north Bengal. That homestead agronomy is the substrate from which the contemporary Cooch Behar landrace cannabis populations descend.

Revenue

Cannabis was a consistent but minor element of the state's revenue, well below land revenue and generally below country spirit duty. The administration report for the half-year ending October 1883 records ganja duty and ganja licence fees of roughly Rs. 12,000 within an excise total of roughly Rs. 33,000, country spirit and opium being comparable items, while bhang licence fees stood at only a few hundred rupees, indicating a much smaller licensed bhang trade than ganja even as unlicensed bhang use from wild plants remained widespread; ganja consumption that half-year was around 70 maunds, having fallen from a peak of about 92 maunds in 1877-78. The 1894 enhancement brought the state's rates into line with the Bengal duty on flat ganja. Toward the end of the colonial period the state's cannabis revenue drifted downward in step with the all-India contraction of licensed ganja sales, the administration report for 1934-35 recording falling ganja duty against rising outstill revenue. Across the period the import-prohibition and the parallel rates were designed to prevent the arbitrage smuggling that the reports record running in both directions with the surrounding British districts.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission did not sit in the princely states, on the Governor-General's instruction that there were political objections to its holding sittings in native states although information on them comparable to that gathered for British India should be included. Cooch Behar was accordingly not visited but supplied a written memorandum: at the request of the Government of Bengal, the state's Superintendent, the Dewan, the Civil and Sessions Judge and the Fouzdary Ahilkar framed answers to the Commission's written questions, and the information was forwarded to its Secretary. The resulting memorandum was printed in the Appendices of Volume III of the Commission's report. Read against the Commission's findings for the Bengal Presidency, its picture of Cooch Behar is unremarkable: a working licensed excise system tracking the Bengal model, no significant local commercial cultivation and wild growth typical of the sub-Himalayan belt that posed ordinary enforcement problems but no exceptional concern.

Partition and merger, 1947 to 1950

Cooch Behar did not accede to either dominion at the Partition of August 1947. The maharaja signed an Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union on 28 August 1949, administration was transferred to the Government of India on 12 September 1949 and the state was merged into West Bengal on 19 January 1950, when it became Cooch Behar district. The excise transition was effected by three instruments of 1950: the Cooch Behar (Assimilation of State Laws) Act, which catalogued the surviving Cooch Behar Acts and either repealed, amended or assimilated them to West Bengal law; the West Bengal State Laws (Extension to Cooch Behar) Act, which extended the Bengal Excise Act of 1909 to the merged territory; and the Opium and Revenue Laws (Extension of Application) Act, which extended the central revenue laws. The Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878 was thereby superseded after seventy-two years of continuous operation, and the state golah system was wound up in the early 1950s. Licensed ganja sale continued in West Bengal until the NDPS Act of 1985 ended licensed ganja vend in the state, while licensed bhang vend continued under the West Bengal excise regime that descends in part from the Bengal Presidency framework into which the Cooch Behar system was assimilated.

Legacy

The historic territory of the state now forms the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal together with parts of Alipurduar district, and the Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekliganj sub-divisions of the present district descend directly from the sub-divisions in which the golah system operated. Cannabis cultivation in the territory is now illegal under the NDPS Act and is the subject of recurrent enforcement along the Indo-Bangladesh border and in the interior. The surviving landrace cannabis populations of the district, documented by the Zomia Collective's WEB01 field accessions, are the agronomic legacy of the pre-prohibition north Bengal homestead cultivation complex, and the Rajbanshi cultural relationship to cannabis that the state's consumption record attests is treated more fully in Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture.

Documentary record

The English-language record of the Cooch Behar cannabis system is thin. The principal published sources are the run of Cooch Behar State annual administration reports, of which the 1891-92 report is the earliest readily available with cannabis excise material, and Volume I of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report. Two documents remain the principal lacunae: the full text of the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878 and its 1883 revision, not located in any digitised collection, and the state's memorandum to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in the Appendices of Volume III, not yet retrieved in full. A complete year-by-year compilation of the state's ganja and bhang revenue, consumption and licence figures from the full run of administration reports between 1872 and 1949 remains to be assembled, as do the relevant passages of Khan Choudhury Amanatulla Ahmed's standard Bengali history Cooch Beharer Itihas (1936) and of Charu Chandra Sanyal's The Rajbansis of North Bengal (1965).

See also

• Ganja Mahal – the licensed Bengal Presidency cultivation tract that supplied the state's ganja
• Bengal Presidency cannabis trade – the wider licit trade of which the state's imports formed part
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission – the 1893–94 colonial inquiry to which the state submitted a memorandum
• Cannabis in West Bengal – the regional overview of which this article is a part
• Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture – the cultural tradition of the state's principal community
• Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi (1916) – the gazetteer of the supplying tract, which records the export of Naogaon ganja to Cooch Behar