Cannabis in colonial India

Cannabis in colonial India covers how the governments of British India and the princely states controlled the hemp drugs, ganja, bhang and charas, under the East India Company and then the Crown, from the 1790s to the Partition of 1947. They licensed and taxed the drugs. Bengal confined cultivation to one tract, the Ganja Mahal, collected a fixed duty before the drug left the warehouse and auctioned the right of retail sale. In 1895 the Government of India held that the Bengal system "is the one which should be generally followed". In Burma ganja was prohibited from 1873–74. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission found that the prohibition "has not been effectual".

In 1839 William Brooke O'Shaughnessy published trials of hemp preparations on patients at Calcutta. From 1871 the Government of India asked the provinces whether ganja caused insanity. The Commission appointed in 1893 was told to test the opinion that the drugs often caused lunacy. It found that the asylum returns rested largely on police reports and accepted 98 of the 222 admissions of 1892 that had been attributed to hemp drugs. It recommended control and taxation instead of prohibition.

Madras and Bombay later confined cultivation to licensed tracts. Several provinces raised their duties before 1914. At Geneva in 1925 India agreed to control the export of hemp drugs but would not accept international rules on their use within its provinces. The Dangerous Drugs Act, 1930 licensed the import and export of the drugs and saved the provinces' own excise laws. Studies of Jamaica and the Caribbean trace ganja there to Indian indentured emigrants. Partition cut the Naogaon growers, now in East Pakistan, off from a large part of their market.

Before Company rule

George Abraham Grierson, who searched Sanskrit and Hindi literature for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, found the word ganja first in the Rajanighantu, which he dated to about 1300. He held that the intoxicating power of the plant was known by the beginning of the 14th century.

An appendix to the Government of India's excise papers of 1890 quoted a translation of the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shah in which Sultan Aláuddin, after forbidding the drinking and sale of wine, "also prohibited bagui and hemp (bhang), as also gambling". Two members of the Commission who dissented from its report drew opposite lessons from the past. Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy wrote that the Hindu law books mention no taxes on intoxicants. Lala Nihal Chand argued from the Manusmriti that the use and sale of the drugs must have been "equally if not more stringently prohibited" than spirits. He cited the remission of taxes on salt and spirituous liquors under Akbar in the Ain-i-Akbari. He also quoted an excise officer of the North-Western Provinces, Richard Burn: "The use of these drugs is said to be increasing because, under the Moghul rule, it was forbidden under such heavy penalties as whipping or mutilation". The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya writes that Mughal abkari was a simple market tax of the sayer class.

At Goa, the physician Garcia de Orta distinguished bangue from opium in his Colloquies of 1563. He described a powder of the leaves, sometimes with the seeds, to which some added nutmeg and mace, cloves, camphor, amber or opium: "These are the Moors, who are much addicted to it." He added that "The profit from its use is for the man to be beside himself, and to be raised above all cares and anxieties". Thomas Bowrey, who traded on the Coromandel Coast between 1669 and 1679, wrote in his account of the Bay of Bengal that at Masulipatam Muslims who abstained from strong drink "besott themselves" with bangha and gangah. Bangha grew along that coast and in Bengal; gangah was brought from Sumatra and sold at "five times the price".

The Bengal model: duty, licence and vend, 1790–1893

Main articles: Bengal Presidency cannabis trade and Ganja Mahal

Gathering the ganja crop at Naogaon in the Ganja Mahal, 16 February 1894. A plate from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

Before British rule the tax on spirits and drugs in Bengal was mostly levied through zamindars or tax farmers. On 19 April 1790 the government of Bengal resumed from them the right to collect it. The Government of India's excise papers of 1890 said the step was taken "on moral grounds". In the words of the Bengal Excise Commissioner, which the Commission quoted, the object of the measures from 1790 was "to check immoderate consumption and at the same time to augment the public revenue". Regulation XXXIV of 1793 forbade anyone to make or sell bhang, ganja, charas or other intoxicating drugs without a licence from the Collector.

In 1798 the Bengal authorities inquired into "ten intoxicating articles", among them ganja, bhang, majum and charas, with a view to prohibiting their sale. The Board of Revenue's letter of 29 May 1798 found that most were not "very violent or dangerous" except in excess and that "most of these articles ... appear to be useful either in medicine or otherwise". It recommended restraining their use and improving the revenue by suitable taxes. Regulation VI of 1800 fixed daily rates of duty on retail sale, one rupee a day in the cities of Dacca, Murshidabad, Patna and Benares and less in smaller towns. It prohibited the manufacture and sale of charas and madak as "being of a most noxious quality". Regulation VII of 1824 allowed charas to be sold again. The duties of whole districts were farmed out from 1824 to 1847.

The daily tax lasted until 1853, when a duty of one rupee a seer replaced it. Act XXI of 1856, the consolidating Excise Act for Lower Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, gave powers to restrict and tax the trade. It let the Board of Revenue place the cultivation, preparation and storage of the drugs under supervision and forbade cultivators to sell ganja or bhang except to licensed vendors. A fixed fee of Rs. 4 for each ganja licence followed in 1860–61. From 1876 retail licences were sold at auction.

Jessore, whose ganja was celebrated in the first half of the 19th century, had its cultivation "entirely suppressed" in 1875. By then ganja was grown in a compact tract in the Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts. Under Bengal Act VII of 1878 growing the plant and making ganja, charas or bhang needed the Collector's licence. A non-licensee could hold no more than a quarter of a seer of ganja or bhang or five tolas of charas.

In 1890 the Government of India wrote that the rate of duty on ganja had been "continuously raised from R2-6 per seer in 1870-71 to R8-5 in the present year". It called the drug "far more injurious in its effects than spirit or than any other drug commonly consumed". The Commission counted five increases in the fixed duty up to 1892–93. Over the same years the revenue doubled from its level of 1876–77 while the average taxation per seer rose from Rs. 4-0-2 to Rs. 10-15-1. Ganja shops fell from 4,398 to 2,672 in twenty years. In 1892–93 ganja and the other hemp drugs brought in 24¼ lakhs of rupees out of Bengal's excise revenue of 115 lakhs, about 21 per cent and second only to country spirits.

Bengal considered a government monopoly of ganja in 1877 and again in 1887 but declined it both times. The Commission found smuggling absent except into Orissa, where ganja came in from the Garhjat states. It judged that Bengal had followed its principles "with the most successful results". The Government of India's Resolution of 1895 held that "the Bengal system of administration is the one which should be generally followed".

Hemp in colonial medicine

William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, professor of chemistry at the Medical College in Calcutta, published On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah at Calcutta in 1839. He gave the drug to animals and found carnivores "invariably and speedily" intoxicated. He then tried it on patients with rheumatism, hydrophobia, cholera, tetanus and convulsions in an infant. His one patient with hydrophobia died; he wrote that he was not "rash enough to indulge the hope" of "an effectual remedy". He called his cholera cases "inconclusive" but "promising". From the tetanus cases he concluded that "in Hemp the profession has gained an anti-convulsive remedy of the greatest value". Pharmacographia, quoted by George Watt in 1893, credited the drug's introduction into European medicine chiefly to "the experiments made in Calcutta by O'Shaughnessy, in 1838-39".

O'Shaughnessy reprinted the paper in The Bengal Dispensatory of 1842, published by order of Government, with new footnotes. Surgeon Raleigh had given the resin freely in tetanus, "but all proved fatal". O'Shaughnessy now wrote that "the use of hemp is so universal among the lower classes of the natives of Bengal" that it would help only "a small proportion of cases, among adult males especially". In 1839 he had described "the singular form of delirium which the incautious use of the Hemp preparations often occasions, especially among young men who try it for the first time", cured in every case he had seen. The 1842 text called it "the singular form of insanity" and headed the passage "Insanity occasioned by continued Hemp Inebriation".

Edward John Waring's Pharmacopoeia of India, prepared in 1868 under the authority of the Secretary of State for India, made the dried flowering tops of the female plant "from which the resin has not been removed" the official drug. It called their properties "primarily stimulant; secondarily anodyne, sedative, and antispasmodic". It held that the narcotic, diuretic and parturifacient properties assigned to them "require confirmation". Watt wrote that the drug's use "in European practice has greatly decreased of late years". He advised buyers to take first-quality ganja direct from the government golas of Bengal and said that charas "should never be employed".

Of the Commission's 1,193 witnesses, "little less than two-thirds" referred to the use of the drugs by "the Vedanti and Yunani schools of native physicians and native doctors generally". The Commission concluded that "the medicinal use is well known throughout India". Grierson found the first mention of bhanga as a medicine in the Suçruta, recommended "as an antiphlegmatic". The Commission called the practice of hakims "wholly empirical, the drugs being used apparently haphazard for the most diverse diseases". Yet it held that Cannabis indica "must be looked upon as one of the most important drugs of Indian Materia Medica". It set the "strictly medicinal use" apart from "the popular use of the drugs by the ordinary consumer", though it admitted that the two "can hardly be separated by a hard-and-fast line": "a drug may be a useful medicine, but a bad thing to allow into the market freely for general consumption". Witnesses in every province described bhang or ganja given to cattle and horses. In the Commission's words, "A very common use of the drugs is as a tonic to produce condition, to make oxen fleet of foot".

In 1957 R. N. Chopra and I. C. Chopra wrote that hemp preparations had once been used "quite extensively" in Western-style practice in India and had declined, apparently because they "deteriorate rapidly and their potency was thus variable and uncertain". They recorded that cannabis remained official in the Indian Pharmacopoeia of 1954.

Insanity, crime and the enquiries of 1871–1895

Main articles: Papers Relating to the Consumption of Ganja and Other Drugs in India (1893), Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and Government of India Resolution No. 1369 Ex. (1895)

The 1871 circular and the 1873 Resolution

On 10 October 1871 A. O. Hume, Secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, wrote to the provincial governments that it had been "frequently alleged" that the abuse of ganja produces insanity. The information was "avowedly imperfect" and asylum officers had not been directed to the question. He asked for an enquiry that "should not be simply medical" but would also cover violent crime, to inform any restriction by higher duty or by limiting cultivation. Roy's dissent traced the circular to a Financial Department note of 1870 asserting that "every lunatic asylum report was full of instances of insanity and crime due to the use of ganja".

Among the replies of 1871–72, the superintendent of the Lahore asylum counted 89 hemp users among 248 inmates, from the admission rolls and the inmates' own statements. At Delhi the share of patients put down to hemp rose from 11.92 per cent in 1867 to 20.60 in 1870. At the Dullunda asylum near Calcutta ganja was traced as a cause in 768 of 1,520 admissions over nine years. The superintendent at Nagpur put 61 of 317 admissions since 1864 down to ganja, yet the Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces wrote that the popular belief in permanent insanity was "not altogether borne out" by the asylum statistics. In Bombay the Colaba asylum put 70 of 629 admissions in eight years down to hemp, yet the Inspector-General found too little direct evidence to justify exceptional legislation. The Madras Government set the 4.6 per cent of its own asylum admissions against the 27.5 per cent reported from Bengal for 1870. It judged that hemp needed no protective legislation in the Presidency. The government of the North-Western Provinces held that even the asylum returns rested on hearsay. In Oudh the Chief Commissioner's office concluded that the ill effects of hemp had been exaggerated.

Resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873 concluded that it was not "specifically proved that hemp incites to crime more than other drugs or than spirits. And there is some evidence to show that on rare occasions this drug, usually so noxious, may be usefully taken. There can, however, be no doubt that its habitual use does tend to produce insanity." It asked the provinces to discourage consumption by restricting cultivation, preparation and retail sale and by the highest duty that would not encourage illicit supply.

From the Commons question to the Commission

In 1877 Bengal appointed Hem Chunder Kerr to inquire into ganja cultivation. The Lieutenant-Governor, Ashley Eden, concluded that the tax should be as high as the drug "can possibly bear" without putting it out of reach. On 16 July 1891 Mark Stewart asked in the House of Commons about a newspaper statement that "the lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers". In August 1892 the Government of India wrote that it was "inclined to believe that ganja is the most noxious of all intoxicants now commonly used in India", but feared that prohibition would drive its users to worse drugs. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission was appointed in 1893. It was told to examine in particular the evidence for the "commonly received opinion" that hemp drugs often caused lunacy. The Commission or some of its members visited every asylum in British India and enquired on the spot into every case attributed to the drugs in the calendar year 1892.

The Commission also sent selected questions to the commanding officers of Indian regiments. The replies were printed by number only, without naming the regiments. Several commanding officers reported regimental orders forbidding the drugs. One wrote that "There being strict regimental orders prohibiting the use of these drugs, I know of none". On custom, the Commission found the use of bhang in Northern India "more or less common everywhere in connection with the social and religious customs of the people". Ganja entered the observances of certain classes, though "those who consider it essential are comparatively very few". Of 575 witnesses with a decided view on prohibiting ganja and charas, 99 favoured it and 476 opposed it. The Commission rejected the total prohibition of any hemp drug. It recommended controlling their use and taxing them "as fully as possible".

The audit of the asylum returns

The Commission found that the opinion it had been asked to test rested on the yearly statement of causes in the asylum reports. Most superintendents admitted that the "cause" entries came wholly from the descriptive rolls sent in with each patient, often "merely ... the guesses of police officers". Subordinates were pressed to fill the column. At Dullunda several old entries were altered from "unknown" to "ganja smoking". Colonel Meadows of Berhampur said: "We assign cause too often ourselves: it is insisted on". Dr A. Crombie, for seven years superintendent of the Dacca Lunatic Asylum, wrote that among the ganja smokers in Bengal's asylums he believed ganja in "a very large proportion" of cases to be "the actual and immediate cause of their insanity". The Commission examined his 14 hemp-drug cases of 1887 and found nine wrongly entered.

In 1892 the asylums of British India admitted 1,344 patients. Of these, 222 were attributed to hemp drugs. The Commission accepted 98, or 7.3 per cent of all admissions, as cases in which the drugs could reasonably be counted a cause in whole or in part. Without the "mixed" cases the share fell to 4.5 per cent. Ten of the 98 had recovered before admission and showed no symptoms in the asylum, yet the returns classed them as "toxic insanity". The Commission cited them as an example of the "purely mechanical manner" in which the returns were made up. Nihal Chand's dissent set the 222 against the 1,344, a share of 16.5 per cent. He gave 238 of 1,266 for 1893. He defended the police entries on the ground that "ganja-smokers are generally men of low caste and of bad character", out of reach of senior officers. Roy's dissent held that a conclusion drawn from one year's cases, "however correct it may be for that year", "cannot perhaps be accepted as general".

The Commission held that where the habit was established and no other cause was shown, "it may be accepted as reasonably proved" that hemp drugs do cause insanity. It also found that "there is occasionally seen a tendency to confound intoxication and insanity". In some cases men who should simply have been punished for intoxication had been sent to asylums and kept there though sane, cases "much rarer than they used to be". Some who committed violent crimes under hemp had been acquitted as insane where alcohol would have meant conviction. Witnesses had cited 81 cases of violent crime. Of the 23 cases whose papers the Commission examined, not less than 18 showed no connection with hemp drugs. It concluded that "as a rule these drugs do not tend to crime and violence". In its general summary it found that "the moderate use of hemp drugs produces no injurious effects on the mind". Excessive use "indicates and intensifies mental instability" and "may even lead to insanity". Moderate use "produces no moral injury whatever".

Readings since

The historian James H. Mills has argued that attributing insanity to cannabis in the asylums of the 1870s was an administrative expedient resting on police information. In his reading it made the cannabis smoker a threat to social order and led in time to the Commission.

Four systems of control, c. 1871–1895

Treading ganja at Ahmednagar in the Bombay Presidency, 27 November 1893. A plate from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

When the Hemp Drugs Commission surveyed British India in 1893, each province ran its own system under its own law. Possession limits ranged from five tolas of ganja under the Excise Act of 1881 (Act XXII of 1881) to 40 tolas of any hemp drug in Bombay and Sind, while Madras prescribed none. The Commission estimated that the area grown for the drugs in all India "can hardly exceed 6,000 acres". Its table of retail prices led it to conclude that outside Bengal and Assam taxation was "totally inadequate". The 1895 Resolution told the provinces to work up to the Bengal standard. The provinces fell into four groups: those that confined cultivation and taxed the drug at its source, as Bengal did; those that left cultivation free and controlled only the sale; and those supplied wholly by import. Burma prohibited the drugs.

The provinces of British India and Berar in 1893: hemp-drug law and control, with the orders of the 1895 Resolution

Province	Law	Cultivation	Main supply	Retail vend	Tax on the drug	1895 order	Sources
Bengal	Bengal Act VII of 1878	Licensed, confined to one tract under the Collector of Rajshahi	The licensed tract	Separate licences for ganja, charas and bhang, auctioned yearly	Fixed duty per seer before issue from the warehouse	The system "which should be generally followed"
Assam	The Bengal Act of 1878 as amended	Forbidden	Rajshahi ganja, imported into registered warehouses	Shops auctioned	The Bengal duty, paid on removal from the warehouse	Cultivation prohibited
Central Provinces	Act XXII of 1881	Licensed, in the Khandwa tahsil only	The government storehouse at Khandwa	Wholesale monopolies by tender; retail shops auctioned	Rs. 2 a seer	A direct duty on all ganja, exported or not; the fixed price abolished
Berar	A special local law of 1873	Licensed, at Rs. 10 an acre	Local crop and Khandwa	Auctioned with opium	None	Licensed cultivation in limited areas; a fixed duty
Madras	Madras Act I of 1886, in force for sale only	Unrestricted	Local crop, chiefly in Kistna and North Arcot	Retail licences auctioned from 1891	None	Cultivation licensed and confined; a fixed duty
Bombay	Bombay Act V of 1878	Not prohibited; a permit needed to dispose of the crop	Local crop, chiefly in Ahmednagar and Satara	Manufacture and retail sale farmed, usually by district	A pass duty on import, export and transport	Cultivation licensed and confined; a fixed duty
Sind	Bombay Act V of 1878	Bhang unrestricted	Local bhang; ganja from Panvel, charas from Amritsar	Retail farms auctioned yearly	None	Not named
North-Western Provinces and Oudh	Act XXII of 1881	Unrestricted	Ganja from Bengal, Khandwa, Gwalior and Bundelkhand; charas through the Punjab	All the drugs farmed together by district	None	Cultivation and manufacture prohibited; bonded warehouses
Punjab	Act XXII of 1881	Not controlled; little grown	Charas from Yarkand and Central Asia; bhang from the wild plant	Monopoly of sale auctioned by tahsil	None	A duty of not less than R80 a maund on imported charas
Ajmere-Merwara, Coorg, Quetta-Pishin	Act XXII of 1881	Little or none	Imported	Vend monopoly by auction or tender	None	The Berar measures, "possibly", for Ajmere and Coorg
Burma	Excise Act of 1881	Prohibited	Smuggled ganja	None	None	Licensed sale referred to the Chief Commissioner

Cultivation confined and taxed at source

Assam followed the Bengal law and drew all its licit ganja from Rajshahi. Licensed wholesale vendors brought it into registered warehouses under double lock. Retail vendors paid the Bengal duty when they took it out. Cultivation for the drugs was "entirely forbidden". Imports from Bengal averaged 644 maunds a year in the four years from 1879–80 and 750 in the last five years to 1892–93. The Commission held the increase "doubtless connected with the development of the tea industry in Assam and the influx of coolies attending it". It also found the plant growing wild "in considerable quantity in all parts of Assam". A circular of 1882 told officers to interpret the rules "liberally" where wild hemp was dried and kept as a medicine for cattle. The Commission recommended changing it to permit "the use of green or dry hemp for the use of cattle". Hemp-drug revenue in Assam rose from Rs. 99,052 in 1873–74 to Rs. 3,03,633 in 1892–93. The 1895 Resolution recorded that in Assam "the cultivation of the hemp plant is prohibited and the clandestine cultivation is unimportant".

The Central Provinces reached a similar system by stages. Cultivation was free when the vend monopoly was first auctioned in 1871–72. Rules of 1875 required a licence. After the Judicial Commissioner held the acreage fees illegal in 1878, the administration bought nearly the whole crop, some 6,856 maunds. The Government of India objected to a government monopoly, so in 1880–81 one contractor took the wholesale monopoly of the province, paying a duty of Rs. 2 a seer and selling to retailers at Rs. 3. A notification of 16 February 1882 confined cultivation to the Katol and Khandwa tahsils. By 1893 the whole crop, once manufactured, had to be deposited in the Government storehouse at Khandwa. From 1890–91 the law confined cultivation to the Nimar district, and by 1893 licences were given only in its Khandwa tahsil. The Commissioner of Excise wrote in 1887 that Khandwa served chiefly as "a mart for the convenience of foreign purchasers", with traders coming from Bhopal, Indore, Gwalior, Ratlam, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Baroda and other states. The province itself consumed only about a fifth of the Nimar crop. Its fixed duty "has not been raised since 1882-83". The Commission found that Bengal had doubled its taxation while that of the Central Provinces "remained stationary". The 1895 Resolution called the duty of R2 a seer "too low a rate". It ordered that all the province's ganja pay a direct duty, whether consumed there or exported. It also abolished the fixed price at which wholesale vendors supplied retailers.

Berar had similar rules under a separate legal footing. The Commission wrote that "Berar is not British territory, and the rules constitute a special local law issued by the Governor-General in Council in virtue of specially acquired jurisdiction". Cultivation was allowed only under licence, at Rs. 10 an acre, in the Akola, Buldana and Amraoti districts. The rest of the supply came from Khandwa. The Commission urged a direct duty and assimilation to the system of the Central Provinces. The Resolution ordered for Berar the measures it laid down for Madras and Bombay.

Cultivation free, sale controlled

"Hemp drug shop, bhang, ganja, & majum displayed, Khandesh". A plate from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894.

The Madras Presidency had the powers of its Abkari Act of 1886 over cultivation, manufacture, sale and possession, but brought the Act into force for sale only. The plant did not grow wild in the plains. Systematic cultivation for ganja lay in the Kistna and North Arcot districts. The Commission accepted a regular area of 350 acres. Madras ganja went to Ceylon, Mysore, Hyderabad and Cochin. Some was smuggled to Burma and Mysore. Retail licences were sold at auction from 1 April 1891. Their revenue rose from Rs. 8,805 in 1890–91 to Rs. 54,989 in 1891–92, but there were only 246 shops, one for every 144,781 people. The Commission called this "manifestly inadequate" and wrote that "the needed reforms should be no longer delayed".

The Bombay Presidency and Sind worked under Bombay Act V of 1878. Permits were needed to move more than 40 tolas. The joint privilege of making and selling the drugs was auctioned, usually for a whole district to one vendor. The duty was a pass fee on import, export and transport. T. D. Mackenzie, Commissioner of Customs, Salt, Opium and Abkari, wrote that cultivation "is not prohibited by law in any district", though a cultivator needed a free permit to dispose of his crop. The Commission found Bombay's regular ganja area "considerably larger than in any other province", grown chiefly in Ahmednagar and Satara. It wrote that the system had been treated "mainly from the revenue point of view". Sea exports averaged 3,246 maunds a year from 1890–91 to 1892–93, 771 of them to London. In Sind, the Acting Commissioner wrote that "There is no restriction whatever on the cultivation of bhang"; the province imported its ganja from Panvel in the Kolaba district and its charas from Amritsar. For Madras and Bombay the Commission recommended licensed cultivation confined to limited areas, supervised manufacture and storage under a fixed duty and the assimilation of both systems to that of Bengal. The Resolution adopted these proposals.

In the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, the Commission found, the cultivation of the plant "is free to all parties", so that there was "no check therefore on the production of hemp drugs". The right to sell all the drugs, usually for a whole district, was farmed by auction to contractors, who were "at liberty to procure the drugs wherever they like, and sell them at any price they choose". The licence fees, Rs. 7,04,788 in 1892–93, were the whole of the taxation. In the hills of Kumaon and Garhwal hemp was grown chiefly for fibre. Most of the ganja came from outside. Bengal's duty had ended a once large trade from Rajshahi: an order requiring payment of duty there "may be said to have killed the trade". The Commission named as the "weak point" of the province's system the unequal taxes paid at source. Bengal ganja paid Rs. 6 to Rs. 9 a seer, while Khandwa ganja paid no duty but fees of up to Rs. 2 a maund. Gwalior ganja paid less than Rs. 5 a maund. Bengal ganja, it found, was "being displaced by the drug from the Central Provinces and Native States, which is almost wholly untaxed". The Resolution ordered cultivation and manufacture prohibited and bonded warehouses set up.

Provinces supplied by import

In the Punjab "ganja is practically unknown". Charas came from Yarkand through Kashmir and from Bokhara and perhaps other parts of Central Asia through Afghanistan. Bhang was gathered from the wild plant of the sub-Himalayan districts. Cultivation was not controlled. The Commission wrote that "Nearly the whole of the charas supply of India comes through the Punjab". Some 500 maunds a year came by way of Kashmir and six or seven times as much direct through Kulu to Hoshiarpur. The Excise Commissioner, T. G. Walker, put the import at about 4,000 maunds a year. A fourth or a fifth of it stayed in the province and the rest went on, chiefly to the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. The Deputy Commissioner of Jalandhar, Denzil Ibbetson, wrote that in his tract the excise laws on bhang were "practically a dead letter". Walker wrote that "no direct duty or tax of any sort is levied". The only revenue came from auctioning the monopoly of sale. The Excise Commissioner's report for 1893 called this "the weakest part of our excise system in the Punjab". Act X of 1893 made an import duty on intoxicating drugs legal. A duty of Rs. 20 a maund on charas was then proposed. The Commission thought Rs. 80 a maund "not too high to begin with". The Resolution ordered a duty of not less than R80 a maund on all charas imported into the Punjab, to be stored in bonded warehouses and paid when vendors took it out.

Ajmere-Merwara, Coorg and Quetta-Pishin also worked under Act XXII of 1881. There was a little cultivation in Ajmere and none in the other two. The auctioned vend monopoly was the only revenue. The Commission held that "Progress in Ajmere must depend upon co-operation with the British system in surrounding States". The Commission judged that Coorg's ganja "would seem to be grown in the Madras Presidency". For Baluchistan as a whole the Commission judged the consumption of charas "twelve times as great" as that of bhang or of ganja. The Resolution extended the Berar measures "possibly" to Ajmere and Coorg.

Burma: prohibition, 1873–1937

Main article: Cannabis in colonial Burma

The Hemp Drugs Commission called Burma the one case in which the policy of control and taxation had been "definitely abandoned". Ganja was sold under licence there until 1872. Reviewing the excise report for 1870–71, the Chief Commissioner, Ashley Eden, asked his Commissioners whether every licence could be withdrawn. He thought it "very desirable to at once sacrifice the small revenue derived from this source and stop the consumption absolutely", and called ganja a "pernicious drug, which is smoked only by the natives of India" and cited admissions to the Dacca Lunatic Asylum attributed to it. The Government of India's Resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873 agreed that cultivation and consumption "should be absolutely prohibited", as they had been "from the beginning of the year 1873–74". In 1878 the Chief Commissioner called a return to licensing "a retrograde step". The prohibition passed into the Excise Act of 1881.

In 1892 the Government of India called consumption there "almost entirely confined to coolies and other immigrants from India". Customs seizures of smuggled ganja, chiefly from ports on the Madras coast, were 17,754 tolas in 1888–89 and 626 in 1889–90, then rose to 30,353 tolas in the first eight months of 1893–94. J. E. Bridges of the Eastern Division likened the Government's attitude to that of its Burmese predecessor: "formal prohibition without strict enforcement". A. M. B. Irwin of Tharrawaddy called the prohibition "a means of oppression by the police and a cause of corruption among them". C. B. Cooke of Pegu judged that the measures had not succeeded "in respect of the natives of India" but that their "prime object", which "was in the interest of the Burmans", "has been fully realised".

The Commission found that the prohibition "has not been effectual". It held that it would be "better to license this use of the drug under proper control and taxation than to maintain an unworkable prohibition", licensing sale to "natives of India" while keeping the bans on cultivation and on "the use by the Burmans". Nihal Chand's dissent called the prohibition "successful and of immense benefit to the country". The 1895 Resolution accepted that the ban "is ineffectual so far as natives of India are concerned", but referred licensed sale to the Chief Commissioner for his officers' opinion. The province kept the ban: the provincial government dropped a proposal to legalise possession and sale in 1919–20, and the Legislative Council rejected one to legalise possession by Indians in 1933–34.

The princely states

The Commission did not sit in the princely states. Its terms of reference cited "political objections" to sittings there and asked instead for comparable information. In the larger states, officers appointed through the Agents to the Governor-General or the Darbars collected it. The Commission neither chose nor examined these witnesses. Their answers were printed in 1895 in a confidential supplementary volume, and the Government of India declined to publish the states' evidence "for political reasons". The Commission called its own material on the states "somewhat incomplete and fragmentary". It held that a uniform British system "must necessarily fail of its purpose" without the co-operation of the states "interlaced with British territory", whose arrangements bore on British excise chiefly through the ganja they produced.

Princely states and Nepal in the Hemp Drugs Commission's report, grouped by their part in the supply of hemp drugs, 1893

Group	State	What the report and the state witnesses describe	Sources
Producing and exporting	Gwalior	About 400 acres; growers sold only to licensed vendors. The Commission called Gwalior "the most considerable source of the ganja supply" of the North-Western Provinces.
	Indore	Cultivation unrestricted; an export duty of Rs. 7 a maund from 1879; 1,318 maunds exported in 1892–93.
	Hyderabad	Cultivation unrestricted, the crop sold to the holder of an auctioned sale monopoly; 270 shops.
	Orissa Tributary States	Homestead growth "quite uncontrolled and extremely common"; the smuggling of Garhjat ganja and bhang "continues unabated".
Regulated excise systems	Mysore	The Excise Act of 1881, extended to the state in 1885; one wholesale contractor.
	Baroda	A state monopoly of sale from 1892; 101 shops.
	Feudatory States of the Central Provinces	Cultivation stopped at the instance of the Local Administration; ganja supplied to the chiefs at cost price from the Government storehouse at Khandwa.
	Travancore	Cultivation forbidden; supply imported; the system of the Madras states "much the same as in the Presidency itself".
Supplied by import, taxed at the border	Rajputana states	Import, export and transit duties; only Dholpur tried to regulate cultivation; Bikanir introduced an excise in 1893.
	States of the Punjab	Sale licensed by the states; bhang grown only in Bahawalpur; ganja and charas said to be prohibited in Nabha.
Himalayan	Kashmir	No cultivation; about 70 maunds of drug from the wild plant, used locally; Yarkand charas passed through "with bulk unbroken".
	Tehri Garhwal	Hemp grown for fibre and seed; a little charas made by hand.
	Nahan	Hemp only wild; sale "leased as in the British territory".
	Nepal	The wild plant tended and sometimes transplanted; 177 maunds of Bengal ganja imported in 1892–93.

The Commission placed the Himalayan states in the tract of wild growth and judged that their arrangements "need not interfere with British excise arrangements". Cooch Behar prohibited cultivation and drew its ganja from Rajshahi, with the duty credited to the state; its Dewan described an excise "based on the Government system in force in Bengal".

Hyderabad

In the Nizam's dominions the right of sale was auctioned. The Commission found no restriction on cultivation, though the cultivators were "bound to dispose of their produce to the licensee". It recorded a duty of Rs. 10 a maund on ganja crossing the frontier. The Director of Agriculture and Commerce put the ganja crop at "about 300 to 400 acres", grown for local markets. The Commission took 350 acres "as a fair figure". It judged that the existing arrangements would check export to British provinces "if they are observed". It proposed asking the state for "more complete control" over cultivation only once reform in British India made smuggling more profitable.

Mysore

Mysore ran its hemp drugs under the Excise Act of 1881, applied to the state by Regulation III of 1885. The Commission judged the system "in advance of" both neighbouring presidencies. Cultivation needed a licence; licensed growing had been "practically abandoned". One contractor held the wholesale monopoly and paid the Darbar a duty of 6 annas a sér on ganja. The Commission called the Mysore arrangements "a very complete system", whose difficulties came "from the want of system in British territory": ganja entered freely from the Madras Presidency and probably from Dharwar. J. G. McDonnell of the Mysore excise complained that "Mysore is heavily handicapped by the extensive smuggling of ganja from Her Majesty's territory".

The 1895 order

The Commission proposed that the states, subject to special exceptions, be invited to adopt the system recommended for British India, with a "standard of administration" put before them. It also advised that, as opportunity offered, they be asked to accept its possession limits of 5 tolas of ganja or charas and 20 tolas of bhang. The 1895 Resolution ordered that wherever cultivation was allowed it be licensed and confined to selected areas. It added: "The same system should, so far as may be, be introduced in the Native States."

Excise after the Resolution, 1895–1947

Carrying out the Resolution, 1895–1907

The 1895 Resolution accepted the Commission's possession limit for British India, five tolas of ganja or charas and a quarter of a seer of bhang, with its proposal that "Native States should be invited to adopt this maximum". Ganja exported from the Central Provinces was to be "taxed adequately under arrangements to be made with other British Provinces and with Native States". Import, export and transport duties on ganja were held unnecessary "except, perhaps, on imports from such Native States as do not assimilate their system".

The historian Peter Hynd writes that Bengal's concentrated and supervised production was a unique exception before the Commission. A comparable system had come to the Central Provinces in 1881. The other provinces followed only after the Commission. In his account Madras confined cultivation from 1898 to about 500 acres between Bapatla in Guntur district and Polur in North Arcot. Bombay's Abkari Act Amendment of 1901 restricted it to two tracts in Satara and Ahmednagar, stored the crop in bonded warehouses and levied the duty on removal.

The Government of India appointed the Indian Excise Committee on 7 September 1905 to examine the excise administration of each province. Under its president, J. Thomson, the Committee signed its report at Ootacamund on 4 July 1906. The policy it worked to was to tax liquor as highly as possible without encouraging illicit production and "without driving people to substitute deleterious drugs for alcohol". Its draft Excise Bill defined "intoxicating drug" to include ganja, bhang, charas and anything prepared from any part of the hemp plant. The bill let each provincial government declare what was to be deemed ganja, bhang or charas. It required a licence both to cultivate hemp and to collect spontaneous hemp.

The 1914 correspondence

In February 1914 the Government of India answered a temperance deputation of 1912, led by Sir Herbert Roberts, in a letter to the Secretary of State. Since 1905–06, it wrote, revenue from country spirit, opium and hemp drugs had risen considerably, while the consumption of hemp drugs had "diminished by over 8 per cent". At Calcutta in December 1913 another deputation had warned that restricting drink might drive consumers to "more deleterious drug habits". The Viceroy replied that revenue per seer of hemp drugs had risen 46 per cent in seven years and that opium, hemp drugs and liquor did not "compete successfully with each other". Accepting the policy in May 1914, the Secretary of State noted the "grave possibilities" of "driving consumption to a more deleterious class of drug or to illicit and cheaper sources of supply". He also noted that 22,653 shops licensed for liquor or drugs had been closed since 1905–06.

In its reply of 1913 Bengal had kept its ganja duty at Rs. 11 a seer since 1905–06 and raised it to Rs. 15 from 1 April 1913 "with a view to checking the increase". The United Provinces had closed 302 hemp-drug shops and raised the duties; consumption there fell from 347,000 to 265,000 seers while revenue rose from 19.37 to 23.16 lakhs of rupees. In the Bombay Presidency consumption rose from 339 to 398 seers per 100,000 people while taxation rose by 45 per cent. Sind had cut its shops by 21 per cent; consumption per head had fallen by about 22 per cent. Madras reported revenue up from 4.46 to 6.81 lakhs and consumption up from 47.6 to 52.4 thousand seers. The Excise Commissioner of Bihar and Orissa wrote that since the extension of the distillery system ganja "has again been rising in popular favour". In South Bihar consumption rose from 618 maunds in 1907–08 to 773 in 1912–13.

In Assam the Chief Commissioner appointed a committee in December 1912 to enquire into the consumption of opium and ganja, including the rise in ganja consumption since 1907–08. It heard 482 witnesses. The committee set the growth of the "foreign population", from which most consumers came, at 35.14 per cent between 1901 and 1911, against an 88 per cent rise in ganja consumption. In Kamrup consumption rose from 68 maunds in 1904–05 to 123 in 1909–10. The committee found opium "being replaced by ganja" among Assamese Hindus over most of the district. It held that ganja's "religious associations" led upper-class Assamese to regard it as "a less disreputable vice than opium". It recommended raising the duty, lowering the possession limit to five tolas and raising the minimum age of purchase to 20. It also warned of "a very real danger" that severe restriction would greatly increase the consumption of wild bhang.

Provincial politics and prohibition, 1921–1949

In the Bengal Legislative Council, Chattopadhyaya writes, the minister Nawab Saiyid Nawab Ali Chaudhuri answered demands to prohibit ganja and liquor in 1921 by defending licensing boards, higher retail prices and a gradual reduction of shops. In the Congress's civil disobedience campaigns of the early 1930s, the picketing of excise shops selling liquor, opium and hemp drugs in Bengal and Bihar drew wide support. In 1931 a motion in the Council to prohibit charas was withdrawn after the government said it had raised the minimum age for buying charas from 16 to 20 and limited possession to one tola. The Ganja Society of Naogaon secured in 1930 the sole purchase of the bhang made at the Bhagalpur farm in Bihar. In 1936 it won the exclusive right to supply ganja and bhang in Bengal; the government fixed the cost price that wholesalers from outside the province paid it. It also supplied the Orissa states of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Dhenkanal under what Chattopadhyaya calls the "Cooch Behar System".

The Congress resolution adopted at Karachi in 1931 declared that "Intoxicating drinks and drugs shall be totally prohibited, except for medicinal purposes". The Government of India Act 1935 left excise on liquor and drugs to the provinces; the Constitution kept that allocation. In 1948 and 1949 H. C. Mookerjee, vice-president of the Constituent Assembly, argued in a series of articles for prohibiting ganja and licensing addicts, whom he put at "1 percent of the total population". The Assembly made prohibition a Directive Principle in Article 47 of the Constitution.

International control to 1947

The final protocol of the Hague Opium Conference recorded that the conference thought it "desirable to study" the question of Indian hemp "from the statistical and scientific point of view, with the object of regulating its abuses". Indian hemp came before the Second Opium Conference at Geneva on a proposal of the delegate of Egypt, M. El Guindy, to add hashish to the list of dangerous drugs. H. Clayton, for India, said that his government would view the proposal "with sympathy" but that he had "no instructions regarding it". In its answer, given after consulting the Government of India, the Indian Delegation accepted control of exports but not international rules on the control of the drugs within the provinces.

Trade across the frontier

The Indian Delegation offered to co-operate "to the extent of controlling the export of the drug by applying the import certificate system". The International Opium Convention signed at Geneva on 19 February 1925 made that the rule. Under its Article 11 the parties undertook to prohibit the export of the resin and its preparations to countries that had prohibited their use and to require an import certificate stating that Indian hemp was "required exclusively for medical or scientific purposes". In British India the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1930 (Act II of 1930), which received the Governor-General's assent on 1 March 1930, required a licence under central rules for the import, export and transhipment of any dangerous drug. After the provincial government of Sinkiang prohibited the export of charas in 1934, the licit import from Central Asia, bonded through Leh, dwindled. India's report for 1942 recorded that "Supplies of the drug have now ceased". R. N. and I. C. Chopra wrote in 1957 that the import "was entirely prohibited by the Government of India". Once it stopped, they wrote, "consumption of ganja and bhang increased a good deal".

Control within the provinces

The Delegation's note called the control of production, transport and sale in the provinces "of a very stringent nature". It said that charas "is not prepared in India but is imported from Central Asia", and that ganja production was prohibited except in small areas under the excise authorities. It named "social and religious customs" and the "wild-growing plant" as obstacles to confining the drugs to medical and scientific use. J. C. Walton, another Indian delegate, told the conference that the plant "grows wild" and that the drug is made from it "by a very simple process". A sub-committee had proposed confining Indian hemp to medical and scientific use and barring the raw resin "under any circumstances whatsoever". India could not accept those proposals "in so far as they affect the methods of internal restriction applied by the various Governments in India". The conference adopted a narrower text, drafted by a special sub-committee, as Article 11. Of the hemp products, only the "Galenical preparations (extract and tincture) of Indian hemp" came under the Convention's chapter confining manufactured drugs to medical and scientific purposes. W. W. Willoughby, who advised the Chinese delegation, concluded that for Indian hemp "certain undertakings were entered into looking to the control of international traffic, but none as to limitation or even as to the governmental control of its production". The 1930 Act saved any provincial enactment that imposed a restriction it did not impose, or a greater one, "on the consumption of or traffic in any dangerous drug within British India". The historian Haggai Ram calls the "midwifing of the first anticannabis regime in the world", through the 1925 Convention, probably the "most remarkable drug control legacy" of the League of Nations.

What counted as hemp

The Convention defined "Indian hemp" as "the dried flowering or fruiting tops of the pistillate plant Cannabis sativa L. from which the resin has not been extracted, under whatever name they may be designated in commerce". The 1930 Act recited in its preamble that India was "a State signatory" to the Convention, whose aim was to suppress the abuse of dangerous drugs "especially those derived from opium, Indian hemp and coca leaf". It vested in the Governor General in Council "the control over certain operations relating to dangerous drugs" and made the penalties uniform throughout British India. Its definition of "hemp" took in the leaves, small stalks and flowering or fruiting tops of the plant, including bhang, siddhi and ganja. It also took in charas, "the resin obtained from the Indian hemp plant".

Hemp drugs and indentured emigration

Jamie Banks counts 1.27 million Indian immigrants to British colonies between 1834 and 1919. Of these, 238,909 went to British Guiana and 143,939 to Trinidad between 1838 and 1918. Instructions issued in 1880 to the surgeons who examined and selected emigrants up-country, Banks writes, ordered the exclusion of "opium-eaters" and "ganja-smokers". In 1877 Kerr reported that Calcutta's wholesale dealers had "in former days" sold large quantities of chur, the refuse of ganja, to the crews of ships bound for Mauritius. In 1874 and 1875 the serang of the Lalla Rookh and the captain and chief officer of the Nighthawk were prosecuted and heavily fined for possessing it. The Commission recorded Bengal ganja shipped by sea in 1892–93 to London, to British Indian ports and to foreign ports. Bombay ganja went by sea to Aden, Muscat, Zanzibar, London, Liverpool and Marseilles.

Banks writes that "most studies now contend" that Indian migrants were probably the first to bring cannabis to the Caribbean. Lambros Comitas traced the "ganja complex" of Jamaica to the subcontinent, carried by East Indian indentured labourers in the late 19th century. Michael Beaubrun pointed to the "Hindu names" ganja, kali and chilam still used on the island.

A note of 1893 by Surgeon-Major Comins quoted the Protector of Immigrants in Trinidad that an ordinance of 1885, requiring a licence of £100 an acre to grow ganja, had practically stopped its growth and consumption for several years, until emigrants who had left Trinidad grew the plant in Venezuela and tried to smuggle it back. The Hemp Drugs Commission was "not sure" that hemp drugs were prohibited in Trinidad. It judged that any prohibition there "does not seem of late to have been effectual". W. H. Grimley, Commissioner of Chota Nagpur, cited the Trinidad case to the Commission against prohibitive rates of duty in India. Nihal Chand's dissent, citing the report of a Trinidad commission, listed Trinidad and Mauritius among the countries where hemp drugs were prohibited. Banks dates Trinidad's prohibition to 1894.

Banks writes that British Guiana put the sale of ganja and bhang under licence in 1861; Mauritius prohibited cannabis in 1840 and allowed its import, sale and possession again in 1883; Jamaica's first control came with its Opium Law of 1913. In Réunion, whose indentured labourers came from southern India, Jean Benoist found ritual use of cannabis in Indian ceremonies. In Natal the Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885–87, quoted in Nihal Chand's dissent, found hemp smoking harmful to the health of Indian immigrants. It put those smoking to excess at "one-fifth probably" of the Indian population of the Pietermaritzburg circle.

Partition

Partition in 1947 left the Naogaon growers in East Pakistan. Chattopadhyaya writes that the Radcliffe Line cut them off from a large part of their market in western Bengal and the rest of India. Citing a district history of 1970 by Mohammad Afzal, he writes that more than three-fourths of the licensed ganja products were burnt or lost in cancelled transactions between 1947 and 1950. A. M. Rahman and colleagues write that Pakistan kept the colonial policy of raising revenue from ganja. In their account East Pakistan grew it through the Ganja Society from 1947 to 1971, though the market shrank and exports to India stopped. They put Naogaon's production at 170 tonnes in 1947 and about 21 tonnes in 1951. Bangladesh at first kept up cultivation on the Pakistani pattern. It ended in the 1980s, after the country signed a drug-control agreement in 1974.

A review of legal trade in narcotics, published in the Bulletin on Narcotics in 1957, named India "by far the largest consumer" among the countries still using cannabis for medical or quasi-medical purposes. The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 repealed the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930.

See also

• Berar Province
• Bhang
• Cannabis in Bangladesh
• Cannabis in Cooch Behar State
• Cannabis in West Bengal
• Charas
• Ganja
• Ganja Matters (2026)