Chilam

Part of a series on

Culture

Clay chilams for sale in the market at Jorhat, Assam, in 2014.

Cannabis culture·Glossary

Traditional Uses

Ritual use·Social consumption·Traditional medicine·Ayurveda·Cannabis in Ayurveda·Cannabis in Thai traditional medicine·Cannabis in traditional Chinese medicine·Cannabis in Khmer medicine·Medicines

Smoking Implements

Chilam·Hookah·Water pipes·Sebsi·Bamboo pipes·Rolling techniques

Oral Consumption

Majoun·Thandai·Cannabis edibles·Bhang

Food Culture

Cannabis cuisine·Cannabis in Bengali Cuisine·Cannabis in Khmer cuisine·Cannabis in Acehnese cuisine·Bhangolu·Foods and drinks

Preparation & Serving Rituals

Kif·Charas·Ganja·Hashish

Material Culture & Implements

Pipe craftsmanship·Grinding stones·Mortars and pestles·Storage of cannabis

Social Contexts & Customs

Sharing customs·Gender roles·Kif cafes

Etiquette & Protocol

Consumption etiquette·Ritual purity

Economic & Trade Culture

Bhang shops·Kif markets·Trade customs·Gift economy·Hospitality offerings

Regional Cultural Practices

Cannabis in Khmer culture·Cannabis in Bengali culture·Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture·Cannabis in Santal culture·Cannabis in Riffian culture·Cannabis in Rastafari culture·Cannabis in Thai culture·Cannabis in Afghan culture·Cannabis in Ethiopian culture·Cannabis in Mexican culture·Cannabis in Jamaican culture·Cannabis in India

Peoples

Hmong people·Kaloeng people·Karen people·Lao people·Malana people·Nyaw people·Phu Thai people·Santal people·So people·Thai people·Yoy people

Cannabis & Identity

Diamba·Sadhu·Fakir

Cannabis & Religion

Tantric cannabis use in India·Vijaya·Baul·Fakirs in Bengali culture·Cannabis in Hinduism·Cannabis in Bengali Religion·Shiva·Maha Shivaratri·Holi·Tantra·Trinath·Sufism·Rastafari·Cannabis in Buddhism·Sacramental use·Shamanic use

Traditional Knowledge Systems

Folk taxonomy·Quality assessment·Oral transmission of knowledge·Cultural taboos

Music, Art & Expression

Cannabis in music·Cannabis in vallenato·Cannabis in art·Religious iconography·Cannabis poetry·Sufi poetry·Folklore

Modern Traditional Culture

Diaspora culture·Cannabis tourism·Cultural preservation

Portal·Category

Chilam (also chillum) is a conical clay pipe smoked in South Asia, above all for ganja and charas mixed with tobacco. The smoker holds it upright in both hands and draws the smoke through the hollow of the hand, so that the lips never touch the clay, and the pipe goes round a circle of smokers.^{: para. 416: 242} The word first named the bowl of the hookah, which held the tobacco and the charcoal. In the 1890s worshippers of Shiva commonly invoked the god before raising the pipe. In the 20th century it was shared by sadhus, by village smokers in north India and by devotional singers in Nepal.^: 242: 250 Indentured labourers from India took the pipe and its name to Jamaica and Trinidad.^: 16: 188

The word

Chilam is a Hindi and Urdu word. In John T. Platts's dictionary of 1884 it is the part of a huqqa that holds the tobacco and the fire. To fill a chilam (chilam bharnā) also meant to serve or wait upon someone, and a heavy smoker was a chilam-chat. English writers in India spelled it chillum, a form H. H. Wilson called corrupt in his glossary of 1855, and used it for the hookah bowl and, loosely, for the whole pipe or a turn at smoking it. Hobson-Jobson quotes the word from 1781, in a prisoner's account of "3 chillums a day" for a hookah.

By the 1850s the word was used for the smoking of ganja. A writer in the Calcutta Review in December 1857 thought that a labourer, after a day's work in the sun or rain, might find "a refreshment in smoking a chillum of ganjah". In a paper read to the Bengal Social Science Association in January 1868, Kanny Lall Dey said that ganja and charas could be used only by burning them "in a chillum" and drawing the smoke through a pipe, always mixed with tobacco. The kulka used for ganja, he wrote, was "of a peculiar shape, quite unlike that for tobacco smoking", and so was the hookah.^{: 106, 108} In Trinidad the word is spelled chilum.^: 188

Form

In 1894 the pipe was a bowl of clay with a short neck issuing straight from its bottom, the same pipe that was commonly used for tobacco. The way of preparing the drug, the kind of pipe and the manner of drawing the smoke were, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission found, the same all over India.^{: para. 416} In the 1950s the commonest smoking pipe in India was still a simple earthenware chillum, shaped like a funnel with a wide base and a long neck, like the tobacco pipe of poorer smokers, according to I. C. Chopra and R. N. Chopra.

Something sits between the charge and the narrow end so that the burning mixture does not fall through. In the village near Lucknow that Khwaja Hasan studied in 1959–60, the base of the bowl was first covered with a small charred clay filter. The ganja and tobacco went on top, and a ring of rope fibre the width of the bowl, called baand, was burnt separately and laid over the charge.^{: 238, 241} The Chopras describe the charge set between two thin pieces of broken earthenware, which kept the coal from burning it too fast and cooled the smoke.

A damp cloth was generally wrapped round the neck of the pipe and folded into the palm of the left hand.^{: para. 416} With a brazier and a pair of tongs it made up the smoker's equipment. Other pipes served in place of the clay one: some smokers in Bombay and the Central Provinces preferred a pipe of sugarcane, and in the Satpura Hills a green branch of Euphorbia neriifolia was cut into a pipe when nothing else was at hand.^{: para. 418}

Filling and smoking

A Chillum, a coloured etching of a man smoking outside a hut in Calcutta by Balthazar Solvyns, 1799. The pipe is held in the cupped hands.

To prepare ganja, the smoker kneaded a small piece in the palm of the left hand with the right thumb, dripping water on it until it no longer coloured the water. The pipe was laid with a little tobacco, then the washed and chopped ganja, then another thin layer of tobacco, and a live coal was set on top. With the cloth folded into the left palm and the neck held between thumb and forefinger, the smoker pressed the right hand against the cloth and drew through the gap between its thumb and first finger. A few short breaths lit the pipe; then came one long, deep draught, and the pipe passed to the next person in the circle.^{: para. 416} The Commission thought the tobacco made the pipe burn properly and go further, and diluted the smoke.^{: para. 419}

Charas was more often kneaded into two or three times its quantity of the moist tobacco prepared for the hookah. Dry tobacco and the chilam could take the place of the hookah and its tobacco.^{: para. 417} In the 1950s the Chopras found charas warmed a little and mixed with about twice its quantity of tobacco before it went into the pipe. The coal, a glowing piece of charcoal or a smouldering cake of cow dung, was set on with tongs, and the smoke was held in the lungs as long as possible.

In Hasan's village four or five men gathered round one pipe. The first took small puffs to light it and then one full draught, which alone he inhaled, and passed it on; a pipe went round once, or at most twice.^: 242

Worship and fellowship

A sadhu smoking a chilam at Pashupatinath, Kathmandu, on the eve of Maha Shivaratri in 2023.

Many Hindus held the hemp plant to be a special attribute of Shiva. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission recorded "the common practice of invoking the deity in terms of adoration before placing the chillum or pipe of ganja to the lips". In Hasan's village the first smoker offered the smoke to Shankar, another name of Shiva, with the call "Jai Shankar, Kata Lage na Kankar", a prayer that the smoke would not hurt the smokers' throats.^: 242 Kanny Lall Dey wrote in 1868 that smokers of ganja took the name of Mahadeb, that is Shiva, before they began, then sat in a ring and passed the hookah round, and that they smoked in company and never alone.^: 108

Because the hands form the mouthpiece and no one's lips touch the clay, Hasan wrote, the pipe stays ritually pure, and men of different castes, and Bhagats (devotees) with ordinary villagers, can smoke from one chilam. Members of the sweeper caste were left out.^: 241–243 In 1957 the Chopras described the takyas or dehras where Muslim fakirs met to smoke in the towns of northern India: the pipe went from hand to hand, and in their account "social and caste distinctions disappear".

At religious gatherings in Upper India, the Commission was told, mendicants hung from a tree a huge chillum holding a seer or more of charas, so that all comers could share it.^{: para. 418} In the Trinath worship of eastern Bengal, which arose about 1867, everyone present was expected to smoke ganja during the rite.

At the devotional gatherings called bhajans, held every night in Kathmandu, ganja was passed round in a chilam among the singers and musicians, the anthropologist James Fisher wrote in 1975. Smoking was not obligatory, but sharing the pipe stated "the fact of devotional fellowship". Members of the lowest castes could not share it, women rarely smoked, and it was the older men who took the pipe.^{: 250–251, 253}

At the Kumbh Mela of 2013 the magazine Hinduism Today found the pipe most common among the naga sadhus, who go naked, and asked heads of the ascetic orders about it. Sri Mahant Ganeshananda Saraswati said that "Our naga sadhus have chillum as part of their sadhana", to keep the mind on God; others held that it was for ascetics and not for householders, and Sri Mahant Divya Puri, head of the women's wing of the Juna Akhara, said the practice should end. At the Kumbh Mela of 2019 the yoga teacher Ramdev ran what he called a "Chillum Mukti Abhiyan" (Leave Chillum Movement), collected clay pipes from ascetics and asked them to pledge to give up smoking.

In the Caribbean

Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas counted "chillum pipe" among the Hindi words for cannabis and its use that working-class Jamaicans used, with ganja and kali. They took these words, and the absence of African terms, as evidence that smoking ganja reached Jamaica with the indentured labourers from India who began to arrive in 1845.^: 16 In the rural Jamaica they studied, the word, properly the bowl, named the whole pipe. That pipe was a water pipe of wood, coconut shell or horn, fitted with a stem of wood or rubber tubing. Smokers preferred the spliff, which each man rolled for himself, to the chillum, which was shared and needed a place where smokers could gather.^: 47 Among Rastafari, Pretorius wrote in 2006, the chillum is a conical pipe; its mouth end, sometimes covered with a piece of cloth, is called the sapi.^: 1023

In the glossary of Ansley Hamid's book of 2002 on marijuana in Trinidad and New York, the Trinidadian chilum is a conical clay pipe, cupped in both hands, first imported from India and by then made on the island.^: 188 In a Trinidad village in the 1970s Hamid saw very old Indian men, who denied ever having smoked marijuana, cup their hands round tobacco cigarettes as though they were holding a chilum.^: 39

Law

In the United States, federal law makes it an offence to sell drug paraphernalia, to send it by post or across state lines, or to import or export it. The statutory definition covers items primarily intended or designed for inhaling or otherwise taking marijuana, hashish and other controlled drugs, and lists "chillums" among its examples. Items traditionally intended for use with tobacco are exempt. These provisions go back to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and were moved into their present section in 1990.

See also

• Hookah
• Sebsi
• Cannabis in Hinduism
• Ganja