Ganja
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Ganja is the cured flowering and fruiting tops of cultivated female cannabis, prepared for smoking. It is one of the three preparations around which the cannabis economy of India and Bangladesh has been organised since at least the eighteenth century, alongside bhang, the leaf preparation, and charas, the separated resin. The three are distinguished by the part of the plant used: ganja is made only from a cultivated crop from which male plants have been removed and cannot be made from wild growth.
In Bengal the licensed crop was worked into three commercial forms, flat, round and broken or chur, which differed in how the harvested tops were pressed and in how much woody stalk they carried. Colonial excise taxed them at different rates and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 used the Bengal grades as the reference against which the products of other Indian provinces were compared.
The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act defines ganja by plant part. The boundary that definition draws has been litigated in the Indian courts. Indenture carried its use beyond South Asia, to Natal and to the Caribbean.
Name
Gañjā is attested in Sanskrit as a name for hemp. Monier-Williams records the feminine gañjā in the sense "hemp", citing the Bhāvaprakāśa, alongside senses of a tavern and of a drinking-vessel, especially one for intoxicating liquors; the masculine and neuter gañja carries the unrelated senses of a treasury or jewel room, a mine, a station of cowherds and a mart where grain is stored for sale.[1]
The same entry records gañjā as a variant of guñjā, the unrelated plant Abrus precatorius, so an occurrence of the word in a Sanskrit text does not by itself establish a reference to cannabis.[1]
Definition and plant part
The three-fold division of ganja, bhang and charas was already established when the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission refined it in its chapter on the hemp plant. The commission defined ganja as the resinous flowering tops of carefully cultivated and rogued female plants, smoked in a pipe; bhang as the dried leaves and shoots, low in resin, drunk as an infusion or eaten in confections; and charas as the separated resin, differing from the others in the manner and economy of its extraction rather than in any inherent quality.[2]
The commission recorded that good ganja required cultivation and tending and could not be made from wild plants, whereas bhang could be gathered from wild or cultivated growth alike.[3] Agronomic work on the last generation of licensed Bengali cultivation states the criterion in modern terms: ganja is the drug taken from dried female flower buds, the removal of males before they shed pollen being what makes the difference in quality.[4] A recent review of cannabis use in India states the same division in present-day terms: ganja as the dried flower buds or fruits of the female plant, charas as the resinous exudation and bhang as a paste of the matured leaves.[5]
Statutory definition
In India the term is defined by statute. Section 2(iii) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 defines "cannabis (hemp)" in three limbs, of which the second reads:
(b) ganja, that is, the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops), by whatever name they may be known or designated;[6]
The exclusion the definition carries has been litigated. In Shiv Kumar Mishra v. State of Goa the Supreme Court of India rejected an argument that seeds and leaves should be deducted from the weight of a seizure, holding that where the material seized consisted of leafy and flowery parts together, the seeds and leaves fell within the definition "since the seized Ganja was accompanied by the flowery parts of the plant". The court added that nothing in the Act requires moisture content to be excluded and that the weight is the one taken at seizure.[7]
Because the statute defines cannabis by plant part, the leaf preparation falls outside it.[6] The consequence is visible in state excise law. The West Bengal excise rules of 2003 list bhang among the categories for which a retail licence may be granted, and refer to ganja shops only as erstwhile premises, since converted to the sale of foreign liquor.[8]
Grades
Bengal worked the licensed crop into three forms, which the excise administration taxed as distinct articles. Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 report for the Bengal government describes each from direct observation in the growing tract.
Flat or chāptā ganja was made from plants cut in the morning once the dew had lifted. The tops were dried on a cleared floor called the chātor, cut into lengths of one to two feet with the flowerless twigs and the lower bare stalk discarded, exposed to the dew overnight, then bundled and laid on a mat in a circle roughly 14 feet round with the tops pointing inwards, where four or five people trod them flat while holding each other by the shoulders.[9]
Round ganja was made from plants cut in the afternoon. It was rolled underfoot in two courses, ekmaldi then domaldi, by workers ranged in two rows steadying themselves on a horizontal bamboo bar, then finished by hand three to five twigs at a time and tied into bundles of about 100. Kerr called the process "manipulation, or, more correctly speaking, pedipulation".[9]
Chur or broken ganja was not a separate manufacture. It was the breakage from the other two processes, the flower fragments that dropped as flat bundles were tied and as round twigs were rolled, kept aside because they could not be pressed back onto the spikes. Because it consisted principally of female flowers with their resin and carried no stalk, Kerr recorded that it held weight for weight more narcotic matter than flat and round ganja, "which are made up of nearly one-half of woody stalks". The word means broken or powdered, and the product was also known as rorā. Excise recognised the difference in a duty differential: four rupees on chur against three on round ganja.[9]
Consumers were fixed to one grade. Kerr found that in the flat-ganja districts of Bhagalpur and Monghyr smokers held round ganja too strong to use, while in Birbhum, which took the round sort, a wholesaler of 25 years' standing told him buyers thought flat ganja full of leaf and that it burned the eyes. Kerr dismissed these preferences as of no value, attributing them to habit and prejudice.[9]
Manufacture
Ganja comes from the pistillate plant, a point Kerr's report had to establish against the growers' own usage. The cultivators called the drug-bearing plants mardā, male, and held that the plants they called mādi should be searched out and destroyed before flowering or they would cause the crop to run to seed. Kerr referred the question to Dr King of the Imperial Botanical Gardens and to Mr Clarke, who reported from the cultivation around Naogaon that "the ganja plants are now in full flower, and in these cultivated fields I could find no male plants at all: every plant of some thousands must have been female".[9]
Male plants were pulled before they flowered, by specialists the cultivators called poddar or parakdar and, in English, ganja doctors. They walked the fields in November, broke the stems of the males and left the farmers to uproot them, repeating the round two or three times; a former ganja doctor interviewed in the 2020s gave the sexing criteria as round sparse leaves and wide branch spacing for males against taller, more branched pre-flowering females carrying white hairs on the leaves.[4] Kerr gives the cultivators' own field mark as the thicker rounded bristles on the plant they called male, a difference not visible on the khāsiā or hermaphrodite plants, which were never touched except by mistake and were left in the field to wither; he also lists the poddar's fee among the cultivation expenses advanced to a share-cropping tenant.[9]
How completely the crop was kept unpollinated changed over the life of the system. Kerr treated the destruction of the males as removing "the source of the pollen, which is absolutely necessary for impregnation", while noting that a few always escaped and that seeds were "by no means rare" in ganja.[9] The farmers who worked the last generation of the licensed system describe a deliberate limit: about 40 per cent of the seedlings were pulled, and enough male plants were left standing to produce seed for the following year's sowing, for the Ganja Society office and for food.[4]
Harvest ran through February and March. A powerful sun was treated as indispensable: cultivators would not cut on a cloudy day, and plants dried over a fire instead took on what Kerr called an unnatural darkish colour.[9] Manufacture happened in a fenced yard under supervision, with a single gate and straw screening the work from outside view, and finished ganja was graded before it left.[4]
The Bengal licensed system
Cultivation in Bengal was confined to a compact supervised zone in the north of the province, administered as the Ganja Mahal and centred on Naogaon, which the district gazetteer describes as the licensed source of ganja for the greater part of British India.[10] The commission's province-by-province survey nonetheless treated Bengal as one production system among several rather than the whole, alongside smaller industries in the Bombay Presidency, the Central Provinces, the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, Sind and Madras.[3] The crop moved from the tract through a licensed wholesale system into the wider Bengal trade,[11] and from 1917 the growers' cooperative known as the Ganja Society held the cultivation monopoly.[4] Before Act II (B.G.) of 1876 there was no legal bar on growing the plant; that season was the first in which cultivators had to hold a licence from their district collector. Kerr, searching for breaches, found a single unlicensed grower.[9]
The tract fell on the eastern side of the 1947 partition, and cultivation continued in what became Bangladesh until 1987, when it ceased on the country's commitment to international narcotics control.[12] The commercial and imperial history of the tract is treated at length in Utathya Chattopadhyaya's Ganja Matters.[13] The regional record is treated in Cannabis in West Bengal.
Consumption
The commission recorded ganja as smoked in a pipe, which separates it in practice from bhang, which is drunk.[2] Writing on cannabis in north Indian village society in the 1970s, Khwaja Hasan set the three preparations against one another as socially distinct and argued that their use carried religious sanction through an association with Shiva where alcohol was governed by caste prohibition.[14] His account is treated at Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India (1975). The commission's chapter on social and religious customs records ganja smoked in Shiva's honour by ascetics and offered at temples and melas across Bengal and beyond.[15]
The record also runs outside devotional use. The missionary-scholar P. O. Bodding recorded gã̄jã as an ingredient in ten of the medical prescriptions he collected among the Santal people and as a substance demanded as an offering in the ojha's spirit-possession practice.[16] His collection is treated at Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (1940).
Outside Bengal
Naogaon ganja doctors were hired to train growers in Nepal, where cultivation and production around Kathmandu and Butwal were shaped by them.[4] Nepali use of the drug in the same period is recorded in Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview (1975). In Natal, ganja smoking among Indian indentured labourers drew two official attempts at prohibition that came to nothing. A medical officer asked for a ban in 1884, and the Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885 to 1887 asked the Governor in Council to use his powers under section 70 of Law 2 of 1870 to bar the possession and use of the hemp plant by indentured labourers. Opinion was divided and no rule was issued in 1884, and none appears to have followed the 1887 request either, so Natal still had no law controlling cannabis at the time of Union, while the Cape Colony had prohibited it under Act 34 of 1891.[17] The fuller record is treated in Cannabis in South Africa.
Ganja is still made under the name outside South Asia. Collection records for accessions gathered in the Phu Phan hills of northeastern Thailand in 2025 describe whole branches dried and cured in semi-darkness in outdoor sheds before bagging. The name travelled the same way. The presence of ganja in Jamaica is commonly attributed to the Indian indentured labourers brought in to work the sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery, some 33,000 of whom arrived between 1838 and 1917, and it reached Trinidad by the same route, sold there in licensed East Indian shops until its use was prohibited.[18] The South Asian grading travelled with the word. In Jamaica ganja remained the second of three grades, below the most potent, for which Jamaicans substituted the term kali, a Hindi word for buds, and above bhang.[19]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (new, greatly enlarged and improved ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. gañja, gañjā – via Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Chapter II: The Hemp Plant". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I. Simla: Government Central Printing Office – via archive.org.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Chapter IV: Cultivation in each Province". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I. Simla: Government Central Printing Office – via archive.org.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Rahman, A.M.D.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G.; Nemoto, K. (2023). "Traditional cultivation and the production system of cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 67 (4): 99–109. doi:10.11248/jsta.67.99.
- ↑ Karki, P.; Rangaswamy, M. (March 2023) [published online 15 August 2022]. "A review of historical context and current research on cannabis use in India". Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. 45 (2): 105–116. doi:10.1177/02537176221109272.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985(Act No. 61 of 1985), 1985, section 2(iii).India.
- ↑ Shiv Kumar Mishra v. State of Goa. Supreme Court of India (23 February 2009). Criminal Appeal No. 316 of 2009, arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 8552 of 2008.
- ↑ Government of West Bengal, Excise Department (29 July 2003). West Bengal Excise (Selection of New Sites and Grant of Licence for Retail Sale of Liquor and Certain Other Intoxicants) Rules, 2003 (PDF) (Report). Notification No. 800-EX, Kolkata Gazette, Extraordinary; rule 4.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 Kerr, Hem Chunder (1877) [Reprinted as a Parliamentary Paper, House of Commons, 1893]. Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. §§59–83.
- ↑ O'Malley, L.S.S. (1916). Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. ch. XII, pp. 134–144 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Mills, James H. (2003). Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press – via archive.org.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M.; Nemoto, K.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G. (2022). "A history of cannabis (ganja) as an economic crop in Bangladesh from the late 18th century to 1989". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 66 (1): 21–32. doi:10.11248/jsta.66.21.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. p. 316. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ Hasan, Khwaja A. (1975). "Social aspects of the use of cannabis in India". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 235–246. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.235.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Chapter IX: Social and Religious Customs". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. §§430–446 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Bodding, P.O. (1925). Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore. Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. 10. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Part 2 (1927), pp. 229, 231, 235–237, 241, 246, 264, 341 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Paterson, C. (2009). Prohibition and resistance: a socio-political exploration of the changing dynamics of the southern African cannabis trade, c. 1850 – the present (MA thesis). Rhodes University.
- ↑ Prince, Raymond; Greenfield, Rochelle; Marriott, John (1972). "Cannabis or alcohol? Observations on their use in Jamaica". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 1–9.
- ↑ Rubin, Vera; Comitas, Lambros (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. p. 18. doi:10.1515/9783110812077.