Gazetteer

A gazetteer is a geographical and statistical reference work describing the places within a defined territory: their physical setting, history, population, administration, economy and notable sites, usually arranged as a systematic survey of a country, province or district. In British India the genre took institutional form in the district gazetteers, standardised volumes compiled by provincial governments to a fixed chapter scheme. Their chapters on agriculture, excise and the people of each district incidentally preserve much of the surviving record of the colonial ganja economy, which makes them a recurring primary source on this wiki. The volumes most relevant here are the early-twentieth-century gazetteers of Bengal and of the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, several of which describe the licensed Ganja Mahal and the wider north Bengal cannabis belt.

Bengal and Eastern Bengal district gazetteers

The Bengal District Gazetteers were compiled under the editorial supervision of L. S. S. O'Malley of the Indian Civil Service, who wrote thirty of the thirty-eight volumes himself. The parallel Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers covered the districts of the province created by the 1905 partition of Bengal and dissolved in 1912; their cultivation districts passed to East Pakistan at the 1947 Partition.

Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas – L. S. S. O'Malley, 1910. Records Santal ganja use among the Sapha Har and the district's ganja excise. The only volume with its own page on this wiki so far. Facsimile
Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi – L. S. S. O'Malley, 1916. Chapter XII, "The Ganja Mahal", is the canonical gazetteer description of the licensed cultivation tract; the most cannabis-significant volume of the series. Facsimile
Bengal District Gazetteers: Pabna – L. S. S. O'Malley, 1923. Covers the eastern fringe of the cultivation belt. Facsimile
Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers: Jalpaiguri – J. F. Gruning, 1911. Records the Jalpaiguri excise, a dedicated account of the Rajbansis and the Jalpesh Temple. Facsimile
Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers: Dinajpur – F. W. Strong, 1912. Treats the northern fringe of the tract and the cross-border movement of seed and finished ganja into Naogaon. Scan to be located.
District Gazetteer of Eastern Bengal and Assam: Bogra – c. 1910. Covers the portion of the Ganja Mahal that lay in Bogra district before the 1896–97 boundary transfer to Rajshahi. Facsimile

The Eastern Bengal and Assam volumes appeared under slightly varying series titles in the originals; the page titles above follow the form used in each volume.

Other district volumes noted in the project's research but not yet assessed include the Birbhum gazetteer, cited for the Baul and Fakir cannabis tradition at Joydev–Kenduli and Bakreshwar, and Vas's Rangpur Gazetteer (1911), a candidate in the Rajbanshi source hunt.

Bengal and Eastern Bengal district gazetteers

See also