Talk:Ahmednagar
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Ahmednagar treats the licensed ganja-growing tract of the Ahmednagar district of the Bombay Presidency, from the crop returns of 1881–82 to the excise report of 1939–40. The district as an administrative unit, officially Ahilyanagar, is treated at Ahilyanagar District.
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Why the area is mapped
- The Hemp Drugs Commission's report (Vol. I, para. 125) names Ahmednagar and Satara as the two districts of the Bombay Presidency where regular cultivation was principally carried on, and gives Ahmednagar's area for each year from 1885–86 to 1892–93.
- The Collector, E. J. Ebden (Vol. VII, Bombay witness 5, pp. 5 and 9), places most of it in the Nagar taluka and the rest chiefly in the Rahuri and Newasa talukas, and his appended letter gives taluka averages for 1881–82 to 1893–94.
- The Bombay excise reports confine licensed cultivation to the Nagar taluka from 1917–18 and to the single village of Mehekari by 1939–40.
Growing status
- The status is Historical. No source read says that the cultivation ended.
- First grown: 1881. The earliest year a source records the crop grown, not the year it began. The Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency volume for Ahmadnagar (1884, p. 246) counts 1,146 acres under hemp for ganja in 1881–82, and Ebden's averages also open with 1881–82.
- Last grown: 1939. The latest year a source read records it grown: the excise report for 1939–40 (para. 33) gives 75 acres at Mehekari. That report is the last of the series held on the Internet Archive, so the year marks the end of the sources read, not of the cultivation. Later Bombay and Maharashtra excise reports would be the next sources.
How the border is drawn
- The border is the Nagar (Ahilyanagar), Rahuri and Nevasa talukas in OpenStreetMap (administrative relations 10347872, 10347870 and 10347875), simplified, about 3,800 km². It is a proxy: these are the three talukas Ebden named as the area where the cultivation had been "fairly regular and of considerable extent" (Vol. VII, p. 9), and they held 475 of his 577-acre average.
- Shrigonda averaged 26 acres in Ebden's letter but 319 acres in the gazetteer's return for 1881–82; it is left outside the border, which follows the Commission-era evidence.
- The map point (19.04, 74.75) is in the Nagar taluka; the border is not drawn from it.
- Mehekri (Ebden's spelling) and Mehekari (the excise reports') are taken to be the same village of the Nagar taluka; neither source gives its location further.
Sources
- Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Ebden's answers 9 and 13 and his appended letter (Vol. VII, pp. 4–5, 9), Kharkar's (pp. 57–58) and Down's (p. 119) evidence, and the presidency memorandum's district table (Vol. III, p. 89) were read on the page images; the rest in the OCR text. Vol. I was read in the OCR text only; its figures for 1892–93 agree with Guzder's taluka table (382 acres) in Vol. VII.
- Gazetteer and excise reports were read in the Internet Archive OCR text. Page numbers in the 1884 gazetteer are taken from its running heads.
- Kennedy's list of eight talukas (Vol. VII, p. 117) answers the Commission's question about where the plant grows spontaneously, so the article does not cite it as a list of growing talukas.
- The excise report for 1914–15 (para. 41) says the seed used in the district came from the United Provinces through a growers' credit society; the passage is broken in the OCR text and is not used.
Where the sources disagree
- Acreage. The gazetteer gives 1,146 acres for 1881–82; the Commission's table gives 1,030 for 1885–86 and 382 for 1892–93; the presidency memorandum gives a ten-year average of 660 acres; Ebden's letter gives a thirteen-year average of 577. The article gives each with its source.
- Sowing. Ebden puts sowing about the end of July; Guzder at the beginning of June. The article gives both.