Talk:Baluchar (cannabis)

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Page scope

Baluchar (cannabis) covers the name baluchar: its spellings, what witnesses before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission took it to mean, where they thought the name and the drug came from, its place in the ganja trade of the North-Western Provinces beside pathar, and its use outside those provinces. How Bengal's ganja was grown and made, and its three forms, are treated at Ganja#Grades and Ganja Mahal.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources and how they were read

Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, vol. I (Report). Paras. 248, 291, 356, 358, 360, 364 and 415 were read on the page images. The machine-read text of this volume has two errors that bear on this name: in para. 356 it reads "adulterated with gathar", where the printed page reads pathar; in para. 415 it reads "the epithet mohkini", where the printed page reads mohini. In para. 291 it gives the retail price of pathar as "14 annas"; the printed page reads 1½ annas. No word gathar occurs anywhere else in the commission's volumes.
Vol. III. Thomas Stoker's memorandum on the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, paras. 21–22, p. 28, read on the page image.
Vols. IV–VII. The name was searched for in every volume of evidence, allowing for misread forms (baluchur, balucher, daluchar and the like). Every passage quoted or paraphrased in the article was read on the page image. Witness numbers and pages are those printed in each volume.
Watt. George Watt's article on the hemp plant, read in the reprint in the House of Commons return of 1893, pp. 164–165, on the page images. The passage from E. T. Atkinson's Himálayan Districts (Watt cites p. 761) is read there; Atkinson's own volume was not read. In Watt's text the quotation marks close after the description of pattar as bought "in the rough state"; the prices that follow are Watt's lines, so the article gives them to Watt's article and not to Atkinson.
Grierson. Bihar Peasant Life (1885) was not read. The article cites Chattopadhyaya's Ganja Matters (2026), p. 46 and note 45, which gives Grierson's p. 243.
Not found. The name does not occur in Kerr's report of 1877 (read in the 1893 return) or in Prain's report of 1893, searched with and without accents. The Assam committee report of 1913 on disk has no text layer and was not read.

Title and spellings

The title carries the disambiguator because Baluchar is also a place name: a town in Murshidabad, in present-day West Bengal, gives its name to the Baluchari sari. The bare name is not redirected.
Baluchar ganja, Baluchur and Balucher redirect here. Bilúchar occurs in one source and Baluchari is the name of the sari, so neither has a redirect.
The first-recorded year is 1881, from the passage by Mr. Wall that the commission's report quotes (vol. I, para. 364). Watt's article (1889) and Grierson's survey (1885) are both later.

Kind of page

Baluchar named a kind of drug in trade, Bengal ganja as it was sold elsewhere, not a population of plants. The page is therefore a product name. No accession on the wiki carries the name.

Where the sources differ

Which form. Stoker found the Bengal import into the North-Western Provinces almost entirely flat ganja, and most witnesses there and in Bengal who name a form use baluchar for flat ganja. Others use it for broken ganja (Bhagalpur; Nawabganj in Bara Banki), for round ganja (Ajmere; Cuddapah) or for all three Bengal forms (S. P. Roy, Allahabad). In Lucknow flat ganja was called pathar, in Fyzabad baluchar. The article gives examples of each usage; it does not count them.
Strength. Most witnesses who compare the two rate baluchar above pathar. Some say the reverse: S. P. Roy (vol. V, pp. 174 and 177) and K. Kampta Pershad of Basti (witness 53, p. 87), who calls pathar "more intoxicating than baluchar" and inferior for its taste.
Where it came from. Witnesses in the North-Western Provinces place baluchar variously: a place in Rajshahi (Roy), a village near Hajipur across the Ganges from Patna (P. C. Banerji), Patna, Murshidabad and Patna, "Hat Naogaon", Monghyr (witness 247, p. 333) and Benares (witness 257, p. 350). Stoker derives the name from a village in Bengal without naming it.

Not used, and why

The town of Baluchar in Murshidabad. No source read connects the ganja name with this town, so the article does not make the connection.
Baluchara in Bogra. Umagati Ray of Jalpaiguri (vol. IV, witness 232, p. 490) lists cultivation at "Naogaon in the Rajshahi, Baluchara in the Bogra, and Mahadebpur in the Dinajpur districts". No source read ties the trade name to this place either.
Bombay and Berar. A Bombay witness speaks of baluchar as a flat ganja of Benares (vol. VII, Bombay witness 118); a Berar witness calls it the plant that yields charas in Upper India (vol. VII, Berar witness 32). Single statements, not used.
The import duty. The commission's proposals for taxing pathar on import into the North-Western Provinces belong to the article on pathar.

Wikipedia

English Wikipedia has no article on the name and no mention of it (search of 21 October 2026).