Talk:Cannabis in Bengali cuisine
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Page scope
The page covers drinks and foods made with bhang or ganja among Bengali speakers in West Bengal and Bangladesh: the siddhi drink, majum and other sweets, fried and frozen preparations, and the bhang foods of festivals. The drink as a rite of worship is covered on Cannabis in Bengali Religion, festival hospitality and the social life of the drugs on Cannabis in Bengali culture. Foods made with cannabis in other regions are on Cannabis cuisine; products sold commercially today are on Cannabis edibles. Medical confections of the Ayurvedic texts belong to Cannabis in Ayurveda.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and unresolved readings here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), volume IV. The Bengal witnesses answered numbered questions; the passages used here are mostly their answers on the forms in which the drugs were consumed and on social and religious custom. Witness numbers, names and printed page numbers are those of the volume. The volume covered the whole Bengal Presidency, which then included Bihar and Orissa; the page uses the evidence of witnesses from Bengali-speaking districts and from Calcutta, and leaves out what witnesses from Bihar and Orissa described in their own provinces.
- Abhilas Chandra Mukerjee (witness no. 63) is the source for the Calcutta foods (p. 162), the majum of the town of Dacca (p. 160), the Bijoya drink and the eight festival preparations of eastern Bengal (p. 165). No other witness in the volume names madan khir or satabari. Banku Behari Dutt (witness no. 72, p. 209) independently reports the gorkha larhus given when a cow calves in Backergunge.
- W. B. O'Shaughnessy (1839), pp. 8–9, for Ameer's recipe and his statements about the Calcutta trade. The same recipe is reprinted in O'Shaughnessy's Bengal Dispensatory (1842), which Mukerjee cited in his evidence. Devendranath Roy's 1893 description of majum (p. 324) gives the same ingredients in nearly the same words as O'Shaughnessy and repeats the detail of dhatura seeds added to order; it may have been taken from the book rather than from observation.
- D. Prain (1893), p. 6 for siddhi as the official name of the leaf in Bengal, and p. 68 for the drop placed on the tongue at Durga Puja.
- Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Ganja Matters (2026), p. 92 for Regulation VI of 1800 and p. 100 for siddhi in the wealthy homes of Calcutta.
Readings
- Gupta's siddhi kachauri (vol. IV, p. 45) is called a fritter, while Mukerjee, Price and Ghosha describe a kachuri as a fried pastry or a filled patty.
- Mukerjee's price for Dacca majum (p. 160) is not legible in the copy of the volume consulted.
- Mukerjee calls Maha Navami "the third day of the Durga Puja", counting the days of the worship itself.
Gaps
- The "Since 1947" section cites no source on bhang foods in Bangladesh, on the Bijoya drink in either Bengal today, or on whether majum, bhang kachuri and the festival sweets of eastern Bengal are still made.
- The page cites no Bengali-language source for the names and recipes; all of them are taken from English-language evidence of 1839 and 1893.