Talk:Cannabis in Bengali culture
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Page scope
The page covers the social and secular life of cannabis among Bengali speakers in West Bengal and Bangladesh: names and words, the reputation of the ganja smoker, proverbs and folk tales, smoking in company, festival hospitality, licensed shops and the politics around them, the customs of the Naogaon cultivators, and the period since 1947. Worship, including the Bijoya drink as a rite, Shiva, Tantric texts, ascetics and the songs of the ganja smokers, is covered on Cannabis in Bengali Religion. Food and drink preparations belong to Cannabis in Bengali Cuisine. The Ganja Mahal, the Ganja Society, bhang shops and the chillum each have their own page and are summarised here.
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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). The Bengal witnesses in volume IV answered numbered questions; the passages used here are mostly their answers on the habit of smoking in company (question 30) and on public opinion (question 33). Witness numbers, names and page numbers are those printed in the volume. The phrase "ganjar adda" is on p. 387, in the evidence of Hari Krishna Mazumdar (witness no. 169).
- Opinions of witnesses. The witnesses were officials, landholders, pleaders, doctors and missionaries. Their judgements of ganja smokers, from Gupta's "epithet of scorn" to Price's account of never having seen a man ruined by the drug, are quoted and attributed to the witness who gave them.
- Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Ganja Matters (2026) is the source for the names collected by Kerr in 1877 (p. 44), turitananda (pp. 56–57), chabuk (p. 45), the proverbs that the page does not cite from volume IV directly (pp. 49–52), Kalidas Mukhopadhyay's satire of 1876 (pp. 55–57), Kalimohan Chakrabarti's Ganjar Golpo (pp. 1, 60), the politics of excise shops (pp. 206–207, 217–218), Harendra Coomar Mookerjee's articles (pp. 222–225), and Mohammad Afzal's and Mahfuzur Rahman's accounts of Naogaon (pp. 214–216, 228). Kolir Nobo Rong, Ganjar Golpo and Afzal's history are cited through his reading.
- Rahman and colleagues (2025) interviewed former cultivators in Naogaon between 2017 and 2020. The songs, proverbs, tales, fair and customs in the Naogaon section are their informants' accounts, given in the article as such.
- G. H. Damant (1873). The tale of the two ganja-eaters is read in The Indian Antiquary, vol. 2, p. 271.
Gaps
- The ganja adda is cited from the 1893 evidence alone; the page cites no modern study of the adda as a social form in relation to ganja.
- The "Since 1947" section cites nothing on the Bijoya drink, bhang shops or ganja in Bengali film and fiction in West Bengal after 1947. Kaliprasanna Singha's Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (1862) has passages on ganja smokers that the page does not yet use.
- On the Bangladesh side, the page cites no scholarship on ganja at Lalon's shrine at Cheuriya or at other shrine gatherings.