Talk:Cannabis in Santal culture

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Page scope

Cannabis in Santal culture covers the uses of cannabis recorded among the Santal: in medicine, in the possession plays rehearsed by the disciples of an ojha, in the Kharwar reform movement of the Santal Parganas, and as wage labour in the Naogaon ganja tract. The Santal as a people, their history, society and religion are covered on Santal people. Bodding's monograph and O'Malley's gazetteer each have a page of their own.

Sourcing

The article rests on P. O. Bodding's Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (parts 1 and 2, 1925 and 1927), the evidence of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1893–94), L. S. S. O'Malley's Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas (1910), S. K. Jain and C. R. Tarafder's index of Bodding's plants (1970), and two studies of the Naogaon Ganja Mahal by A. M. D. Rahman and colleagues (2023, 2025).

Discussion

How far the material goes

Everything on Santal medicine, the possession plays and the Kharwar movement comes from the Santal Parganas between 1893 and 1927, and most of it from Bodding, who also contributed notes to O'Malley's gazetteer. The Naogaon material concerns Santal women's wage labour in a Bengali cultivators' tract, not Santal use of the drug.

Smith's two answers

E. McL. Smith (Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Bengal witness no. 40) said in his written answers that "even Sonthals, specially Kharwars" were addicted to ganja and that the aboriginal tribes were "getting a taste for it"; in his oral evidence he said that "the Sonthals are not consumers of the hemp drugs" and drank rice beer. His oral evidence on the Kharwar movement says that the Kharwars had given up liquor for ganja. The commission's report (vol. I, para. 488) lists "Sonthals" among the aboriginal peoples who, by the witnesses' accounts, smoked hemp drugs.

The possession play

Bodding's account (part 1, pp. 51–53) is of disciples of an ojha rehearsing the plays they act in the villages at the Dasae dance. The call for ganja comes from the two players possessed by the jugi bonga, the spirit of a wandering Hindu ascetic. Ganja is the last of the ascetic's things they call for, after a knotted stick, a hair rope, a gourd and a forehead mark; the scene is a play, separate from Bodding's account of treatment.

The name Kharwar

In Smith's evidence, Oldham's remarks and O'Malley's gazetteer, Kharwar names Santal followers of the reform movement, whom Smith calls "Hinduised Sonthals". The same name belongs to a separate people of Chota Nagpur, described by H. H. Risley in The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891).

Fibre crops

O'Malley's gazetteer puts 1,190 acres of the Santal Parganas under "hemp", in a paragraph on fibre crops beside jute (pp. 165–166). It does not say which plant, so the figure is not evidence of cannabis grown by Santals.