Talk:North Bihar Plains

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Page scope

North Bihar Plains treats the historical cannabis growing region of the Bihar plain north of the Ganges: the wild hemp of the Patna and Bhagalpur Divisions of the 1890s, cut for bhang and sent to the warehouses of Monghyr and Bhagalpur. The strip along the Nepal border is the Eastern Terai; the plains of West Bengal to the east are the North Bengal Plains. The districts as administrative units are treated at their own pages, such as Purnea District, Bhagalpur District and Darbhanga District.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the region is mapped

• The Commission's finding. The spontaneous growth is "extremely common and plentiful in that part of the Patna Division which lies north of the Ganges"; the Bhagalpur Division is "the region from which the bhang supply of Calcutta is brought"; in north Bhagalpur and Purnea the growth is "specially abundant within the influence of the floods of the Kosi river" (Hemp Drugs Commission report, vol. I, paras. 26–27). South of the Ganges it is "evidently very scanty" (para. 31).
• The bhang trade. Bhang was "prepared for the market in only three districts, viz., Monghyr, Bhagalpur, and Purnea", from leaves collected by wholesale dealers under the Collector's permits (Gupta's Bengal memorandum, vol. III, para. 6, p. 3); the leaf that entered the Bengal warehouses came chiefly from those three districts (vol. I, para. 226).
• The witnesses of 1893–94. Champaran, Saran, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga: K. G. Gupta (witness 17), G. E. Manisty (19), Roy Brahma Dutt (71), L. Hare (18), Raghunandan Prasad Sinha (171), H. C. Williams (13). Bhagalpur, Monghyr and Purnea: F. H. B. Skrine (11), Nobin Chandra Kar (66), Surendranath Mozoomdar (60), Wooma Charan Bose (74), A. G. M. Wodschow (193), Bhuvan Mohun Sanyal (225), and two agents of Calcutta bhang dealers (242). B. C. Basu's special inquiry in Purnea and north Bhagalpur is printed in vol. III, pp. 233–235.
• No source read for this page records hemp grown as a crop in these districts. Skrine, Dutt, Sanyal, Basu and the dealers' agents all say that it was not cultivated; Lyall (witness 1) suspected fostering and Hare (18) plants that looked cultivated, and the Commission (vol. I, paras. 92–94) found only the secret rearing of a few plants. No source calls the region "North Bihar Plains": the name is the plain north of the Ganges in today's Bihar, the tract the sources call the Patna Division north of the Ganges, North Behar, and Purnea and North Bhagalpur.

Growing status

The status is Historical. The evidence runs from 1877 to 1923, and no later source read for this page says either way whether hemp grows or is gathered there now. A search of English and Hindi newspapers for crops, destruction of wild stands or licensed collection since 2000 in the north Bihar districts found only one household case: eight plants in a courtyard at Barhara, Purnia, in January 2025, which is not a growing tract. A newspaper report of a standing ganja crop destroyed in the Baikunthpur diara of Gopalganj could not be read: its page is no longer online and no other paper was found carrying the story, so neither its date nor its place is known. The searches reached few Hindi papers, so the absence of other reports is a limit of the search as much as a finding.

Years grown

The infobox gives 1877 to 1923. The first is Hunter's Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. XV (1877), p. 103: hemp "is not cultivated in Monghyr; but it is found wild in most places". Monghyr District then lay on both banks of the Ganges (Hunter's preface), and only its north-bank part is in this region, so the year rests on a district of which part is drawn. The last is the excise report of Bihar and Orissa for 1923–24 (para. 41, p. 12): bhang collected in the district of Purnea under the provincial contract, during the cutting season of 1923. That report says "collected", not "wild"; the 1920–21 report says that bhang "grows wild" in Bhagalpur, and every 1890s source says that it was not cultivated in Purnea, so the collection was of the wild plant. Both are years the sources were written for; neither marks a start or an end. The High Court ruling on the possession of wild bhang in Darbhanga (1892, in Dutt's evidence) is the year of a legal decision, not of growth, so it is not used.

How the border is drawn

• The border is the union of the 21 Bihar districts that lie north of the Ganges in OpenStreetMap (West Champaran, East Champaran, Gopalganj, Siwan, Saran, Sheohar, Sitamarhi, Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, Darbhanga, Madhubani, Samastipur, Begusarai, Khagaria, Supaul, Saharsa, Madhepura, Araria, Purnia, Kishanganj and Katihar) and the six blocks of Bhagalpur District on the north bank (Bihpur, Gopalpur, Ismailpur, Kharik, Naugachhia and Rangra Chowk), less the ground already inside the Eastern Terai, Terai and North Bengal Plains borders, simplified: about 50,750 km² in one part.
• About 2,500 km² of the districts lie inside the Eastern Terai border and are left to it: 45% of West Champaran, 4% of Kishanganj, 2% of Sitamarhi and 1% of Madhubani. A further 137 km² of the hills north of that strip in West Champaran is cut off by it and left out.
• The Ganges as the southern edge. The Commission set the plain north of the river against the scanty growth south of it (vol. I, paras. 26 and 31), and Basu left the south-Gangetic part of Bhagalpur out of his inquiry because the plant grew rarely on its hard reddish soil (vol. III, p. 233). The colonial districts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur lay on both banks; only their north-bank parts are drawn. Munger District, south of the river, is not drawn, although Mozoomdar's 300 maunds were for the whole of colonial Monghyr.
• The border stops at the West Bengal line to the east, the Uttar Pradesh line to the west and the Nepal border to the north.
• The map point (26.10, 86.01) is a central point of the border; the border is not drawn from it.

Places named by the witnesses

The witnesses name Samastipur (Dutt: the part of Darbhanga where the plant grew most), the headquarters subdivision of Purnea (Sanyal), the Gangetic villages near the Kosi in north Bhagalpur and the sandy banks of the Kosi in Purnea (the dealers' agents), the Nepal border of Darbhanga (Williams), Champaran (Gupta) and Dumur in Purnea (Wodschow's indigo factory). None has a source giving an extent or a year other than 1893–94, so none is a growing area of its own. Purnea, which the Commission called "the great bhang-producing district" (vol. I, para. 28), has no figure of its own for the bhang gathered there; Sanyal (225) says it was not ordinarily sold in the district and Lyall (1) that only a small amount was grown in Purnea, Monghyr and Bhagalpur together.

Accessions

• Vermoesen s.n., Pusa (1911) lies inside the border, at Pusa in Samastipur District; its labels describe the plants as growing wild in the grass under the trees, 4 July 1911.
• Banerjee 263 (1964) lies inside the border, at Motihari in East Champaran; its notes line is blank.
• The ZOM-IND-UTT lots from Gaya lie south of the Ganges, outside the border.

Sources

• Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Vol. I paras. 26–28, 31, 92–94, 226 and 598; vol. III, Gupta's memorandum paras. 6–7 and Basu's reports; the vol. IV witnesses cited. All read on the page images. The OCR misreads several figures and names: Mozoomdar's Monghyr figure is 300 maunds (OCR "800"), the agents' exports were 98 and 305 maunds (OCR "805"), witness 11 is F. H. B. Skrine and witness 18 is L. Hare, and Basu's word for the homestead land is dihisar.
• Excise reports of Bihar and Orissa for 1920–21, 1922–23 and 1923–24 (Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, digital copies), read on the page images.
• Hunter (1877), vol. XV, p. 103 (Monghyr), read on the page image.
• District administrations. The "About District" pages of Purnia, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, West Champaran, Saharsa and Katihar, read on 20 October 2026.

Evidence not used

• Gupta (witness 17) thought the plant grew on land submerged in the rains, from what excise men told him; Basu, who toured the villages, found it never grew on land that stayed under water. The article gives both.
• Prem Chand, a missionary at Gaya (witness 202), saw the plant growing in abundance in the north of Bhagalpur District; it is a single line, and the Bhagalpur witnesses cited say the same at more length.
• The District Board of Monghyr (witness 250) put the district's bhang at 200 to 300 maunds a year, against Mozoomdar's 300; the article gives Mozoomdar's figure, with his name.
• Chopra and Chopra (Bulletin on Narcotics, 1957) list Bihar among the Indian states where the plant grows wild and give 20 hectares of cultivation for ganja and charas in the state, without naming a district; Bihar then included the south of the state, so the figures are not placed in this region.
• The excise rules made under the Bihar and Orissa Excise Act, 1915, as printed in a later consolidated copy, carry an undated note that Bengal allowed bhang to be imported only from "the producing districts of Monghyr, Bhagalpur and Purnea"; the same copy's rule on importing bhang into Bihar names Uttar Pradesh as the source. The note's date cannot be fixed, so it is not used for the years.
• O'Malley's district gazetteers of Purnea (1911), Muzaffarpur (1907) and Champaran (1907), and Byrne's of Bhagalpur (1911), give ganja revenue but say nothing of wild hemp, bhang collection or cultivation; the "hemp" of the Purnea volume along the Panar is san (Crotalaria juncea). The Saharsa district gazetteer's excise chapter (figures to 1962–63) lists bhang among taxed articles and a ganja warehouse at Madhepura, and records seizures of Nepali ganja; it says nothing of local wild hemp. Hunter's volumes for Tirhut, Champaran, Saran, Bhagalpur and Purniah name cannabis only in lists of medicinal drugs.
• The Bihar Prohibition and Excise Act, 2016, s. 30(b), makes it an offence to cultivate any hemp plant without a licence.