Talk:Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)
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How the report was read
The whole report was read for this page on 17 September 2026, in the text and on the page images. The copy is the National Library of Scotland's, India Papers 74913508, shelfmark IP/6/RC.6, digitised in A Medical History of British India. The library's viewer answers scripts with a human-verification page, so the images and the OCR text used here come from its open dataset (doi:10.34812/2w0t-3f08), which the library publishes as free of known copyright restrictions.
Printed page n is image n + 8. That holds across the whole item: 73 of the numbered pages carry their printed number at the head, and none of them contradicts its image. Images 7 and 8 are the covering letter, which the report does not paginate, so citations of it give "covering letter" in place of a page number. The scan is complete, and the text ends on p. 79 with Table XIII, Prain's signature and the press line.
Every quotation on the page was matched against the report's own text. The quotations from volume III of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and from Prain's 1904 memoir were read on the page images instead, because those volumes are not held here as text.
What the page leaves out
The report describes users, cultivators and whole communities in the terms of its time. Two of those passages are quoted and attributed on the page. The rest are not repeated here: the Calcutta durwans (pp. 69–70), a face called "monkey-faced" (p. 70) and the comparison of India with Egypt and the Levant (p. 77).
The thirteen tables are summarised rather than reproduced. Table XIII, on the employment of hemp (p. 79), would carry a figure well, but the open-data images are 600 pixels wide and the table cannot be read at that size. A larger image has to come from the library's viewer, which a person has to open.
Chapters IV and V of Part II review the chemical literature from 1821 to 1891 and set out Prain's fractional analysis in detail. The page gives the result and the method in outline.
Where later accounts differ from the report
Chattopadhyaya's Ganja Matters (2026) misquotes the report on pp. 36–37. The "nobler" sentence appears there with the word "intoxicating" added, and the account of the "special men" adds "thousands of bighas", "four times" and a visit finished "just days before he arrived". None of that is in the report. The comparison is set out on Talk:Poddar. The page quotes the report.
The same author's dissertation of 2018 says at p. 68 that Prain "argued that such presses would be able to produce at least one maund … of ganja in the duration of one whole pressing", citing p. 23 of the report, in a passage about the lever presses used in manufacture. Page 23 of the report is about a machine for compressing chur into storage cakes, "say a maund or more … at one time". The page therefore cites the dissertation for its account of how the report was used later, not for what the report says. The dissertation also calls Prain "Col. David Prain" in 1893, where the covering letter and his evidence to the commission both give Surgeon-Captain.
T. Stoker's memorandum for the North-Western Provinces (vol. III p. 33) reports that Prain "pronounced bhang to be more harmful than ganja". The same paragraph says that Stoker had not been sent a copy of the report. The page sets the report's own comparison (p. 71) beside it and leaves the second-hand claim unjudged.
Title and category
The title page reads "REPORT ON THE CULTIVATION AND USE OF GÁNJÁ", with an accent on both syllables, and the page takes that spelling with the year added, as the Kerr 1877 page does. Three redirects point at it: Prain 1893, the unaccented spelling and the single-accent spelling the Kerr page uses for its own title. This wiki's search matches titles and not text.
The infobox sets the regional category to India, as the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission page does, because Part II ranges beyond Bengal. The Kerr page sets Bengal Presidency, which is a category that does not exist.