A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India

A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India

Publication

Author	George Watt, "assisted by numerous contributors"(1851–1930)
Language	English
Composed	Prefaces dated 1 July 1885 (vol. I), 1 January 1889 (vol. I reissue) and 6 August 1892 (vol. VI, part 1)
Published	1885–1893 (vol. I reissued 1889); index 1896
Publisher	Superintendent of Government Printing, India
Place	Calcutta
Volumes	6 volumes in 9 parts, with an index (1896)

Cannabis Content

Volume	Vol. II: Cabbage to Cyperus (1889)
Pages	103–126
Chapter	Cannabis sativa, Linn.; reprinted in 1893 in a House of Commons return (pp. 155–174)
Regions documented	Eastern Bengal, the Central Provinces and Bombay (ganja); Nepal, Kashmir, Ladakh and Afghanistan (charas); the lower hills of the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab and Madras (bhang); Kumaon and Garhwal (fibre); Sind; Yarkand and Kashgar
Varieties described	Wild and cultivated hemp in Garhwal; pattar and bilúchar ganja in the North-Western Provinces; male phúl-bhang and female gul-bhang plants of the north-western Himalayan fibre crop
Preparations	Ganja (flat, round and chúr or rorá); charas (Yarkand powder charas; garda in three sorts, surka, bhangra and khaki); bhang (siddhi, sabji, sabzi); májun; tincture and extract; hemp-seed oil
Uses documented	Fibre and cordage; smoking and drinking; medicinal; food; excise and trade
Taxonomic significance	States that Cannabis indica "has been reduced to C. sativa, the Indian plant being viewed as but an Asiatic condition of that species"; cited by Small and Cronquist (1976) among early authors who gave the intoxicant plants no separate formal rank

Access

Digital facsimile	View on the Internet Archive
Original held at	Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève; Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; Missouri Botanical Garden; New York Botanical Garden (sets listed in Taxonomic Literature)

A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India is a reference work on the economic products of British India, compiled by George Watt "assisted by numerous contributors" and printed for the Government of India by the Superintendent of Government Printing in Calcutta. It appeared in six volumes, the last in four parts, between 1885 and 1893, with an index in 1896. Its entries give scientific and vernacular names, properties, domestic and medical uses, trade statistics and the published sources for each product. The second volume (1889) carries a 24-page article on Cannabis sativa, the hemp plant, which the House of Commons reprinted in 1893 and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 quoted.^: 155

Watt compiled the Dictionary for the Government of India's Department of Revenue and Agriculture, and much of its material came from district and forest officers who answered his inquiries, as E. P. Stebbing stressed in 1930. The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya reads it as part of the economic botany through which the colonial state sought to fix the cannabis plant and its products in names that revenue officials could use.^: 29–30 As a work compiled for a revenue department, the Dictionary is evidence of the administrative thinking that produced it as much as a source on cannabis, and it is read in that double light.

Watt wrote hemp for the plant and its fibre, and called ganja, charas and bhang the "forms of the narcotic".

Origins

Watt came to the Dictionary through exhibition work. At the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–84 he was put in charge of the Economic Court, for which he compiled a catalogue of the economic products of India running to more than 1,700 pages. The Department of Revenue and Agriculture then retained him to expand the catalogue into a dictionary and to prepare the Indian economic court for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886. In 1887 he became the Government of India's Reporter on Economic Products, a newly created post.

In the preface to the first volume Watt wrote that the time available had largely ruled out original investigation of disputed questions. Authors' opinions had therefore been placed side by side, even where they conflicted. In an obituary of Watt, I. H. Burkill answered critics who found no evaluation of products in it by recalling that Watt "had orders to compile and not to review".

The work

The entries run in alphabetical order across the volumes:^: 108–109

Volume	Entries	Date
I	Abaca to Buxus	1885 (preface 1 July 1885); reissued 1889 (preface 1 January 1889)
II	Cabbage to Cyperus	1889
III	Dacrydium to Gordonia	1890
IV	Gossypium to Linociera	1890
V	Linum to Oyster	1891
VI, part 1	Pachyrhizus to Rye	1892 (preface 6 August 1892)
VI, part 2	Sabadilla to Silica	1893
VI, part 3	Silk to Tea	1893
VI, part 4	Tectona to Zygophillum	1893
Index		1896

The paragraphs of each entry are numbered in the margin, and the text refers to them by number.^{: 162, 165} The third volume also carries the London imprint of W. H. Allen and Co.^: 108

In 1901 Watt was called away from a revision of the Dictionary to organise the exhibition of Indian art at Delhi. The revision became an abridgement dealing only with commercial products, written between 1904 and 1907 and published in London in 1908 as The Commercial Products of India.

Cannabis in the Dictionary

The article Cannabis sativa fills pp. 103–126 of the second volume. It opens with the plant's names in European languages and a list of vernacular names under 20 language and provincial headings, from Hindi, Bengali and Sanskrit to Kashgari, Burmese and Sinhalese. Watt added that these names were "either given to the plant or to the forms of the narcotic. It has been found impossible to separate them for certain, and they have accordingly been left for the present in what must be admitted an unsatisfactory form."^: 155 Most of the article is quotation from earlier writers, under headings for the plant's habitat, its history, cultivation, the narcotic, the fibre, trade, oil, medicine, chemistry and food.^: 155–174

The article circulated before the volume appeared. In 1887 the Revenue and Agricultural Department printed at Simla a pamphlet, Hemp or Cannabis Sativa, Linn., Being an Enlargement of the Article in the "Dictionary of the Economic Products of India".^: 268 The Board of Revenue in Madras was sent Watt's pamphlet on hemp for remarks, and in the Punjab a Government of India reference about the draft article opened a correspondence on hemp drugs that the Punjab Government printed in January 1889.^: 82: 46

The plant and its range

The article lists Cannabis indica Lamarck as a synonym and states that "Cannabis indica has been reduced to C. sativa, the Indian plant being viewed as but an Asiatic condition of that species".^: 155–156 The plant "appears to be quite wild on the Western Himálaya and Kashmír" and is "acclimatised on the plains of India generally".^: 104 It had gone wild as a cold-season annual on rubbish heaps in Bengal.^: 156 Watt explained the difference between European and Indian hemp by climate. In his account the same species gave fibre in Europe while its chief value in Asia was the narcotic, which made hemp "one of the most notable illustrations of the effect of climate" on a plant's chemistry.^: 156–157

Where each form came from

Watt assigned each trade form to a region. Ganja came from the cultivated plant in Eastern Bengal, the Central Provinces and Bombay. Charas came from the cultivated plant in the mountain tracts of Nepal, Kashmir, Ladakh and Afghanistan. Bhang came from the wild plant on the lower hills, especially in the North-West Provinces, the Punjab and Madras.^: 156 He held that the chief seats of commercial hemp cultivation were Eastern Bengal, the Central Provinces and Bombay, and that writers who stressed the crop of Garhwal, the Punjab and Kashmir had largely overlooked them.^: 159–160

For the cultivation of ganja in Bengal Watt abstracted Hem Chunder Kerr's report of 1877, which he called "a valuable treatise".^: 160 The abstract describes the nursery, transplanting and manuring of the crop and the removal of the male plants by an expert known as the ganja-doctor (poddar or parakdar).^{: 160–161: 109–110} For the hemp grown in Kumaon and Garhwal he quoted E. T. Atkinson, who distinguished two varieties there, the wild and the cultivated, the wild being "practically useless either for the fibre or the drug". From J. F. Duthie and J. B. Fuller he took the account of a fibre crop whose male plants (phúl-bhang) were cut a month or six weeks before the females (gul-bhang), and whose seed pods and leaves were rubbed between the hands for charas.^{: 162–163: 112}

Ganja, charas and bhang

In Watt's definitions, ganja is the female flowering tops with their resin; charas is the resin found on the leaves, young twigs, bark and young fruits; and bhang is the mature leaves, in some places with the fruits, but not the twigs.^: 163 Following Kerr, he described the treading of flat ganja and the rolling of round ganja in Bengal, and the loose fragments called chúr or rorá, which paid a higher duty than round ganja. He suggested that the fragments of chúr probably existed "in a slightly different chemical state" and more nearly resembled charas than ganja.^: 164 From Atkinson he recorded two sorts of ganja sold in the North-Western Provinces: pattar, imported from Holkar's territories, and the dearer bilúchar from Lower Bengal.^: 165

For charas Watt drew on correspondents. A Mr Dalgleish told Watt that at Yarkand and Kashgar the charas was beaten from the flowering twigs onto cloth in the form of a fine greyish powder, then stored in bags and pressed into bales for export. Dr Gimlette, the Residency Surgeon at Kathmandu, reported that in Nepal the resin was rubbed from the flowering tops by hand, and that the momea sold in the Kathmandu bazaars was not a preparation of hemp, although earlier writers had given that name to a fine Nepal charas.^: 165–166 Watt stated that charas was collected in Sind and Central India by men running through the fields, said to wear leather aprons, and that the chief supply of charas to India came from beyond the Himalaya.^: 166–167 From B. H. Baden Powell's Panjab Products he quoted an account of garda, a Punjab charas shaken from stored bhang in three sorts, surka, bhangra and khaki.^: 167

Bhang, headed in the article with its other names siddhi, sabji and sabzi, came chiefly from the wild plant. Because a man could not be held responsible for wild plants growing near his hut, Watt wrote, most bhang escaped duty. On the lower Himalayan slopes, up to 8,000 feet (2,400 m), the plant was so plentiful that it was used as bedding for cattle. Ganja and charas, which came only from the cultivated plant, could be regulated by law.^: 167–168 He summarised the excise system: licensed cultivation and manufacture, and the sale of the right to retail by annual auction, with Madras as the exception.^: 168 Bhang went into a green intoxicating drink and the sweetmeat májun and was much weaker than ganja or charas.^: 167

Fibre, trade, medicine and food

The fibre sections review the Government of India's unsuccessful experiments in raising hemp fibre on the plains from 1802 onwards. Watt proposed systematic trials, with fortnightly microscopic and chemical examination of the growing plants, to find the age at which the Indian plant's fibre was best.^{: 161–162, 168} He printed the official figures of India's foreign trade in "hemp" for 1881–86, noting that most of it was probably Manila hemp and sunn hemp.^: 169–170

Under medicine Watt quoted the Pharmacopoeia of India, William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, Robert Christison and Persian and Sanskrit authorities, then a series of opinions from medical officers across India. He argued that heavy fiscal restrictions on Bengal ganja had probably diverted the export trade to Bombay, so that the cheaper and inferior ganja of Bombay and the Central Provinces was reaching European pharmacy. He advised exporters to buy only first-quality ganja direct from the government stores of Bengal.^: 171–173 The article closes with the plant's chemistry, the roasting and eating of the seed in the hills and an Italian building material made with hemp.^: 173–174

Watt's framing

The article carries the attitudes of its compiler and of the writers he quoted. Watt called the three forms "this poisonous drug".^: 167 He repeated a derivation of "assassin" that he credited to "Mr. Sylvester de Lacy, the well-known Oriental scholar": the users of hashish were "persons who fortify themselves with hasish before performing certain ceremonies or perpetrating inhuman deeds".^: 159 In the passage on momea he linked a drug said to contain human fat to a superstition "amongst the ignorant classes of Northern India" that they might be carried off to a distant land and made into it, which officers had cited among the objections of the poorer classes to emigration.^: 166 Among the medical opinions he printed was Civil Surgeon D. Basu's that "[l]ong continued use of ganja is a prominent cause of insanity".^: 173 Chattopadhyaya reads Watt's admission about the vernacular names as a sign that colonial officials could not separate the plant, its products and the words for them, even while the Dictionary served an economic botany that tried to.^: 27–30

Reception and historiography

The House of Commons reprinted the hemp article in 1893 as the last of five papers in its return on the consumption of ganja in India, headed as "extracted from" the Dictionary, vol. II, pp. 103–126.^: 155

Officials who wrote for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission answered the article directly. T. Stoker, the excise commissioner of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, called it an "otherwise admirable monograph on the hemp plant" but held that its author had been "largely misled by fallacious conclusions from erroneous statistics" in his criticism of that government's fiscal policy. The Minister of Indore, quoted in R. H. Gunion's memorandum on Central India, wrote that the collection of charas by men in leather aprons, described at p. 116 of the second volume, was "a matter of history" in his state. Some witnesses answered the commission's questions by referring it to the Dictionary. The commission's report quoted Watt's account of the plant's range and found him less decided than David Prain in excluding India from the area where it grew wild.

Prain's Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893) rejected the view that chúr was closer to charas than to ganja. Citing the Dictionary for it, Prain wrote that the opinion had "found its way into works of the highest authority" and answered that "Chúr is gánjá".^: 10 In botany, Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist cited Watt's 1889 article among the early studies of the southern, intoxicant plants whose authors saw no merit in giving that group separate formal recognition.^: 410

R. S. Chakravarthy's 1975 article in Economic Botany called the Dictionary "a landmark in the study of the economic plants of India". Taxonomic Literature, summarising that article, states that the Dictionary was updated in The Wealth of India (1948–1973).^: 109 In Ganja Matters (2026) Chattopadhyaya opens his first chapter with Watt's words on the vernacular names, quoted from the 1887 pamphlet, and quotes his definitions of bhang and charas in describing the "standard triplex" of ganja, bhang and charas that colonial administrations adopted.^{: 25, 27–28}

Editions and availability

Cosmo Publications of Delhi reprinted the work in ten volumes in 1972. Cambridge University Press reissued it in nine parts in its Cambridge Library Collection in 2014. Scans of the original volumes are on the Internet Archive, and the hemp article can also be read in the 1893 House of Commons return.

See also

• George Watt
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Papers Relating to the Consumption of Ganja and Other Drugs in India (1893)
• Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)
• Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877)
• The Commercial Products of India

References

Bengal Presidency Central Provinces Bombay Presidency Nepal Kashmir Ladakh Afghanistan North-Western Provinces Punjab Madras Kumaon Garhwal Division Sind Yarkand Kashgar Ganja Charas Bhang Pattar ganja Biluchar ganja Flat ganja Round ganja Chur ganja Charas Garda Bhang Majun Tincture Hemp-seed oil Fibre Smoking Oral preparations Medicinal Food Excise Trade Reference work Government dictionary of economic products