Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi (1916)
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| Author | L. S. S. O'Malley(1874–1941) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Composed | c. 1915–1916 |
| Published | 1916 |
| Publisher | The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot |
| Place | Calcutta |
| Volumes | 1 (a volume of the Bengal District Gazetteers series) |
| Pages | 45, 132–133, 134–144, 191 |
|---|---|
| Chapter | ch. XII, "The Ganja Mahal" |
| Regions documented | Naogaon ganja tract (the ganja mahal) |
| Preparations | Ganja (flat and round chur); charas; bhang |
| Uses documented | Cultivation; excise and trade; religious and ascetic |
| Digital facsimile | View on BHL |
|---|
The Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi is a district gazetteer compiled by the Indian Civil Service officer L. S. S. O'Malley and published at Calcutta in 1916. It is one of the revised Bengal District Gazetteers, the standardised provincial reference series issued under the authority of the Government of Bengal. The volume describes Rajshahi, a district of the Rajshahi Division of Bengal Presidency on the right bank of the Padma; the district lay in eastern Bengal at the time of writing and today forms part of Bangladesh.[1][2]
Unlike most of the series, the volume is a cultivation source of the first rank. Rajshahi contained the ganja mahal, the Government-supervised tract in the Naogaon subdivision that was the licensed source of ganja for the greater part of British India, and O'Malley gives it a chapter of its own (ch. XII, "The Ganja Mahal," pp. 134–144).[1] That chapter is the volume's principal cannabis content; shorter references occur in the excise subsection of the General Administration chapter (pp. 132–133), in the account of the district's people (a ganja-using religious sect, p. 64), and in the place-by-place gazetteer (the Raja of Tahirpur as a member of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, p. 191).[1] O'Malley states that the chapter was compiled chiefly from Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 cultivation survey and from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894, and it is best read as a 1916 administrative digest of those two sources rather than as an independent inquiry.[1]
Composition and publication
O'Malley (1874–1941) wrote thirty of the thirty-eight volumes in the revised Bengal District Gazetteers series he superintended, most of them published between 1906 and 1911; the Rajshahi volume is one of the later ones, issued in 1916.[2] Like the rest of the series it was prepared from the existing administrative record, and the cannabis chapter draws on the two standard authorities on the subject. A footnote at the head of the chapter records that it "has been compiled chiefly from a Report on the Cultivation of Ganja by Hem Chandra Kar (1877) and the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894)".[1] The first of these is Hem Chunder Kerr's Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal, the foundational 1877 survey of the Bengal tract;[3] the second is the seven-volume report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94.[4] The gazetteer's account of the cultivation cycle and of the excise machinery follows these sources closely, with figures brought up to the second decade of the twentieth century.[1]
Structure and content
The volume follows the standardised chapter scheme shared by the Bengal District Gazetteers, with chapters covering Physical Aspects, History, The People, Public Health, Agriculture, Natural Calamities, Rents, Wages and Prices, Material Condition, Forests, Mines and Minerals, Land Revenue, General Administration, Local Self-Government and Education, followed by a place-by-place gazetteer and an index.[1] Its handling of cannabis differs from the rest of the series in degree: where O'Malley's contemporaneous Santal Parganas volume treats the drug incidentally and carries no cultivation account, the Rajshahi volume devotes a full chapter to the licensed tract.[5]
The cannabis-relevant material occupies four parts of the book. The History chapter notes the administrative consolidation of the tract (ch. II, p. 45); the chapter on The People records a ganja-using sect among the district's heterodox Muslims (p. 64); the General Administration chapter tabulates the district's intoxicant excise (pp. 132–133); and the chapter on The Ganja Mahal gives the cultivation, manufacture, administration and economy of the tract in full (ch. XII, pp. 134–144).[1] A further notice of an Indian Hemp Drugs commissioner appears in the gazetteer of places (p. 191).[1]
Cannabis in the text
The ganja mahal
The chapter defines the ganja mahal as the area in the Naogaon subdivision in which the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) was grown under Government supervision for its three products, ganja, charas and bhang.[1] It places the tract at 76 square miles across the Naogaon, Badalgachhi and Mahadebpur thanas, comprising 322 villages, with about 7,094 acres suitable for the crop; the area actually cultivated averaged some 970 acres over the preceding seven years, for a normal outturn of 8,000 maunds, against a statutory maximum then fixed by the Government of India at 1,026 acres.[1] The consolidation of the tract under a single authority is dated to 1896–97 in the History chapter, which records the transfer to Rajshahi of the Mahadebpur thana from Dinajpur and of portions of two Bogra thanas, the object being "to bring the whole area growing gánja under one jurisdiction"; the Naogaon subdivision itself had been created in 1877.[1]
The chapter sets out the markets the tract supplied, a description that places Rajshahi ganja across eastern and northern India and beyond:
The Mahal supplies not merely the needs of the whole of Bengal and Assam, but also those of Bihar and Orissa and of a part of the United Provinces; some is also exported to the Feudatory States of Orissa and Cooch Behar, and a small quantity is shipped to London, whence it is passed on to the West Indies.
The reference to export to the Feudatory State of Cooch Behar connects the tract directly to the princely excise system documented separately for that state.[1]
Cultivation and manufacture
The chapter describes the cultivation cycle in full: seedlings raised in a sandy nursery, transplanted into the field in September, then repeatedly manured and trimmed to force a pyramidal habit, with the male plants removed before pollination.[1] The last operation was carried out by a specialist, the poddar (or parakhdar), who broke over the plants he judged to be male for the cultivator to pull up; the gazetteer notes, following Kerr, that the inspection was made in the morning for the light and that the distinctions the experts drew "cannot be described with confidence".[1] Manufacture took place in fenced yards called chatars, of which the chapter records twenty, distributed among three circles; it distinguishes two grades, flat ganja (chur) made by treading and pressing the flowering tops and round ganja made by rolling them, and explains the drying and kneading as reducing the weight of the excisable article and consolidating its resin for transit.[1]
Administration, licensing and revenue
The chapter sets out the supervisory apparatus of the monopoly. The Collector of Rajshahi was ex-officio Superintendent of the ganja mahal; the Sub-divisional Officer of Naogaon was its Deputy Superintendent, with charge of cultivation, manufacture, storage and issue; and a Supervisor in direct charge was assisted by three Excise Sub-Inspectors and an Inspector of Excise, the tract being divided into three circles named Muradpur, Kirttipur and Gobindpur.[1] Cultivation was confined to licensed growers, the licences granted free of charge for a single working season and specifying each man's plots; the chapter records nearly 3,000 such cultivators across some 200 villages, each working about one bigha on average.[1] Manufactured ganja was weighed, sealed and stored in the warehouses at Naogaon, where it was sold to licensed wholesale dealers, generally through licensed brokers entitled to a brokerage of Rs 2 per maund; the dealer's purchase was sent under a pass to his gola at the headquarters of the importing district, where it was kept under double lock.[1] The chapter gives the drug as taxed at Rs 20 per seer, the cultivators' price as Rs 40 to Rs 300 per maund and the retail price as 10 to 12 annas a tola, so high a margin that O'Malley observes it made the drug "worth ⅜ths of its weight in silver"; the average yearly outturn is recorded as yielding a duty of "nearly 66 lakhs or a little under £450,000".[1] This last figure is the total duty realised on the tract's output across all the provinces it supplied, and is distinct from the revenue raised on consumption within Rajshahi district itself.[1]
The cultivators
The chapter closes with an account of the cultivators quoted from a 1904 report by G. Rainy of the Indian Civil Service, which describes them in terms unusual for a colonial revenue document:
As a class the cultivators of the Ganja Mahal are remarkable in two ways. They are singularly peaceable and law-abiding, and they are remarkably wealthy and prosperous … They are without doubt the richest and most prosperous body of peasantry in Bengal, and their wealth and prosperity is the direct gift of Government, which has made them its partners in an enormously valuable monopoly.
The passage illustrates a feature of the tract that modern scholarship has emphasised, the dependence of a prosperous small-peasant cultivating class on a state monopoly.[6] The chapter records, by way of illustration, that the cultivators subscribed Rs 5,000 towards a higher English school at Naogaon and financed local roads and bridges themselves.[1]
Excise in the district
The excise subsection of the General Administration chapter gives the consumption-side picture for Rajshahi district itself, as distinct from the production tract. For 1914–15 the total district excise revenue is recorded as Rs 3,09,000, of which country spirit furnished 46 per cent, ganja 34 per cent and opium 9 per cent; the ganja revenue from licence fees and duty came to Rs 1,05,000, raised through 7 wholesale and 45 retail licences.[1] The subsection notes that only flat chur ganja was consumed in the district, and gives contemporary wholesale and retail prices.[1] It records pachwai, or rice beer, as commonly drunk by the Oraon and Santal populations, and tabulates the licences for tari and home-brewing alongside those for the hemp drugs.[1]
A ganja-smoking sect
The chapter on the people of the district records, among notes on its heterodox Muslim groups, a small sect described as followers of Nera Fakir or Guru Safa, said to dance, sing and smoke ganja under the direction of a guru, and found at Bagmara, Tanor, Nator, Naogaon and Rampur Boalia.[1] The association of ganja with ecstatic and ascetic religious practice is the general pattern recorded across the colonial literature on Bengal;[7] the gazetteer attests its appearance in a specifically named Rajshahi sect.[1]
A member of the Hemp Drugs Commission
The gazetteer of places, in its notice of the Tahirpur family, records that Raja Sashi Shekhareshwar Ray Bahadur of Tahirpur, made a Raja in 1889 and a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, "was a member of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-94" and received the personal title of Raja Bahadur in 1896.[1] He sat as one of the commission's Indian non-official members; the notice situates a named commissioner in the district whose ganja tract the commission examined.[1]
A fibre crop returned as "hemp"
The agricultural calendar and crop statistics use the word "hemp" of sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea), the unrelated fibre legume frequently returned as "hemp" or "san" in colonial Bengal crop statistics, and not of the drug plant.[1] The drug crop is treated only in the Ganja Mahal chapter and under the excise heading; the agricultural "hemp" acreage is not evidence of drug-cannabis cultivation outside the licensed tract.
Reception and afterlife
The Bengal District Gazetteers were intended as, and became, the standard administrative description of each district, and O'Malley's volumes are used as descriptions of early-twentieth-century rural Bengal.[2] The Rajshahi chapter on the ganja mahal has remained the fullest single gazetteer account of the tract, and modern historical and agronomic studies of Naogaon ganja draw on it alongside Kerr and the Hemp Drugs Commission: Utathya Chattopadhyaya's work on the political economy of the tract,[6][8] and the historical and ethnobotanical studies of the surviving Naogaon ganja-growing community by Rahman and colleagues, all treat the tract the gazetteer describes.[9][10]
Editions and availability
The work was first published in 1916 by the Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, as one of the revised Bengal District Gazetteers.[1] A scan of the 1916 first edition is held by the Internet Archive through the Digital Library of India under the identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.206886 (also catalogued as dli.ministry.07426), the copy whose pagination is followed in this article.[1]
Significance for landrace documentation
The gazetteer's value to the documentation of South Asian cannabis is that, almost alone among the district gazetteers, it is a cultivation source. Its chapter on the ganja mahal is the most accessible gazetteer-form account of the only legal ganja-producing tract in British Bengal, the tract that supplied the whole of Bengal and Assam and parts of Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces, and from which ganja reached the Feudatory State of Cooch Behar and, in small quantity, London and the West Indies.[1] Because the chapter is an administrative digest of Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 survey[3] and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report,[4] it is a convenient secondary witness to both where those sources are otherwise hard of access, and it carries figures for the tract brought up to 1914–15. The tract lies wholly in present-day Bangladesh; the gazetteer documents the lowland cultivation system whose product moved into the territory of present-day West Bengal and the princely states on its northern margin, and complements the ethnographic and consumption-side gazetteers such as the Santal Parganas volume in the cluster of colonial Bengal cannabis records.[5]
See also
- Ganja Mahal – the licensed ganja cultivation tract the gazetteer describes
- Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877) – Hem Chunder Kerr's survey, the chapter's principal source
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission – the 1893–94 colonial inquiry, the chapter's other principal source
- Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas (1910) – O'Malley's contemporaneous volume for the aboriginal-majority district to the west
- Cannabis in West Bengal – the regional cannabis overview
- Gazetteer – the colonial Bengal gazetteers indexed for the project
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 1.31 1.32 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1916. Page references in this article follow the 1916 first edition (Internet Archive in.ernet.dli.2015.206886; also catalogued as dli.ministry.07426).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Fuller, C.J., "An Anthropologist and Historian Ahead of His Time: L. S. S. O'Malley in British India", BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris, 2023.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Kerr, Hem Chunder, Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1877. Reprinted as a Parliamentary Paper, House of Commons, 1893.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1910.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chattopadhyaya, Utathya, "Naogaon and the world: Intoxication, commoditisation, and imperialism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1840–1940," PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IX, "Social and Religious Customs," §§430–446.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya, Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India, University of California Press, Oakland, 2025. ISBN 978-0-520-42568-2.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M., Nemoto, K., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B. & Sarwar, A.K.M.G., "A History of Cannabis (Ganja) as an Economic Crop in Bangladesh from the Late 18th Century to 1989," Tropical Agriculture and Development 66(1), 2022, pp. 21–32.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M.D., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B., Sarwar, A.K.M.G. & Nemoto, K., "Traditional Cultivation and the Production System of Cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh," Tropical Agriculture and Development 67(4), 2023, pp. 99–109.
Further reading
- Chattopadhyaya, Utathya, Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India, University of California Press, Oakland, 2025.
- Kerr, Hem Chunder, Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1877.
External links
- Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi – 1916 first edition, Internet Archive (Digital Library of India)