Bengal Presidency cannabis trade
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Bengal Presidency cannabis trade refers to the licensed, excise-regulated commerce in cannabis preparations - ganja, bhang and charas - across the Bengal Presidency under East India Company and Crown rule, from the consolidation of Company authority in the late eighteenth century to Partition in 1947. From the 1790s the colonial state taxed cannabis through a licensing system inherited from Mughal-era *abkari* (excise) practice, and over the nineteenth century it confined licensed cultivation to a single small tract in northern Bengal, the Ganja Mahal around Naogaon, while the manufactured product was distributed and consumed across the Presidency and beyond.[1][2]
The trade was built on a graduated excise duty levied at the point of issue from licensed warehouses, on a small body of wholesale dealers who carried the drug under transport permit, and on a network of licensed retail shops. It was examined in detail by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94, which rejected prohibition and recommended that the Bengal model of confined cultivation, warehouse monopoly and high duty be extended to the other provinces of British India.[3] Although it generated significant revenue, the cannabis trade was always far smaller than the opium trade that dominated colonial fiscal policy in Bengal.[1] Because the licensed cultivation belt lay entirely within what is now Bangladesh, the two provinces that took the name "Bengal" after Partition stood in different relations to the trade: West Bengal retained the principal consumption markets and the wholesale and retail infrastructure, while the production tract passed to East Pakistan.[1]
Pre-monopoly trade, c.1722–1789
The earliest written notice of cannabis cultivation in Bengal identified in colonial records dates from 1722, when the East India Company conducted experimental trials of hemp as a fibre crop.[2] James H. Mills describes a divided late-eighteenth-century Company interest: a sustained but unsuccessful attempt by the Calcutta Botanic Garden to grow European-style fibre hemp on the Bengal plain, and a parallel willingness to tax the existing peasant trade in narcotic ganja.[1]
Before any formal monopoly the trade was scattered and taxation was overlaid on the Mughal-era *abkari* farms that the Company inherited. The major early production zone was around Jessore in southern Bengal, where the tracts of Keshabpur, Fakirhat and Noyapara are estimated to have produced some 2,000 to 2,400 tonnes of cannabis annually before the 1870s; the Jessore industry was suppressed in 1875 as administrative consolidation shifted licensed cultivation north to the Naogaon area of Rajshahi district.[2] Cultivation in this phase occurred on lands held under tenure from *zamindari* estates created by the Permanent Settlement of 1793, and large revenue-paying landlords were central intermediaries; the detail of pre-1860s tenancy arrangements is poorly documented in surviving published sources and has been reconstructed mainly from Bengal Board of Revenue files.[4]
The excise framework
The legal foundation of the trade was laid in 1790, when duties on alcohol and other intoxicating drugs were first levied by the British on landlords in Bengal, and in 1793, when Regulation XXXIV of 1793 - part of the Cornwallis Code - specified that no person was to manufacture or sell bhang, ganja, charas or other intoxicating drugs without a licence from the collector of the district. The Commission's own historical chapter records that the system was introduced "with a view to check immoderate consumption, and at the same time to augment the public revenue."[5] In 1800 the manufacture and sale of charas was prohibited as being of a noxious quality; the restriction was rescinded in 1824 on the ground that charas was not more harmful than ganja or the other intoxicating drugs.[5]
Across the first half of the nineteenth century the licensing of manufacture and sale was tightened through a succession of excise regulations, the trade being progressively narrowed to a single licensed source. The arrangements were codified for cultivation under Bengal Act VII of 1878 and for vend through the contemporaneous excise rules, which together fixed the duty structure, the warehousing requirement and the licensing of wholesale and retail dealers that defined the trade for the rest of the colonial period.[1]
Production and the Ganja Mahal
By the 1850s licensed cultivation had been consolidated into a small tract in northern Bengal, administratively designated the Ganja Mahal, lying across the boundaries of the old Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts with its headquarters at Naogaon.[6] Within the tract cultivation was permitted only on land specified in a written licence, and was organised on a three-circle rotation that limited supply and simplified inspection.[7] The tract was the sole licensed origin of the manufactured ganja that supplied the Presidency trade; its cultivation system, manufacture and revenue administration are treated in the dedicated article.
Bengal ganja was traded in three grades, distinguished for duty purposes: flat ganja, the bulk product, pressed into cakes on the manufacturing platform; round ganja, rolled into cylindrical form, the long-stalked variety commanding the highest price; and *chur* ganja, the resinous fragments collected from the platform floor and sold at lower duty.[6] The Commission regarded the flat and round ganja of Bengal as distinct from the charas of Punjab and Yarkand and from the inferior unmanufactured ganja of the Bombay and Madras presidencies.[8]
Wholesale distribution and the gola system
Manufactured ganja could not enter the trade directly. It was deposited under guard in licensed warehouses, the *gola*, kept by a warehouse-keeper and supervised by the Ganja Supervisor and the Excise Department. A wholesale dealer (*mahajan*) required two further licences: one to purchase the drug at the gola, and one to transport it outside the Mahal. Duty was levied at the point of issue from the warehouse, before the drug passed to the retail vendors.[1] The structure gave the administration a single chokepoint at which to count stock, assess duty and detect leakage, and it is the feature the Commission most often held up as a model.[5]
Wholesale dealers converged on the Mahal during the marketing season, which ran from about January to April after the harvest, to buy product at the gola and dispatch it under transport permit.[1] The first assistant supervisor of cultivation at Naogaon described the warehousing and dispatch arrangements to the Commission in 1894.[9]
Markets and distribution within Bengal
From the Mahal the drug moved by river, road and, from the 1870s, by the Eastern Bengal Railway and its branch to Santahar. River carriage along the Jamuna and its tributaries was the principal artery. The Commission and later studies identify the principal sales points within Bengal as Dhaka, Tangail, Madaripur, Faridpur, Pabna, Santahar, Khulna, Jessore, Darsona, Chittagong, Comilla, Barishal, Mymensingh, Parbatipur, Sylhet, Sunamganj and Srimangal.[2]
Pabna, immediately south of the Mahal, illustrates the retail end of the trade in a consumption district. Its 1923 gazetteer records district excise revenue of Rs. 2,22,000 in 1919–20, of which Rs. 1,12,000 was derived from hemp drugs, mainly ganja, against Rs. 83,000 from country spirits - hemp drugs thus out-earning country liquor in the district.[10] Average annual consumption was about one-sixth of a *seer* of hemp drugs per hundred persons, and licensed hemp-drug shops stood at one to every 8 square miles in the urban areas of the district and one to every 54 square miles in the rural areas.[10] Calcutta, the Presidency capital, was the largest single consumption market.[1]
Inter-provincial and export trade
Beyond Bengal, Naogaon ganja moved overland into the United Provinces, Bihar and the Central Provinces, where it competed with the ganja of Bombay (Ahmednagar) and Madras (Arcot and Guindy).[11] Burma was a contested market: under the Burma Excise Act of 1873 the cultivation, sale and possession of ganja were prohibited in Lower Burma, and smuggling from the Bengal Mahal across the Bay of Bengal and overland by way of Chittagong remained a continuing administrative concern.[1]
Smaller export movements of Bengal ganja reached the indentured-labour destinations of Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji and Natal, and British and American pharmaceutical houses such as Squire and Sons and Burroughs Wellcome drew on Bengal supply for medical *Cannabis indica* preparations.[1] The Bengal trade was conducted throughout in plant matter rather than in extracted resin, which distinguished it from the charas trade of the northwest.[1]
Revenue
The trade was a settled source of excise income. Across the 1860s the Government of Bengal collected on average about Rs. 1,000,000 a year in duty on ganja shops and gola issues.[5] The Pabna figures for 1919–20, in which hemp drugs out-earned country spirits, indicate the weight the retail trade could carry in a single consumption district.[10] Set against the wider colonial revenue system, however, the cannabis trade was minor: it was consistently dwarfed by the opium trade, which by the 1840s was the second largest source of revenue for the Government of India, and the administration's interest in cannabis was always subordinate to its interest in opium.[1]
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and the trade
The trade was the central subject of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, appointed in 1893 after a parliamentary question on the effects of ganja and the desirability of prohibiting its growth and sale.[3] Bengal supplied the largest single body of evidence to the inquiry, including the testimony of supervisory officers from the Naogaon tract.[9] The Commission found no trustworthy basis for a connection between the moderate use of hemp drugs and insanity, rejected prohibition, and recommended that the Bengal regulatory model - licensed cultivation confined to a small area, a monopoly gola system and a graduated duty pitched as high as the suppression of smuggling would allow - be extended to the other provinces.[3]
Decline and Partition
The interwar decades brought a slow administrative tightening and a sustained fall in output, from a peak of about 880 tonnes in 1858 to roughly 170 tonnes by 1947.[7] India was a party to the International Opium Convention concluded at Geneva in 1925, which for the first time placed cannabis, described in the convention as "Indian hemp," under international control alongside opium and cocaine.[1]
Partition in 1947 divided the trade along the Radcliffe Line. The entire licensed cultivation tract and its gola warehouses passed to East Pakistan, while West Bengal retained the principal consumption markets and the wholesale and retail vending infrastructure, including Calcutta and the Hooghly riverside.[1] Licensed cultivation continued in East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, through the Ganja Society until it was wound down in 1987 in compliance with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.[2]
See also
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 Mills, James H., Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 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.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. III, "Appendices, Miscellaneous." (Wellcome/NLS scan, archive identifier b32222920_0003.)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1916. Page references follow the 1916 first edition (Internet Archive in.ernet.dli.2015.206886; also catalogued as dli.ministry.07426).
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 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.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. III, "Production and Area of Cultivation."
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. IV, Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam, Witness 84, Sib Chandra Soor, First Assistant Supervisor of Ganja Cultivation, Naogaon, pp. 230–258.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Pabna, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1923, pp. 95–96.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IV, "Cultivation in each Province."