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.[3] It was examined in detail by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94, which rejected prohibition and recommended that the Bengal system of ganja administration be generally followed in other provinces of British India, naming the Central Provinces, Madras, Bombay and Berar.[4] 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.[5]
The excise framework
The legal foundation of the trade was laid in 1790, when the British government, taking back from the landlords of Bengal the miscellaneous duties they had been collecting, continued and extended the duties on liquors and drugs, 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. A historical sketch appended to the Bengal excise memorandum in the Commission's third volume gives the aim of the duties as "to check immoderate consumption, and at the same time to augment the public revenue".[6] In 1800 the manufacture and sale of charas was prohibited as "being of a most noxious quality"; the restriction was rescinded in 1824 on the ground that charas was not more harmful than ganja or the other intoxicating drugs.[6]
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.[7] 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.[8] 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, pressed underfoot on the manufacturing ground; round ganja, rolled first underfoot and then by hand into a cylindrical form; and chur, the broken fragments. The Commission explained their relative value by purity, round ganja being freer of stick and leaf than flat and chur purer still, and in 1893 chur paid the highest rate of duty of the three. The Bengal Excise Commissioner, K. G. Gupta, attributed a recent rise in its consumption to its being more lightly taxed in proportion to its narcotic content.[9][10][3] By 1916, O'Malley recorded, the cultivators broke the flower heads off both flat and round twigs, so that the tract's product was flat chur and round chur, taxed at Rs. 20 a seer.[7] The Commission noted that the terms flat, round and chur belonged to the Bengal manufacture and excise system, and judged the manufacture most perfect in Bengal: in other provinces at least one of its three essential steps (pressing, drying and the removal of leaf) was to some degree neglected.[10][11] Charas was not made in Bengal; the province imported it from the Punjab.[12][13]
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.[citation needed] The Commission recommended that the Bengal system be generally followed in four other provinces, with the addition of government warehouses in Rajshahi for the storage of ganja.[4]
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, Sib Chunder Soor, described the cultivation and manufacture of the drug to the Commission in 1894.[14]
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.[15] 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.[15] Calcutta, the Presidency capital, was the largest single consumption market.[1]
Inter-provincial and export trade
Beyond the province, Bengal ganja went by land to Assam, Cooch Behar, Nepal and the North-Western Provinces, and by sea to London and to other ports in and beyond India.[13] The North-Western Provinces had once drawn nearly all their ganja from Bengal, but the heavy Bengal duty cut the trade, and by the 1890s the inferior but far cheaper ganja of Khandwa in the Central Provinces and of Gwalior had largely superseded it there.[16] 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.[citation needed] In 1892–93 ganja and the other hemp drugs yielded 24¼ lakhs of rupees of the 115 lakhs of excise revenue raised in the Lower Provinces, about 21 per cent and second only to country spirits.[17] 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.[15] 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 one of the subjects of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, appointed in 1893, after a question in the House of Commons, to inquire into the cultivation of the hemp plant in Bengal, the trade in its drugs, the effects of their consumption and the desirability of prohibition.[18] Bengal supplied the largest single body of evidence to the inquiry, including the testimony of supervisory officers from the Naogaon tract.[14] The Commission found that the moderate use of hemp drugs produced no injurious effects on the mind,[19] rejected prohibition in favour of control and restriction, taxing the drugs as fully as possible short of driving consumers to smuggling or to worse intoxicants,[20] and recommended that the Bengal system of ganja administration be generally followed in the Central Provinces, Madras, Bombay and Berar, with government warehouses for the Bengal crop to be built in Rajshahi.[4]
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.[8] 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, under a drug-control commitment entered into in 1974 that required it to end within 15 years.[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 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XV, "Existing systems described", paras. 592–601, pp. 291–296 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XVIII, "Summary", paras. 740–742, pp. 359–361 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum on hemp drugs in Bengal, by Mr. K. G. Gupta, Commissioner of Excise, Bengal". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. app. A, "Brief historical sketch of the modes of taxation of ganja", p. 16 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 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).
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 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 (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VIII, "Extent of use and the manner and forms in which the hemp drugs are consumed", paras. 415–429, pp. 154–158 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VI, "Preparation of the raw drugs from the cultivated and wild plant", paras. 220–225, pp. 85–87 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VI, "Preparation of the raw drugs from the cultivated and wild plant", para. 273, p. 103 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VI, "Preparation of the raw drugs from the cultivated and wild plant", para. 232, p. 91 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", paras. 278–283, pp. 107–108 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Sib Chunder Soor, Satgope, 1st Assistant Supervisor of Ganja Cultivation, Naogaon, Rajshahi". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. witness no. 84, pp. 230–235 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Pabna, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1923, pp. 95–96.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", paras. 289–291, pp. 109–111 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum on hemp drugs in Bengal, by Mr. K. G. Gupta, Commissioner of Excise, Bengal". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. para. 60, p. 13 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. I, "Introductory", para. 1, p. 1 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XIII, "Effects – moral: general summary of conclusions", para. 552, pp. 263–264 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XIV, "The policy of hemp drug administration", paras. 553–590, pp. 265–290 – via Internet Archive.