Bhang

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Wild bhang at Amritsar, photographed for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission on 23 April 1894.

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Bhang is the dried leaf of cannabis and the drinks, pastes and sweets made from it in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. It is one of the three drug preparations that colonial excise law, and the Indian statutes after it, separated by plant part: bhang from the leaves, ganja from the flowering tops and charas from the resin. Much of it was gathered from the wild growth below the Himalaya and in the north Indian plains. It was also grown as a crop in Sind and parts of Gujarat and Rajputana, and taken from the leaf and broken flower heads left over from making ganja.

In much of northern India and the Himalaya bhang is the name of the hemp plant itself, and in the 1890s it was also the name of the male plant. In the south it named any cannabis drink, whatever it was made from. In Persian bang now means hashish, and in Swahili bangi is the common word for cannabis.

Bhang was taxed lightly or not at all under British rule, and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 judged that suppressing its use would be "totally unjustifiable". The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 excludes leaves from its definition of cannabis, and bhang is licensed and sold under state excise rules in several Indian states.

Name

In Sanskrit the masculine bhaṅga is given the sense "hemp" with a citation to the Atharvaveda, and the feminine bhaṅgā is both hemp and "an intoxicating beverage (or narcotic drug commonly called 'Bhang') prepared from the hemp plant", with a citation to the Śārṅgadhara-saṃhitā. Whether the word meant the cannabis plant at that date, I. C. and R. N. Chopra wrote in 1957, "is an open question".^: 11 R. L. Turner's comparative dictionary of the Indo-Aryan languages lists the word under its own entry, separate from the homonym bhaṅga "breaking", and traces it into Pali and Prakrit and into Kashmiri, Sindhi, Punjabi, Kumaoni, Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Bihari, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi, with the senses "hemp" and "bhang". Its addenda add the Kachchhi bhaṅg, "a drink made from hemp". In Hindustani dictionaries of the 1880s bhāṅg is "the hemp plant" and "an intoxicating drink made of the leaves of hemp", and the Persian bang, with the same two senses, is derived from the Sanskrit.

The Persian word has its own history. Middle Persian texts use bang, also written mang, for a drug that is sometimes lethal and sometimes hallucinogenic, and Gherardo Gnoli relates it to Avestan baṇha and to the Atharvavedic bhaṅga; W. B. Henning disputed the connection. Its Arabic form banj was applied in older Arabic and Persian sources to three plants, hemp, henbane and jimsonweed, and Steingass's Persian dictionary has only the henbane sense for banj. The Unani schedule of India's drug rules still separates bhang (cannabis) from bazrul-banj (henbane seed).^: 301

Portuguese writers spelt the word bangue. Garcia da Orta, writing at Goa in 1563, described leaves pressed and powdered, sometimes with the seeds, and reported that Sultan Bahadur told Martim Afonso de Sousa that whenever the sultan wanted at night to go to Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Arabia or Persia he had only to take "a little Bangue".^: 55 For the work, see Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563). Hobson-Jobson quotes the word from Linschoten in 1598 onward, including John Fryer's "Bang (a pleasant intoxicating Seed mixed with Milk)" of 1673. In Ceylon, Robert Knox ate a dried leaf of which he wrote, "they call it in Portugueze Banga". When Robert Hooke described the plant to the Royal Society in 1689 he wrote that it was "call'd, by the Moors, Gange; by the Chingalese, Comsa, and by the Portugais, Bangue", and judged that it "may be said to be only Indian Hemp". Other names for the leaf and the drink include siddhi, sabzi and patti, and a deputy collector at Orai told the commission of 1893–94 that bhang was popularly called "sabzi, buti, vijia, harshni, and kamalapati"; sabzi is from the Persian for "green" and buti means "herb".^: 47

Definition and plant part

A specimen sent from the botanical garden at Saharanpur in 1889, labelled with the vernacular name Bhang.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission opened its questions to witnesses with three definitions taken from the botanist David Prain. The third read: "Siddhi, bhang, subzi, or patti are different names applied to the dry leaves of the hemp plant, whether male or female, and whether cultivated or uncultivated".^{: 59: 3–4} The commission found that the definition needed qualifying. Its witnesses applied the word to green leaves and to the female flower head too, and the male flowers entered the drug because it was made by drying whole plants and beating out the leaves. Over most of India, the commission added, the female plant was called ganja and the male plant bhang.^: 59–60 In the ganja cultivation of the Central Provinces and Berar the male plants pulled out of the crop were called bhangya or bhangra.

In Bombay the bhang of the shops was largely the broken flower heads that fell from ganja on the treading floor, "what is known in Bengal as chur", and a customer who asked for chur was handed what the shopkeeper called bhang. In the Madras Presidency the name meant almost only the drink, which was usually made from ganja, and bhang as a separate raw drug was not known. The commission's own conclusion was that "bhang is a more comprehensive term than ganja, and often includes it". It called bhang "the ancient name of the plant" and reasoned that the drug and the drink, needing no separation of the female plant, must have come before ganja and smoking.^: 60 The Government of India's resolution on the report repeated that the name "is also applied to the drink prepared by infusion" of the leaves and that in some parts of the country it was "applied to what is elsewhere called ganja".

A specimen gathered by Walter Koelz in 1931 carries the common name "Bang" in the Kulu dialect, and in Himachal Pradesh the plant is still called bhang and is used for fibre and in ritual. In 1923 India's annual report to the League of Nations called bhang "the liquid strained off mature leaves", a definition soon changed to the leaves themselves. The Chopras, surveying the Indian cannabis drugs for the United Nations, defined bhang as "the matured leaves and, in some parts of India, also the fruit of the cannabis plant", and noted that in Madras and Orissa "the name 'bhang' stands for any preparation of cannabis taken by mouth". A 2023 review calls bhang a paste of the matured leaves.

The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya argues that the three-way division was an administrative standard that did not change how speakers of the regional languages used the words, and treats ganja and bhang as "unstable nouns" whose meanings shift with context. In his account consumers used bhang for the drink and gave the foods made with the leaves longer names such as bhang masala, pakoda or bhang laddoo.^{: 2, 10, 120}

Statutory definition

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 defines "cannabis" as "the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops) from which the resin has not been extracted". The leaves are left outside that definition, but article 28(3) obliges the parties to "prevent the misuse of, and illicit traffic in, the leaves of the cannabis plant".^{: 1, 14} The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 defines ganja in the same words, "excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops", and does not name bhang.^: 225 The government's national policy on narcotic drugs states the consequence: bhang, "not made from cannabis resin or from flowering tops", is not covered by the Act, its production and sale "is permitted by many State Governments", licensees may make it "from the leaves of the wildly grown cannabis plants only", and mixing in flowering tops or resin is an offence under the Act.

Indian courts have read the Act the same way. The High Court of Karnataka summarised decisions of the Bombay High Court in 2002 and the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2004 that acquitted defendants of possessing bhang because it was not covered by the Act. In 2022 the High Court of Karnataka, granting bail on a seizure of bhang, described it as "a traditional drink" sold near Shiva temples and in lassi shops in north India, and held that until a forensic report showed it to be made from ganja or charas the court could not treat it as cannabis under the Act. The High Court of Jharkhand, setting aside a conviction in 2026 after the laboratory report called the seized material bhang, held that ganja and charas fall within the Act's definition of cannabis "whereas under N.D.P.S. Act, 'Bhang' is excluded".

Bhang is regulated instead under state excise law, as it was in the 1950s. The Uttar Pradesh retail rules define it as "the leaves and small stalks of hemp plant", let licensed shops sell it loose or as ground pellets and cap a sale at 120 grams to one person; the state's 2025–26 excise policy allots its bhang shops by e-lottery. Delhi issues a single licence for the retail vend of "hemp drugs (bhang)", defining bhang as the dried leaves "whether male or female, and whether cultivated or uncultivated", with the same 120-gram limit. Punjab's rules of 1956 limit a sale to 233 grams, forbid drinking on the premises and bar sales to anyone under 25, while Assam passed an act in 1959 to restrict bhang "with a view to effect its ultimate prohibition". The Drugs and Cosmetics Rules list bhanga "(Except seeds)" among the poisonous substances of the Ayurvedic system.^: 300

Pakistan's Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997 repeated the Single Convention's tops-only definition until an amendment of 2022 added the words "and include all forms known as bhang, siddhi or ganja"; its schedule of punishments now opens with bhang, at up to three years' imprisonment for less than a kilogram.^{: 6, 12} Pakistan's 1979 Prohibition Order had already named "the leaves, small stalks, and flowering or fruiting tops" of the plant, "including all forms known as bhang, siddhi or ganja", as intoxicants. Bangladesh's Narcotics Control Act of 2018 sets penalties for the "ganja or bhang plant" and for any drug prepared from its branches, leaves or flowers.

Making bhang

Wild cannabis in the public gardens at Amritsar, April 1894. In the Punjab the commission found bhang gathered mostly from such self-sown growth.

The commission's summary of its provincial evidence was that "bhang, whether produced by the cultivated or wild plant, is prepared by simple drying". In the North-Western Provinces the plants were cut, dried and shaken or beaten to free the leaves, by contractors or by "residents of jungly tracts for sale to licensed vendors". Wild bhang came from "the belt of wild growth below the Himalayas" and was gathered from March to June; landholders sold it to the contractors, and leaves dried under straw turned yellow where sun-dried leaves stayed green. In the Punjab most bhang came from uncultivated plants, usually cut in May. One witness said the flowering tops were preferred, and the bhang of Ambota and Gagret, of Bhimbar in Kashmir and of Gurdaspur was regarded as superior.^: 94 Landless Dalit labourers harvested the Punjab crop for the contractors.^: 53

In Bengal the leaf was gathered from wild growth in Bhagalpur, Monghyr and Purnea in two forms, dried leaves with small stalks and, for home use, the flowering shoots. The commission accepted the Excise Commissioner's view that "the use of untaxed bhang is general" and that country people collected it wherever the plant grew. A costlier preparation in which the dried leaf was boiled in milk and water and dried again was reported from Dacca and Dinajpur, but the commission judged it uncommon. The cultivators of the Ganja Mahal threw their own leaves away, since wild bhang could be had for nothing nearby and made the better drink.

Bhang was also grown. In Sind it was the most important of the three drugs, grown on an average of 262 acres for an estimated 3,000 maunds a year, and the whole plant was dried and flogged, the broken leaves, flowers and seed forming bhang and the best heads being kept apart under the name ghundi or ghundi bhang and occasionally smoked. Gujarat dried and beat its bhang crop in the same way, and the states of Rajputana grew most of the bhang they used. In 1982 the government of Madhya Pradesh set land aside for bhang farming to supply pilgrimage towns such as Ujjain. Farmers there were told to grow male plants, so that a single pollination could not lead to the whole crop being classed as ganja.^: 225

Dried bhang kept better than ganja. The Chopras put its life at three to four years out of sun and air, and wrote that the stored drug was "specially desired when joyful occasions are to be celebrated"; a Bengal excise official told the commission that its value as a medicine increased with age.

The drink

For the plain drink the drug was pounded "very fine with a little black pepper", diluted with water to the strength wanted and filtered through a cloth. It went by bhang or siddhi in Bengal, bhang, siddhi or thandai in the North-Western Provinces, bhang or ghola in the Punjab, Bombay and the Central Provinces, and, depending on its strength, ghota or panga in Sind.^: 156 Drinkers who could afford them added sugar, milk or curds and spices: anise, fennel, coriander, cucumber and melon seeds, almonds, rose petals, cloves, saffron and cardamom among them. A minority added dhatura seeds, opium or other poisons to strengthen it.^: 156–157 By the 1950s the drink was called thandai, siddhi, sawi or sukhe in the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, bhang, ghota or pang in Bombay and central India, sidhi in Bengal, dudhii in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and ramras in the south.^: 7

The north Indian thandai described by the anthropologist Khwaja Hasan was made by grinding almonds, pistachio, rose petals, black pepper, aniseed and cloves on a toothed stone plate, thinning the paste with water, dissolving it in milk and then adding the bhang.^: 240 In Pakistan the dried leaves were soaked, warmed without boiling and rinsed in running water before grinding.^: 352

Eaten bhang

Bhang was also eaten. The simplest form was the leaf pounded with spices and swallowed as a bolus, sometimes with molasses, which habitual drinkers did on a journey or when they could not prepare the drink; in the Punjab, Berar and Bombay the paste was called fakki or fanki.^: 158 Sweetmeats made by extracting the drug with heat into sugar and milk were widely eaten, the commonest being majum, "known by that name from one end of India to the other".^: 158 The Chopras added bhang halwa, made from the drug boiled in jaggery syrup, curries made with leaves ground on the curry stone, and ice-cream sold in large towns in the hot weather.^: 8 In north India small raw balls of bhang were eaten with sweets, and an ice-cream laced with bhang was called hari gulfi, "green ice cream".^: 240–241 In the Himalaya bhang pakoras were made of leaves mixed with chickpea flour, small balls of crushed fresh leaves were sold in the markets in summer, and porters chewed the leaves on high passes.^: 207–208

Excise and control in British India

Main article: Bengal Presidency cannabis trade

A licensed hemp drug shop in Khandesh with bhang, ganja and majum displayed, 1894.

Bengal's Regulation XXXIV of 1793 brought "intoxicating drugs", a category that included bhang, ganja and raw opium, into the excise rules, and Regulation VI of 1800 added that they were known locally under other names such as subjee and majoom.^: 92 In Bengal later in the 19th century, Peter Hynd writes, bhang, "being less potent and easy enough for anybody to produce from wild cannabis plants, was subject to few restrictions and paid the lowest rate of duty".^: 31 From 1876 annual retail licences for ganja and bhang were sold at auction.^: 107 Bombay's Abkari Act of 1878 counted bhang among its "intoxicating drugs", and the Bombay act of 1901 set the duty on bhang at half a rupee a seer, against two rupees on charas and four on ganja.^: 47–48

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission found bhang the hardest of the three drugs to control in Bengal, Assam, the North-Western Provinces and the Punjab, because of "large spontaneous growth in the mountainous and submontane tracts". Bengal levied eight annas a seer on bhang brought to the government storehouses, which the commission judged "but a small fraction of what is illicitly consumed". On the question of prohibition the commission concluded that "the suppression of the use of bhang would be totally unjustifiable", and that the excessive use of ganja and charas had been more harmful than that of bhang. The Government of India agreed and declined to prohibit it. The resolution set out the commission's recommendations that a duty be levied on bhang "where possible" and that the legal limit of possession be a quarter of a seer of bhang, against five tolas of ganja or charas. In Bengal, it noted, there was no licensed cultivation for bhang, which came from the North-Western Provinces or from the wild growth north of the Ganges, and "practically bhang is under little control". It doubted that the wild growth should be destroyed, "considering the generally innocuous character of bhang".

Bhagalpur in Bihar remained a source. A "Bhaugulpore farm" produced bhang cakes there under a monopoly negotiated in 1930. In 1933 a larger area was sanctioned to grow ganja and bhang for western Bengal and the United Provinces. In 1936 the Ganja Society won the exclusive right to supply both drugs in Bengal.^: 219–220 Bhang was used extensively in Uttar Pradesh, the Punjab, Sind, Rajasthan and Bengal, but the quantity recorded fell from 584,332 lb in 1934–35 to 128,407 lb in 1954. Collecting it from wild plants for sale was by then permitted only under licence in the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.^: 28 The All-India Narcotics Conference of 1956 resolved that non-medical use of bhang should be prohibited across the country by 31 March 1961, two years after ganja. Since 1985, Chattopadhyaya writes, the federal and state governments have strengthened control of the leaves for bhang within state-licensed retail shops while policing ganja and charas severely.^: 228

Consumption

The Government of India's instructions to the commission referred to the Bengal custom of offering "an infusion of bhang to every guest and member of the family on the last day of the Durga Puja", and the Bengal evidence confirmed it. In Bihar, where Holi was "observed more generally", bhang was commonly drunk at the festival and at Diwali, the Sankrantis, weddings and other family occasions. At Puri it was used by the attendants and worshippers of Jagannath, and in Orissa siddhi sweetmeats were offered to Ganesh at Ganesh Chaturthi.^: 160 In the North-Western Provinces the commission found "overwhelming evidence" of almost universal use at Holi, with its witnesses evenly divided on whether this was social custom or religious duty.^: 161–162 In the Punjab bhang was drunk at Holi, Dasehra and Diwali, and among Sikhs "the use of bhang as a beverage appears to be common, and to be associated with their religious practices".^: 162 In Gujarat bhang water was poured over the lingam on Shivaratri, and in Karachi bhang was offered to all comers at weddings and gatherings and given free at temples.^: 164–165 The commission concluded that in northern India "the use of bhang is more or less common everywhere in connection with the social and religious customs of the people", and that a large section of the community held it essential to some observances.

J. M. Campbell, a Bombay revenue and customs collector writing for the commission, framed the plant as holy "to the Hindu". He recorded that among the higher classes of Gujarat Hindus the bride's family sent bhang to the bridegroom's party during the wedding, and that in Bombay the pouring of bhang over the lingam was rarely performed outside the Bhuleshwar and Babulnath temples.^: 250–252 In the 1950s the drink was still poured on the Shivalinga through the night of Shivaratri and offered by Banias and Bhatias to Baldev. Orthodox Hindus forbidden alcohol took it after a fast, and some Hindu and Sikh temples and Muslim shrines served it "much after the fashion of punch, from a common bowl". Labourers on building and excavation work took "a glass of bhang towards the evening".

Shudra and untouchable castes did not join the thandai parties of the twice-born castes and held their own. In the village near Lucknow that Hasan studied in 1959–60, regular users were "negligible", no more than four in a population of 1,190, and both ganja and bhang could be bought in small quantities from licensed dealers.^{: 238, 241, 245} In Pakistan, Munir Khan and his colleagues found the villagers of Khanpur "almost exclusively bhang drinkers", taking on average six tumblers a day with more in the summer, while men in Lahore drank bhang with friends at uddas and smoked charas at work.^: 347–348 In Nepal schoolchildren drank bhang at Krishna Ashtami, and pilgrims from India gave cannabis to sadhus at Shivaratri in Kathmandu.^: 252 Bhang drinks of milk, sugar, cream, spices and nuts are common in northern and central India today, alongside sweetmeats made with clarified butter.^: 227

Outside South Asia

In Iran bang came to mean hashish. A drink called bangāb was made by boiling cannabis leaves in water or milk, or by stirring powdered bang into water, and by the 1980s Iranian usage did not distinguish bang from hashish or čars. In present-day Iranian speech the hashish smoker is the bangi.^{: 272, 279} In Afghanistan the penal code of 1924–25 brought charse and bhang under government regulation and taxed them at 50 per cent,^: 187–188 and farmers in the west of the country name a cannabis variety Bangi Herati.^: 15

In east and central Africa the word names cannabis itself. Brian du Toit grouped the African names into three regions, a southern one using dagga, a western one using diamba and an east-central one using forms of bangi, among them Tsonga mbange, Shona mbanji and Swahili banghi. He suggested that the word might have reached east Africa as a name pointing to the plant's Indian origin.^{: 81–82, 85–86, 101} For the history of these names, see Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis sativa in Southern Africa (1975) and Diamba. In Kenya cannabis is called bhang in English, in court reporting and official studies alike. A 1996 assessment for the United Nations found that "the urban demand for bhang has led to its large commercial production in rural areas". In Tanzania the drug-control authority calls it bangi.

In 1922 bhang came to official notice in the Straits Settlements, prompting an enquiry in the Netherlands Indies, and the Netherlands Indies drug ordinance of 1927 listed bhang among the preparations of "Indian hemp" resin it controlled.^: 11 In Jamaica bhang was the mildest of three grades, below ganja and kali.

See also

• Bhangolu
• Cannabis cultivation
• Charas
• Ganja
• Hashish
• Hemp
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Kif
• Siddhi
• Vijaya