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Cannabis in India

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Two men at a whitewashed shopfront, one seated in the doorway beside a hand balance, with stoppered glass jars and two shallow metal bowls of dark loose material set out on a striped cloth over the counter.
A licensed hemp drug shop in Khandesh, in the Bombay Presidency, with bhang, ganja and majum on sale; plate from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894.
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Cannabis in India covers the growing, preparation, use and regulation of cannabis in India. Indian usage and Indian law divide the plant's drug products by the part of the plant they are taken from: bhang from the leaves, ganja from the flowering tops and charas from the resin.[1]: 3–4[2] The plant grows wild below the Himalaya and across the northern plains, and is grown as a crop in the Himalayan valleys, the hills of the north-east, the hill districts on either side of the Andhra Pradesh–Odisha border and the forests of the southern Western Ghats.

Cannabis entered the Sanskrit medical literature around the 11th century. Under the East India Company and the Crown the hemp drugs were licensed and taxed instead of prohibited, and Bengal confined the growing of ganja to one tract, the Ganja Mahal around Naogaon. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 recommended control and taxation, and found the use of bhang bound up with the social and religious customs of northern India. The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 prohibits the cultivation of the plant and dealing in ganja and charas except as the Act allows. Its definition of cannabis excludes the leaves, and bhang is sold under state excise licences.

Bhang is offered to Shiva and drunk at Maha Shivaratri, Holi and other festivals, and smoking ganja and charas in the clay chilam is part of the life of many sadhus. The police and excise departments of several states destroy thousands of acres of the crop each year. Since 2017 some states have allowed the plant to be grown under licence for research, medicine or industrial use.

Plant parts and their names

Main articles: Bhang, Ganja and Charas
Black-and-white photograph of tall, loosely branched cannabis plants with narrow, divided leaves growing thickly under trees.
Wild cannabis at Amritsar, photographed for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission on 23 April 1894. Wild growth of this kind supplied much of the bhang of northern India.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission took its definitions of the three drugs from the botanist David Prain. Ganja was the dried flowering tops of cultivated female plants; charas was the resin, collected separately; and bhang, also called siddhi, subji and patti, was the dry leaves of the plant, male or female, cultivated or wild.[1]: 3–4[3] In use the words were looser. Over most of India the female plant was called ganja and the male plant bhang.[3]: 59–60 In Bombay the bhang of the shops was largely the broken flower heads that fell from ganja on the treading floor,[4] and in the Madras Presidency the name meant almost only the drink, which was usually made from ganja.[5] The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya treats the three-way division as an administrative standard that did not change how speakers of the regional languages used the words.[6]: 2, 10, 120

Ganja of good quality needs a tended crop, while ganja of an inferior kind can be made from wild growth.[7] Removing the male plants before they shed pollen is what makes the difference in its quality.[8] In the Himalaya charas is rubbed off the flowering tops between the palms of the hands, and in Yarkand and elsewhere in Eastern Turkestan the dried plants were beaten over cloth; in the 1890s these were the only two methods in use "on any considerable scale".[9] Nearly all the charas consumed in British India then came from Central Asia through the Punjab, and the Commission called it "practically a foreign article".[7][10] Ganja and charas were smoked mixed with tobacco in the chilam, a conical clay pipe held upright in both hands so that the lips never touch the clay.[11]: para. 416[12]: 242 Bhang is drunk in milk with sugar, cream, spices and nuts across northern and central India, and eaten in sweets made with clarified butter.[6]: 227

The Sanskrit names of the plant include bhaṅgā, vijayā, mātulānī, jayā, indrāśana and, from the 16th century, gañjā.[13] The Sanskritist G. Jan Meulenbeld judged vijayā "almost useless in tracing the history of Cannabis in India, since this name is applied to a number of quite unrelated plants".[13]

Growing regions

Two people stand among tall green plants, one with arms raised into the foliage.
Villagers rubbing charas from standing plants at Tosh, in the Parvati Valley of Himachal Pradesh, September 2011.

In the 1890s bhang was the hardest of the three drugs to control in Bengal, Assam, the North-Western Provinces and the Punjab, because of the "large spontaneous growth in the mountainous and submontane tracts".[14] Ganja was then grown under licence in Bengal and on a smaller scale in the Bombay Presidency, the Central Provinces, the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, Sind and Madras.[15] A Narcotics Control Bureau official said in 2021 that cannabis cultivation in India was "largely concentrated around the Maoist-affected Andhra-Odisha border".[16]

The Himalaya

See also: Western Himalayas and Eastern Himalayas

In the 19th century hemp in the Kullu Valley was a fibre crop, grown in small patches near houses and made into rope and sandals, and the valley was the main route by which charas from Ladakh and Yarkand reached the Punjab.[17][18][19] Wild stands in the Manikaran valley of Kullu District are still used for fibre, food, medicine and ritual.[20] Hand-rubbed resin is made in the Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh, among them the Parvati and Malana valleys.[21]: 9[22]: 508 The sociologist Prasenjeet Tribhuvan, who did fieldwork in the Parvati Valley, called it "the crux of charas cultivation and trade in the district", with more than 70 villages.[22]: 505, 508 The anthropologist Richard Axelby dates the adoption of commercial cannabis growing at Malana to the late 1970s.[23]: 54

Along the Jhelum and its side streams in Kashmir hemp grew wild in the 19th century, and the state leased out the right to cut it and make gard bhang from the leaves; the state told the Commission that hemp was not cultivated there.[24] Cannabis is now grown in the valley in fields, in orchards and on forest land.[25][26]

Bengal plains and the Dooars

See also: North Bengal Plains and The Dooars
Landrace cannabis plants growing in an open field.
Cannabis growing near Looksan in the Dooars, northern West Bengal, 2025.

In the princely state of Cooch Behar cannabis grew wild as a weed of the sub-Himalayan belt.[27] The state prohibited commercial cultivation and bought its ganja from the Ganja Mahal in neighbouring Rajshahi.[28][29] The licensed ganja tract of colonial Bengal, around Naogaon, is now in Bangladesh.[8]

The north-east

See also: Brahmaputra Valley, Shillong Plateau, and Indo-Burman Range

In 1893 J. J. S. Driberg, Assam's Commissioner of Excise, told the Commission that besides the excise ganja the government had to deal with "the so-called wild ganja, which grows luxuriantly in the plains districts", and with hill ganja smuggled down from the surrounding hills.[30] In 2005 the South Asia office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described cannabis as "widely cultivated" in Manipur and Meghalaya.[31] A 2014 case study of a village in Ukhrul District of Manipur found that, with no other means of livelihood, ganja had been the mainstay of many families in the district for decades.[32]

The Eastern and Western Ghats

See also: Eastern Ghats and Western Ghats

In the 1890s the Board of Revenue in Madras reported that the Khonds of the hill tracts of Ganjam grew the plant "on a large scale for smoking and for barter in the low country".[33] In 2019 the crop covered over 10,000 acres in 200 villages of the Visakhapatnam agency, the hill country now in Alluri Sitharama Raju District.[34] In Odisha it is planted at the end of July in remote hill plots, and the flowers are picked about five months later.[35] Ganja from Idukki District in Kerala is sold as Idukki Gold; locally the plant is called neela chadayan.[36] Writing in Down To Earth in 1994, P. R. J. Pradeep said that ganja cultivation was "spelling doom for the richest pockets of the rainforests in the southern parts of the Western Ghats".[37]

The Deccan and Malwa

See also: Deccan, Malwa, and Nimar

Apart from about twelve acres grown for bhang in Surat and Broach, the hemp cultivation of the Bombay Presidency in the 1890s was "practically confined to the Deccan or Central Division", most of it in Ahmednagar and Satara.[38] In the same years ganja was grown in the Indore State north of Indore, and an agency surgeon told the Commission that cultivation went on all over Malwa.[39] In the ganja fields of the Central Provinces the male plants pulled out of the crop were called bhangya or bhangra.[40]

Texts and travellers before 1790

Main articles: Cannabis in Ayurveda and Tantric cannabis use in India

Whether the plant appears in the Vedic texts is disputed. Monier-Williams gives the Sanskrit bhaṅga the sense "hemp" with a citation to the Atharvaveda,[41] but whether the word meant the cannabis plant at that date, I. C. and R. N. Chopra wrote in 1957, "is an open question".[42]: 11 In Meulenbeld's analysis the drug is absent from the early medical compendia. The first reference that he and Dominik Wujastyk accept as certain is in a Bengali work of the 11th or 12th century, and from the 14th century cannabis is common in the medical literature.[13]: 60[43]: 56–57, 60 The plant appears in the Sanskrit alchemical and Tantric literature from about the 12th century, and in Bengali Śākta ritual texts codified between roughly the 11th and 18th centuries.[43][44] George Abraham Grierson, who searched Sanskrit and Hindi literature for the Commission, found the word ganja first in the Rajanighantu, which he dated to about 1300.[45]

An appendix to the Government of India's excise papers of 1890 quoted a translation of the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shah in which Sultan Aláuddin, after forbidding the drinking and sale of wine, "also prohibited bagui and hemp (bhang), as also gambling".[46] Chattopadhyaya writes that Mughal abkari was a simple market tax.[6] At Goa the physician Garcia de Orta described bangue in his Colloquies of 1563, a powder of the leaves sometimes taken with the seeds and with spices, camphor or opium.[47] Thomas Bowrey, trading on the Coromandel Coast in the 1670s, wrote that at Masulipatam bangha grew along the coast and in Bengal, while gangah was brought from Sumatra and sold at "five times the price".[48]

Licence and excise, 1790–1947

Main articles: Cannabis in colonial India and Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
Black-and-white photograph of men cutting tall cannabis plants in a field
Gathering the ganja crop at Naogaon in the Ganja Mahal, 16 February 1894, from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

On 19 April 1790 the government of Bengal took back from the zamindars and tax farmers the right to tax spirits and drugs. Regulation XXXIV of 1793 forbade anyone to make or sell bhang, ganja, charas or other intoxicating drugs without a licence from the Collector.[46][49] By 1875 ganja was grown in Bengal only in a compact tract in the Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts,[50] the Ganja Mahal centred on Naogaon, which became the licensed source of ganja for the greater part of British India.[51] Retail licences were sold at auction from 1876, and the fixed duty on ganja was raised five times up to 1892–93.[52] In 1890 the Government of India called the drug "far more injurious in its effects than spirit or than any other drug commonly consumed".[53] In Bengal bhang, easy to make from wild plants, was subject to few restrictions and paid the lowest rate of duty.[54]: 31

The Commission, appointed in 1893, was told to test the opinion that the drugs often caused lunacy. It found that the asylum returns rested largely on police reports and accepted 98 of the 222 admissions of 1892 that had been attributed to hemp drugs.[55] The historian James H. Mills has argued that attributing insanity to cannabis in the asylums was an administrative expedient resting on police information.[56] The Commission recommended control and taxation instead of prohibition.[57] It judged that "the suppression of the use of bhang would be totally unjustifiable".[7] The Government of India declined to prohibit bhang,[58] and held in 1895 that "the Bengal system of administration is the one which should be generally followed".[59] In Burma, then governed from India, ganja had been prohibited from 1873–74, and the Commission found that the prohibition "has not been effectual".[60]

At Geneva in 1925 India could not accept proposals to confine Indian hemp to medical and scientific use "in so far as they affect the methods of internal restriction applied by the various Governments in India".[61] The Dangerous Drugs Act, 1930 saved any provincial law that imposed a further or greater restriction "on the consumption of or traffic in any dangerous drug within British India".[62] The Congress resolution adopted at Karachi in 1931 declared that "Intoxicating drinks and drugs shall be totally prohibited, except for medicinal purposes". The Government of India Act 1935 left excise on liquor and drugs to the provinces, the Constitution kept that allocation, and the Constituent Assembly made prohibition a Directive Principle in Article 47.[6] Partition in 1947 left the Naogaon growers in East Pakistan, cut off from a large part of their market in western Bengal and the rest of India.[6]

Indian indentured labourers took the chilam and its name to Jamaica and Trinidad.[63]: 16[64]: 188 Lambros Comitas traced the "ganja complex" of Jamaica to the subcontinent, and Michael Beaubrun pointed to the "Hindu names" ganja, kali and chilam still used on the island.[65][66]

Prohibition by plant part, 1947 to the present

Main article: Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985

From independence to 1985

A review of the legal trade in narcotics published in the Bulletin on Narcotics in 1957 named India "by far the largest consumer" among the countries still using cannabis for medical or quasi-medical purposes.[67] The recorded quantity of bhang fell from 584,332 lb in 1934–35 to 128,407 lb in 1954, and collecting it from wild plants for sale was by then permitted only under licence in the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.[42]: 28 The All-India Narcotics Conference of 1956 resolved that the non-medical use of bhang should be prohibited across the country by 31 March 1961, two years after ganja.[68]

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 defines cannabis as the flowering or fruiting tops of the plant, "excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops".[69]: 1 Dave Bewley-Taylor, Tom Blickman and Martin Jelsma write that India opposed a ban on the traditional use of bhang during the drafting, and that the exclusion of the leaves let that use continue.[70]: 21 India made the reservation under article 49 that let a party permit the non-medical use of cannabis for a time,[71] a use that had to end within 25 years of the treaty's entry into force.[69]: art. 49 The United Nations Commentary puts that deadline at 12 December 1989.[72]: 470

In Chattopadhyaya's account the government had begun drafting a new narcotics law by December 1983, and the bill introduced by the finance minister V. P. Singh in August 1985 passed both houses quickly with little debate.[6]: 226 The President assented to the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act on 16 September 1985 and it came into force on 14 November 1985.[73] It repealed the Opium Acts of 1857 and 1878 and the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930.[74]

The Act and the states

The Act defines "cannabis (hemp)" as charas, ganja and any mixture or drink made from them. Its definition of ganja, "the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops)", repeats the Single Convention.[2] The Act forbids anyone to cultivate the plant or to produce, possess, sell, transport or consume a narcotic drug except for medical or scientific purposes and as the Act and its rules allow.[75] Each state may by rules permit and regulate the cultivation of the plant and dealings in cannabis other than charas, and may confine cultivation to cultivators it has licensed.[76][77] The Government may allow the plant to be grown for fibre, seed or horticulture.[78] Unlicensed cultivation carries rigorous imprisonment of up to ten years, and the penalty for possessing or dealing in cannabis rises with the quantity.[79] A notification of 2001 sets the small and commercial quantities at 1,000 grams and 20 kilograms for ganja and at 100 grams and 1 kilogram for charas.[80]: 16–17, 19

The Act does not name bhang.[81][6]: 225 The government's National Policy on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances states that bhang, being "not made from cannabis resin or from flowering tops", is not covered by the Act, and that many state governments permit its production and sale. A licensee may make it only from the leaves of wild plants, and anyone who mixes flowering tops or resin into it is punishable under the Act.[82]: para. 21 The High Courts of Bombay, Punjab and Haryana, Karnataka and Jharkhand have held that bhang falls outside the Act.[81][83] The Supreme Court held in 2009 that where leaves and flowering parts are seized together, the seeds and leaves fall within the definition of ganja.[84]

Bhang is regulated under state excise law. The Uttar Pradesh rules define it as "the leaves and small stalks of hemp plant" and cap a sale at 120 grams to one person,[85] and the state allots its bhang shops by e-lottery.[86] Delhi issues a licence for the retail vend of "hemp drugs (bhang)" with the same limit.[87] The Punjab rules of 1956 limit a sale to 233 grams and bar sales to anyone under 25,[88] while Assam passed an act in 1959 to restrict bhang "with a view to effect its ultimate prohibition".[89] Chattopadhyaya argues that the exclusion of the leaves "strategically protected bhang from the axe of prohibition", and that since 1985 the central and state governments have tightened the control of bhang in state-licensed shops while "severely policing ganja and charas".[6]: 227–228

Licensed cultivation

The National Policy states that the states "have actually not been licencing cultivation of cannabis" and that cultivation "will not be permitted" except for research, including trials of varieties.[82]: para. 20 It commits the Central Government to "encourage research and trials of cultivars of cannabis with low THC content".[82]: paras. 22–23 In October 2018 the Uttar Pradesh cabinet allowed farmers to grow hemp for research and medicinal purposes under the supervision of the Excise Department; The Tribune reported that Uttarakhand had become the first state to allow farmers to grow the crop the year before.[90] In September 2024 the Himachal Pradesh Legislative Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the controlled cultivation of cannabis.[91] Amended state rules came into force on 23 July 2026. The Tribune reported that they allow cultivation only for medicinal and scientific purposes, in enclosed settings such as greenhouses, from indigenous certified seed bought from authorised suppliers.[92]

Enforcement and eradication

Every holder of land must report cannabis illegally grown on it, and a magistrate or an empowered officer may order an illegally grown crop to be destroyed.[93] The National Policy directs that wild growth "shall be destroyed as far as possible" by the state officials empowered under the Act.[82]: para. 32 By the count of the Narcotics Control Bureau, 3,198 acres of illicit cannabis were destroyed in India in 2014, 2,065 of them in Odisha.[94]

Operation Parivarthana, an Andhra Pradesh police campaign begun in October 2021, had destroyed more than 6,000 acres in the Visakhapatnam agency by early December.[95] In the 2025–26 season the Odisha Police destroyed cannabis on 36,508.792 acres in six districts.[96] In March 2026 the government of Tripura told the state assembly that cannabis had been destroyed on 12,479.98 hectares in the previous three years.[97] In January 2021 the news agency IANS reported that police records showed 50,000 acres under cannabis in the Kullu Valley alone.[98] In Kullu District in 2012, Tribhuvan reports, the police registered about 510 cases under the Act for possessing or growing charas, 143 of them against local residents.[22]: 510

Religious and social use

Main article: Cannabis in Hinduism
A painting of a goddess in a red skirt holding out a small cup to a pale seated god with matted hair, with a white bull lying beside them and a flowering tree behind.
Parvati offering bhang to Shiva, in a painting of the Chamba school of about 1825.

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 those who held ganja essential to their observances were "comparatively very few".[99] It wrote that "it is chiefly in connection with the worship of Siva" that the plant is associated, and that it was "popularly believed to have been a great favourite of Siva".[100] Texts that name Shiva together with the plant are medieval, the earliest of them from the 12th or 13th century.[101]: 79 J. M. Campbell, a Bombay revenue and customs collector, opened his note for the Commission with the sentence "To the Hindu the hemp plant is holy"; the characterisation of Hindu belief in the note is his.[102]: 250

At Maha Shivaratri ganja was offered to Shiva and consumed by certain classes of his worshippers,[100] and in the 1950s bhang was still poured over the linga through the night.[42] In 2007 Varanasi had 49 government-approved bhang shops, and its bhang sellers said their sales doubled on the festival day.[103] In the North-Western Provinces the Commission found "overwhelming evidence" of the almost universal use of bhang at Holi, its witnesses divided on whether this was social custom or religious observance.[104]: 161–162 In Bengal a cup of bhang was passed round the family and guests on Bijoya Dashami, the last day of Durga Puja.[105] Among the Sikhs of the Punjab "the use of bhang as a beverage appears to be common, and to be associated with their religious practices".[104]: 162 At Puri bhang was used by the attendants and worshippers of Jagannath.[104]: 160 In the 1950s some Hindu and Sikh temples and Muslim shrines served bhang "much after the fashion of punch, from a common bowl".[42]

The Commission reported "the almost universal use of hemp drugs by fakirs, jogis, sanyasis, and ascetics of all classes, and more particularly of those devoted to the worship of Siva".[100] Stuart Sarbacker finds routine use "extensive among renouncer (sādhu and sādhvī) communities in India as a sacramental substance and a social glue", and also "debate within and among sādhu communities", some of which prohibit it.[101]: 79 In 2013 the head of an akhara at Nashik told Hinduism Today that "Our naga sadhus have chillum as part of their sadhana".[106] In Tantric ritual the plant is consecrated as vijayā by mantra and gesture before it is taken.[107]

In a village near Lucknow studied in 1959–60, only four of 1,190 people were regular users; most took the drugs at festivals and ceremonies. Brahmans and devotees who had vowed to give up liquor did not abstain from hemp drugs, and the Shudra and untouchable castes did not join the thandai parties of the twice-born castes but held their own.[12]: 238–239, 241, 245

Medicine

Main articles: Ayurveda and Cannabis in Ayurveda
A printed English recipe paragraph headed Madana modaka in italic type.
The recipe for madana modaka, with hemp leaves, flowers and seeds fried in clarified butter, in U. C. Dutt's Materia Medica of the Hindus, 1877.

Ayurveda classes cannabis, under the names bhaṅgā and vijayā, among the semi-poisonous plants (upaviṣa), which may be used as medicine only after purification.[108]: 236–237, 247 Swagata Tavhare and Rabinarayan Acharya counted 210 formulations with bhaṅgā as an ingredient in the rasaśāstra texts and medical compendia.[109]: 59, 61 Cannabis leaf is an official drug of the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India under the name vijayā,[110] and the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules list bhanga "(Except seeds)" among the poisonous substances of the Ayurvedic system.[111]: 300

In 1839 William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, professor of chemistry at the Medical College in Calcutta, published trials of hemp preparations on patients with rheumatism, hydrophobia, cholera, tetanus and convulsions.[112] The Commission concluded that "the medicinal use is well known throughout India",[113] and witnesses in every province described bhang or ganja given to cattle and horses.[114] Cannabis remained official in the Indian Pharmacopoeia of 1954.[42] The National Policy describes its medicinal use in India as "extremely limited and confined to alternate medicine such as homeopathy and ayurveda".[82]: para. 20

Conservation

Digitised herbarium sheet with a large fruiting female cannabis plant beside a handwritten field label.
Watt 9644, a female plant collected by George Watt in Kullu in 1888, in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Cannabis is number 4665 in the Wallich Catalogue of the East India Company's herbarium, built up at Calcutta by Nathaniel Wallich, and comprises eight lots.[115][116] George Watt's sheets, gathered between 1878 and 1890 in the Punjab, Sikkim and the hills around Shimla and Kullu, are at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.[117] Walter Norman Koelz, who collected in South Asia between 1930 and 1953, gathered the plant in Lahaul, Kangra, the Punjab and the Khasi Hills.[118][119]

In November 2026 the National Plant Germplasm System of the United States held 24 accessions of cannabis seed from India.[120] The collection documentation of the Zomia Collective describes the Parvati Valley as "known for high-density charas production and ongoing hybrid pressure".[121] Himachal Pradesh's rules of 2026 require licensed growers to use indigenous certified seed.[92]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Prain, D. (1893). Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via National Library of Scotland.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985(Act No. 61 of 1985), 1985, section 2(iii).India.
  3. ↑ 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. V, "Methods of cultivation and matters connected therewith", paras. 151–154, pp. 59–60 – via Internet Archive.
  4. ↑ 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. 255, pp. 98–99 – via Internet Archive.
  5. ↑ 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. 248–250, p. 96 – via Internet Archive.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 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. 564–567, pp. 272–273 – via Internet Archive.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Rahman, A.M.D.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G.; Nemoto, K. (2023). "Traditional Cultivation and the Production System of Cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 67 (4): 99–109. doi:10.11248/jsta.67.99.
  9. ↑ 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.
  10. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94, Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, pp. 113–114 – via Internet Archive.
  11. ↑ 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.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Hasan, Khwaja A. (1975). "Social aspects of the use of cannabis in India". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 235–246. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.235.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Meulenbeld, G.J. (1989). "The search for clues to the chronology of Sanskrit medical texts, as illustrated by the history of bhaṅgā (Cannabis sativa Linn.)". Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik. 15. Reinbek: Dr. Inge Wezler, Verlag für Orientalistische Fachpublikationen: 59–70. ISSN 0341-4191.
  14. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XVI, "Provincial systems examined", paras. 676–677, pp. 329–330 – via Internet Archive.
  15. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 89–150, pp. 35–58 – via Internet Archive.
  16. ↑ TNN (1 February 2021). "Ganja from Andhra Pradesh being sold pan India and in Sri Lanka". The Times of India. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
  17. ↑ Lyall, J. B. (1874). Report of the Land Revenue Settlement of the Kangra District, Panjab, 1865–72. Lahore: Central Jail Press – via Internet Archive.
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  19. ↑ Davies, R. H. (1862). Report on the Trade and Resources of the Countries on the North-Western Boundary of British India. Lahore: Government Press – via Internet Archive.
  20. ↑ Rathore, S.; Shashni, S.; Samant, S.S.; Sundriyal, R.C. (2018). "Indigenous uses of wild hemp (Cannabis sativa) by the local inhabitants in Manikaran Valley of Himachal Pradesh, North Western Himalaya". Journal of Non-Timber Forest Products. 25 (3): 127–130. doi:10.54207/bsmps2000-2018-7393KF.
  21. ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2006). "Review of the world cannabis situation" (PDF). Bulletin on Narcotics. LVIII (1 and 2). New York: United Nations (published 2008).
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Tribhuvan, Prasenjeet (2018). "Cannabis and Social Change in the Indian Himalayas". Journal of Ethnobiology. 38 (4): 504–516. doi:10.2993/0278-0771-38.4.504.
  23. ↑ Axelby, Richard (2015). "Hermit village or Zomian republic? An update on the political socio-economy of a remote Himalayan community" (PDF). European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (46): 35–61 – via Digital Himalaya.
  24. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Kashmir State memorandum". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. paras. 1–11, 17–21, 26–31, pp. 128–129 – via Internet Archive.
  25. ↑ Sharma, S. P. (3 June 2018). "On the drugs trail". The Statesman. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
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  27. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. III, "The existence, prevalence, and character of the spontaneous growth", paras. 28, 34, pp. 19–21 – via Internet Archive.
  28. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", para. 95, p. 37 – via Internet Archive.
  29. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XVII, "Systems of Native States", para. 697, p. 343 – via Internet Archive.
  30. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. J. J. S. Driberg, Commissioner of Excise and Inspector General of Police and Jails". 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. Assam witness no. 2, answer 70, pp. 532–533 – via Internet Archive.
  31. ↑ UNODC Regional Office for South Asia (September 2005). South Asia Regional Profile, September 2005: India (PDF) (Report). United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. p. 38. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
  32. ↑ Raman, Vino (16 August 2014). "Dynamics of Ganja Cultivation in Manipur: Case Study of a Village in Ukhrul District". Reports from the States. Economic and Political Weekly. 49 (33). Retrieved 19 October 2026.
  33. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum on hemp drugs in Madras, by Mr. W. O. Horne, Acting Secretary, Board of Revenue, Madras". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. paras. 8–10, p. 83 – via Internet Archive.
  34. ↑ "Ganja cultivation goes unabated in Araku agency". The Hans India. 24 February 2019. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
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  36. ↑ Abraham, Bobins (24 January 2017). "Asia's Best Marijuana Is Grown In India And Its In Kerala. Here's The Full Story Of Idukki Gold". Indiatimes. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
  37. ↑ Pradeep, P. R. J. (15 April 1994). "Up in smoke". Down To Earth. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
  38. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 125–127, pp. 48–49 – via Internet Archive.
  39. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 142–146, pp. 55–56 – via Internet Archive.
  40. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. V, "Methods of cultivation and matters connected therewith", para. 186, p. 71 – via Internet Archive.
  41. ↑ Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (new, greatly enlarged and improved ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. bhaṅga, bhaṅgā, p. 744 – via Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries.
  42. ↑ 42.0 42.1 42.2 42.3 42.4 Chopra, I. C.; Chopra, R. N. (1957). "The use of the cannabis drugs in India". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 4–29.
  43. ↑ 43.0 43.1 Wujastyk, Dominik (2002). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Herbal Medicine". In Salema, A. (ed.). Ayurveda at the Crossroads of Care and Cure. Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar. pp. 45–73. ISBN 972-98672-5-9.
  44. ↑ Sauthoff, Patricia (2024). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Alchemy". In Maas, Philipp A.; Cerulli, Anthony (eds.). Suhṛdayasaṃhitā: A Compendium of Studies on South Asian Culture, Philosophy and Religion. Dedicated to Dominik Wujastyk. Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis. Vol. 28. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing. pp. 165–179. doi:10.11588/hasp.1386.c20158. ISBN 978-3-948791-99-5.
  45. ↑ Grierson, George Abraham (1894). "Note on references to the hemp plant occurring in Sanskrit and Hindi literature". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 246–249.
  46. ↑ 46.0 46.1 "Appendix H: Sketch of the History of Excise Administration". Collection of Papers Relating to the Excise Administration of India (Reprinted from the Supplement to the Gazette of India, 1 March 1890). Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India. 1890. paras. 1–16, pp. 80–83 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
  47. ↑ Orta, Garcia da (1913) [1563]. Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India. Translated by Markham, Clements. New edition (Lisbon, 1895) edited and annotated by the Conde de Ficalho. London: Henry Sotheran and Co. pp. 53–56.
  48. ↑ Bowrey, Thomas (1905). Temple, Richard Carnac (ed.). A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series. Vol. 12. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society – via Internet Archive.
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  50. ↑ 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. paras. 8–19 and 44, pp. 4–6 and 10–11 – via Internet Archive.
  51. ↑ O'Malley, L.S.S. (1916). Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. ch. XII, pp. 134–144 – via archive.org.
  52. ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XVI, "Provincial systems examined", paras. 640–643, pp. 312–314 – via Internet Archive.
  53. ↑ "Remarks on the Debate in the House of Commons on 30th April 1889 on the Excise Administration of India". Collection of Papers Relating to the Excise Administration of India (Reprinted from the Supplement to the Gazette of India, 1 March 1890). Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India. 1890. Despatch No. 29 of 1890, Government of India to the Secretary of State, 4 February 1890, paras. 25–58, pp. 21–33 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
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  58. ↑ Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). VI. Question of prohibition, paras. 33–37, pp. 11–12 – via National Library of Scotland.
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  66. ↑ Beaubrun, Michael H. (1975). "Cannabis or alcohol: the Jamaican experience". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. p. 487. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.485.
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