Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture
More actions
Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture covers the hemp plant among the Rajbanshi, the cultivating people of the north Bengal plains whom colonial writers called Rajbansi or Koch, in the former Cooch Behar State and the neighbouring districts of Jalpaiguri, Rangpur and the Dooars. The plant grew wild around villages and homesteads across this country. Its leaves were pounded into bhang at home, and ganja, the dried flowering tops, was bought from the licensed shops and smoked in company. In Cooch Behar bhang was drunk at the close of Durga Puja and on the day of the worship of Madan Kam, the god of love, whose spring festival the Rajbanshi kept. Bhang was still the main offering when an ethnographer watched a performance of the Madan Kam ritual in Cooch Behar in 2004. Local doctors prescribed ganja and siddhi for stomach complaints and skin disease, and smokers held the drug to ward off malarial fever.
Officials of Cooch Behar State and of the neighbouring British districts described this use to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893–94. Most of them spoke of smokers by class and occupation, the "agricultural and labouring classes", and two named the Rajbanshi. Their estimates of the share of the adult men of Cooch Behar who smoked ganja ranged from six or seven per cent to sixty-five.
The people
Colonial writers used the names Koch and Rajbansi for the same people. John F. Gruning's gazetteer of Jalpaiguri (1911) called "the Rajbansi or Koch" the most numerous group in the district, 321,170 people at the census of 1901 and more than two-fifths of the population.[1]: 34 Herbert Hope Risley's ethnographic glossary of 1891 says that the Kochh of Rangpur, Jalpaiguri and Kuch Behar were then known by the name Rajbansi, taken up with a claim to descent from the Kshatriyas; Risley rejected that descent and classed the people by the racial categories of colonial anthropometry.[2]: 491 W. W. Hunter's statistical account of the Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts and Kuch Behar (1876) set the "Rajbansis proper of Kuch Behar" apart from the Pani-Koch, a group of the forest edge described by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in his manuscript account of Rangpur.[3]: 355
The wild plant
Hemp grew without cultivation across the Rajbanshi country. Jadub Chandra Chuckerbutty, the civil and sessions judge of Kuch Behar, told the Commission that it grew spontaneously in the State and in the neighbouring districts of Rangpur, Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, Dhubri and Goalpara, that its growth was dense, and that the plants were known locally as ganjari, ganja, bhang and siddhi.[4]: 253 In Malda the deputy collector in charge of excise, Gobind Chandra Das, found village sites, the spare ground of homesteads and roadside waste "often seen covered with a dense growth of bhang", and wrote that the plant was also abundant in Kuch Behar.[5]: 175 In Darjeeling the plant grew wild in abundance below about 4,000 feet.[6]
Cooch Behar prohibited the cultivation of hemp,[4]: 253 and the people made bhang at home from the leaves of the wild plant. Haridas Mukerji, the officiating fouzdar ahilkar of the State, said that bhang was prepared in houses from the dried leaves "but not by any particular class of people".[7]: 135 The wild plant yielded no ganja. Rai Calica Dass Dutt, the State's dewan, who had supervised its excise department for nearly twenty-three years, said that the wild plants were "not exactly of the same description" as those of the cultivated fields of Rajshahi, from which the government supplied the State's ganja, although ganja plants could be grown in Cooch Behar from Rajshahi seed. He had heard that ganja plants were once grown in the State with a poor outturn, and that the cultivation was stopped and supplies taken from Rajshahi instead.[8]: 136–137 Rajshahi ganja came from the licensed tract of the Ganja Mahal.
Ganja smoking
The Cooch Behar witnesses described the smokers by class and gave very different numbers. Mukerji put the ganja smokers at about sixty per cent of the population, most of them "the poor, labouring and agricultural classes", and confined generally to adult men; ganja was smoked in company and bhang drunk alone.[7]: 135 Chuckerbutty put the figure at about sixty-five per cent of the adult male population, "generally used by the agricultural and labouring classes".[4]: 253 The dewan worked from the excise returns instead: the State consumed no more than seventy maunds of ganja a year among about 160,000 adult men, so that the smokers could not exceed six or seven per cent of them. He said that use had grown over the previous twenty-five years as the people grew more prosperous and had fallen back with the rising duty.[8]: 137
The witnesses also differed on how the habit was regarded. Mukerji wrote that public opinion was against it and that ganjakhore, "ganja-smoker", was "a term of reproach and contempt".[7]: 135 The dewan found that ganja was "not held in very great disrepute among the natives of this State", and that vendors were "invariably insulted and sometimes assaulted" when their supply ran short.[8]: 137
Two witnesses from outside the State named the Rajbanshi. Gobind Chandra Das of Malda counted "the Raj Bangsis and Koches of the Barindra", the Barind upland, among the moderate smokers who took ganja after the day's work, in the morning and evening and sometimes at midday. Das, who held ganja to be "the most injurious form of intoxicant used by any people on earth", wrote that they "do not take much of liquor, and, being well off, generally indulge in this drug as a luxury", and he called the men indolent, smoking at home while their women did the work.[5]: 179, 181 The Darjeeling return listed "Rajbansis and Muhammadans in the Terai" among the district's consumers, alongside up-country labourers, ascetics and a small part of the Bengali population; the hill peoples were largely non-consumers.[6]
Other writers placed the drug elsewhere. Gruning reported in 1911 that the consumption of ganja in Jalpaiguri was "mostly confined to people from up-country", and that the Rajbansis and Muslims of the district drank little or no liquor.[1]: 128 The Pani-Koch whom Buchanan-Hamilton described in the early nineteenth century used tobacco and strong liquors, "but not opium nor hemp".[3]: 355
Bhang and the festivals
Chuckerbutty told the Commission that the people of Kuch Behar drank bhang on Bijaya, the day the image of the goddess Durga is given to the water, and on the day "the Madan, Kamdeb (the god of love) is worshipped", in both cases "generally temperately". He knew of no custom attached to ganja and no worship of the hemp plant.[4]: 253–254 An account of Kuch Behar reproduced by Hunter places the Rajbansi worship of Madan Kamdeo on the fourteenth day of the moon in Chaitra: tall bamboos dressed in red cloth and topped with yaks' tails were set up in the courtyard and worshipped for three days, with songs "of a loose description".[3]: 378 The Bijaya drink was common to Bengali Hindus. Mukerji noted it "among the Hindus of Bengal" and called the use "essential" on that day.[7]: 135
Outside the festivals, the State officials linked bhang drinking with incomers. Mukerji said that the local up-country and Oriya people generally drank it, and the dewan that only some up-country Brahmins and Kshatriyas drank it, "an insignificant proportion of the population".[7]: 135[8]: 137 Poor people smoked bhang, alone or mixed with ganja, when they could not pay for ganja, and the dewan said this often happened when the crops failed.[8]: 137
The ethnographer Svetlana Ryzhakova watched a performance of the Madan Kam ritual drama, Modon Kam, among the Rajbanshi of Bara Kodali, a village about an hour from Tufanganj in Cooch Behar, in February 2004. The drama belongs to the festival of Chaitra Sankranti in mid-April; this performance was arranged for her by her field assistant, a native of Tufanganj, and parts of the rite were shortened or altered. Men alone take part in the rite, and women prepare the offered food, prasad, and eat it afterwards. Two bamboo poles stood for Madan Kam and his consort Rati, called Naru. The main prasad, set out in a bowl, was bhang, a paste of sugar and pounded hemp stalks. At the close the participants turned to the bhang, one of the most important parts of the prasad in Ryzhakova's account, and the singer's verses tell of the hemp pounded in a mortar and of a woman from the lowlands who comes to make Naru for Madan Kam.[9]: 162, 164–165, 172–173
Medicine
Hunter's list of the indigenous drugs common to Kuch Behar includes sidhi (Cannabis indica) as a sedative.[3]: 444 Mukerji said that the State's kabirajes prescribed ganja and siddhi for indigestion, dyspepsia and skin disease, and that the labouring and agricultural classes held the drugs to be digestive, to give staying power, and to ward off disease in malarious and unhealthy tracts.[7]: 136 Chuckerbutty added chronic dysentery to the list of complaints treated.[4]: 254 Gobind Chandra Das reported that the Raj Bangsis and Koches of Dinajpur, Rajshahi and Malda praised ganja "as a preventive of malarious fever", a belief he rejected: the women of those tracts, who did not smoke, were in his view healthier than the men.[5]: 181
A survey of medicinal plants among the communities of Alipurduar district, the Rajbanshi, Nepali, Bodo, Garo and Oraon, carried out from July 2018 to January 2020, found bhang grown in home gardens. Its leaf was taken by mouth as an extract for inflammation of the body and as an intoxicant, and the survey also placed it among the plants with magico-religious and veterinary uses.[10]: 230, 232
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Gruning, John F. (1911). Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers: Jalpaiguri. Allahabad: Pioneer Press – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Risley, H. H. (1891). "Kochh". The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic Glossary. Vol. I. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Hunter, W.W. (1876). A Statistical Account of Bengal, Volume X: Districts of Darjiling and Jalpaiguri, State of Kuch Behar. London: Trübner & Co. – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Jadub Chandra Chuckerbutty, Brahmin, Civil and Sessions Judge, Kuch Behar". 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. 94, pp. 253–254 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Gobind Chandra Das, Baidya, Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, Malda". 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. 64, pp. 175–188 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. R. T. Greer, Deputy Commissioner of Darjeeling". 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. 22, p. 60 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1895). "Evidence of Haridas Mukerji, M.A., B.L., Offg. Fouzdar Ahilkar, Cooch Behar, Brahmin". Supplementary Volume: Evidence of Witnesses from Native States. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal Native States, witness no. 1, pp. 135–136 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1895). "Evidence of Rai Calica Dass Dutt Bahadur, Dewan of the Cooch Behar State, Cooch Behar, Bengalee, Kayastha, Hindu". Supplementary Volume: Evidence of Witnesses from Native States. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal Native States, witness no. 2, pp. 136–137 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
- ↑ Ryzhakova, Svetlana I. (2019). Опьяненные любовью: традиция разыгрывания ритуальной драмы Модон Кам среди раджбанси Северной Бенгалии [Intoxicated by love: the tradition of playing ritual drama Modon Kam among the Rajbansi of North Bengal]. Studia Religiosa Rossica (in русский) (3): 160–175. doi:10.28995/2658-4158-2019-3-160-175.
- ↑ Mandal, Aninda; Roy, Raju; Roy, Kuheli; Choudhury, Anindita; Islam, Jarzis; Thakur, Salman; Barman, Sanchita; Dutta, Asish; Sarkar, Madhuchhanda; Debnath, Ananta; Alam, Rakhibul (2021). "Ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants used by the ethnic communities of Alipurduar district of West Bengal, India". Plant Archives. 21 (1): 229–238. doi:10.51470/PLANTARCHIVES.2021.v21.no1.032.