Cannabis in Santal culture
More actions
Cannabis in Santal culture covers the uses of cannabis recorded among the Santal, a Munda-speaking people of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and northern Bangladesh. Colonial officials and the Norwegian missionary P. O. Bodding recorded them in and around the Santal Parganas district between the 1890s and the 1920s: in the evidence taken there by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893, in L. S. S. O'Malley's district gazetteer of 1910 and in Bodding's studies of Santal medicine, published in 1925 and 1927. In 1970 S. K. Jain and C. R. Tarafder indexed the plants in Bodding's remedies, and in 2023 and 2025 A. M. D. Rahman and colleagues published studies of the Ganja Mahal, the former licensed ganja tract of Naogaon in Bangladesh, drawn from interviews with its cultivators.
Officials and Bodding wrote that the Santals seldom used ganja, the dried flowering tops of the plant; their usual drink was rice beer. Ganja went into Santal remedies and was called for in a possession play. A Hinduising reform movement that gave up liquor kept it, and in the Naogaon tract landless Santal women packed it for wages.
Rice beer and ganja
O'Malley's gazetteer calls pachwai, rice beer, "the national drink of the aboriginals, who regard it as a nutritious food". In the Santal Parganas in 1907–08 rice beer yielded Rs 58,000 of excise revenue, and duty and licence fees on ganja yielded Rs 79,000. Spending on hemp drugs in the district came to Rs 447 per 10,000 people, against an average of Rs 548 for the whole of Bengal.[1]: 235
E. McL. Smith, a deputy magistrate who had served for nearly 20 years in the Santal Parganas, gave the commission two accounts in 1893. His written answers said that ganja smokers belonged to all classes, that "even Sonthals, specially Kharwars (Hinduised Sonthals) are addicted to the habit" and that the aboriginal tribes were "getting a taste for it". Questioned in person, he said that "the Sonthals are not consumers of the hemp drugs. They take rice-beer for the most part". In his sub-division 128,000 of the 230,000 inhabitants were Santals.[2] Bodding wrote in 1925 that ganja "is only exceptionally used by the Santals".[3]
The commission's report placed "aborigines of different races, such as Sonthals, Gonds, and many more" among the classes that, by the witnesses' accounts, smoked hemp drugs.[4] On hemp drugs and violent crime, it set aside the one case that the witness W. C. Taylor could recall, an attack on his party by a Santal during what the report calls "the Sonthal rebellion of 1856", as "surely a doubtful case".[5]
Medicine
Bodding's Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore sets out Santal remedies disease by disease, each ingredient under its Santal name with a botanical identification. He identifies the Santal ganja as Cannabis sativa, and his plant index lists it in ten prescriptions.[6] In S. K. Jain and C. R. Tarafder's index of Bodding's plants, these are remedies for epilepsy, convulsions and cramps, paralysis of the tongue, tetanus, convulsions with delirium, sores, and coughs and colds.[7]: 248
Six of the ten prescriptions combine ganja with opium; others add tobacco, black pepper or the roots of datura. For epilepsy, ganja, tobacco, opium and a bear's brains were mixed with mustard oil and poured into the nose when a fit began; in another remedy a piece of ganja "the size of a fly's head" was ground with other ingredients and blown into the nose through a tube. Other remedies applied ganja to the fontanel, cooked it in mustard oil as an ointment, or gave it to be licked after a pill, and one remedy for tetanus gave it to be smoked. For convulsions with delirium, ganja and opium were made into pills, stirred into water and drunk, after which the patient "will become intoxicated and lie still".[6]
Possession plays
Bodding describes the training of disciples by a guru of the ojha, the Santal medicine man. The disciples learn to be possessed by spirits (bonga) and rehearse the plays they act in the villages at the Dasae dance. One play brings on the jugi bonga; in Santali, Bodding explains, jugi means a wandering Hindu ascetic. Two disciples possessed by the jugi sit on their haunches and, using a Hindi verb, call for a knotted stick, a rope of cow's-tail hair, a gourd, the Hindu forehead mark, which Bodding says the Santals did not otherwise use, "and finally ganja, the Indian hemp". Some of the money the guru collects is spent on buying the ganja. The two players keep their parts until the audience tires of them.[3]
The Kharwar movement
The Kharwar movement was a religious reform among the Santals. O'Malley wrote that it revived in times of famine or scarcity and that on its religious side it showed "a tendency to Hinduism". Its early followers gave up liquor but kept ganja:
Its early followers called themselves Sapha Har, i.e., the pure men, and eschewed fowls, pigs and intoxicating liquor, but took ganja. One still meets Santals who call themselves Sapha Har, wear their hair in long matted tresses, and claim that they worship Mahadeo and never kill animals except as a sacrifice.
[1]: 150–151
The commission's witnesses described the same turn from liquor to ganja. Smith said that the political disturbance he had in mind began in 1879 and broke out again at the census of 1881, and that its leaders were Kharwars, "who are Hinduised Sonthals. These people have abjured liquor and taken to ganja." The agitation began as a religious movement in favour of Hinduism against the old Santal worship and turned into a refusal to pay rent. Smith did not attribute the movement to ganja, but said that once it had begun the ganja smokers "went further than the others" and led the talk of taking over the government and paying no rent.[2] W. B. Oldham, Commissioner of Chittagong, added in remarks on another witness's answers that in the Santal Parganas "the reformed or Hinduized Sonthals, who call themselves Kharwars and who eschew alcohol, have taken to ganja". He wrote that officials "certainly thought that it emboldened and made more reckless and troublesome the Kharwar Sonthals".[8]
Naogaon
In the licensed ganja tract of Naogaon, in present-day Bangladesh, Santal women worked in the making of ganja after the harvest.[9]: 106 Former cultivators interviewed by Rahman and colleagues said that Santal women packed the processed ganja. They owned no land in the tract, so they could not grow the crop, and sold their labour for low pay as day labourers.[10]: 4, 7
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 O'Malley, L.S.S. (1910). Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. E. McL. Smith, Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, Sonthal Parganas". 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. 40, pp. 94–97 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bodding, P.O. (1925). Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore. Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. 10. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Part 1, The Santals and disease (1925), pp. 51–53 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. X, para. 488, p. 194 – 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, para. 547, p. 258 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Bodding, P.O. (1925). Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore. Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. 10. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Part 2 (1927), pp. 229, 231, 235–237, 241, 246, 264, 341 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Jain, S.K.; Tarafder, C.R. (1970). "Medicinal plant-lore of the Santals (a revival of P.O. Bodding's work)". Economic Botany. 24 (3): 241–278. doi:10.1007/BF02860661.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Jaga Mohan Bhattacharjya, Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector and Personal Assistant to Commissioner, Chittagong, with remarks by Mr. W. B. Oldham, C.I.E., Commissioner of Chittagong". 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. 51, pp. 119–120 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M.D.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G.; Nemoto, K. (2025). "Studies on ethnobotany of folk customs for cannabis in Naogaon, Bangladesh". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 69 (1): 1–8. doi:10.11248/jsta.69.1.