Cannabis in West Bengal

Cannabis in West Bengal covers the medical, ritual, agricultural, commercial and legal record of the cannabis plant in the territory of the present-day Indian state of West Bengal. The record runs across four chronological horizons of differing evidentiary weight: Sanskrit medical writing from the 11th century onwards; Bengali Śākta Tantric ritual codified between the 11th and 18th centuries; early-modern European traveller accounts from 1563 onwards; and the dense colonial documentary record of the Bengal Presidency from 1790 to 1947, anchored by the seven-volume Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report of 1894. The popular framing of cannabis as a "5,000-year-old" Indian sacrament collapses these horizons and conflates speculative readings of the Vedic and early Āyurvedic literature with the textually secure record. The present article follows the evidentiary discipline established by Meulenbeld (1989), Wujastyk (2002) and Sauthoff (2024) in keeping the horizons distinct.

The territory of present-day West Bengal was the Calcutta-centred administrative, commercial and scholarly headquarters of the colonial Indian cannabis economy. The Presidency capital housed the Excise Department that regulated the trade; the Bengal Secretariat Press that published its foundational documents; the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Calcutta Botanic Garden where its scientific study was conducted; and the wholesale and financial infrastructure through which the trade passed. The licensed cultivation tract that the Excise Department regulated, however, lay entirely north of the Ganges in what is now Bangladesh: the Ganja Mahal of Naogaon in Rajshahi Division was severed from West Bengal by the Partition of 1947, leaving the consumption markets, the urban vending infrastructure and the cultivator-descendant Bengali Muslim population of the Indian portion of the colonial economy but not the licensed cultivation belt itself. A separate sub-Himalayan tradition of household and field-edge cultivation, worked by the Rajbanshi peasantry across Cooch Behar State, Jalpaiguri and the two Dinajpurs, straddled the eventual border and persisted in the Indian portion of the former Cooch Behar territory after Partition.

Cannabis cultivation in contemporary West Bengal is criminalised under the NDPS Act of 1985 and survives across two regionally distinct belts. The sub-Himalayan plains household belt encompasses Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar with smaller extensions into Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur; its cultivator community is predominantly Rajbanshi and Nepali and in continuity with the colonial-era plains household tradition rather than with the Bengali Muslim chasi tradition of the licensed Naogaon tract. The southwestern jungle belt extends across Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram and parts of Paschim Medinipur and Birbhum on the lateritic margin of the Chota Nagpur plateau and is worked by Santal, Munda and Bengali Hindu agrarian populations. The agronomic relationship between the two belts is not currently established.

Religious and cultural use is documented across multiple traditions. Bengali Śākta Tantric ritual integrates the consecration of vijayā from the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra forward. Śaiva offering of bhāṅ and gāñjā is a normative element of the major Bengali pilgrimage centres, conspicuously Tārakeśwar on Śivarātri and through the Śrāvaṇa Yātrā. The Bāul-Fakir lineage of Birbhum, Murshidabad and Nadia treats gāñjā, bhāṅ and siddhi as sādhanā-adjuncts, with the principal annual gathering at the Joydev-Kenduli Melā at Makar Saṅkrānti. The 19th-century Trinātha cult, the Koch-Rajbanshi folk Śaiva and Śākta complex of north Bengal and the Santal, Munda and Oraon ethnobotanical traditions of western Bengal extend the picture across community lines.

Three principal product types were formalised for colonial excise purposes and consistently distinguished across the witness questions of the IHDC: gāñjā (গাঁজা), the flowering tops of the female plant; bhāṅ (ভাং), the leaves and seeds drunk as siddhi (সিদ্ধি) or worked into the majoon (মজুন) confection; and carās (চরস), collected resin, never produced commercially in Bengal but imported from Yarkand and the Punjab under the same excise framework. The post-1989 licit cannabis economy in West Bengal is confined to bhang preparations sold seasonally through long-established sharbat houses in central and North Kolkata. The contemporary illicit cannabis trade and the present legal regime are treated separately at Cannabis trade in West Bengal and under Legal Status in the parent state article.

History

Main article: History of Cannabis in West Bengal

Pre-Colonial Period

Image of Codex Cashmiriensis folio 187a from the Atharva-Veda Saṁhitā.

Pre-colonial Bengali cannabis culture is documented across four chronological horizons whose evidentiary weight differs substantially. The Vedic and Sanskrit-lexicographic mentions of bhaṅga from c. 1200 BCE onwards are ambiguous in their botanical identification; the classical Āyurvedic compendia in their earliest layers do not securely attest cannabis as a medicine or intoxicant; the first irrefutable Indian medical attestation appears in an 11th-century Bengali text; and the dense documentary record of Bengali devotional, sectarian and culinary cannabis use consolidates only under the Sultanate, Mughal and early Nawabi regimes between c. 1500 and 1790. The popular framing of cannabis as a "5,000-year-old" Indian sacrament collapses these horizons and the present section follows Meulenbeld (1989), Wujastyk (2002) and Sauthoff (2024) in keeping them distinct.

Sanskrit textual and medical tradition

Main article: Cannabis in Ayurveda

The earliest text routinely cited as evidence for ancient Indian cannabis is Atharvaveda 11.6.15 (conventionally c. 1200–1000 BCE), which names bhaṅga among five auspicious herbs said to release the worshipper from anxiety. The 14th-century commentator Sāyaṇa glosses bhaṅga here as a kind of wild grass rather than Cannabis sativa specifically and modern scholarship treats the Atharvavedic reference as etymologically related to but botanically distinct from the later cannabis identification. Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 4th century BCE) and the Amarakoṣa (c. 5th–6th century CE) contain the form bhaṅgā without botanical specification; identification with cannabis in these lexical sources requires reading later certainty back into them.

The widely repeated claim that the Suśruta Saṃhitā (c. 3rd–4th century CE in its standard recension) prescribes cannabis as an antiphlegmatic derives from G.A. Grierson's note prepared for the IHDC. Grierson himself, however, observed that vijayā in the relevant Suśruta passages was probably haritakī (yellow myrobalan) rather than hemp; Meulenbeld's 1989 study established that the cannabis passages in Suśruta and Caraka belong to disputed later strata of those texts and cannot bear the evidentiary weight assigned them.

The earliest irrefutable Sanskrit medical attestation of cannabis as an ingestible intoxicating medicament is a Bengali text. The Cikitsāsārasaṃgraha of Vaṅgasena, a physician working in Bengal in the late 11th century CE whose name itself encodes Bengali origin (vaṅga = Bengal), recommends bhaṅgā as a digestive and appetiser, includes it in the powdered formula jātīphalādi cūrṇa for rājayakṣma (tuberculosis/consumption) and gives a rejuvenative recipe in which one who daily consumes indrāśana ("Indra's food," i.e. cannabis) with milk and sugar becomes free from all diseases and long-lived. The compendium circulated widely in the Pāla–Sena and post-Sena Bengali medical milieu and represents the first secure point at which cannabis enters the Indian medical record.

A near-contemporary Bengali figure, Cakrapāṇidatta of the Pāla court of Nayapāla (mid-11th century), compiled the medical vocabulary Śabdacandrikā listing for cannabis the synonyms vijayā ("the victorious"), trailokyavijayā ("victorious in the three worlds"), bhaṅgā, indrāśana and jayā. The semantic field of this synonym set was the earliest in the Indian record strongly to imply that the intoxicating use of the plant was already recognised. The Ānandakanda, a Sanskrit rasaśāstra–Tantric alchemical work dated to the 12th–13th century, devotes most of its chapter 15 (some 186 verses) to vijayā, covering cultivation, sowing and harvest mantras, male and female plants, purification, nine stages of intoxication and an elaborate rejuvenation treatment (kuṭīpraveśika rasāyana) involving prolonged consumption in a specially constructed hut. The Śārṅgadhara Saṃhitā (c. late 13th–early 14th century) became the first classical compendium to classify bhaṅgā as vyavāyin (a quick-acting drug that pervades the body before being absorbed) and to pair it explicitly with ahiphena (opium). Later compendia and nighaṇṭus, including the Dhanvantari Nighaṇṭu, Madanapāla Nighaṇṭu (1374), Rāja Nighaṇṭu of Narahari Paṇḍita (14th century) and the Bhāvaprakāśa of Bhāvamiśra (16th century), extend the synonym lists and indications and were the standard reference works of Bengali kavirājas by the late medieval period.

Tantric textual emergence

Main article: Tantric cannabis use in India

Bengal was the heartland of Vajrayāna Buddhism under the Pāla dynasty (c. 750–1174 CE), which patronised the great monastic universities of Nālandā, Vikramaśīla, Odantapurī, Somapura (Pāhāḍpur) and Jagaddala. The wandering mahāsiddhas of this milieu composed the Caryāpada (চর্যাপদ), the oldest extant corpus of Old Bengali verse, datable to between the 8th and 12th centuries; forty-seven verses survive in the palm-leaf manuscript recovered by Haraprasad Shastri from the Nepal Royal Court Library in 1907. The Caryāpadas are composed in sandhābhāṣā (intentional language). Although their imagery includes brewing and intoxication, no extant verse explicitly names cannabis: the substance consistently invoked is madya (liquor). Cannabis use among Bengali tantric adepts is, however, securely attested in other Pāla-era and immediately post-Pāla sources: Nāgārjuna's Yogaratnamālā (12th century) recommends cannabis smoke in tantric ritual contextsTemplate:Verify source and the Tārā Tantra edited by Akshay Kumar Maitra references its tantric use directly. Aldrich (1977) traces continuous Indian tantric cannabis use to roughly this horizon, which represents the first secure rather than speculative attestation.

The Bengali Śākta Tantric tradition was codified between the 11th and 18th centuries in the Mahānirvāṇa, Kulārṇava, Niruttara, Tārā, Kāmākhyā and other Tantras, several of which integrate cannabis directly into prescribed ritual. The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, a Bengal text whose extant recension is generally treated as late 18th- or early 19th-century, was first published by the Adi-Brahma-Samaj in 1798 Śakābda (1876 CE) with the commentary of Hariharānanda Bhāratī.

Early-modern documentation and Mughal context

Main article: Cannabis in Mughal India

The earliest detailed European description of bhang in South Asia is in Garcia da Orta's Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia (Goa, 1563), in the dialogue "Do bangue, Cannabis," which distinguishes the substance from European hemp and describes preparation of the leaf and seed into a powder mixed into drink with optional additions of areca, opium, cloves and nutmeg. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1596) explicitly identifies bhang use in Bengal. Thomas Bowrey's A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669–1679 is widely regarded as the earliest detailed English-language account of cannabis use in coastal Bengal, describing East India Company sailors at Bālāsore experimenting with bangue. Niccolao Manucci's Storia do Mogor, François Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire (covering his 1665–66 journey to Bengal) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's Voyages (covering Dhaka and Hooghly) attest post (cold opium infusion), bhāṅ and maʿjūn at the Mughal court and in Bengal sūbah towns.

Abu'l-Faẓl's Āʾīn-i Akbarī (c. 1590) refers to bhāṅ, post and opium among recreational intoxicants and gives the rent-roll of Bengal's nineteen sarkārs, but does not itemise a separate gāñjā or bhang revenue line. Mughal and Nawabi intoxicant taxation in Bengal sūbah was subsumed within the catch-all sāyer (miscellaneous non-agrarian) revenue and the ābkārī (literally "distiller's") tradition, administered by local zamindars and ijāradārs under broad farming-out arrangements that the 1793 Cornwallis-era licensing inherited directly. Raja Soshi Sikhareshwar Roy of Tahirpur (Rajshahi), in his note of dissent to the IHDC, argued explicitly that under Mughal rule the hemp drugs had never before been taxed as a separate excise. By the late 18th century the tract that the British would formalise as the Ganja Mahal, covering parts of Naogaon, Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur with secondary nodes in Jamalpur, Netrokona and the hilly Chittagong tract, was already the principal Bengali production zone.

Cultivation in pre-colonial Bengal was concentrated on the alluvial flats of the lower Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and the Padma-Atrai basins of northern Bengal, the future Ganja Mahal. A parallel sub-Himalayan tradition of household-level and field-edge cultivation ran through the Koch kingdom (the future Cooch Behar State) and the Rajbanshi-majority plains of Jalpaiguri, the two Dinajpurs and Rangpur. The Cooch Behar State's 1894 submission to the IHDC reported directly that:

"wild hemp grows spontaneously in most parts of the State," which "lies within the belt of Sub-Himalayan growth,"

The Commission separately noted that in the Rajshahi Division:

"the Terai is still credited with heavy growth and the northern parts of the Dinajpur and Rangpur districts are specially mentioned."

Outside the State's own licensed system, cultivation in the wider Rajbanshi plains operated at household and field-edge scale, in continuity with the feral-tolerant pattern still documented in the same belt under Cultivation below.^{[original research?]} Consumption was densest in (a) the urban-mercantile centres of Murshidabad, Dhaka, Hooghly and, after 1690, Calcutta, where Mughal-Nawabi court use of maʿjūn, post and bhāṅ set patterns subsequently adopted by Bengali bhadralok households; (b) the Śākta pilgrimage circuit of Tārāpīṭha, Kālīghāṭ, Bakreśwar and the śmaśāna-shrines of the Rāḍh region; (c) the Śaiva centres, especially Tārakeśwar and Baidyanāth; and (d) the rural countryside of Birbhum, Murshidabad, Nadia, Kushtia and Faridpur, the historic Bāul-Fakir heartland. Riverine ghat-side preparation of bhang and siddhi, pounding on a stone slab beside the river, was a near-universal pre-colonial practice across the delta. The wild Himalayan plant of the upland north had little role in pre-colonial Bengali culture, which depended throughout on cultivated lowland material.^{[original research?]}

Distinguishing secure from speculative attestation

For the purposes of citation discipline, pre-colonial Bengali cannabis claims fall into three classes. Securely attested by primary sources before 1790: Sanskrit medical use from the 11th-century Bengali physician Vaṅgasena onwards; Bengali Tantric Śākta consecration of vijayā in the Mahānirvāṇa and related Tantras; European traveller reports of bhang in Bengal (Linschoten 1596; Bowrey 1669–1679; Bernier; Tavernier; Manucci); Mughal court familiarity with bhāṅ, post and maʿjūn (Āʾīn-i Akbarī, c. 1590); and cultivation in the future Ganja Mahal tract by the late 17th–18th century. Securely attested only in 19th-century retrospective documentation, but with strong continuity arguments to the pre-1790 period: the Bijoyā Daśamī siddhi offering as universal Bengali household custom; Śivarātri bhang at Tārakeśwar; Bāul-Fakir cannabis use; the figure of the gā̃jākhor in Bengali folklore; and the term siddhi as the name for the drinkable preparation. Speculative or back-projected: the Atharvaveda-as-proof-of-Vedic-cannabis reading, which depends on a botanical identification Sāyaṇa himself did not make; the Suśruta Saṃhitā as a confident early cannabis source, which Grierson and Meulenbeld both rejected on textual-strata grounds; and "5,000-year-old timeless Hindu cannabis sacrament" narratives, which are largely 20th-century reframings of textually unstable evidence.

Colonial Period

Main articles: Cannabis in the British Raj and Cannabis in Cooch Behar State

Under British colonial rule, the Bengal Presidency (which at various points included present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Odisha and Assam) was the administrative, commercial and scholarly centre of the Indian cannabis economy. Calcutta, the Presidency capital, housed the Excise Department that regulated the trade; the Bengal Secretariat Press that published its foundational documents; the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Calcutta Botanic Garden where its scientific study was conducted; and the wholesale and financial infrastructure through which the trade passed. The licensed cultivation belt, however, lay entirely north of the Ganges in what is now Bangladesh and was severed from West Bengal by the Partition of 1947.

The first formal British taxation came in 1790, when duties on alcohol and intoxicants were levied on landlords across the Presidency. Regulation XXXIV of 1793, part of the Cornwallis Code, required a licence from the district collector for the manufacture or sale of bhang, ganja, charas and other intoxicating drugs. Pre-monopoly cultivation was scattered across zamindari estates, with the Jessore tract in the southern Presidency reportedly producing some 2,000–2,400 tons annually before its suppression in 1875 and the consolidation of licensed cultivation northward to the Naogaon area of Rajshahi district.

By the 1850s licensed cultivation had been consolidated into the Ganja Mahal, a small geographical zone astride the Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts of the northern Presidency, with its headquarters at Naogaon. The Mahal was worked under a three-circle rotation in which each circle was permitted to grow ganja once every three years, with manufactured product held in licensed warehouses (golas) under Excise Department supervision and duty levied at point of issue. The licensed Naogaon cultivator population was predominantly Bengali Muslim rather than Koch-Rajbanshi: the legendary first cultivator at Muradpur, Zarif Mandal and the leading lineages of the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society (registered 1917) were drawn from the Bengali Muslim peasantry of the Rajshahi plain. The larger sub-Himalayan Rajbanshi cannabis belt, encompassing the Cooch Behar State, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the two Dinajpurs, remained outside the British Bengal regulated cultivation tract throughout the colonial period; the household and feral-tolerant tradition documented there by the IHDC is the more direct antecedent of the contemporary north Bengal landrace populations recorded under Cultivation below.^{[original research?]}

Cooch Behar State operated its own parallel ganja regime under the Cooch Behar Excise Act (Act VIII B.C. of 1878, revised by Act I of 1883), drafted during the minority of Maharaja Nripendra Narayan under the supervision of Colonel J.C. Haughton, then administering the state for the infant maharaja. The Act drew its structure closely from the Bengal Excise Act of 1878 (Bengal Council Act VII of 1878), defined the excisable articles as country spirit, foreign liquor, opium, ganja, bhang (siddhi) and charas and provided for state licensing of manufacture, possession, transport and retail sale; police were invested with the powers of excise officers in 1891-92 under section 41 of the Act as revised. A 1892-93 notification framed "on the lines of section 17A of Act VII of 1878 (B.C.)" prohibited the import of any excisable article into the State without an authorised licence. Duty was set by notification rather than by the primary text, allowing the maharaja in council to harmonise rates with the Bengal Presidency: from 3 February 1894 the State's ganja duty was raised in step with the British Indian increase. The Commissioner of the Rajshahye Division of British Bengal was ex-officio Political Agent for the State, providing a direct administrative link between the Naogaon Ganja Mahal and the Cooch Behar parallel system through a single colonial officer. The state distributed its produce through state-run golahs rather than through caste-managed retail contractors, the principal structural difference from the Bengal Presidency system. By the 1880s Cooch Behar was divided into four revenue and excise sub-divisions: Sudder (the State capital), Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekliganj, each operating a sub-divisional golah under the Naib Ahilkar with magisterial excise jurisdiction held by the Fouzdary Ahilkar; a dedicated Abkari Moburir was posted at Mekliganj and a fifth sub-divisional golah was later established at Tufanganj. Outlying retail points operated at Sitai, Sitalkuchi and Haldibari. The Ganja Gollah at the State capital was a recognised public-works asset, listed alongside the Palace, the Treasury and the Dispensary in the State's building inventory, with stocks under formal accounting: the 1891-92 Administration Report records the writing-off of 36 maunds 7 chuttacks of ganja found short across the State golahs and the destruction of a further 2 maunds 78 seers 16 chuttacks of refuse ganja unfit for use. The State did not licence in-state cultivation of ganja as a commercial crop. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission recorded directly:

"Cultivation of the hemp plant is prohibited in the State of Kuch Behar and it is probable that secret cultivation is only carried on to the same extent as in the surrounding British territory."

The State accordingly procured its ganja by import from the Naogaon Ganja Mahal under the import licensing regime, stored it at the sub-divisional golahs and issued it to licensed retail shops. In the half-year ending October 1883 the State collected Rs. 6,901 in ganja duty and Rs. 5,049 in ganja licence fees, against Rs. 9,128 in opium duty and Rs. 9,480 in country-spirit duty; bhang licence fees in the same half-year were Rs. 332. Ganja consumption that half-year was around 70 maunds, having fallen from a peak of 92 maunds 5 seers 14 chuttacks in 1877-78. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission did not sit in Cooch Behar but issued written questions; answers were prepared by the Superintendent, the Dewan, the Civil and Sessions Judge and the Fouzdary Ahilkar of the State and submitted to the Commission's Secretary as the official Cooch Behar State memorandum, published in IHDC volume III appendices.

The colonial-era consumer market for ganja in the Rajbanshi plains was demographically distinct from the producer population. Gruning's 1911 Jalpaiguri Gazetteer records ganja excise receipts of Rs. 25,411 in 1907-08 and referring to migrant labour from the plains and the tea-garden coolie population rather than to local Rajbanshi households, notes directly:

"the consumption of ganja, i.e., the dried flowering tops of the female hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) is mostly confined to people from up-country,"

The administrative foundation of the system was Hem Chunder Kerr's Report on the Cultivation of and Trade in, Ganja in Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877) and the cultivators were organised from 1917 as the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Cooperative Society Limited.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC) was appointed by Resolution of 3 July 1893 following a question in the House of Commons by William Sproston Caine MP requesting an enquiry into the cultivation and trade of hemp drugs in Bengal specifically. The seven-member Commission first met in Calcutta on 3 August 1893 and conducted much of its work from the Presidency capital; one of its three Indian members was Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur, a major zamindar in the Rajshahi cultivation belt. Volume IV of the seven-volume report is devoted to the evidence of Bengal and Assam witnesses and constitutes the densest body of named Bengali testimony in any colonial-era source on cannabis. The Commission found that the moderate use of hemp drugs produced no injurious effect on the mind, rejected prohibition and recommended that the Bengal regulatory model be extended to other provinces.

The Radcliffe Line of 1947 placed the entirety of the cultivation tract, together with the Ganja Society's Naogaon headquarters, in East Pakistan. West Bengal retained the consumption markets, the Calcutta wholesale infrastructure, the urban retail vending network and the Bengal Cooperative Bank deposits of the Naogaon Society, but lost the licensed cultivation belt entirely.

Post-Independence

Cooch Behar did not accede to either dominion at Partition in August 1947. The maharaja signed an Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union on 28 August 1949, administration was transferred to the Government of India on 12 September 1949 and the state was merged into West Bengal on 19 January 1950, when it became Cooch Behar district.

The excise transition was effected by three instruments enacted in 1950. The Cooch Behar (Assimilation of State Laws) Act, 1950 catalogued the surviving Cooch Behar Acts and either repealed, amended or assimilated them to West Bengal law. The West Bengal State Laws (Extension to Cooch Behar) Act, 1950 extended the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 to the merged territory. The Opium and Revenue Laws (Extension of Application) Act, 1950 (Act No. 33 of 1950) extended the Opium Act, 1878 and related central revenue laws to the merged territory of Cooch Behar, with corresponding repeals of any pre-existing Cooch Behar state law on those subjects. The Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878 was thereby superseded after seventy-two years of continuous operation and the state-direct golah system was wound up in the early 1950s.

From 1950 onwards the licensed retail of ganja, opium and bhang continued in West Bengal under the Bengal Excise Act, 1909, administered by the West Bengal Excise Department. The colonial-era distinction between the three hemp products was preserved: ganja and charas as the flowering tops and resin, bhang as the leaf preparation. Retail licences were issued at district level on the model of the pre-Independence framework. The volume of licensed cannabis trade contracted progressively across the 1960s and 1970s as middle-class urban culture moved away from the licit cannabis economy of the colonial period and as state policy on intoxicants tightened.^{[editorialising?]}

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS Act) was assented to by the President on 16 September 1985 and brought into force on 14 November 1985. The Act's section 8 prohibited the production, manufacture, possession, sale, purchase, transport and use of any "narcotic drug" or "psychotropic substance" except for medical or scientific purposes under licence. Ganja and charas fell within the Act's definition of "cannabis (hemp)" at section 2(iii); within that definition the term "ganja" was specifically defined as:

"the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops),"

This left bhang preparations (made from the leaves) outside the central narcotics framework and within the residual jurisdiction of state excise law.

West Bengal observed a transitional period in which existing state-issued licences continued in force after the NDPS Act came into operation. The Calcutta High Court has subsequently recorded that until 11 December 1989 the holders of state retail licences were:

"carrying on business in Ganja, Opium and Bhang under then valid licenses granted by the State of West Bengal but after coming into force of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act 1985, a bar came to be imposed on the sale of those intoxicants."

The 11 December 1989 cutoff terminated the licensed retail of all three intoxicants in the state, including bhang, ending a Bengal cannabis-licensing tradition that dated back to Regulation XXXIV of 1793 in British Bengal and to the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878 in its princely-state parallel. The bhang category was subsequently reconstituted as a discrete retail licence (Rule 4(c)) under the West Bengal Excise (Selection of New Sites and Grant of Licence for Retail Sale of Liquor and Certain Other Intoxicants) Rules 2003 and the Calcutta High Court reaffirmed in Promodh Jha v. State of West Bengal (22 January 2008) that bhang as defined by the Bengal Excise Act 1909 falls outside the NDPS Act and remains within the state excise regime. Licensing for ganja and charas was not resumed and remains barred under section 8 of the NDPS Act. The contemporary licit cannabis economy in West Bengal is therefore confined to bhang preparations, sold seasonally through long-established sharbat houses in central and North Kolkata and a small number of district-level outlets, as described under the contemporary West Bengal cannabis trade. The post-1989 legal status of cannabis in the state is treated in fuller form under Legal Status in the parent state article.

Cultivation

Main articles: Cannabis cultivation in West Bengal and Cannabis cultivation in Bengal

Cannabis cultivation in the territory of present-day West Bengal is recorded across three colonial-era regimes. The first was the licensed Ganja Mahal of the Bengal Presidency, a 16-mile-radius tract centred on Naogaon in the Rajshahi Division, documented by the 1894 IHDC and by Hem Chunder Kerr's prior 1877 report. The tract lay entirely east of the Radcliffe Line and is now in Bangladesh. The second regime was the Cooch Behar State excise apparatus under the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878, whose administration report for 1891-92 records ganja revenue under only two heads, duty on ganja and licence fees of ganja shops, with no line for cultivation tax of any kind. Cultivation in the state was prohibited. The third tradition, undocumented in any colonial revenue table, was the household and field-edge cultivation of the wider sub-Himalayan plains across Rangpur, the Dinajpurs, Jalpaiguri and the territory of Cooch Behar State, worked by the Rajbanshi peasantry and continuing the pre-colonial pattern that long predated either licensed regime. The IHDC acknowledged that this third tradition persisted, under suppression by the colonial apparatuses to the same extent in the Cooch Behar State as in the surrounding British districts.

The first regime's record is dense, written by colonial officials and Bengali deponents giving sworn evidence in 1893-94. The second regime's record is administrative and statistical. The third tradition's record is almost wholly absent from the colonial documentary record and survives mainly through Buchanan-Hamilton's early-nineteenth-century Rangpur survey, ethnobotanical traces in Risley and Gruning and the contemporary persistence of the populations themselves as documented since 2025 by the Zomia Collective WEB01 expedition.^{[original research?]}

The Bengal Landrace

The Bengali landrace is a dioecious annual. Cultivators identified the unfertilised female flower cluster as the article of commerce.^{[clarification needed]} Soor's 1894 deposition records the distinctive Bengali cultivator terminology in which the ganja-bearing female plant is referred to as the "male," with the corresponding male identified by its early pollen release and removed before flowering completed. Hermaphrodite plants, called khasia, were removed at the same stage on the ground that retained khasia material produced seeded ganja of reduced commercial value. The Bengali cultivator did not grow a separate seed crop. Seeds for the next sowing fell during the processing of the main harvest and were gathered at the chatar floor a practice distinguishing Bengali cultivation from that of Khandwa in the Central Provinces where a dedicated seed crop was grown.

A single landrace underlay the Bengal commercial crop.^{[original research?]} The IHDC and the witness depositions distinguished four product types. Flat ganja, prepared by pressing harvested tops underfoot on the chatar, divided into mota-dal (মোটা ডাল, large twig) and mehi-dal (মিহি ডাল, small twig). Round ganja, rolled by hand between two parallel bars, was variously called jessori, noray or gol (গোল). The "jessori" name preserved the Jessore origin from the southern Presidency cultivation suppressed in 1875. Chur (চুর) or phatak was the broken material recovered from the chatar floor. Rora was the specific chur recovered from round ganja processing. In Cooch Behar State the flat product was known regionally as chipti per the 1893-94 written submission of the State's Civil and Sessions Judge to the IHDC.

Soor's deposition recorded soil-mediated morphological variation within the tract. Plants raised on light sandy loam, called polé, grew tall and well-branched with thick floral clusters. Plants raised on heavier clayey soil, called kheary, were stunted and produced reddish ganja which fetched higher prices in the wholesale market. At that time, Bengal did not produce charas. The IHDC and Soor were direct on this point: the resin was never collected commercially in Bengal and what little resin-rubbed product circulated in Calcutta and the eastern Presidency was imported from Yarkand and the Punjab.

The agricultural calendar

Soor's 1894 deposition gave the month-by-month schedule of the Naogaon chasi calendar. Nursery beds were prepared in Jaiṣṭha and early Āṣāḍh (May and June). Seeds were sown across late Āṣāḍh and Śrāvaṇ (June and July), with the seed material drawn from the previous season's chatar gatherings. Seedlings were transplanted from nursery to field through Bhādra and Āśvin (August and September). Across Āśvin and Kārtik (September to mid-November) male plants were identified and pulled at first staminate emergence, khasia hermaphrodites identified and removed and the surviving females staked and pruned. Harvest fell in Pauṣ and Māgh (December and January), with processing on the chatar following immediately. The wholesale marketing season ran from Falgun through Caitra (February through April), with mahajan buyers travelling from Calcutta, Dhaka and Patna to the Naogaon golahs to purchase under transport permit.

The licensed tract operated on a three-circle rotation. Each cultivator's holding lay in one of three circles, of which only one was permitted to grow ganja in any given year. The two resting circles were under pulses, oilseeds, vegetables or rice. The rotation served both fertility management and the colonial excise purpose of restricting commercial output to the tract's licensed capacity.

The chasi cultivator tradition

The chasi (চাষি) of the Bengal Ganja Mahal were a cultivator community concentrated in the Naogaon subdivision of Rajshahi. Witness depositions to the IHDC recorded the community as overwhelmingly Bengali Muslim. Mr. Price, the District Officer for the tract, reported the cultivator ratio at seven Muslim to two Hindu; Soor, working from inside the tract, reported the ratio at ninety-two to eight, with the processor population at the chatar at eighty-five to fifteen. The legendary first cultivator at Muradpur, Zarif Mandal and the leading lineages of the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society, registered under the Co-operative Societies Act, 1912 in 1917, were Bengali Muslim peasants of the Rajshahi plain.

Cultivation knowledge transmitted from father to son. Soor recorded:

"a new cultivator would in all probability make a mess of the business for the first year or two"

The master cultivator of the tract was called the poddar or parakhdar, named in the IHDC as the senior expert directing field and chatar operations on behalf of the household. Soor named the supplementary labour system "baygar kamla" without specifying its mechanism in his deposition.

The landrace and its associated knowledge passed beyond the licensed tract through a Nepali diaspora. Bengali ganja doctors trained Nepali cultivators at Kathmandu and Butwal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transmitting the chasi protocol to the Nepali household-cultivation tradition that survived the 1976 Nepali prohibition.

Processing and preparation

Manufacture of ganja in the Naogaon tract took place on the chatar (চাটার), also called the khola (খোলা), an open yard with one or more huts attached to the cultivator's homestead. Three product types were prepared by distinct protocols.

Flat ganja was prepared by treading harvested tops underfoot on the chatar surface. Soor recorded the standard batch as fifty to sixty plants, a treading circle of approximately fourteen feet in circumference and a three-day processing cycle. Round ganja was rolled by hand between two horizontal bars by ten to fifteen men working each side of the bar, over a four-day cycle. The long-stalked round product commanded the highest wholesale price.

Chur was the resinous fragmentary material recovered from the chatar surface after a flat or round batch had been completed. Free of leaf and stick, chur was assessed at the highest excise duty rate of the three product types. Bengal did not produce charas. The deliberate hand-collection of resin onto leather aprons or cloth, the technique that produced commercial charas in the Hindu Kush and the western Himalayas, was not practised in Bengal. Manufactured product was stored at the cultivator's chatar under poddar supervision until permit-controlled removal to the Naogaon golah for excise assessment.

Yield and the cultivator economy

Hem Chunder Kerr's 1894 deposition gave the per-bigha figures for the tract: cultivation cost across the season ran to between fifty and sixty rupees per bigha, with a net profit of twenty-five to fifty rupees per bigha for the chasi household. The bigha at Naogaon was the standard Bengal bigha of one-third of an acre, giving a cultivated area in 1892-93 of 3,540 bighas or 1,180 acres.

Both Kerr and Soor recorded that ganja was not the most profitable available crop. Soor recorded that sugarcane, jute, onion and tobacco were "not less profitable than ganja" on the same Naogaon soils. The advance-payment system, in which wholesale mahajan purchasers paid cultivators a fraction of the expected crop value early in the season against delivery at harvest, structured the relationship between cultivator and trader.

The sub-Himalayan plains household belt

Beyond the licensed Naogaon tract a wider tradition of household and field-edge cannabis cultivation ran across the sub-Himalayan plains, encompassing Rangpur, the Dinajpurs, Jalpaiguri and the territory of Cooch Behar State. The IHDC observed:

"in the Rajshahi Division the Terai is still credited with heavy growth and the northern parts of the Dinajpur and Rangpur districts are specially mentioned"

The cultivator population of this belt overlapped substantially with the Rajbanshi agrarian community of the same districts.

Cooch Behar State explicitly prohibited cannabis cultivation under the Cooch Behar Excise Act of 1878. Witness 94 of the IHDC, the State's own Civil and Sessions Judge, gave sworn evidence that:

"the cultivation of the plant is prohibited in the Kuch Behar State" and that "ganja is not produced in the Kuch Behar State."

The State's annual administration reports confirm this from the revenue side. The 1891-92 excise statement records ganja revenue under only two heads: duty on ganja (Rs. 15,906) and licence fees of ganja shops (Rs. 11,649), against opium duty (Rs. 17,888) and out-still country spirit (Rs. 23,508). No line for cultivation tax, licence or acreage appears in the statement. The State procured its ganja entirely by import from the Naogaon Mahal under an import-licensing regime and distributed it through sub-divisional state golahs at Sudder, Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekligunj.

The IHDC was nonetheless explicit that prohibition did not eliminate cultivation. Volume I §95 records:

"cultivation of the hemp plant is prohibited in the State of Kuch Behar and it is probable that secret cultivation is only carried on to the same extent as in the surrounding British territory."

Buchanan-Hamilton's early-nineteenth-century Rangpur survey had recorded the same household pattern across the same belt before either licensed system existed. The project identifies this unlicensed homestead tradition, distinct from the chasi method of the Naogaon tract, as the substrate from which contemporary north Bengal landrace populations descend.^{[original research?]}

Partition and prohibition

The Radcliffe Line of 1947 placed the entire licensed Bengal Mahal in East Pakistan and severed the chasi cultivator tradition from the territory that became West Bengal. The Dinajpur fringe of the wider plains belt was bisected: Bangladesh's Dinajpur and Thakurgaon districts retained the largest share of the historical Rajbanshi cultivation belt, with the Indian Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur districts holding the western remnant. Cooch Behar State acceded to India in 1949 and merged into West Bengal as a district in 1950.

From 1950 the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 administered the residual licensed cannabis trade in West Bengal. The colonial distinction between ganja, charas and bhang was preserved and district-level retail licences continued on the pre-Independence pattern, but no licensed cultivation regime was established in the new state. The contraction of licensed retail across the 1960s and 1970s, the NDPS Act of 1985 which criminalised the production, possession and trade of cannabis flowering tops at the central level and the 11 December 1989 termination of all West Bengal cannabis retail licensing together closed the licensed-trade horizon. Bangladesh enacted parallel prohibition in 1989, ending the Naogaon Ganja Society's licensed cultivation after a continuous 1854-1989 operation. The household Rajbanshi tradition in the wider sub-Himalayan plains, never licensed in either jurisdiction, continued through both the 1947 rupture and the 1985 criminalisation.

Contemporary surviving cultivation

Cannabis cultivation in a Rajbanshi homestead, North Bengal Plains

Surviving cannabis cultivation in West Bengal occurs across two regionally distinct belts.

The first and more extensively documented is the sub-Himalayan plains household belt, encompassing Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar with smaller extensions into Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur and into the Dooars-Terai margin. Cultivation here is small-scale, often at homestead or kitchen-garden plot dimensions, embedded within a wider matrix of feral and semi-feral populations along river beds, field margins and roadside verges. The 2025 WEB01 expedition of the Zomia Collective documented populations across this belt and lodged the project's current Indian accessions, with the Upper Jaldhaka Valley populations recorded as the Haldibari-format reference accessions (ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250030 and ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250031). The cultivator community across this belt is predominantly Rajbanshi and Nepali rather than Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim, in continuity with the colonial-era population of the wider plains belt and not with the Bengali Muslim chasi tradition of the licensed Naogaon tract.^{[original research?]} A 27 February 2025 joint operation of the Border Security Force 78 Battalion and the Narcotics Control Bureau destroyed five acres of cultivation at the Indo-Bangladesh border in Cooch Behar district. A 24 January 2022 operation at Sitalkuchi recovered 690 kg of dried product from a homestead cluster in 537 Singimari village, Brahmattarachatra Gram Panchayat. Identification of the cultivator population in the press default as "Bengali farmers" obscures the underlying Rajbanshi continuity and is rejected by the wiki on ethnographic grounds.^{[editorialising?]}

The second belt is the southwestern jungle region across Bankura, Purulia, Jhargram and parts of Paschim Medinipur and Birbhum, operating on the lateritic margin of the Chota Nagpur plateau. Cultivation here is more often patch-scale within forested or scrub-jungle terrain, with the cultivator community drawn from the Santal, Munda and Bengali Hindu agrarian populations of the region. A 1 January 2025 Al Jazeera feature on West Bengal cultivation gave the most detailed contemporary published account of the southwestern belt, with cultivator interviews from the Jangal Mahal region. The agronomic relationship between the southwestern populations and the northern Rajbanshi belt is not currently established. The two belts may represent independent landrace lineages with distinct deep histories, may represent a single substrate, or may reflect the introduction of seed material from the north into the southwestern belt in the late-colonial or post-Independence period.^{[original research?]}

The contemporary documentary record is structurally constrained by the criminal status of the practice. Cultivators are not interviewed in their own voice in the academic literature. Enforcement-frame reporting captures destruction events and seizure figures but cannot reliably distinguish landrace populations from introduced hybrid material. Ethnobotanical fieldwork on the surviving Rajbanshi and southwestern traditions remains thin in the peer-reviewed literature.^{[editorialising?]} The Zomia Collective WEB01 documentation is the largest current systematic record of the north Bengal populations; comparable systematic work on the southwestern belt has not yet been undertaken. The Get Bengal feature on contemporary Bengali cannabis cultivation, while journalistic rather than academic, provides one of the few recent Bengali-language-attuned overviews of the surviving practice across both belts.

Preparations and Consumption

Main articles: Cannabis consumption in West Bengal, Cannabis preparations in Bengal, Cannabis grading systems of Bengal, Cannabis in Bengali Cuisine, Cannabis in Ayurveda and Cannabis in Unani medicine

Stub

This section is incomplete. Add sources and expand it.

By the period when documentation becomes dense (16th–18th centuries) three distinct Bengali cannabis preparations are clearly differentiated. These categories were subsequently formalised for colonial excise purposes and consistently distinguished across the witness questions of the IHDC.

Ganja (গাঁজা) was the flowering tops of the female plant. In pre-colonial Bengal the "rolled or Bengal type" was regarded as of higher quality than the "trodden or Bombay type" and was preferred for medicinal use, smoked in a cilam often with the invocation of Śiva.Template:Verify source Under the colonial excise system the Ganja Mahal manufactured ganja in three product types. Flat ganja (chyapta, চ্যাপ্টা) was produced by pressing cut tops flat under foot on the manufacturing platform (chatar, চাতার). Round ganja (gol ganja, গোল গাঁজা; long and short-stalked) was rolled between the hands or under the foot into cylindrical or oblong form, with long-stalked round ganja commanding the highest price. Chur ganja (চুর গাঁজা) was the resinous fragments and debris collected from the chatar floor.

Bhang (ভাং) was the leaves and seeds of the plant, ground and consumed as a drink (known in Bengali as siddhi, সিদ্ধি) or worked into the sweet confection majoon (majun, মজুন). The pre-colonial drinkable preparation was produced by soaking dried leaves and flowering tops, grinding them on a stone slab with sugar, milk and the ṭhāṇḍāi spice matrix (black pepper, cardamom, fennel, cucumber seed, almond, rose petals) and straining the mixture into milk. The dry leaf material itself was also called siddhi and was sold at Bengali Hindu ritual-supply shops (daśakarmā-bhāṇḍār). No securely pre-1790 Bengali manuscript using the exact word siddhi in the drinkable cannabis sense has yet been published in translation, but the practice itself is plainly implied by Vaṅgasena's 11th-century milk-and-sugar recipes. Majoon, the sweetened cannabis confection inherited from Persian-Mughal pharmacy, combined bhang paste with ghee, flour, sugar, often poppy seed and at times opium, nutmeg or Datura metel. It was sold widely "at festivals and other great gatherings of the brethren." Under the colonial excise system bhang was sold through licensed government bhang shops. This vending tradition continued in West Bengal under the post-Independence Bengal Excise Act, 1909 framework until the cessation of state cannabis licensing on 11 December 1989 (see Post-Independence above).

Charas (চরস) was collected resin. Its manufacture and sale was prohibited in 1800 "as being of a most noxious quality" but the restriction was rescinded in 1824 on the ground that the drug was "not more prejudicial to health than ganja or other intoxicating drugs." Charas was never produced in Bengal in commercial quantity but was imported from the northwest (principally Yarkand and Punjab) and sold under the same excise framework.

Religious and Cultural Use

Main articles: Cannabis culture in West Bengal, Cannabis and Hinduism, Cannabis in Bengali Religion, Cannabis in Bengali culture, Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture and Tantric cannabis use in India

Cannabis use in Bengal is documented across multiple religious traditions in colonial-era sources, with the densest evidence in Volume IV of the IHDC (1894). The Commission's seventy standardised witness questions included extensive enquiry into religious and ritual use and the Bengal evidence covered Shaiva and Shakta worship in the Shiva–Kali–Durga complex; charanamrita and prasad offerings at temple sites; and use among Vaishnava bairagi and Baul mendicants. The clearest pre-colonial documentation is reconstructed from late 18th- and 19th-century sources looking back and from IHDC chapter IX, which collected sworn evidence on customs whose roots witnesses described as immemorial.

Tantric ritual practice. The Bengali Śākta Tantric tradition codified between the 11th and 18th centuries in the Mahānirvāṇa, Kulārṇava, Niruttara, Tārā, Kāmākhyā and other Tantras integrated cannabis directly into ritual. The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra explicitly directs the sādhaka to consecrate vijayā before consumption, with the vijayā-consecration mantra invoking ambrosia and the favour of Kālikā. The pun between siddhi as yogic attainment and siddhi as cannabis preparation is structural in Bengali Śākta usage. In the formal scheme of the pañcamakāra of the Bengali Śākta vāmācāra tradition (madya or wine, māṃsa or meat, matsya or fish, mudrā or parched grain and maithuna or sexual union), cannabis is not one of the canonical five but functions as a substitute or adjunct to madya in many kaula and bhairavī-cakra lineages. White (2003) treats this substitution as continuous with the older soma-offering pattern reinterpreted in tantric idiom. The Sahajiyā lineages, comprising the older Buddhist sahaja-siddha tradition and the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā that emerged from Caitanyaite milieus after the 16th century, inherited the emphasis on deha-tattva ("body-truth") and on intoxicants as adjuncts to sādhanā, though explicit textual record of cannabis use among Sahajiyās before 1790 is thin and is reconstructed largely from later Bāul songs and from ethnographic continuity arguments.

Devotional and festival use. On Bijoyā Daśamī, the tenth day of Durgā Pūjā, the IHDC found that the custom of offering an infusion of hemp leaves to every guest and household member was common in Bengal and "may almost be said to be universal." Witnesses including Mahāmahopādhyāya Maheśa Chandra Nyāyaratna, Principal of the Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta; Maharaja Sir Jyotīndramohan Tagore, K.C.S.I.; and Raja Piari Mohan Mukharji, C.S.I., attested its prevalence and its association with the religious devotions of the people. After the household consigned the goddess's image to the river, the bijoyā siddhi-cup was passed and bhang-laced sweetmeats were distributed. On Śivarātri the Commission established that the hemp plant, especially gāñjā, was most strongly associated with the worship of Śiva, in popular belief a favourite of the god. Siddhi was offered to the Śiva image at Benares, Baidyanāth, Tārakeśwar and elsewhere. At Tārakeśwar in Hooghly district, the major Bengali Śaiva pilgrimage centre whose temple in its present form was established in 1729 by Raja Bharamalla Rao, pouring bhang-water over the liṅga on Śivarātri night was the normative ritual act. Cannabis at the spring festival of Dol Yātrā / Holi is attested across Bengal in IHDC testimony, paired in the Bengali calendar with the Vaiṣṇava swing-festival of Caitanya's birthday on Phālgun pūrṇimā.

Modern festival continuity. The IHDC's nineteenth-century enumeration of bhang-using Bengali festivals has held unevenly into the twenty-first century. The Bijoyā Daśamī siddhi offering, described in 1894 as almost universal, now survives chiefly among traditional families and has been displaced in middle-class urban practice by sweets and embraces.^{[editorialising?]} Śivarātri bhang preparation and consumption continues at Śaiva temples across the state in continuity with the IHDC pattern, conspicuously at Tārakeśwar, where the contemporary Tarakeswar Yātrā during Śrāvaṇa (mid-July to mid-August) draws saffron-clad devotees carrying Gaṅgā water from the Nimai Tirtha Ghat at Baidyabati roughly 39 km along the pilgrim road to pour over the Śiva liṅga. The Dol Yātrā / Holi observance of the Phālgun pūrṇimā remains the principal occasion at which bhang ṭhāṇḍāi, bhang laḍḍū and bhang lassi circulate as festive items. On Kālī Pūjā at the Kārtik new moon, which coincides with the all-India Diwali, Tantric celebrants at the śmaśāna sites of Tārāpīṭha, Nimtala and Keoṛatala include bhang and gāñjā in their ritual offerings. The Gajan and Charak Pūjā cycle of late Caitra, celebrated above all at Tārakeśwar but also widely in rural Bengal, retains the Gajan sannyāsī tradition of fasting, body piercing and walking on hot coals; the smoking of gāñjā by sannyāsīs during the festival continues as an accompaniment to its bodily austerity.

The Śākta pilgrimage circuit. The Bengali Śākta circuit comprising Kālīghāṭ (one of the fifty-one śakti pīṭhas, in present-day Kolkata), Bakreśwar, Kankalitala and especially Tārāpīṭha in Birbhum district on the Dvārakā river (one of the principal śmaśāna-Tārā shrines of Bengal) constituted the canonical pre-colonial setting for Tantric cannabis offerings, with gāñjā smoked in the cilam and siddhi consumed as drink by sādhakas at the cremation-ground sādhanā.

Modern Tārāpīṭha and the Bāmākhepā lineage. Tārāpīṭha, the shrine of the goddess Tārā whose adjoining Mahāśmaśāna cremation ground is regarded as a siddhapīṭha for Tantric sādhanā, is the most ritually conspicuous site at which cannabis is openly present in twenty-first-century Bengali religious practice. The site's modern identity is anchored in the figure of Bāmākhepā (Bāmācaraṇ Caṭṭopādhyāy, 1837–1911), a contemporary of Ramakrishna who received Tārā-mantra initiation from Kailāśpati Bābā at the Vaśiṣṭha-āsana at Tārāpīṭha and completed his Tantric training under the Kaulācārya Mokṣānanda; his father Sarvānanda Caṭṭopādhyāy was a Śyāmā Saṅgīt singer. Bāmākhepā lived and practised at the cremation ground, where his sādhanā integrated gāñjā smoking and the consumption of ritually transgressive substances within the cremation-ground frame; his disciples Tārākhepā and Nigamānanda Sarasvatī perpetuated the lineage and his samādhi shrine near the entrance to the Mahāśmaśāna remains a focus of pilgrim ritual. The Mahāśmaśāna continues to host a population of Aghorī and Śākta sādhus whose practice involves gāñjā as a sādhanā adjunct alongside the pañcamakāra repertoire described above. The figure of the Aghorī as such has its formal seat at the Kīnā Rām Sthal in Varanasi, but a recognised Aghorī presence at Tārāpīṭha and at the urban Kolkata burning grounds of Nimtala and Keoṛatala is documented in McDaniel's ethnographies of Bengali ecstatic religion.

Folk and mendicant traditions. The Bāul-Fakir lineage, a syncretic Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā / Sufi-Fakir minstrel tradition, is concentrated in Kushtia and Shilaidaha in East Bengal and in Murshidabad, Birbhum and Nadia in West Bengal, with its principal annual gathering at the Joydev-Kenduli Mela in Birbhum at Makar Sankranti (mid-January). It emerges into the textual record from the 15th century, though as an organised sect it is securely documented only from the 18th. Bāuls and Fakirs treated gā̃jā, bhāṅ and siddhi as sādhanā-adjuncts in a usage structurally identical to their Tantric Śākta deployment. The Bāul association with cannabis is most famously linked to Lālan Fakir (Lālan Śāh, 1774–1890), but the pattern predates him in the 17th- and 18th-century Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā poetic corpus. The wider category of the gā̃jākhor ("gañjā-eater" or "gañjā-smoker") in Bengali folklore covers Śaiva sādhus, bairāgīs, nāgā ascetics, aghorīs, fakirs and jaṭā-sporting wanderers passing through Bengal en route to Puri, Tārāpīṭha, the annual Gangasagar Mela at Sagar Island, Kāmākhyā or Hardwar. The Commission found that supplying gañjā to such mendicants was treated by Bengali householders as a routine act of religious charity. The Sāntal, Munda, Oraon and other ādivāsi populations of western Bengal (Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and the Chota Nagpur fringe) had their own distinct ethnobotanical relations to cannabis, with Sāntal medicinal uses for epilepsy, tetanus, paralysis and fever-delirium reflecting traditions reaching back into the pre-colonial period.

The contemporary Bāul-Fakir tradition. The Bāul-Fakir continuum is the subject of a substantial modern ethnographic literature. The rigorous ethnography centres Bāul sādhanā on the body, organised around breath control (pūrak, kumbhak, recak), sexual yoga and the manipulation of the "four moons" (cār candra): faecal matter, urine, semen and menstrual blood. Cannabis is not part of the formal Bāul curriculum in Openshaw's, Knight's or Lorea's accounts and Capwell's monograph does not treat it as a central ethnographic theme; gāñjā smoking is documented as a common but not universal social and devotional practice at Bāul gatherings, accompanying music and the asceticism of householder-renouncer Bāuls. The principal Bāul gatherings in West Bengal are the Joydev-Kenduli Melā at the birthplace of the twelfth-century poet Jayadeva, held around Makar Saṅkrānti and the Pauṣ Melā at Śāntiniketan in late December originally established in connection with Rabindranath Tagore's Brahmo religious project. The 2025 Joydev-Kenduli Melā hosted approximately 250 ākhṛās or temporary hermitages and more than 650 stalls. Bāul songs were inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008 as "Baul songs," having been proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005.

Muslim renunciate traditions. Bengali Islam organises substantial popular devotion around the dargāhs of Bengali pīrs. The most prominent in West Bengal is the shrine of Furfura Sharif in Hooghly district, the seat of the Silsila-i-Furfura Sharif founded by Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddique (1846–1939); the Silsila-i-Furfura is reformist and shar'ī in orientation under the legacy of Abu Bakr Siddique, who emphasised the propagation of Sharī'a, Sunna and Ṭarīqa and the suppression of practices he regarded as polytheistic and cannabis is not associated with the formal devotional practice of this lineage. A separate stream of Bengali Muslim renunciate practice, however, encompassing the Faqir tradition that overlaps culturally with the Bāuls, the Madārī and Qalandar dervishes who pass through Bengali pilgrimage circuits and the popular pīr cults documented by Asim Roy, has historically been considerably more permissive of intoxicants. The IHDC noted the Muslim parallel of the Trinath cult under the name Tinlakh Pīr and the offering of gāñjā to pīrs in the Surma Valley as a propitiatory rite for cattle. The Lālan Fakir tradition centred at Kuṣṭiyā in Bangladesh, with a substantial following in adjoining districts of West Bengal, tolerates gāñjā smoking in its ākhṛā culture even where formal Lālan doctrine does not require it.

The Trinātha cult. The Trinātha Melā cult, founded around 1867 in the village of Dhamrai in Dhaka district, made an offering of three pice each of gāñjā, oil and betel-nut to a syncretic deity representing the Hindu trinity. By 1894 the IHDC reported that the cult had spread "extensively throughout Eastern Bengal and the Surma Valley of Assam" and was practised by Hindus and by Muslims, the latter under the name Tinlakh Pīr. The Hindu-Muslim parallel made Trinātha a notable instance of religious-cannabis syncretism crossing community boundaries. A 2025 ethnographic study of the surviving Trinātha ritual in the Barak Valley records its near-extinct continuation: three cilim-fuls of gāñjā are offered before the deity, the ash from the burnt gāñjā is collected on a banana leaf to serve as prasād "imbued with special potency," and the offering is accompanied by uludhvani, conch and kīrtana. The cult's home territory lay east of the Radcliffe Line and the practice today survives in the Barak Valley and parts of north-eastern Bangladesh rather than in West Bengal proper.

Rajbanshi religious traditions of north Bengal. The Koch-Rajbanshi of Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar, the two Dinajpurs and the wider trans-border Kamtapuri region (Lower Assam, Rangpur Division in Bangladesh, the Nepal Terai) maintain a folk Shaiva and Shakta religious complex largely outside Brahminical ritual authority. The twelve principal deities of the Rajbansis recorded in the Jalpaiguri Gazetteer of 1911 are Bisto Thakur (rains), Borma Thakur (homestead fires), Pobon Thakur (storms), Basumati Thakurani (the earth and the harvest), Bishhaori Thakurani (snakes and child sickness), Chandi Thakurani (illness), Kali Thakurani, Mahakal Thakur (the hills and jungles, propitiated against tigers and leopards), Gram Thakur (village illness), Sib Thakur, Lakhi Thakurani (good fortune) and Dharam Thakur, with the related figures Madankam, Hudum Deo, Sona Ray, Hira Devi, Mashan/Masna and Bishahari attested across the wider literature. Hudum Deo is propitiated by a women-only rain ritual in which images of the deity are carried at night into the fields and naked dance is performed around them, attested in identical form by Risley in 1891 and in Captain Lewin's 1876 account of Kuch Behar State. Madankam Puja, a male-controlled folk Shaiva festival running from the first day of Baiśākh to Saṅkrānti in the Dooars, Terai, Cooch Behar and the Bogra district of Bangladesh, treats the bamboo as the symbol of Śiva-Kāmadeva; the festival is recorded under the name Madan Kamdeo Puja in Hunter's 1876 account, where a bamboo pole dressed with red cloth and yaks' tails is worshipped over three days accompanied by songs "of a loose description." A direct cannabis attribution for Madankam itself is not confirmed in the published record, although the structurally adjacent Trinātha cult described above uses gāñjā as a principal ritual ingredient. The Jalpesh Temple near Maynaguri in Jalpaiguri district, founded by Bishwa Singha of the Koch dynasty in 1524 and rebuilt under Maharaja Nara Narayan in 1563 and successive rulers, is the principal Rajbanshi Shaiva pilgrimage centre; its Śrāvaṇa and Śivarātri melas situate Rajbanshi devotion within the wider regional Shaiva framework in which cannabis offering is a normative element. Hunter's 1876 account records an annual Shivaratri attendance of around two thousand at Jalpesh, with hookahs among the trading goods listed alongside cloth, umbrellas, brass utensils, blankets and ghi. The temple was a State-funded institution: until 1891-92 its operations were financed entirely from dedicated land revenue under Cooch Behar State and on the Government of Bengal's resumption of those lands a compensatory grant of Rs. 1,000 per annum for repairs together with a monthly Rs. 60 grant to the Pujari was instituted in order to preserve it. Cannabis is recorded in the Kuch Behar State indigenous pharmacopoeia listed in Hunter's 1876 account as sidhi (Cannabis Indica), classified as a sedative alongside other named medicinal plants of the State; the same volume lists ganja (Cannabis Indica) among the medicinal plants of the Darjeeling tract. Bhawaiya, the principal Rajbanshi folk song tradition canonised in the twentieth century by Abbasuddin Ahmed (1901–1959), is the cultural matrix within which Hudum Deo Puja and other Rajbanshi ritual-song registers operate, although the standard Bhawaiya repertoire is thematically agrarian and pastoral rather than intoxicant-centred.

Bengali literature, music and theatre. The figure of the cannabis-using devotee is firmly embedded in Bengali Śākta and Śaiva poetry, most extensively in the Śyāmā Saṅgīt tradition associated with Ramprasad Sen (c. 1718/1720–1775) and Kamalakanta Bhattacharya (1769–1820), which develops a sustained vocabulary of divine intoxication and ecstatic madness. The intoxication is most often coded in these poets' Bengali as madirā (wine) or sudhā (nectar) rather than as bhāṅ or siddhi; the wine functions as a Tantric metaphor for the mantra and the guru's instruction. The poems were composed within a milieu in which bhāṅ and gāñjā were known and used as Śākta substances and were sung by performers some of whom partook of them in life. Ramakrishna Paramahaṃsa (1836–1886) at Dakṣiṇeśvar inhabited the same Śākta-Tantric environment; his sādhanā under the Bhairavī Brāhmaṇī in the 1860s involved Tantric rites of the type prescribed in the Bengali Tantras, as recorded by Svāmī Sāradānanda in Śrī Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Līlāprasaṅga. Ramakrishna himself appears in the Śrī Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Kathāmṛta of Mahendranath Gupta as a habitual tobacco smoker rather than as a gāñjā consumer, but he uses the figure of the gā̃jākhor as an analogy for spiritual fellowship in his exchange of 25 October 1885, in which a hemp smoker keeps the company of other hemp smokers and is filled with joy on meeting one. Jeffrey J. Kripal's Kālī's Child (1995) advanced a contested psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna's Tantric practice that has been criticised by the Ramakrishna Mission and other scholars and remains a touchstone of academic debate. Bankim Candra Caṭṭopādhyāy's late-nineteenth-century novels and essays reference bhāṅ and gāñjā within the social texture of Bengali life; the gā̃jākhor (গাঁজাখোর) recurs as a comic and cautionary type and the phrase gā̃jākhuri galpa (গাঁজাখুরি গল্প), literally "a story told by a gāñjā-smoker," entered colloquial Bengali as a synonym for a tall tale. The gā̃jākhor persists as a stock comic figure in Bengali jātrā and twentieth-century Bengali cinema, in recurring cameo rather than as a starring role. Rabindranath Tagore's prose treatment of Bāuls and his musical absorption of Bāul tunes did not foreground cannabis. The Bāul song corpus of Lālan Fakir (c. 1774–1890), Duddu Śāh, Pañju Śāh and Bhābā Pāglā contains many references to madness (khepā-mi) and intoxication that are sometimes glossed by practitioners with reference to gāñjā.

Pan-Indian akhāṛā networks and the Gaṅgāsāgar Melā. Bengali sādhus participate in the wider north Indian ākhāṛā networks, especially during the Kumbh Melās at Prayāgrāj, Haridwar, Nashik and Ujjain on a twelve-year cycle, at which Nāgā sādhus of the Junā, Nirañjanī, Mahānirvāṇī and other ākhāṛās are observed smoking cilim-fuls of gāñjā and carās as a public sacrament to Śiva. The principal pilgrimage in West Bengal itself at which a comparable concentration of cross-Indian sādhus assembles is the Gaṅgāsāgar Melā at Sagar Island at the mouth of the Hooghly, held around Makar Saṅkrānti on 14 January. The 2026 Melā reached approximately 1.3 crore pilgrims. Pilgrims and sādhus assemble at the Babughat transit camp in Kolkata before crossing to Sagar Island; Naga sādhus smoking cilim-fuls of gāñjā at the transit camp are a recurrent feature of festival photojournalism.Template:Weasel The Tāponidhi Śrī Ānanda Ākhāṛā has framed the practice in the public press as a sādhanā in its own right, with cilim smoking described as a discipline "to keep their mind established in God." District administration in West Bengal does not, as a matter of routine, intervene against cilim smoking by Naga sādhus at the Gaṅgāsāgar Melā, in line with broader administrative practice at major Hindu festivals elsewhere in India.^{[editorialising?]}

See also

• West Bengal
• Cannabis trade in West Bengal
• History of Cannabis in West Bengal
• Cannabis cultivation in West Bengal
• Cannabis consumption in West Bengal
• Cannabis preparations in Bengal
• Cannabis grading systems of Bengal
• Cannabis culture in West Bengal
• Cannabis and Hinduism
• Cannabis in Cooch Behar State
• Cannabis in Bengal Presidency under Colonial Rule
• Cannabis in Mughal India
• Cannabis in Bengali Cuisine
• Cannabis in Bengali Religion
• Cannabis in Bengali culture
• Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture
• Cannabis in Ayurveda
• Tantric cannabis use in India
• Cannabis cultivation in Bengal
• Ganja Mahal
• Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Bengal Excise Act, 1909
• Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985
• Upper Jaldhaka Valley
• The Dooars
• North Bengal Plains
• WEB01