Charas

Part of a series on

Cultivation

Resin gathered on the palm by hand-rubbing, the method used in the Himalayas.

Cannabis cultivation·Glossary

Planting & Propagation

Direct seeding·Transplanting·Seed selection·Seed storage·Vegetative propagation

Field Selection & Preparation

Site selection·Land clearing·Slash-and-burn cultivation·Plot orientation·Terraced cultivation

Soil Management

Soil preparation·Soil amendments·Mulching·Soil fertility

Water Management

Rainfed cultivation·Irrigation·Drought management

Nutrient Management

Animal manure·Green manure·Composting·Wood ash·Fish fertilisers

Crop Management

Roguing·Weeding·Pest management·Disease management·Sex identification·Poddar·Topping and training

Intercropping & Companions

Companion planting·Mixed cropping·Sequential cropping

Seasonal Calendars

Cropping calendars·Photoperiod cropping·Multi-season cultivation

Harvest Techniques

Sinsemilla·Selective harvest·Whole-plant harvest·Harvest timing

Post-Harvest Processing

Drying·Curing·Trimming·Storage of cannabis

Traditional Processing

Charas·Hashish·Hand-rubbing·Dry sift·Bhang preparation·Ganja processing·Kif·Thai stick

Regional Cultivation Systems

Himalayan cultivation·Rif cultivation·Hindu Kush cultivation·Southeast Asian cultivation·African cultivation·Andean cultivation

Agricultural Tools

Hand tools·Hash sieves·Trimming tools·Drying racks

Breeding & Selection

Mass selection·Pollen management·Population breeding·Outcrossing·Seed saving

Traditional Knowledge

Indigenous farmer knowledge·Ethnobotanical practices·Oral transmission of knowledge

Portal·Category

Charas is the resin of the cannabis plant collected separately from the rest of the plant; it is also the name under which that resin has been made, traded and taxed in northern South Asia.^: 3 Indian usage and Indian law divide the plant's drug products by the part of the plant they are taken from: charas is the resin, ganja the flowering tops and bhang the leaves.^: 3–4 Further west the word is used for hashish. In Afghanistan, where it is pronounced chaars, it is the local name for hashish made from resin sieved out of the dried plant.^: 22 In Iran it is one of the words for hashish.^: 279

The resin is taken from the plant in two ways. In the Himalayas it is rubbed off the flowering tops between the palms of the hands. Beyond the mountains, in Yarkand and elsewhere in Eastern Turkestan, the dried plants were beaten over cloth and the dust that fell was worked into a mass. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 found these the only two methods in use "on any considerable scale". The second is the method now used in Afghanistan, where the dried plants are threshed and sieved into a resin powder called garda that is pressed into hashish.^{: 20, 22}

At the end of the 19th century nearly all the charas consumed in British India came from Central Asia through the Punjab, much of it over the passes to Leh and down the Kullu Valley to Hoshiarpur. The Commission called it "practically a foreign article". It was smoked mixed with tobacco. The Commission found its heaviest use in the Punjab and the North-Western Provinces. The trade came to an end in the 1930s.^: 3 After independence in 1947 India and Pakistan both prohibited the traffic in charas.^: 6 India's Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 defines charas as the separated resin of the plant. Resin rubbed by hand is still made in Nepal and in the Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh, among them the Parvati and Malana valleys.^{: 9: 508: 54}

Name

The ethnobotanist Mia Touw, citing the Pharmacographia Indica of 1893, wrote that the word "comes from the Persian and meant leather bag for pressing hemp dust". The geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy holds that the word "most likely originated from Persian and first referred to sieved hashish", which was carried in leather pouches of that name.

David Prain, writing in 1893, reported that the word was "said to signify in Sanskrit a skin, and to be used in Persian in the special sense of a skin tied up at the corners so as to make a bundle or bag", citing Dymock's Pharmacographia Indica. He suggested that the name had passed from the container to the thing contained, "the euphemistic use of the container for the thing contained".^: 7 He also read the tsjersi of Engelbert Kaempfer, whose Amoenitates exoticae of 1712 describes grades of sifted hemp dust in Persia, as Kaempfer's spelling of charas.^: 8

A Bengal inquiry of 1798 into the qualities of 10 intoxicating articles, made to decide whether the sale of any of them should be prohibited, listed charas among them alongside opium, ganja, bhang and toddy.

Definition and plant part

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission took its definition from the botanist David Prain's Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá, which calls charas "the resinous matter which forms the active principle of the plant when collected separately".^: 3 Prain explained why the resin could be collected by itself in the mountains. Across the Western Himalayas and Turkestan, an area he took to include Nepal, Kumaon, Kashmir, Ladakh, Kabul, Herat and Bokhara, it appeared on the surface of the leaves shortly before the plant flowered and stayed there, so that none of the measures used in the plains to remove the male plants were needed.^: 3 Charas on his account came chiefly from cultivated plants and only from female ones, but nothing was done to stop the plants from setting seed.^: 11

Prain described charas as a greenish-brown, moist, resinous mass, the resin mixed with the hairs and small fragments of the leaf, which hardened with keeping and was inert once it had turned brownish grey and earthy.^: 7 The Commission added that it generally carried leaf dust and other impurities picked up in manufacture and that, as a dark green or brown paste, it was hardly ever confused with ganja or bhang. In Kashmir and the Punjab, though, the name ganja was sometimes given to charas; in parts of Rajputana the two were not strictly told apart.

The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya describes the three names as a "triplex" that colonial officials in British India, faced with the many names for cannabis products in different languages, eventually systematised as juridical categories.^: 6 Excise laws and inspectors' manuals in Bengal and the Punjab equated charas with hashish. By the interwar period it was commonplace for revenue, police and excise officers to write one of the three names when describing any seized cannabis product, even where the words were not in common use.^: 42–43

The Commission could not say how long charas kept, since the drug was imported and the age of any sample was unknown. It judged that its physical properties made it easy to adulterate. A Punjab drug vendor of 20 years' standing told it that charas was "very strong during the first year" and then lost strength until by the fourth year it became "quite useless", while another witness spoke of Bokhara charas that could be kept for six years in India without going bad. The Joint Commissioner at Leh held that charas went bad after a year; the Commission thought that too short.

Prain held that the narcotic of charas and of ganja was "the same thing" and that charas was the strongest of the three products; good Yarkand charas had been found to be 78 per cent resin and 22 per cent residue, mostly vegetable hairs.^{: 8, 10} The Commission found that the female plant grown for fibre in Kumaon yielded "a very considerable amount of charas" and that whether a crop yielded charas depended on "the quantity of resin secreted in the flower head and the economy of extracting it".

In 1896 the chemists T. Barlow Wood, W. T. Newton Spivey and Thomas Hill Easterfield chose charas for analysis because the active principle seemed most concentrated in this natural exudation and it contained no chlorophyll. From several pounds of the resin sent by an official at Etawah in the North-Western Provinces they separated a red oil that made up 33 per cent of the charas and proposed the name cannabinol for it.^{: 539–540, 546}

The Commission found no evidence that charas was made in Bengal, although the resin was "available in plenty" in the licensed crop of the Ganja Mahal. It put this down to the lack of demand. Prain noticed that the men who pressed ganja finished the work with a sticky black coating on the soles of their feet. "Practically, therefore, this black substance is pure charas", he wrote, collected by the feet where the hillman collected it on his palms; the plains cultivator threw it away. Prain put the loss at nearly 10 per cent of the resin in the crop.^: 16–17

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), reviewing the world cannabis situation in 2006, glossed charas as "hand-rubbed cannabis resin".^: 9 A 2025 study of the phylogeography of cannabis keeps the word for "hand-rubbed resin from living cannabis plants", distinct from the "sieved hashish" of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The Afghan cannabis surveys, by contrast, give charas as the local name for hashish made from sieved resin powder.^: 22 The Commission of the 1890s had used the word for resin taken by either method.

Statutory definition

The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930 defined charas as "the resin obtained from the Indian hemp plant, which has not been submitted to any manipulations other than those necessary for packing and transport". Its second schedule wrote the same definition into the Punjab Excise Act of 1914. In Pakistan, where the British drug laws had stayed in force, the Prohibition (Enforcement of Hadd) Order of February 1979 prescribed more severe penalties and listed charas among intoxicants in almost the same words.^: 15–16

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 defines "cannabis resin" as "the separated resin, whether crude or purified, obtained from the cannabis plant".^{: art. 1(1)(d)} India's Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 uses the same words for charas, adding "in whatever form" and extending the definition to hashish oil:

charas, that is, the separated resin, in whatever form, whether crude or purified, obtained from the cannabis plant and also includes concentrated preparation and resin known as hashish oil or liquid hashish

The Act lets state governments permit and regulate the cultivation of the cannabis plant and the production, sale and use of cannabis, but it excludes charas from that power. Pakistan's Control of Narcotic Substances Act of 1997 defines "cannabis resin (charas)" in nearly the same terms. Since an amendment of 2022 it has graded the punishment for charas offences by weight; for up to 499 grams the penalty is imprisonment of ten months to five years and a fine of up to 40,000 rupees.^{: 6, 12–13}

Nepal's Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act of 1976 (2033 in the Nepali calendar) counts charas (chares) within its definition of ganja, together with the natural resin obtained from the plant. It treats extracting charas from the plant as production. A proviso lets the government make rules to license, for a prescribed period, the production, collection and sale of charas from cannabis growing wild in the western hills of the country.^{: 2–3, 5}

Making charas

Main articles: Hand-rubbing and Dry sift

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission found two methods in use. One was rubbing the flower heads with the hands, as in Kumaon and Nepal; the other was what it called the garda method of Yarkand, which "consists in beating the plant over cloth, and manipulating the dust that is thus deposited". In Prain's account the resin was taken south of the Himalayas from plants that had not been reaped, while beyond the mountains, in Ladakh, Yarkand and Turkestan, reaped plants were beaten on coarse cotton cloths.^: 7–8

In the classification of drug-type cannabis published by John McPartland and Ernest Small in 2020, the wild-growing plants of montane India, Nepal and Bhutan, which they name Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. himalayensis, are harvested for fibre, bhang, seed and hand-rubbed charas, while the Central Asian domesticate, var. afghanica, was cultivated "for sieved hashīsh (nasha, charas)".^{: 97, 99} The 2025 phylogeographic study cites a hypothesis of Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin that plants in dry climates were selected for resin glands that fall off easily, which suits sieving, while in the humid and rainy Himalayas glands that withstand the rain were favoured. The study concludes that sieving there was replaced by hand-rubbing or by smoking the dried flowers as ganja.

Rubbing by hand

A witness from the hills of the North-Western Provinces gave the Commission a working account of the Himalayan method as practised on the fibre crop. The female plants were cut in November and spread out to dry for 24 hours. The people then sat round in the heat of the day and plucked off the flower heads, by then full of seed, rubbing each handful between the palms for about 10 minutes. The resin that built up on the palms was scraped off and rolled into balls. Sometimes the plants were trodden instead and the feet scraped. A choice kind called chahar mulhi came from passing the hands up the ripe plants as they stood in the field, which the witness said was disliked because it was thought to damage the fibre.

The answers of the Nepal Darbar describe the same operation: the plant "is squeezed between the palms of both hands, and the gummy substance which sticks to the hands is scraped into a vessel, and is called charas". The Residency Surgeon at Kathmandu found the drug collected within 50 miles of the capital by rubbing the young flowering tops between the hands as they stood. In Kullu and the Punjab hill states the flower heads were rubbed between the hands and the resin scraped off the palms or off the feet where the plants had been trodden. At Malana, where commercial cannabis cultivation was taken up in the late 1970s, villagers told the anthropologist Richard Axelby that an Italian who had settled among them taught them to make charas by the "hand-rubbed" technique, drawing resin from the plant "by massaging each flowering leaf between the palm and fingers".^: 54

In 2006 the UNODC described hand-rubbing as "concentrated in India and Nepal".^: 9 Chouvy notes that it is not practised in Kashmir, where the resin is sieved. McPartland and Small report that by 1980 Afghan landraces had been brought into southern Kashmir and were grown there for sieved hashish.^: 85

Beating and sieving

The Commission's account of the trans-Himalayan method came second-hand, from a witness who traded to Ladakh and had it from Ladakhi merchants. In Yarkand the plant was sown in the month of Baisakh on waste land and round other crops, reaped in Katik when the flowers were ripe and dried for a month on the roofs of houses. The farmers then threshed the plants at night indoors. The smaller flowers fell to the floor as a powder that was sifted three times, bagged and sold to traders. The merchants stored it until Jeth, when the sun made "a kind of oleaginous substance" ooze from the powder. It was then kneaded like tobacco and bagged in cloth. The charas was sorted into kinds called mushak, bahara, pai and kuppi before being closed up in leather. Prain described trans-Himalayan charas as at first a fine greenish-white powder that stuck together in its bags of its own accord. Around Herat and in Persia, he added, the material on the cloths was sometimes melted into a single mass with warm water, which he took to explain why the charas of Herat was softer, purer and stronger than that of other trans-Himalayan districts.^: 7 The pharmacologists I. C. Chopra and R. N. Chopra, writing in 1957, add that in Yarkand the powder, crushed between the hands from the dried female flower heads and sieved to the fineness of sand or sawdust, was kept in rawhide bags through the winter and put out in the sun at the start of the hot weather until the resin melted. It was then kneaded with wooden rods until each bag gave up one to two pounds (about 0.5 to 0.9 kilograms) of oil.^: 5–6

In the Punjab a kind of charas called garda, a word the Commission took to mean simply dust, was made from the dried plant. In the account of it in the Punjab Products, which the Commission summarised, the finest dust was reddish and called surkha, a green dust bhangra and the poorest khaki, the part that had to be scraped or shaken hard off the cloth; each was kneaded with a little water into a cake. Prain gave the same three grades, naming the green one bhangi charas.^: 8

In Afghanistan, as the cannabis surveys of the UNODC and the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics describe it, farmers dry the cut plants in the field and then indoors before threshing and sieving them into a powder called garda, which is resin mixed with other plant matter.^: 20 Two men beat the dried plants on a barrel to separate the flower heads from the branches, sieve the material through cloth spread on an inclined wooden frame and shake it in a cloth bag to remove the dust. The sieving is done three times. The powder is graded as first, second and third garda, apparently by the number of sievings.^: 22–23 Chouvy derives the word from gard, dust in Dari and Pashto, the sense the Commission had given to the Punjab garda. Most farmers sell the powder to traders, who press it into hashish, locally called charas. For Jooshi hashish, made from the best garda of the north, one farmer holds a handful of powder and lights a match while another sprinkles powder onto the flame. The heating is repeated until the mass is soft, sticky and solid. In the south good first garda is simply pressed and rubbed between the palms until it binds.^: 22–26 When the trade turned from local demand to foreign traffickers, some producers gave up the slower cloth sieves for metal ones, which sieved more material but left more plant matter in the resin.

Collection at harvest

In the ganja districts of the Bombay Presidency an officer described charas as the harvesters' perquisite, "the resinous substance that sticks to the hands or collects on the sickle when cutting or plucking the tops". The harvesters rubbed their hands together now and then and collected a pill "naturally half dirt and sweat and half charas"; "a piece about the size of a marble may perhaps be the reward of a day's work". The Commission regarded this collection as proved for Gwalior and Bombay.

Prain traced an account of men walking through the crop in leather garments and scraping off the resin that stuck to them, which had "passed into all treatises on hemp", to W. B. O'Shaughnessy's Bengal Dispensatory, where it is told of Central India. Prain found that the practice did not prevail in Nepal.^: 7 Witnesses before the Commission described it from Nepal and from the country near Peshawar and Kandahar, but the Commission concluded that it "has not been definitely located" and that "it is doubtful if this device is employed anywhere in India".

The trade from Central Asia

The Commission called charas "practically a foreign article". Small amounts came from Nepal and Gwalior; the bulk came "from Yarkand through the Himalayan passes, or to a much smaller degree from other parts of Central Asia through the routes on the frontier of Afghanistan". Nearly the whole supply entered through the Punjab: 3,000 to 4,000 maunds in an ordinary year on the estimate of the Punjab's Excise Commissioner, rising to 5,000 in the exceptional year 1892–93.

The British Joint Commissioner in Ladakh wrote in 1881 that the charas coming down the Ladakh road was produced in Eastern Turkestan, now Xinjiang, at Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan. It was held inferior to the charas of Bokhara, which came through Kabul to Peshawar and through Kandahar to Shikarpur in Sind. A later Joint Commissioner, Captain Ramsay, reported in 1888 that the Russians were said to have prohibited cultivation in their dominions, so that supplies came "almost entirely from Yarkand territory".

At Leh, Ramsay wrote, Yarkandi traders met Indian merchants who took their charas in exchange for piece-goods and other Indian articles, each side overvaluing its goods; Ramsay and two predecessors had opposed fostering the trade because "all charas dealings partake rather of the nature of a gambling transaction than of legitimate trade". From Leh the drug went to the Punjab by two routes. About 500 maunds a year travelled by way of Kashmir, whose authorities saw that it passed with its bulk unbroken; "six or seven times as much" came "direct through Kulu to Hoshiarpur": 2,201 maunds in 1890–91, 3,242 in 1891–92 and 3,932 in 1892–93. Amritsar was the chief depot, from which the North-Western Provinces drew their supply. In Rajputana the trade was mostly in the hands of travelling Kabulis, known there as Vilayatis.

The Commission judged that the imports could be stopped without much difficulty, with the co-operation of the Kashmir Darbar, but that because charas was "the principal import from Yarkand", its prohibition "would paralyse, if not extinguish, the trade with this country". A Hoshiarpur witness named the traders of Hoshiarpur and Amritsar, "who take merchandise to Ladakh and Yarkand and bring back charas", as those with most to lose. The Government of India's resolution on the report gave the same reason for not prohibiting it: the importation of charas was "the means by which Yarkand makes payment for its consumption of Indian products".

Kumaon and Garhwal made about 50 maunds a year from the fibre crop, most of it used locally. Nepal sent 25 to 50 maunds, much of it to Lucknow. Prain held that habitual users much preferred the Nepal and Garhwal article, which fetched a better price than the best Central Asian charas, because resin rubbed off by hand carried less vegetable matter than resin beaten out on cloth and was harder to adulterate.^: 8 The Excise Commissioner of the North-Western Provinces reported the opposite preference in Kumaon, where the people chose Yarkand charas over their own, though the only advantage the Commissioner could find in it was cheapness. The Nepal Darbar's answers said that Yarkand charas was preferred in Nepal too.

The 20th century

By 1916–17 the drug came down from Leh each autumn in the names of six Hoshiarpur licensees, packed in "hard bolster-like packages, covered with goat or sheep-skins". It was either held in a bonded warehouse at Kullu or sent on in bond to Hoshiarpur.^: 173–174 The Government of India's annual reports of the 1920s record charas from Yarkand deposited in a special warehouse at Leh and distributed from there. A second warehouse was opened at Chitral in 1926 to stop smuggling by that route. In 1928, to undercut the smugglers, the duty in the Punjab, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province and Delhi was cut from Rs. 60 to Rs. 20 a seer. Imports reached 97,949 kilograms in 1931 and fell to 62,380 kilograms in 1932, the last year for which they were reported.^: 2–3

A study by the United Nations Secretariat, published in 1953, traced the end of the trade to Xinjiang, then romanised Sinkiang, whose provincial government prohibited the export of charas in 1934 on the instructions of the Chinese government, although the full effect was not felt for several years. The Government of India's report for 1938 recorded that the trade on a large scale had ceased and that smugglers had turned to opium. Licit supplies ran out in 1942. The last licit consumption in India, 49 kilograms, was in 1945.^{: 1, 3–5} Hermann Kreutzmann, working from India Office records, dates the decisive step to 1936, when the export duty was raised from Rs. 20 to Rs. 200 a pony load and the head of the Kashgar administration announced that "the sale and transmission (export) of opium, Charas and wine is prohibited from today"; charas exports then "nearly collapsed and never recovered".^{: 80, 82} I. C. and R. N. Chopra placed the end on the Indian side, writing that the import of charas was "entirely stopped by the Government of India" in about 1934–35 and that its use had been prohibited since 1935.^{: 6, 16–17} The Central Charas (Import by Land) Rules, made under the Dangerous Drugs Act and in force from 1 October 1935, allowed imports only by prescribed routes and under authorisation.^: 3

From 1935 an inferior "garda charas" was smuggled from Gardez in Afghanistan into the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. In 1940 the government of Kashmir State considered making charas itself because of the Chinese ban on exports from Yarkand. In 1945 some Nepalese charas came in through the United Provinces. A little was produced in Indore State in 1947 before production in the Indian States was prohibited.^: 3–5 India and Pakistan both prohibited the traffic after independence. The Secretariat concluded in 1953 that "the great charas traffic is now extinct".^: 6

Excise and control in British India

Under the Bengal Excise Act of 1878 a licence from the collector was needed to manufacture ganja, charas or bhang and to sell or keep more than five tolas of charas. Charas was not made in the province. The small amount brought in from Upper India under passes paid a duty of eight rupees a seer (levied since 1880) and was then sold by licensed vendors. In 1892–93 only 11 maunds 26 seers paid duty, yielding Rs. 9,097.

In the Punjab, which handled almost the whole trade, the traders who brought charas from Yarkand held no licence. They needed a pass from the Joint Commissioner at Leh or from the Deputy Commissioner of the district where they entered the Punjab, countersigned in each district they passed through. The province's excise income from intoxicating drugs came solely from the monopoly of sale, auctioned each year within tahsils and other subdivisions of districts. Its Excise Commissioner valued the licences for selling hemp drugs in 1893 at Rs. 1,70,854, the whole of the tax on more than 1,000 maunds of charas and nearly 4,000 of bhang. The Commissioner called this "the weakest part of our excise system in the Punjab". An act of 1893 gave the Government of India power to put a duty on intoxicating drugs brought by land from beyond India. A proposal followed that all charas entering the province should be taken to warehouses (golas) and released only under a pass carrying a fee of eight annas a seer.

The Commission recommended a duty of not less than Rs. 80 a maund on all charas imported into the Punjab, the drug to be stored in bonded warehouses and the duty paid as vendors took it out. The Government of India accepted the principle in its resolution of 21 March 1895. By 1916–17 the duty on charas coming through Kullu stood at Rs. 14 a seer. The district gazetteer noted that the trade showed "no signs of falling off in spite of the heavy duty".^: 173–174

In the Bombay Presidency an act of 1901 set differential duties of four rupees a seer on ganja, two on charas and half a rupee on bhang. It limited consumers to five tolas of ganja or charas.^: 48 In July 1931 a member of the Bengal Legislative Council from Calcutta, Haridhan Dutt, moved a resolution for the complete prohibition of charas, which Dutt called "the essence of ganja", describing the trade routes that brought it into Bengal from Nepal and the North-West Frontier Province. Another member told the council that other provinces had banned imports of charas and that Calcutta's consumers had bought 52 maunds that year. The government replied that it had raised the minimum age for buying charas from 16 to 20 and limited possession to one tola. Dutt withdrew the resolution.^: 218

Consumption

Apart from its medical uses, charas was, in the Commission's words, "very rarely consumed in any other way but in the form of smoke". In the Punjab and the North-Western Provinces a quantity no larger than a ganja smoker's charge was kneaded into two or three times its weight of the moist tobacco prepared for the hookah and smoked in the ordinary way; dry tobacco and the clay chillum could be used instead. At religious gatherings in Upper India, mendicants were said to hang from a tree a huge chillum holding a seer or more of the drug so that anyone could share it. Prain recorded a habit in the Himalayas of rubbing a mature flower head between the palms and then drinking water scooped up in the resin-coated hands.^: 63

In the 1950s the Chopras found charas smoked "in more or less the same way as ganja", except that it was usually warmed a little and mixed with about twice its quantity of tobacco before going into the chillum; in the frontier districts of Pakistan and in West Punjab it was also smoked through water in the ordinary hookah. Before its import was stopped it had been used mainly in the north and west of India (the Frontier Province, the Punjab, Sind and Rajasthan) and to a lesser extent in large towns such as Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi.^{: 8, 16}

In a village near Lucknow in 1959–60 the anthropologist Khwaja Hasan found charas smoked in the same way as ganja, mixed with tobacco in a funnel-shaped clay pipe. Users sometimes rolled the mixture into cigarettes, though none were made commercially.^: 240–241 A study of long-term users in Pakistan in 1973 found charas smoked in cigarettes or a chilam, usually mixed with tobacco, while bhang was drunk. In Lahore seven of its 35 subjects smoked only charas and 28 used both, smoking on average 14 cigarettes a day, each holding half a gram to a gram of cannabis; they smoked charas at work and drank bhang with friends at uddas, shops or meeting places attached to a shrine.^{: 347–348, 352}

The Commission mapped "a continuous area of heavy consumption of charas" across the Punjab and the North-Western Provinces, "between Lahore and Shahjahanpur". In the Punjab ganja was not smoked at all and charas took its place. In the western divisions of the North-Western Provinces (Meerut, Rohilkhand and Kumaon) charas was used "to the exclusion of ganja". In Bengal it was "an expensive luxury" at about Rs. 40 a seer, twice the price of ganja; Calcutta and Murshidabad together took only 11 maunds a year. It was not used in Assam or Madras and hardly at all in the Bombay Presidency outside Sind.

In the North-Western Provinces the evidence showed charas "used by the poor more than by the rich". It was in many places cheaper than the best Bengal ganja and, being stronger, was used in smaller amounts. The Commission put its consumers there at about 92,000. A former Excise Commissioner had written in 1881 that charas was coming into favour as the duty on Bengal ganja rose. The Commission found some evidence that the change was still going on. Its effects, the Commission concluded, were similar to those of ganja, "though charas is ceteris paribus the more potent". An economic analysis of the Punjab's district excise figures for 1907 to 1918, when charas and bhang could be bought legally, found that the consumption of opium rose with the price of charas, which its authors read as evidence that consumers substituted the one for the other.

Summing up its chapter on social and religious customs, the Commission remarked that charas, "which is a comparatively new article of consumption, has not been shown to be in any way connected with religious observance". In northern Garhwal, where little charas was made, it was not commonly sold but given to fakirs visiting Badrinath and Kedarnath. Charas rubbed from the wild hemp at Urgam, which grew near a temple of Siva, was given to fakirs and pilgrims to the same shrines. Hasan, on the other hand, held that the use of ganja, bhang and charas "is associated with religio-social ceremonies among the Hindus" and that the hemp drugs, unlike alcohol, were not forbidden to holy men.^: 239 In the Dolpa district of Nepal, James Fisher found that the Magars never smoked ganja or charas, because doing so was the practice of the low-caste kami blacksmiths and carpenters.^: 252

The Himalayas since the 1960s

Nepal

Nepal regulated the cultivation, sale and export of cannabis by licence under an Intoxicants Act of 1961 and rules of 1962, which set excise and sales taxes on its commercial cultivation and sale.^: 252 In the mid-1960s, when a colony of international travellers settled in Kathmandu, the retail price of charas there rose from about $15 to about $70 a kilogram and smuggling into India increased, according to the anthropologist James Fisher.^: 252 By 1967 the licence fee for growing cannabis had reached $450 a bigha, about one and five-eighths acres, before it was lowered to $350 to discourage growers from exceeding their licensed area. Some 30 shops in Kathmandu serving foreign customers paid a tax of Rs. 2,000 each.^: 252–253 On 16 July 1973 the government revoked all licences to cultivate, buy and sell cannabis, so that trafficking became illegal while possession and use did not.^{: 247, 253} Fisher attributed the ban to alarm in the Nepalese middle class and to pressure from the United States government and the International Narcotics Control Board. Fisher put the government's lost licence revenue at $100,000 and judged that "those most hurt by the ban are hill farmers in the west for whom cannabis was a small but crucial cash crop".^: 253–254 The Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act of September 1976 then made cannabis illegal in Nepal.^: 955

The UNODC reported in 2006 that charas from Nepal was "considered to be of an even higher quality" than Indian charas, although lower grades were also produced.^: 9 A 2021 review of studies put Nepal's seizures in 2018 at 1,546 kilograms of hashish and 4,181 kilograms of cannabis.^: 956

Himachal Pradesh

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act took effect in India on 14 November 1985.^: 508 Fieldwork of about 14 months in the Parvati Valley of Kullu district, published by the sociologist Prasenjeet Tribhuvan in 2018, found charas, the local name for hashish, to be "the most profitable and important product of the cannabis plant" in the district. The valley, with more than 70 villages, was in the study's words "the crux of charas cultivation and trade".^: 508 Every household in the three villages studied took part in cultivation, charas production and trade. The plants were grown on state forest land above the villages, which kept them out of the way of police destruction drives. Middlemen bought charas in bulk and sold it to tourists by the tola of 10 grams.^{: 508–509, 513} Women worked in cultivation and harvesting but rarely in selling. Money from the trade was sometimes called bhang ka paisa, "cannabis money", which carried a sense of earnings from selling intoxication.^: 510–511 The district police reported about 510 cases under the Act in 2012 for charas possession or cultivation, 143 of them against local residents.^: 510

At Malana the Associated Press described the village's charas, sold as "Malana Cream", in 2016 as "a variety of oily hash produced in the village from higher-potency plants with hybrid seeds" that had "earned legendary status among pot smokers around the world". It reported a woman ending a day of rubbing with about 20 grams and a local government estimate that 240 hectares in the region had produced more than 12,000 kilograms of hashish that year. Axelby found that each September, before the harvest, teams of police came to Malana to destroy the standing fields.^: 56 A report of 2021 stated that charas "produced at Banjar, Kullu, Manali, Anni and Nirmand areas in Kullu is known as Malana cream" and put the district's charas seizures at 169.7 kilograms in 2020 and 263.4 kilograms by the middle of November 2021. Chouvy notes that India has no official estimates of cannabis cultivation and reports a guesstimate by a former superintendent of the Narcotics Control Bureau of about 2,100 hectares of cannabis in the Parvati Valley in 2013 and 100 to 150 tonnes of hashish from the whole state in 2018.

The anthropologist Daniela Berti has followed prosecutions under the Act in the district courts of the state. In a case heard at Mandi in 2006–07, concerning plants found in a field, a village headman told the court that "Nibhar charas (wild charas) can be found everywhere in our area. It is not sown". The accused was acquitted. In another, the accused reportedly told the police that the cannabis found in their house "had been rubbed from the plants by their own hands" to be given as prasad to ascetics at the Shiva puja; that case also ended in acquittal.^{: 100, 120} A defence lawyer told Berti that in India those accused under the narcotics law were usually acquitted, despite its severity.^: 92

Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran

Afghanistan

Most Afghans, according to James Bradford and David Mansfield, prefer to smoke charas, the local form of hashish, pronounced chaars in Afghanistan and made by sieving the resin glands of the plant and curing the product in a leather pouch. In the reign of Abdur Rahman Khan at the end of the 19th century, most of the charas and opium in the markets of the North-West Frontier Province came from Afghan traders to the north. The British missionary doctor T. L. Pennell wrote in 1908 that the faqirs of the frontier, "like the Hindu Sadhus", constantly smoked charas and bhang with tobacco in their chillums and that in this state they were known as mast and believed by the people to be possessed by divinity.^: 186–187

The penal code of 1924–25, issued under Amanullah Khan, brought opium, charas and bhang under government regulation and taxed the distribution of charas and bhang at 50 per cent; its article 125 forbade the production and use of drugs but exempted charas, bhang and opium intended for trade abroad.^: 187–189 Demand for Afghan opium and charas grew in India and China in the early 20th century. The smuggling of Afghan hashish became a growing problem for the British authorities.^: 188–189 In the 1960s, the years of the Hippie Trail, special teahouses (saqikhana) serving only charas users could be found in Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban banned cannabis production early in their rule, long before their ban on opium in 2000–01.

In 2009 the UNODC and Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter Narcotics estimated that the country's cannabis crop could yield 1,500 to 3,500 tonnes of garda.^: 23 The survey's commentary, signed by the UNODC's executive director, called Afghanistan "the world's biggest producer of hashish"; Bradford and Mansfield judge this "a bold claim with little evidence to support it".^: 5 Only nine of the 46 farmers interviewed for the survey's yield study made hashish themselves.^: 38

Pakistan

In Balochistan around 1980 cannabis was commonly planted in apple orchards, so that a farmer took two crops from the same field. The female plants were harvested from the middle of October. The produce was rubbed over two grades of cloth or gauze, the finer first. The three grades of powder, sold at about Rs. 400, 250 and 150 a kilogram, were made into charas moulded into rectangular slabs of 200 to 250 grams.^: 24 The UNODC reported in 2006 that most Afghan cannabis was processed in the border regions, in the inaccessible Orakzai and Kurram tribal agencies of Pakistan and the Tirah area of the Khyber agency, so that Afghan and Pakistani cannabis products were hard to tell apart.^: 90

Iran

Maziyar Ghiabi describes charas as "the residue obtained from fresh cannabis flowers" and writes that at the turn of the 20th century Iranian smokers burned it on a pin-head above a mirror, drew off the smoke through a wooden tube and afterwards licked the hashish oil left on the mirror.^: 276–277 The first penal law of the Pahlavi era, approved on 27 January 1926, named only the crime of public intoxication with "opium, charas and bang". Among the forms of cannabis most used in Iran since the revolution of 1979, Ghiabi lists "hashish (i.e., bang, charas)".^: 279

See also

• Bhang
• Dry sift
• Ganja
• Hand-rubbing
• Hashish
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Kullu Valley
• Malana Cream