Ganja processing

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Preparing flat ganja at Naogaon, 16 February 1894; plate from the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

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Ganja processing is the work by which the harvested flowering tops of female cannabis were made into ganja, the smoking drug of South Asia. In northern Bengal the licensed crop was sold in three trade forms: flat ganja, pressed by treading the tops underfoot; round ganja, rolled under the feet along a bar; and chur, the broken flower heads that fell from both. The tops were sun-dried, trodden or rolled, cleaned of leaf and seed, pressed under mats, men or weights between stages, tied into bundles and baled.

The process is known in most detail from the Ganja Mahal, the licensed tract around Naogaon, where Hem Chunder Kerr watched it through the season of 1876–77 and set down each step and the names the workers used for them. David Prain went over the same ground in 1893. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission summarised both in its report of 1894 and set beside them the treading and pressing of ganja in the Bombay Presidency, the Central Provinces, Orissa and Travancore. The Bengal method continued in the tract under the Ganja Society until cultivation ended in Bangladesh in 1987.

The manufacturing yard

Gathering the ganja crop at Naogaon, 16 February 1894.

Ganja was made where it was grown. Each cultivator cleared and levelled a plot near the field, called the chátor or in some places the kholá: a grassy spot near the homestead for flat ganja, a rice field for round ganja. On the round-ganja yards huts were put up for the men watching the crop and for the agents of the wholesale dealers who made their own.^{: para. 59: 13–14} Before reaping, the cultivator had to show his licence to the excise supervisor at Naogaon and obtain verbal permission to take the crop from the field.^{: para. 58}

The crop did not ripen evenly, so it was not cut at once. The most mature plants were picked out and only as many cut as could be worked up in that day and the two following. The round was repeated until the field was cleared. Timing was tight: a plant left more than three or four days after it matured withered and was useless. The sign of maturity was the withering and falling of the larger leaves. Kerr found that Hindu cultivators did not usually begin cutting on a Thursday afternoon or on an unlucky day; among Muslim cultivators sowing, transplanting and reaping all had to begin on a Friday.^{: para. 60} The plants were cut with a sickle a few inches above the ground, tied in bundles of 50 or 60 over a bamboo pole and carried to the yard on two men's shoulders.^{: para. 61} The barren plants the cultivators called khásiá were left standing or cut only for fuel.^: 13

Flat ganja was cut at about nine in the morning, once the dew was off the ground. Plants for round ganja were cut in the afternoon, between two and three o'clock.^{: para. 60}

Flat ganja: treading

A ganja plant ready for cutting at Naogaon, February 1894, with some of the dried leaves still on it.

Flat ganja (cháptá) took three days. On the first, the cut plants lay in the sun on the grass of the chátor until early afternoon. A worker then cut each into lengths of one to two feet and threw away the twigs that carried no flowers and the bare lower stalk. The selected lengths were left out overnight in the dew.^{: para. 62}

The treading began on the afternoon of the second day. The lengths, by now withered, were made into bundles of three to ten twigs and laid on a mat in a circle with their tops pointing to the centre and overlapping. Four or five men climbed onto the circle holding one another by the shoulders and trod it, each stamping with the right foot while holding the plants down with the left. Bundle after bundle was added and trodden until the stack stood about a foot high; the stack Kerr measured was 13½ feet round and held 1,326 tops. The treaders bowed to the ganja before setting foot on it. After about half an hour the men got down, the stack was covered with mats and one or two men sat on it, a stage Kerr calls jágdewá. The treading gave the ganja its flat shape and made the small flowers stick to one another in one mass, helped by the resin on them, while the large leaves and the seeds fell away.^{: paras. 63–64} The bundles were then taken off in pairs and beaten together over a mat to shake out seed and crumbled leaf. The stack was then built again with its former top layer at the bottom and trodden a second time. The seed that fell was winnowed by dropping it from a height onto a mat so that the wind carried off the leaf; the cultivator kept it for the next year's sowing.^{: para. 65} Late in the afternoon the bundles were laid out singly and each trodden for six or seven minutes, the treader holding the stem end with one foot and drawing the other from stem to top, then turned and trodden again. By sunset each bundle was down to three or four twigs. The bundles were leaned against a pole and covered with mats for the night.^{: para. 66}

On the third day the twigs that had jammed together were separated, re-stacked, trodden lightly and covered with mats, which Kerr calls jorá bhangá.^{: para. 67} Towards eleven they were laid in two rows on a long line of mats with their heads meeting. They were stamped hard, turned at about half past twelve, sunned and stamped again; the workers called this khonchá.^{: para. 68} The last stage, pátibhángá, began after two o'clock: each twig was laid by itself and pressed with the right foot from stem to top. By four the twigs were tied in bundles of 12 to 14. Most of the leaves and seeds had gone, though a few seeds could still be found. The twigs were quite flat, with the bracts and calyces pressed into one hard mass.^{: para. 69} In Prain's account of 1893 the stack was about 15 inches high. Most of the heads that fell off on the first day were trodden back into the mass, while those falling on the second day were thrown away and burnt.^: 13–14

Ten of the finished bundles were tied together with strips of bamboo bark and carried to the cultivator's house. There they were stacked in a circle with the stems outwards, the tops covered with mats and the stems left bare to dry. Once dry they were kept indoors on bamboo platforms.^{: para. 70}

Round ganja: rolling

The opening of Kerr's 1877 report, from its reprint in the House of Commons return of 1893.

Round ganja took a day longer. The plants, cut in the afternoon, lay out in the evening sun and the night's dew. At about eight the next morning they were cut into sections. More of each plant was rejected than for flat ganja: much more bare stalk and every twig that had borne little or nothing. The selected pieces were spread in the sun to stiffen.^{: para. 71}

A little before noon mats were laid on both sides of a long bamboo bar fixed horizontally on posts four feet high. Twelve men stood in two rows holding the bar with both hands and rolled the bundles under their feet, from the stalk end towards the tops, pressing hard. This first rolling is ekmalái. A bundle usually held 12 or 13 pieces and was often tied at the stem with string, though Kerr was told the more skilled workers could manage bundles untied. Each man rolled his bundle for eight or ten minutes, now and then lifting it to shake off the leaves; Kerr calls the work "pedipulation". The rolled twigs were laid out singly in the sun for about a quarter of an hour, then rolled a second, shorter time (domalái). The men then sat on the mats and rolled three to five twigs at a time hard between their hands, a stage called háth mutá, which might be repeated after half an hour. By late afternoon the twigs had their round shape and had lost most of their leaf. They were tied in bundles of about 100 and covered with mats for the night.^{: para. 72} The next morning the bundles were untied and the twigs dried in the sun again; at midday they were pressed between the hands or, if not dry enough, given another foot-rolling, after which the remaining leaf fell away.^{: para. 74}

The tying of the bundles, sherbándhá, was skilled work. Kerr names the labourers from Jessore as particularly good at it, adding that some local workers had lately learnt it. The head man sorted the twigs his assistants cut for him into long, medium and short; he set the smallest in the middle and the longest, which were the best, round the outside so that they hid the rest, pressed the bundle by hand, tied it at the stem with jute string and cut the stem end off with a sickle. Unflowered twigs and much of the wood were thrown out at this stage. In the evening the bundles were laid on mats in two rows, heads meeting, covered with mats and left overnight under the weight of a bamboo.^{: para. 75} On the last morning they were set in the sun until about two o'clock, then rolled and shaken on the mat. Workers searched each bundle for leaf with their fingers or a sharpened stem and struck it with the hand. Kerr gives these two final operations the name páti bhángá.^{: para. 76} Because the hands did so much of the work, Prain found less leaf in round ganja than in flat.^: 14

Kerr traces the rolled form to Jessore, where the flower spikes had been rolled on a mat until the florets stuck together in a long, tapering cylinder. Wherever it was made, the form still carried the name Jessori ganja; official records called it "round ganja".^{: para. 32} Its market in the 1870s was chiefly Calcutta and the districts round it, while flat ganja was in much greater demand.^{: para. 104} Wholesale dealers from Calcutta commonly bought the standing crop and had their own agents manufacture the round ganja. Kerr found that their agents selected the plants and rejected inferior ones more strictly than cultivators working on their own account. He called the larger rejections wastage.^{: paras. 77, 80} Prain disagreed on this one point. He sided with the dealers: in his view the rejections improved the ganja.^: 15

Chur

Chur (chúr, also called rorá) was not made by a process of its own. It was the flower heads broken from flat and round ganja while the bundles were tied, rolled and shaken, which could not be pressed back onto the twigs and were kept apart. It consisted mostly of female flowers with their resin and no stalk. Under the excise rules of Kerr's time it paid four rupees duty against three on round ganja.^{: paras. 76, 83} He saw scarcely any from flat ganja: the bits that fell were picked up and pressed back into the mass, while those dropped when the bundles were tied were burnt.^{: para. 70} The Commission's summary likewise has the fragments of flat ganja pressed back or burnt. In it chur is the fragments of round ganja only.

Prain gives the yield. Breaking flat ganja into "flat twig" gave about 8½ seers of chur to every 100 seers made. Trimming round ganja to standard lengths gave about 15 seers to 100, more because its flower heads clung less closely together. When the cultivator made round ganja the chur went to the buyer as a perquisite, so the cultivator kept its amount down.^: 9–10

Sun, fire and the reasons for the working

Every stage depended on strong sun. Kerr found cultivators unwilling to cut on an overcast day. If clouds came after the plants were cut, the workers held the sections over a fire for about ten minutes before rolling; the ganja then turned an unnatural dark colour.^{: paras. 73, 84} Prain saw fire drying at Naogaon in a wet season and found that the darker ganja sold less readily. He put the difference down to the lack of light rather than heat: in sun-drying, he suggested, resin passed from the small leaves to the flower heads before the leaves fell, while in fire-drying it stayed in the leaves and was lost with them.^: 15 In the Commission's summary fire drying was an occasional resort that discoloured the ganja and lowered its price.

Prain divided the work into drying and "kneading", which went on together or in alternation. Drying took out the watery juices, which reduced both the weight on which excise was charged and the risk of mould. It also shrivelled the small leaves so that they came away easily. The kneading, which he likened to massage, removed those leaves and pressed the resinous parts together so that they stuck and were less likely to fall off in transit. He pointed out that the two aims pulled against each other: the harder the tops were pressed, the more small leaves were trapped in them; the drier they became for the leaves to fall, the less sticky they were. That, in his view, was why round ganja, which carried less leaf, was more brittle than flat and the hardest to keep in store.^: 15–16 The Commission reproduced his account and added its own reading, that the pressing mattered mainly because it shut air out of the pressed ganja and so slowed its deterioration.

The treading and rolling also cost resin. Prain found the soles of the workers' feet coated with a sticky black layer, which he took to be the same resin as the hand-collected charas of the hills; the cultivators washed it off and threw it away. From the resin left on his own fingers in an experiment he estimated that about a tenth of the resin of the plant was lost in this way.^: 16–17

The leaf and stick separated in manufacture were of little use. The stick could be burnt; the leaf was winnowed from the seed and thrown away, though analysis had found more of the narcotic in it than in ordinary bhang. The seed was kept for sowing; the surplus was eaten or pressed for oil.

Bundles, bales and storage

When a cultivator had finished the whole crop, the bundles were stacked on a floor of logs, bamboo and old ganja stems, tops inward; by day the tops were covered with thick cloths or quilts while the stem ends dried in the sun. At night the stack was covered with mats. The bundles were then made into bales wrapped in thatching grass and taken to the cultivator's house.^{: para. 78} Before he could keep or sell the drug, the cultivator (or the dealer's agent who had bought the crop) had to take out a licence from the supervisor to retain possession of it. Kerr found these licences issued without any inquiry, the supervisor having too few men to visit the yards or the homes of some 2,000 growers.^{: paras. 79–80} He found ganja kept in a cowshed without doors, on an open verandah and in an open hall, with no guard.^{: para. 81}

Flat ganja changed hands by a count of bundles, not by weight. Four or five twigs, as many as fitted between thumb and second finger, made a bundle, ten bundles a larger one and four of those the trade's "maund", of which five or six went to a standard maund. Once sold, the ganja was untied and made up again into bundles of 20 to 28 stalks weighing one and a half to two seers, with the small inferior twigs inside and the long ones outside.^{: paras. 105–106} Round ganja was usually sold by the field, either at a fixed valuation before manufacture or at rates settled after it.^{: para. 107}

By 1893 sold ganja was brought to the ganja office for weighing and then baled for export under a rope and levers, packed in gunny and sealed. Prain gives the size of each kind of bale. Large flat was baled heads inwards in barrel-shaped bundles of a maund, about three feet long; flat twig in small flattish bundles of about a quarter-seer, packed a maund to the bale; round ganja in neat round bundles of the same weight, trimmed to six to nine inches; and chur in bags of a maund.^{: 9–10, 17–18}

Ganja lost weight and strength in store. Kerr and the dealers he consulted put the loss from drying out at no more than about a seer in the maund. Rats did further damage, eating the seed and breaking the twigs to reach it. A westerly breeze dried the ganja and an easterly one moistened it, so round ganja was baled on a damp day with the wind in the east. In raised, well-ventilated masonry storehouses such as those he saw at Bankipore the loss was very small. He recommended that storehouses in the consuming districts be properly built and inspected before use.^{: para. 122}

Grading

Buyers judged ganja chiefly by how little leaf it carried, using its colour as a sign of how it had been worked and its smell as a sign of its strength.^: 9 The excise names marked the form rather than the quality: in the Commission's words the terms "flat", "round" and "chur" were "peculiar to the Bengal manufacture and excise system" and rarely understood outside the province.

Under the Ganja Society a grading committee of six members elected by the growers and a manager appointed by the society sorted the ganja it bought into three grades. The first grade was light brown and held very little dust or seed; the second and third held more and were darker, even black. Under a resolution of 22 March 1922 the price fixed by the Excise Department was at least 100 taka a maund and the three grades could differ by no more than 10 taka; the first two grades sold at nearly the same price.^: 29

In the twentieth century

Main articles: Ganja Mahal and Ganja Society

The Ganja Society was formed in 1917 as a growers' cooperative to support the cultivation, processing, storage and marketing of the tract's ganja.^: 26 Growers interviewed by Rahman and colleagues, the last generation to work the system, told them that the fenced manufacturing yard was a rectangle of about 50 bigha set among the three circles into which the tract was divided. It was built on low, wet ground so that dust and sand did not get into the ganja. An eight-foot fence on bamboo posts surrounded it, with one gate and straw on the outside to hide the work from view. Processing a bigha of crop took seven days. The tops were spread in the sun and then the dew. Bundles of five or ten were built into a round stack with the flower heads inwards and trodden; on the third day the twigs were pressed by the workers for a whole day. Farmers shared the work in one-day shifts; Santal women also worked in the yards. Excise and narcotics officials supervised the work, with armed police posted round the yard and lanterns lit at night. The seed separated in processing was kept for food and oil. The leaf, the fallen flower heads and any surplus ganja were burnt in a 25-foot incinerator near the society's office.^: 106–107

Round ganja had all but gone by then. In the society's stock book for 1951 to 1989, round ganja was produced in small amounts up to 1961 and flat ganja alone after that; of some 763 tonnes produced over the whole period, under three were round.^: 27 Cultivation in the tract ended in 1987.^: 26

Elsewhere in British India

Treading ganja at Ahmednagar in the Bombay Presidency, 27 November 1893.

At Khandwa, in Nimar, the flower heads were broken off with about a foot of twig, spread on a threshing floor, exposed to the dew and then trodden in heaps for four or five days, turned and sunned between treadings, until they were flat, dry and largely free of leaf. At the cultivator's house the ganja was then built into a stack five or six feet high under heavy weights for about a week before being bagged and sent to the government storehouse at Khandwa. In the trade of the North-Western Provinces the ganja of Khandwa and Gwalior was known as pathar and the Bengal drug as baluchar.^: 110

In the Bombay Presidency the tops were sometimes sorted before treading into first, second and third sorts, the third being called chur. They were spread in rows or squares about six inches deep and trodden, turned by hand and trodden again at intervals of a few days. In some places the ganja was heaped in rounds weighted on top until midnight and then opened to air until dawn. Mr Ebden, whose district the Commission describes as having the largest cultivation in the presidency, watched a line of eight or ten men treading a square of ganja to a drum, moving sideways in a spiral from the edge towards the centre.

In Angul, in Orissa, the district officer described the plants tied in bundles or rolled in a mat or gunny bag and kept under heavy weights for two or three days, then exposed to dew, shaken free of leaves and seeds, dried and tied up, a product he called flat ganja; the Commission took him to mean the local article, not the Rajshahi one. Another witness from Orissa described the heads sprinkled with lime water and alternately buried and sunned for two or three months. The Tributary States of Chota Nagpur sent reports of the plants kept wrapped for some days in leaves under straw, or wrapped while still soft in plantain bark. The Commission judged that these practices came to "little more than simple drying and removal of the coarser leaves". The ganja of Orissa's Tributary Mahals was the Gurjat of the excise manual; In Prain's description it and the ganja of Central India were dried less carefully than the Bengal drug and were liable to a fermentation that gave it a heavy, rancid smell.^: 10 The Commission heard that in Travancore flowering ganja was pressed while still green until it matted and began to rot, then dried in the shade and sold as chada ganja.

Recorded terms

Term	Language	Meaning	Place	Year	Source
jorá bhangá	Not stated in the source (und)	stacking and trampling the twigs, mats put on Processing step: Ganja processing	Ganja Mahal	1877	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877), §67, p. 117 of the 1893 reprint: "When the whole of the ganja has been stacked and trampled, mats are put on the same. This is called jorá bhangá."
khonchá	Not stated in the source (und)	stamping the bundles laid in two rows Processing step: Ganja processing	Ganja Mahal	1877	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877), §68, p. 117 of the 1893 reprint: "The above process is locally called khonchá."
pátibhángá	Not stated in the source (und)	pressing of separate twigs Processing step: Ganja processing	Ganja Mahal	1877	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877), §69, p. 117 of the 1893 reprint: "the process called pátibhángá is commenced upon"
háth mutá	Not stated in the source (und)	pressing and rolling three to five twigs hard with the hands Processing step: Ganja processing	Ganja Mahal	1877	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877), §72, p. 119 of the 1893 reprint: "press and roll them hard with their hands. This is called háth mutá"
sherbándhá	Not stated in the source (und)	tying up the ganja in bundles Processing step: Ganja processing	Ganja Mahal	1877	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877), §75, p. 119 of the 1893 reprint: "The work of tying up the ganja in bundles (ántis) next commences. This is called sherbándhá"

See also

• Ganja
• Ganja Mahal
• Poddar
• Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877)
• Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)