Hem Chunder Kerr

Hem Chunder Kerr
Occupation	Officer in the service of the Government of Bengal
Known for	Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Gánjá in Bengal (1877)

Hem Chunder Kerr was an Indian officer in the service of the Government of Bengal who compiled two official enquiries into Bengal commodity crops: a report on jute, published in 1874, and the Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Gánjá in Bengal, which he submitted to the Board of Revenue on 2 April 1877.

The ganja report was the first detailed official account of ganja cultivation in the Ganja Mahal of Naogaon, and it remained the standard description for the rest of the century. The House of Commons ordered it reprinted in 1893, and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, reporting the following year, called it the basis of the information furnished by most of its witnesses. Kerr himself gave written evidence to the Commission in 1893–94, by which time he had retired from the grade of Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector and was serving as Sub-Registrar of Sealdah.

Career

Official papers of the 1870s give his name as Baboo Hem Chunder Kerr, with the honorific then used for Bengali gentlemen in government service. A Government of Bengal resolution of 5 February 1873 records his substantive appointment as Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector. In October 1876 he was serving at Alipore, from which he was released to take up the ganja enquiry.^{: para. 2} By the time the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission took his evidence in 1893–94 he had retired from that grade and held the post of Sub-Registrar of Sealdah; the Commission's heading also records his caste as Kayasth.

The jute enquiry

The Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, observing that his administration lacked industrial statistics, called in a resolution of 4 February 1873 for an account of how jute was grown and traded. A resolution of the following day referred the enquiry to a commission of two: Hamilton Anstruther, a Calcutta merchant, and Kerr, who was to draw a deputation allowance of Rs. 150 a month in addition to his substantive salary. The two had already begun work on 30 January under demi-official instructions passed through the Lieutenant-Governor's private secretary, before the resolution reached them, and they left the presidency on 16 April 1873 to tour the jute districts.

Anstruther died in September 1873, of an illness Kerr attributed to his exertions on the commission, and left no notes or memoranda of his observations. Kerr completed the enquiry and wrote the report alone, asking the government's indulgence for whatever his colleague's assistance might have supplied. The report covered Bengal, Behar, Orissa and Assam, and he submitted it to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal in the Statistical Department on 18 December 1873. The Agricultural Department recorded the Lieutenant-Governor's opinion of it in a resolution of March 1874, describing it as minute and exhaustive and thanking Kerr for the care and ability it showed.

The jute report also carries Kerr's first published account of hemp. Among the fibre plants it surveys, paragraphs 29 to 37 set out the plant's Sanskrit and vernacular names, its notice by Herodotus and its earliest Indian mention in the Atharva Veda and in Susruta, and the five products then taken from it: the leaves sold as siddhi or bhang, the florets and seeds sold as ganja, the resin called charas, the fibre of the bark, and the stem burnt as fuel.^{: paras. 29–37, pp. 8–10} He noted there that the plant was no longer grown for fibre on the plains of India, its fibre cultivation being confined to the Himalayan valleys.^{: para. 35} He referred his reader back to these paragraphs in the ganja report of 1877.^{: para. 7}

The ganja enquiry

Kerr was placed on special duty under the orders of the Government of Bengal to enquire into and report on the cultivation of, and trade in, ganja in the province. He was relieved of his duties at Alipore on 18 October 1876 and spent the following three weeks reading the records held in the Board of Revenue's office, leaving on 10 November for Naogaon in Rajshahi, which he reached on 17 November.^{: para. 2}

Making Naogaon his headquarters, he visited the ganja villages, examined a large number of fields and collected information from cultivators, from the agents of the wholesale golahdars, from brokers and from farias. He observed how the land was irrigated and manured, how the drug was stored in the producing tract and how it was examined, weighed, packed and sealed in the supervisor's office.^{: para. 2} While his clerk and two extra ameens measured the hemp fields, he travelled west in January 1877 to Burdwan, Birbhum, Bhagalpur, Monghyr, Patna and Arrah, inspecting the ganja warehouses and noting how the trade was carried on there, with particular attention to export from the Behar districts to Benares, Allahabad, Mirzapore and other places.^{: para. 3} The clerk and surveyor was Sib Chunder Soor, who told the Commission seventeen years later that he had attended Kerr at the several inquiries and experiments made for the report, and who by then was first assistant supervisor of ganja cultivation at Naogaon. He returned to Naogaon on 28 January for five weeks to observe the reaping, storage and manufacture, then came back to Calcutta on 4 March after a tour of three months and twenty-four days, and closed the enquiry among the Calcutta golahdars and with the Collector of Calcutta.^{: paras. 4–6}

The finished report was submitted to the Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Lower Provinces, on 2 April 1877. It was printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press in Calcutta in the same year, its title page describing the author as "Deputy Collector, on special duty". Its numbered paragraphs run from the names and botany of the plant through the cultivation and manufacturing cycle of the Ganja Mahal to the duty on the drug, and an appendix tabulates the growers, area and outturn of the tract from 1854 to 1876.

Reception

George Watt drew on the report for the hemp article in A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, describing it as a valuable treatise that dealt both with the cultivation of the plant and with the preparation of the narcotic, and abstracting its account of Bengal cultivation. When David Prain was deputed in 1893 to carry the enquiry further, he drew his own report up, as far as was possible, in the form of a supplement to Kerr's, abstaining from repeating what the 1877 report already contained. He corrected Kerr where his own examination differed: against Kerr's account of the barren khásiá plants as hermaphrodites in the ordinary rather than the botanical sense, Prain held that they flower more copiously than any other plants in the field and are in reality females incapable of setting seed.

The House of Commons, in answer to an address of 21 February 1893, ordered the report printed on 3 March 1893. It appeared as item (4) of East India (Consumption of Ganja) at pp. 94–154, alongside Watt's hemp article. Reporting in 1894 on the cultivation of the Ganja Mahal, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission observed that "Babu Hem Chunder Kerr's report is the basis of the information furnished by most witnesses".

Evidence to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission

Kerr appears in volume IV of the Commission's evidence as witness 80, under a heading that gives him as "Babu Hem Chunder Kerr, Kayasth, Retired Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, Sub-Registrar of Sealdah". He answered in writing rather than in person: the volume's index marks witnesses examined orally with an asterisk, and his entry carries none.

His answers open by recalling the 1876–77 special duty and the report it produced, and they send the Commission back to that report for the details of cultivation and manufacture rather than restating them. On questions of policy he told the Commission that the duty on ganja had been raised too high, and that smuggling grew as the duty rose; that private storage should be prohibited and public warehousing established after manufacture; and that too frequent and injudicious interference with the cultivators had grown up, which risked driving them out of the crop, since "there are other crops, such as sugarcane, jute, tobacco, &c., which are not less profitable than ganja cultivation". He also reported that consumption of the hemp preparations was in his view declining, and the cultivation with it, while noting that the official area figures rested on estimate rather than measurement.

See also

• Ganja Mahal
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Poddar
• Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877)