Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
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| Author | Indian Hemp Drugs Commission |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Composed | 1893–1894 |
| Published | 1894 (supplementary volume 1895) |
| Publisher | Government Central Printing Office |
| Place | Simla |
| Volumes | 7 (plus 1 supplementary) |
| Regions documented | Bengal, Bombay Presidency, Central Provinces, North-Western Provinces, Punjab, Sind, Madras |
|---|---|
| Varieties described | Bhang; ganja (flat, round, chur); charas |
| Preparations | Bhang infusion (siddhi); edible confections (majum); ganja smoking; charas |
| Uses documented | Medicinal, recreational, religious and ritual |
| Digital facsimile | View on BHL |
|---|---|
| Original held at | Wellcome Collection; National Library of Scotland |
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC) was a body appointed by the Government of India in 1893 to inquire into the cultivation of cannabis, the manufacture of and trade in its products, the social and moral effects of their consumption, and the desirability of prohibition. Its findings were published in 1894 as a Report of seven volumes and a supplementary volume, running to some 3,281 pages.[1] The commission examined 1,193 witnesses across eight provinces and Burma and concluded that the moderate use of cannabis was practically harmless and that prohibition was neither necessary nor expedient. It remains the most extensive single inquiry into cannabis undertaken in the nineteenth century, and its volumes are a principal documentary record of the plant's varieties, regional cultivation and ritual use in British India before prohibition.
The commission and its sources used the term hemp drugs for the cannabis preparations then in use, chiefly bhang, ganja and charas. This article uses cannabis as the general term, retaining hemp only in the commission's name, in the titles of its volumes and chapters, and in quoted matter.
As a colonial administrative document, the Report is evidence of late-Victorian governmental thinking about intoxicants as much as it is a record of cannabis itself, and modern historians read it in that double light.[2]
Origins
The commission originated not in any administrative initiative within India but in pressure applied at Westminster by the British temperance and anti-opium movements. In 1891 the Anglo-Indian newspaper the Allahabad Pioneer alleged that ganja was far more harmful than opium and that the lunatic asylums of India were filled with ganja smokers. The claim was taken up in the House of Commons by Mark Stewart, and then pressed by the Baptist temperance campaigner William Sproston Caine, whose views on Indian intoxicants had formed during a tour of India in 1888–1889 with the missionary Thomas Evans.[3]
On 2 March 1893 Caine asked the Under-Secretary of State for India whether the Government of India would be instructed to appoint an expert commission to examine the cannabis trade in Bengal, the effect of consumption on the people, and the desirability of prohibition, and insisted that the body be composed partly of non-official Indians.[4] The Government of India constituted the commission by resolution on 3 July 1893; on the suggestion of Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for India, the inquiry was widened from Bengal alone to the whole of British India.[1] Historians have emphasised that cannabis was of limited intrinsic interest to its parliamentary sponsors, for whom it served chiefly as an adjunct to the larger campaign against the opium trade; the contemporaneous Royal Commission on Opium of 1893–1895 overshadowed it at the time and has done so since.[3]
Members and method
The commission had seven members and a secretary. Its president was W. Mackworth Young of the Indian Civil Service, then Financial Commissioner of the Punjab. The other British members were H. T. Ommanney of the Bombay Civil Service, A. H. L. Fraser of the Central Provinces, and Surgeon-Major C. J. H. Warden, professor of chemistry at the Medical College, Calcutta, who served as the panel's medical and chemical expert. The three non-official Indian members, included at Caine's insistence, were Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur in Bengal, Kanwar Harnam Singh Ahluwalia of the Punjab, and Lala Nihal Chand of Muzaffarnagar in the North-Western Provinces. H. J. McIntosh acted as secretary.[1] The participation of Indian members has been read by later scholars as a contested exercise in which an aspiring Indian elite negotiated authority on terms set by British scientific and legal procedure.[5]
The commission first met in Calcutta on 3 August 1893 and concluded its work on 6 August 1894. It held 86 sittings for the examination of witnesses in 30 cities across the eight provinces and Burma, and toured the principal cultivation tracts. To structure the inquiry it circulated a standard list of 70 written questions in advance of oral examination, and classified witnesses as official, non-official, or other persons and associations. In all 1,193 witnesses were examined, among them civil and medical officers, cultivators, traders, private practitioners of both European and indigenous medicine, missionaries and religious figures. Vernacular testimony was taken through interpreters and recorded in English, in which language the evidence volumes were printed.[1]
The report
The Report was printed at the Government Central Printing Office, Simla, in 1894, with some supplementary matter carrying an 1895 imprint. It comprises a volume of findings and a series of evidence volumes arranged by province. Volume I is the report proper, in seventeen chapters, and includes the notes of dissent. Volume II gathers the appendices on the asylum and insanity enquiry; Volume III the miscellaneous memoranda, among them a philological note by George Grierson on references to hemp in Sanskrit and Hindi literature and an essay by J. M. Campbell on the religion of hemp. Volumes IV to VII print the evidence of witnesses, grouped as Bengal and Assam; the North-Western Provinces, Oudh and the Punjab; the Central Provinces and Madras; and Bombay, Sind and the remaining territories with Burma. A supplementary volume records answers on consumption in the native army.[1] The full set has been digitised from the Wellcome Trust and National Library of Scotland copies, and the principal chapters exist in keyword-searchable transcription.[1]
Cannabis of British India as documented by the commission
The commission's largest contribution, for the present purpose, is descriptive: across its volumes it recorded the forms of the plant, the regions in which each was grown, the boundary between wild and cultivated stands, and the social and ritual settings of use. This material is the most systematic survey of the cannabis of late-nineteenth-century India in any single source.
Products and their grades
The commission worked with the established three-fold division of cannabis products and refined it in its chapter on manufacture. Bhang it defined as the dried leaves and shoots of the plant, low in resin, taken as an infused drink or eaten in confections; it was drawn from both wild and cultivated plants and was the cheapest and most widely used form. Ganja it defined as the resinous flowering tops of carefully cultivated and rogued female plants, smoked in a pipe; the Bengal grades of flat, round and broken (chur) ganja served as its reference taxonomy, against which the products of other provinces were compared. Charas, the separated resin, the commission treated as a substance differing from the others in the manner and economy of its extraction rather than in any inherent quality.[6]
Regional cultivation
The commission's province-by-province survey set the licensed cultivation of Bengal - confined to a small tract in the north, administered as the Ganja Mahal around Naogaon - alongside much smaller and more dispersed industries elsewhere, and treated Bengal as one production system among several rather than the whole.[7] In the Bombay Presidency regular cultivation centred on Ahmednagar and Satara, with the older Khandesh tract in sharp decline; in the Central Provinces it was confined by 1890 to the Nimar district around Khandwa, which supplied much of the ganja of western and central India. The North-Western Provinces grew the plant in the Himalayan tracts of Kumaon and Garhwal, principally for fibre but yielding charas and bhang as by-products, and on the plains at Fatehgarh for bhang. In the Punjab, where ganja was not smoked, the small cultivation was for bhang, and charas was supplied overwhelmingly by import. Sind grew bhang as its principal crop and was noted as the one tract where the drug plant also yielded fibre. In Madras, regular cultivation was confined to a few hill sites, supplemented by widespread cultivation of a few plants in household yards.[7] The detailed agronomy of the Bengal tract, including the seedless cultivation technique and the selection of female plants, is treated in the article on Cannabis in West Bengal and the Ganja Mahal.
The commission recorded that good ganja required cultivation and tending and could not be made from wild plants, whereas bhang could be gathered from wild or cultivated growth alike.[7] Charas it described as practically a foreign article in British India: the bulk was imported from Yarkand in Central Asia through the Himalayan passes, with smaller quantities from Nepal and the state of Gwalior, and its supply was bound up with the wider overland trade of the Punjab.[8]
Wild and cultivated growth
On the question of where the plant grew of its own accord, the commission drew on the botanist George Watt and on George King, director of the Botanical Survey of India. It reported wild or naturalised cannabis across the Himalaya from Kashmir to the eastern frontier of Assam and along the hill ranges towards Burma and China, but accepted King's view that this so-called wild growth was for the most part an escape from cultivation, sustained by seed carried from the bhang and ganja that people consumed, rather than a truly indigenous population.[9] The distinction between the wild plant, useful for bhang, and the cultivated plant required for ganja and charas runs throughout the evidence and informed the commission's view that prohibition would be impossible to enforce where the plant grew freely.[7]
Social and religious use
Chapter IX of the first volume, on social and religious customs, is the commission's fullest treatment of cannabis culture and the most detailed nineteenth-century record of cannabis ritual in India. The evidence was gathered through two of the standard questions and arranged by region. The commission found the use of bhang in connection with social and religious custom to be more or less general across India: offered as an infusion on the last day of the Durga Puja in Bengal, drunk during Holi in Bihar and the North-Western Provinces, and associated above all with the worship of Shiva, to whom the plant was held sacred and in whose honour ganja was smoked by ascetics.[10] The chapter records the near-universal use of cannabis by sadhus, fakirs and sannyasis; the use of bhang as a customary drink at Sikh festivals; and regional offerings of ganja and bhang at temples and melas across Bengal, the Central Provinces and the Madras Presidency, including the Trinath cult of the Surma Valley in which the drug was offered by both Hindus and Muslims.[10] The commission concluded that interference with these uses would be felt by consumers as interference with religion.[10] The textual background to the customs was set out in Campbell's memorandum on the religion of hemp and Grierson's note on the plant in Sanskrit and Hindi literature, both in the third volume.[11] The living forms of this devotional and festival use in Bengal are treated in Cannabis in Bengali Religion and Tantric cannabis use in India.
Findings and recommendations
The commission's central evidentiary task was the claim that cannabis caused insanity. Reviewing the statistics of the lunatic asylums it visited, it found that cannabis had often been entered as the cause of insanity in admission papers by police and untrained officers, without medical foundation, and concluded that the asylum returns gave no trustworthy basis for connecting cannabis with insanity.[12][13] Examining every asylum in British India for the year 1892, it found that of the 222 admissions attributed across India to cannabis only 98 could be regarded as in any way reliable; the recorded cause of insanity was commonly supplied by police rather than established by medical inquiry, and in some asylums had been altered after admission, from "unknown" or other causes to ganja, under administrative pressure to complete the returns.[14]
The commission distinguished throughout between moderate and excessive use. It held that moderate use produced practically no ill effects on body, mind or character, that excessive use was injurious but comparatively exceptional, and that the harm of excess fell largely on the consumer rather than on society. It compared cannabis with alcohol, judging their abuse the less harmful of the two.[1] On policy it rejected prohibition, holding it neither necessary nor expedient given the ascertained effects, the antiquity and religious sanction of the practice, the difficulty of suppressing a plant that grew wild, and the risk of driving consumers to more harmful intoxicants. In its place it recommended control through licensing, a limited number of shops, taxation pitched as high as the suppression of smuggling allowed, and statutory limits on lawful possession.[8]
Two of the three Indian members declined to sign the majority report. Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy argued that the report was too sanguine about ganja and charas and proposed restricting them more tightly while leaving bhang free.[15] Lala Nihal Chand filed the longest dissent, accepting that bhang was largely harmless but maintaining a sharper distinction between it and the smoked preparations, and arguing that the high duties the majority favoured would encourage smuggling.[16] The majority recommendations nonetheless prevailed and were adopted by the Government of India.
Reception and historiography
Contemporary medical opinion in Britain received the conclusions favourably, the medical press treating them, like those of the opium commission, as a corrective to exaggerated claims about the harms of Indian intoxicants.[17] Indian temperance and missionary organisations, which had pressed for the inquiry in the expectation of prohibition, were disappointed by the outcome.[3]
Later assessment has been mixed. Oriana Josseau Kalant's critical review of 1972 questioned the commission's sampling, which leaned heavily on official witnesses, and its handling of the asylum data.[18] James Mills has located the inquiry within the colonial networks and missionary politics that produced it and within the asylum system that generated the insanity claims, arguing that its anti-prohibition outcome cannot be separated from the colonial government's reliance on cannabis revenue.[3][19] Amit Ranjan Basu has re-examined the insanity evidence from the Bengal volume, treating the commission's scepticism as broadly sound while showing how the inquiry nonetheless gave shape to a durable category of cannabis-related madness.[13] More recent medical-historical readings accept the commission's clinical reasoning as broadly consistent with later epidemiology while noting the conflict of interest of British members in a revenue-dependent administration.[20][12]
Legacy
The Report became a reference point in twentieth-century drug-policy debate. It is frequently paired with the United States' LaGuardia Committee report of 1944 as one of the principal pre-1960s official inquiries to find against the prohibition of cannabis.[citation needed] It was republished in the United States in 1969 and was taken up by advocates of reform; Tod Mikuriya's 1968 summary of its findings and his later anthologies of medical-cannabis papers brought it to the attention of the movement, and it has been cited in reform and harm-reduction argument since.[21][22]
Within India the commission's framework of licensed and taxed sale, without prohibition of cultivation or of bhang, remained the basis of cannabis regulation into the period after independence. That framework was overturned by the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, which prohibited charas and ganja while leaving the leaf-based bhang to regulation by the states, in the context of India's obligations under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.[23] The commission is regularly invoked in contemporary Indian debate on cannabis law as evidence that the 1985 prohibition departed from more than a century of official practice.[20]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I.
- ↑ Mills, James H., Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Mills, James H. (2005). "Cannabis in the Commons: Colonial Networks, Missionary Politics and the Origins of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893–4". Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 6 (1). doi:10.1353/cch.2005.0012.
- ↑ "Hemp Drugs in Bengal", HC Deb, 2 March 1893, vol. 9, col. 822.
- ↑ Shamir, Ronen; Hacker, Daphna (2001). "Colonialism's Civilizing Mission: The Case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission". Law & Social Inquiry. 26 (2): 435–461. doi:10.1111/j.1747-4469.2001.tb00184.x.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. II, "The Hemp Plant."
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IV, "Cultivation in each Province."
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. XIV, "The Policy of Hemp Drug Administration," §§553–590.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. III, "Production and Area of Cultivation."
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. IX, "Social and Religious Customs," §§430–446.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94, Volume III: Memoranda Submitted to the Commission. Government Central Printing Office, Simla, 1894. Wellcome Trust digitisation, archive identifier b32222920_0003
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Ayonrinde, Oyedeji A. (2020). "Cannabis and psychosis: revisiting a nineteenth century study of 'Indian Hemp and Insanity' in Colonial British India". Psychological Medicine. 50 (7): 1164–1172. doi:10.1017/S0033291719001077.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Basu, Amit Ranjan (2000). "Cannabis and Madness: Evidence from the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Bengal 1894". Studies in History. 16 (1): 1–34. doi:10.1177/025764300001600106.
- ↑ Mills, James H. (2000). "Asylum Knowledge as Colonial Knowledge". Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The 'Native Only' Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 59–63. doi:10.1057/9780230286047. ISBN 978-1-349-41971-5.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, "Note of Dissent by Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy," pp. 363–382.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, "Note of Dissent by Lala Nihal Chand," pp. 383–477.
- ↑ "The Indian Hemp Drug Commission," Texas Medical Journal, vol. 11, no. 3, September 1895, pp. 138–139 (reprinted from the British Medical Journal), PMC9613253.
- ↑ Kalant, Oriana Josseau (1972). "Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94: A Critical Review". International Journal of the Addictions. 7 (1): 77–96. doi:10.3109/10826087209026763.
- ↑ Mills, James H. (2000). Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The 'Native Only' Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230286047. ISBN 978-1-349-41971-5.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Hall, Wayne (2019). "The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893–1894". Addiction. 114 (9): 1679–1682. doi:10.1111/add.14640.
- ↑ Abel, Ernest L. (1980). "The Indian Hemp Drug Debate". Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years. Boston: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-2189-5_6.
- ↑ Mikuriya, Tod H. (1968). "Physical, Mental, and Moral Effects of Marijuana: The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report". International Journal of the Addictions. 3 (2): 253–270. doi:10.3109/10826086809067437.
- ↑ The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (Act No. 61 of 1985), sections 2(iii) and 8.