Kashmir Valley
More actions
| Kashmir Valley | |
|---|---|
| Vale of Kashmir | |
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| |
| Paddy fields at Ladhoo in the Kashmir Valley | |
| Hierarchy | |
| Gene Pool | South Asian Gene Pool |
| Regional Complex | Hindu Kush-Himalayan |
| Growing Region | Western Himalayas |
| Geography | |
| Country | India |
| Province/State | Jammu and Kashmir |
| Coordinates | 33.95, 74.95 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 15,500 km² |
| Terrain | Within the ten districts of the Kashmir Division; its outer edge leaves out ground above 4,000 m, bare or sparse ground, snow and ice, and open water; the basin of the upper Jhelum |
| Growing history | |
| Earlier names | Kashmir proper |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 1 |
| Accessions | 3 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Kashmir Valley is a landrace cannabis growing area in the Western Himalayas growing region, in Jammu and Kashmir, a union territory administered by India. The Kashmir region has been disputed between India and Pakistan since the partition of 1947.[1]
In the 19th century hemp grew wild along the Jhelum and its side streams, and the Kashmir State leased out the right to cut it and make the drug gard bhang from its leaves. The State told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 that hemp was not cultivated in Kashmir.[2] Cannabis is now grown in the valley in fields, in orchards and on forest land.[3][4][5] From April to June 2026, 1,157 kanals of cannabis were destroyed.[6]
Geography
The upper Jhelum drains the valley, whose floor stands at about 1,600 metres and holds the city of Srinagar. To the south-west the Pir Panjal Range and its forested foothills lie between the valley and the lower plains of Jammu and Poonch.[1]
In 1893 wild hemp was abundant in the Wantipora, Haripore and Anantnag tahsils of the Anantnag district and the Nagam tahsil of the Srinagar district, on both banks of the Jhelum and of the Arveni and Kaimu nallahs (streams). Downstream of the city the hemp on both banks was used only for fibre, in the Utarmachipura and Sri Pratap Singhpura tahsils, the Magan ilaqa of the Pattan tahsil and Khinhama.[2] Drawing on a memorandum by Muhammad Hayat Khan, a member of the Kashmir State Council, the commission put the tract of profuse growth in "Kashmir proper, extending from Baramula to Verinag and Shopayan".[7]
Wild hemp under the Kashmir State
The botanist Thomas Thomson came down into the valley in October 1848. He found hemp growing wild along the river in thickets often 12 to 15 feet (3.7 to 4.6 m) high and "almost impenetrable". It was used only to make an intoxicating drink and for smoking, and the whole plant was kept in storehouses in "the town of Kashmir" until it was wanted.[8] Collecting the wild plant "to extract the intoxicating dust" brought about 25,000 rupees a year to the treasury of Ranjit Singh, according to Victor Jacquemont.[9]
Under the system of 1893, set out in the Kashmir State's memorandum for the commission, the zamindars of the neighbouring villages cut the plants in the month of Kartik. The lessee, acting for the State, took all the leaves and half the fibre, and the cutters kept the other half of the fibre and the twigs as their wages. In Srinagar the lessee had the leaves trodden underfoot and sieved until they were reduced to powder and the seeds came away. The powder was gard bhang, also called chura charas.[2] In 1868 garda charas was made by shaking dried plants over a fine cloth, and a Kashmiri dictionary of 1916 glosses churu as "powdered".[10]
In ordinary years the output was about 70 maunds of gard bhang and 400 maunds of fibre. In Sambat 1950, the year the memorandum was written, a flood had damaged the plants and the lessee made only about 35 maunds, so he bought Yarkand charas passing through Kashmir on its way to British India and mixed it with the local drug. The downstream hemp, known as kathiya bhang, gave no gard bhang; it yielded about 600 maunds of fibre a year, and its twigs were burnt. The right to make and sell gard bhang and fibre was auctioned, and the highest bid for Sambat 1950 was Rs 3,210.[2]
About 2,000 people in the province smoked gard bhang, among them fakirs and a few Muslims and Pandits of Srinagar and the towns; the villagers, the memorandum states, were not accustomed to it. The memorandum judged the drug inferior and rarely smuggled into British India.[2]
Cultivated or wild
The State's memorandum opens: "Cultivation of hemp does not prevail in Kashmir". It explains that hemp could be grown anywhere in the province except on the hills and stony land, but that "on account of the wild hemp, the growth of which is abundant throughout Kashmir proper, cultivation of the plant does not prevail at all, though not prohibited by the State."[2] The commission's report repeats that the Governor of Kashmir and Jammu and the member of the State Council reported that the plant was not cultivated, and adds its own view that the wild growth was abundant and potent enough for the people's wants.[11]: 57 The same memorandum describes the yearly cutting of the stands under the State's lease.[2] McPartland and Small list W. R. Lawrence's The Valley of Kashmir (1895) as describing both wild and cultivated plants in the valley, used for fibre and charas.[9] By 1980, according to Clarke, Afghan landraces had been brought into southern Kashmir and grown for sieved hashish, with escapes growing near the fields.[12]: 85
Cultivation in the 21st century
In December 2011 Dupathyaar, a village about 7 km from Bijbehara, had fields of cannabis and opium poppy; boys from nearby villages were paid by the day to extract bhang, and cut plants were stacked for making charas. A local social activist told the magazine Kashmir Life that about 358 of the village's 360 households grew cannabis, and eleven other places in the Bijbehara belt grew it too. The police put the rise in cultivation down to demand for bhang in Punjab and elsewhere in India, and farmers in Bijbehara and Shopian had taken to cannabis and opium poppy because they paid better than the usual cash crops and needed less irrigation.[13] The villages of the belt make up the Bijbehara appellation.
In June 2018 The Statesman reported that orchard owners in south Kashmir were growing cannabis on their vacant land, with hotspots in Anantnag, Pulwama, Budgam, Shopian, Kulgam and Bandipora. The police and the excise department had destroyed cannabis on about 342 acres in 2016, and the drive of 2018 had so far destroyed it on about 67 acres; in the week before the report, plants on 2.5 acres were destroyed at Khundroo in the Achabal area of Anantnag. The Statesman added that south Kashmir had "reportedly outdone in the Mumbai market" the charas of the Malana area.[3] In September 2018 an excise team destroyed cannabis grown on 580 kanals of land at Malhara, in the Zainapora tehsil of Shopian.[14]
Some of the crop is grown on forest land. In July 2019 the Forest Department cleared more than 400 kanals of forest in the upper reaches of the Lolab, in Kupwara district, of cannabis cultivation, at Trimukh top in pockets including Bumus, Dab and Kakarpati.[5] In April 2021 the police registered a case against 47 people of Ladroo (Lidroo), near Pahalgam, for growing cannabis on encroached forest land.[15][16] The Range Forest Officer at Pahalgam told the Daily Excelsior that the villagers had grown it in those forests for several years, "in patches at scattered places so that it looks naturally grown", and that "just like any other crop they harvest it and sell it in the market". A local resident said that the plants had once been grown openly on village farmland and had moved to the upper slopes as police vigilance grew.[15]
In October 2022 the excise commissioner said that 4,143 kanals (517.8 acres) had been cleared of cannabis in Kashmir by September that year. He also said that incidences of banned-crop cultivation in the valley had fallen by 90 per cent, and that Anantnag and Pulwama accounted for 26 and 20 of the 54 cases registered by September.[17] In June 2026 the Anantnag police destroyed cannabis cultivated on private land at Nai Basti, Marhama, and registered a case at the Bijbehara police station.[4] Satellite imagery from the Narcotics Control Bureau identified an estimated 380.51 acres of illicit narcotic crops in six districts of the Kashmir division, though the imagery reached the enforcement agencies only after the crop had been destroyed. In the quarter from April to June 2026, 1,157 kanals of cannabis were destroyed, against 1,152 in the same quarter of 2025, and 247 cases were registered against cultivators.[6]
Appellations
| Appellation |
|---|
| Bijbehara (appellation) |
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Locality |
|---|---|---|---|
| ILE-IND-JAM-0120210001 | Kashmir (Barramulla) 2021 | ||
| ILE-IND-JAM-0120210002 | Kashmir (Srinagar) 2021 | ||
| ILE-IND-JAM-0120210004 | Pulwama (Kashmir) 2021 |
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Kashmir". Encyclopædia Britannica. 15 October 2026. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Kashmir State memorandum". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. paras. 1–11, 17–21, 26–31, pp. 128–129 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Sharma, S. P. (3 June 2018). "On the drugs trail". The Statesman. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 KR Desk (2 June 2026). "Nasha Mukt J&K Abhiyan: Police arrest 4 drug peddlers, destroy illegal cannabis crops, organize awareness rallies". Kashmir Reader. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 KL News Network (24 July 2019). "Cannabis crop destroyed in upper reaches of Lolab". Kashmir Life. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Hussain, Masood (15 August 2026). "Drugs: Kashmir's New Battlefield". Kashmir Life. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. III, "The existence, prevalence, and character of the spontaneous growth", paras. 81–82, pp. 32–33 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Thomson, T. (1852). Western Himalaya and Tibet: A Narrative of a Journey through the Mountains of Northern India, during the Years 1847–8. London: Reeve and Co. p. 455 – via Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144. Supplementary material 1, p. 25. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144. Supplementary material 1, p. 70. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 89–150, pp. 35–58 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144: 81–112. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ Irfan, Shams (5 December 2011). "Fields of Addiction". Kashmir Life. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis cultivation destroyed in south Kashmir". Greater Kashmir. 12 September 2018. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 "47 persons booked for growing cannabis on forest land". Daily Excelsior. 28 April 2021. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ "FIR filed against 47 in Gujjar village in Pahalgam". The Kashmir Walla. 27 April 2021. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ "Excise Dept: Illegal crops on 625 acres destroyed this year". The Tribune. PTI. 18 October 2022. Retrieved 19 October 2026.