Poddar

This article is about the ganja-field specialist of Bengal. For the surname, see Poddar on Wikipedia.

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A ganja plant ready for cutting at Naogaon on 16 February 1894, from a plate in the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

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Poddar, also parakdar and in English the ganja doctor, was the specialist hired to find and destroy the male plants in the licensed ganja fields of the Ganja Mahal, the tract centred on Naogaon in the districts of Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur in the Bengal Presidency.^{: §§34, 48} Naogaon is now a district of Bangladesh.^: 1 Before the crop flowered the poddar went through each field several times, broke the stalks of the plants he judged to be male and left the cultivator to pull them up.^: 62 Kerr's report of 1877 held that the result of the cultivation depended mainly on this work, since a few male plants left in a field set the crop to seed and made its ganja "very inferior and scarcely saleable".^: §48

The work is described in a report printed in the Calcutta Gazette in 1873, in Hem Chunder Kerr's report, in David Prain's Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá of 1893^{: 4, 12} and in the evidence gathered by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893–94. Prain later identified the feature on the young male plant that the poddar looked for.^: 4 Farmers interviewed in Naogaon between 2017 and 2020, some of them former ganja doctors, described the work as it was done before legal cultivation ended in 1987.^{: 1–2, 4} The ganja districts of the Bombay Presidency had a similar examiner of male plants, the parakhai or parakadar.^: 75

Name

A report summarised in 1876 by W. W. Hunter calls these men "gánjá doctors". Kerr gives the local names as poddár and parakdár.^: §48 George Watt's A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1889) repeats them beside "gánjá-doctor".^: 109–110 The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission spelled the second name parakhdar and Prain spelled it parukdar.^: 62: 4 An excise officer from Bihar reported that the experts of Rajshahi were called "Parkhias". In Naogaon the men were called poddar and parakdar.^: 4 The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya, in Ganja Matters (2026), calls the practice parakdari, "examining for quality".^: 36–37 His dissertation of 2018 also uses poddari for the inspection service.^: 54

In general Bengali usage poddār (পোদ্দার) is a professional examiner of the genuineness of coins, a money-changer, a pawnbroker or a banker. Parakh (পরখ) is a test or examination. Hobson-Jobson treats poddār as a corruption of the Persian foṭadār, from foṭa, "a bag of money". It defines the word as a cash-keeper or a treasury officer who weighs money and bullion and appraises the value of coins.

Work in the field

David Prain's account of the poddars in his Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893), p. 4: they go round a field "three or perhaps four times during a season".

In Kerr's account, from about the tenth of Agrahayan, the Bengali month that begins in the latter part of November, until the middle of Paus (December–January), the poddar went over each field three or four times. The plants stood two and a half to three feet high at his first visit. He inspected only in the morning, "when there is no glare", so that he could see the "filaments or stipules" by which he told the male plants from the female. Stooping over the plants, he broke in the middle the stalk of any plant he called mádi and left the owner of the field "to uproot and throw away" what he had broken.^{: §§48, 50}

The cultivators called this picking bách. When it was over the owner trimmed the lowest twigs and moved plants from the most crowded parts of the field into the gaps "where the poddár's operations have left a vacuum". The field had its first watering after the first or the second picking. The cultivator himself went round the field every morning for plants the poddar had missed, which by then he knew by their first flowers. He kept up a daily watch until a few weeks before the harvest.^{: §§48–50, 52}

In the 1873 report, as Hunter condensed it, the ganja doctors are employed "as soon as the plants begin to spread their leaves" and "have the reputation of being alone able to distinguish the female organs in the plants at this early stage". The picking is repeated two or three times. "In a field of one thousand plants, some four hundred would be thus rejected as worthless." Prain's report of 1893 places the poddar's first visit about the middle of November, after the lower branches had been trimmed and the field ploughed and manured again. The poddar broke over the plants he rejected without removing them. The cultivator then trimmed the field again and filled the gaps with seedlings from the nursery, and the field had its first watering. Prain wrote that the poddars went round a field "three or perhaps four times during a season" and that their visits might be repeated "twice or three times" between the waterings.^{: 4, 11–12} The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission wrote in 1894 that the work needed "either the professional poddar or parakhdar or the cultivator himself if he has acquired the necessary skill", that "the exact differences by which the plants are distinguished by the experts cannot be described with confidence" and that the poddar's visit might be repeated two or three times.^: 62 The Rajshahi district gazetteer of 1916, compiled chiefly from Kerr's report and the commission's, likewise has the work done by "a professional called a poddār (or parakhdār)" or by a cultivator who had acquired the skill.^{: 134, 136–137}

A police superintendent at Bogra reported to the commission that the poddars came in Magh (January–February) to pick out "bhang from ganja", in the villagers' phrase, though some villagers said the work could be done in Kartik (October–November). An excise officer who had supervised the Naogaon tract told the commission that the ganja cultivators did not form a separate class. He added: "Trained men are, however, required for the cultivation of ganja, as the ganja doctor who eradicates the male plants."

The poddar's guide

Plate I of Prain's 1904 memoir, drawn from a male plant. Figure 2, at the foot of the plate, is a branch from near the base of the stem on which solitary female flowers take the place of the first male flower clusters.

Kerr wrote that before flowering the marks of difference between the male and female plants were "so slight that to non-professional persons they are not easily perceptible". The cultivators, he wrote, looked for "one or two rounded bristles, which in the male plant look much thicker than those in the female ones".^: §20 Prain reached the Naogaon fields in 1893 too late in the season to see the males removed and so could not tell what Kerr meant by the "filaments or stipules" that guided the poddar.^: 4 His report of that year calls the poddars "special men" who "profess ability to recognise the sexes long before the plants are mature". He wrote that he could not say how they told the plants apart, since he had not yet seen them at work. He judged all the same that "the work is well done": the cultivators, who also went round their fields every day, seldom found a male plant that had been missed, and he found no normal male plant in any field he visited.^: 4 He returned a few years later at the right season and found that the "filaments or stipules" were "the often abortive, solitary female flowers" which, on the male hemp plants of India, frequently grow where the lowest pairs of male flower clusters would be expected.^: 4

Watt repeated Prain's finding in The Commercial Products of India (1908). These misplaced female flowers, he wrote, were "it would seem" visible "long before the inflorescence of male flowers could for certain be recognised", so the poddar broke the stems of the plants that showed them. The cultivator following behind uprooted them and filled the gaps from spare seedlings kept in the seed-beds.^: 261 Prain called the method empirical. In his account the cultivators knew that pollen-bearing plants in some way affected the value of the crop and so removed them. "But of the precise significance of what is done, neither the cultivators nor the poddars are aware."^: 4 He had already called the practice "a purely empirical one" in 1893. He suggested then that it might have begun with keeping male plants out of patches grown for bhang, which would have shown that the plants left set fewer seeds and formed more resin, and he wrote that in the ganja tract finding the male plants "even before they have flowered" had "become an art".^: 12

A former ganja doctor aged 87, interviewed by Rahman and colleagues, described how he made the sex identification before flowering: the male plant looked rounder, with sparse leaves and wider spaces between its branches, while the female was taller, with white hairs on its leaves and more branches. The farmers they interviewed could tell the sexes apart but did not do the work alone.^: 104: 4

Engagement and pay

Kerr found the poddar paid by the size of the field and fed free on the days he worked. The usual fee was Rs 2-8 to Rs 3-8 (two rupees eight annas to three rupees eight annas) for each bigha examined. It was always paid before he finished his last picking.^: §48 In Kerr's list of a cultivator's out-of-pocket costs for a bigha of ganja, the "Fee of the ganja doctor, including his feed" came to Rs 3 as. 6 of a total of Rs 21 as. 14.^: §90 Where a landowner shared a crop with a poor share-cropper (adhidar), he advanced the money for fresh earth, manure and the poddar's fee and recovered half of it after the ganja was sold.^: §56

Chattopadhyaya describes poddar and parakdar as hereditary titles of families that held and passed on the knowledge of ganja cultivation, and as caste names, and writes that the work was "often the most scrutinized and highly rewarded".^: 77 His dissertation had called poddars "a unique caste of agricultural workers trained in the agroecological knowledge of cannabis in eastern India".^: 75 Kerr wrote that the ganja doctors had formerly all been men from Jessore but had since been replaced by men of the tract. In some cultivating families, he added, one member had learned the poddar's business, which saved the fee.^: §48 In 1830 many of these men, who regularly came to Naogaon from Jessore, stopped coming; the Collector of Rajshahi was told to secure their return and reported that they were back by January 1831.^{: 52, 54: 104}

The ganja doctors interviewed by Rahman and colleagues had learned the work from their fathers and grandfathers, who had also been ganja doctors. The work was once lucrative. Farmers hired them on three-month contracts to look after their fields, and they "were paid daily and received 15,000 Tk. upon completing three months of work". Besides removing male plants they repaired broken ridges, dug the soil between the ridges to stop water collecting and inspected one bigha of land a day.^: 4

Culling of males

Kerr wrote that even a clever poddar usually left a few male plants in a field, that "the destruction of the male plant is never thorough" and that the survivors accounted for the seed found in ganja.^: §48 Prain wrote in 1893 that once the hemp began to flower, at the beginning of January, the cultivator watched for "those abnormal male flowers on his female plants which the poddar could not possibly have foretold".^: 12 The commission quoted the passage.^: 63 Prain gave two reasons why the crop still set some seed although probably no male plant was left in any field: nobody tried to uproot the wild male plants that grew in the fences and ditches of the tract, and abnormal male flowers on female plants, for which the poddar "cannot be held responsible", sometimes escaped even the cultivator.^: 4–5

In 1893 Prain searched 20 fields plant by plant without finding a single abnormally monoecious plant. In another field, which had passed out of its owner's care and so had missed "the two latest and, it might be imagined, most important visits from the poddar", he found only one plant with a few male flowers among the female. Every normal plant nevertheless carried some healthy fruit by the harvest, which Prain put down to pollen from male plants left standing in the seed-beds, near houses and in hedges.^: 16 His report of 1893 describes the neglected field as about a bigha in extent, which even allowing for the neglect must still have held 1,800 to 2,000 plants, and says it did not contain a single male plant.^: 4 Of cultivation in the 1980s, a farmer told Rahman and colleagues that about 40 per cent of the seedlings, most of them male, were removed. The farmers said that not every male plant was removed, because seed had to be supplied to the Ganja Society's office for the next sowing and was also needed as food.^: 104

Naming of the sexes

A pollen-bearing shoot (left) and a ganja-bearing shoot (right). Kerr found the Bengal cultivators calling the ganja-bearing plants mardá, male, and the others mádi, female.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reported in 1894 that the Bengal cultivators talked "of the ganja-bearing plant as the male and the pollen-bearing plant as the female", while cultivators in the Central Provinces and western India generally called the plants by their botanical sexes.^: 63 Kerr had found the cultivators calling the ganja-bearing plants mardá (male) and the others mádi (female), so that the plant the poddar broke, "what he calls a mádi plant", was "correctly speaking" a male. In Kerr's view the cultivators had named the two kinds "at random" without being able to determine which was which. He also recorded that the flower of the plants destroyed by the ganja doctor was called phul.^{: §§20, 48, 53}

The 1873 report likewise has the ganja doctors picking out "the female plants", which Hunter's note calls "probably an error of observation". Prain wrote that the cultivators called the rejected plants female "as being the less valuable kind".^: 4 In his report of 1893 Prain had written that the cultivator, "looking at the plant entirely in its resin-bearing aspect, considers the sex that produces this substance the nobler of the two and calls it mardá or male", while "the worse than useless male, which if left would fertilize his field and ruin his crop, is to him mádi, or female". The misapplication of the names, he added, had also been current in Europe three centuries earlier.^: 5 The farmers interviewed in Naogaon between 2017 and 2020 called the female plants madi and the male plants morda.^{: 3, 6}

The same reversal of the names was current elsewhere in India. The Madras bulletin has the male plants on the Javadi hills "called female by the ryots", and at Daggupad the removal of "the male (here as elsewhere termed female) plants". The Jaisalmer State memorandum gave ganja as the dry flowering tops "of cultivated male plant (not female as explained by Dr. Prain)", and said that the female plant, having little intoxicating power and giving no flowers used as ganja, was not grown in the state. In the two Nimar memoranda, by contrast, the plant taken out is the male, called naria or bhangra.

Later accounts

In the 1980s, the last decade of licensed production by the Ganja Society, the ganja doctors still visited the fields in November.^{: 99–100, 104} The former ganja doctor whom Rahman and colleagues interviewed said that some ganja doctors had been hired to teach ganja-growing to farmers in Nepal. The authors write that cultivation and production around Kathmandu and Butwal were greatly influenced by them.^: 104–105 Many ganja doctors also went to Nepal to earn more money than they could in Naogaon.^: 4 Neither paper gives a date for this.

Examiners of male plants elsewhere

The commission found a comparable examiner in the ganja districts of the Bombay Presidency. About six weeks after sowing, when the plants stood two feet high, "the parakhai or parakadar is then called in". Except in the Poona district, whose cultivators a witness described as skilled in distinguishing the male plants, the examination was done by an expert paid eight to ten rupees a month or more. The Collector of Ahmednagar reported that part of this expert's business was to search the surrounding country when he found signs of damage caused by "pernicious plants". It appeared to the commission that the examiner's services were required "for a longer period than they are in Bengal" and that he exercised "a wider control over the cultivation generally".^: 75–77

The District Deputy Collector of Bijapur wrote in 1893 that the selection of the male plants "can only be made by an expert called 'Párakhi'". The experts walked through the crop pulling up male plants until the harvest. The Bijapur ganja farm had engaged one from Lengri, a village in the Khanapur taluka of Satara district where the drug was grown on a large scale. The administrator of Jath told the commission that such an expert was paid at least ten rupees a month while his services were employed. "He is called Parakhdar, because he examines all the plants and carefully takes away all the male plants till they disappear altogether."

At Khandwa in the Central Provinces the cultivators carried out the examination themselves, "and no specialist is required". The commission had no information on the employment of such an expert in Gujarat.^: 78 The excise officer from Bihar said that the Patna Division had no "Parkhias" or ganja doctors who could tell the male plants apart and destroy them.

Two memoranda in the commission's third volume describe the examination at Khandwa more closely. The Deputy Commissioner of Nimar called the eradication of the male and other useless plants párakh, meaning examination, and put its start about a month after sowing, when both kinds began to flower. He reported that "all the cultivators possess the faculty of recognising the noxious and useless plants, and no special class is employed for the purpose". The Officiating Commissioner of Excise for the Central Provinces put the first párakh about six weeks after sowing, when the cultivators could already make out the pollen-bearing sacs of the male flowers, and wrote that it was "repeated daily for about two months". A second examination then took out the adnaria, plants combining the signs of both sexes, which he thought identical with the "abnormal female plants with some male flowers on them" of Prain's report of 1893; a third kind, the resinless moria, he took to correspond with the Bengal khasia.

In the Madras Presidency the work was also the cultivator's own. The Deputy Director of the agricultural branch reported that on the Javadi hills the crop had to be examined "carefully and frequently" from about its fourth month, that detection was possible only once the flowers appeared and that removal went on continuously as plants were found. At Daggupad in Kistna, where the plants were raised in seed-beds and planted out as in Bengal, removal began two months after planting out and went on "as long as male plants are found".

See also

• Cannabis in Bangladesh
• Dioecy
• Ganja
• Ganja Mahal
• Ganja Society
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)
• Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877)
• Sex determination in cannabis