Punjab submontane belt

Punjab submontane belt
HistoricalCannabis last recorded here in 1894
⛶
Location	India
Coordinates	31.31, 76.14
Gene Pool	South Asian Gene Pool
Country	India
Provinces/States	Punjab,Haryana,Himachal Pradesh,Chandigarh
Area	15,400 km²
Primary Rivers	Beas River
Primary Mountains	Shivalik Hills
Growing history
Grown	1893–1894
Earlier names	Submontane districts, sub-montane tracts
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Punjab submontane belt is a historical landrace cannabis growing region in north-west India, on the plain along the foot of the Shivalik Hills. It is drawn on the Pathankot, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar, Rupnagar and Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar districts of Punjab and the northern part of Jalandhar; on Chandigarh; on the Panchkula and Yamunanagar districts and the Naraingarh tahsil of Ambala in Haryana; and on Una in Himachal Pradesh. Their hill ground lies in the Western Himalayas region. In 1893 the Commissioner of Excise of the Punjab wrote that the province's bhang came from the wild hemp plant of the sub-montane tracts under the Himalayas. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission found the plant growing wild in a broad belt along the foot of the mountains, from Peshawar to Ambala. In its words the growth was "most notorious" in Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur and Jalandhar, because the bhang contractors drew their supplies from those districts.

Witnesses from these districts knew of no hemp cultivated there for drugs beyond a few seeds sown by fakirs near their houses. They described a plant of field margins, roadsides, stream banks and waste land, which labourers or the contractors' coolies cut and sold as bhang. The part of the Commission's belt that lies in Pakistan today is outside the region's border.

Geography

Hoshiarpur district lies in the north-east of Punjab, in the Bist Doab. The district administration describes it as sub-mountainous, stretching along the Beas in the north-west and bordering the Kangra and Una districts of Himachal Pradesh; check dams have been built on its choes under the Kandi Watershed Development Project. The town of Gurdaspur lies between the Beas and the Ravi. Pathankot was a tahsil of Gurdaspur until it was made a district in 2011; the town stands in the foothills of Kangra and Dalhousie, near the Chakki. Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar was carved out of Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar districts in 1995. Rupnagar, formerly Ropar, became a district in 1966, and its Kharar and Majri blocks went to the new district of Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar in 2006. The Shivalik range bounds Ambala district on the north and north-east, and Naraingarh is one of its four tahsils. A large part of Yamunanagar district lies in the Shivalik foothills, and the Yamuna flows through it. Una lies in the south-west of Himachal Pradesh and became a district when Kangra district was reorganised in 1972.

The Commission found that the growth thinned out very quickly once the Himalayas were left behind. In its account the belt was very narrow at Peshawar and widened towards the North-Western Provinces. Several witnesses linked it to water from the hills. Denzil Ibbetson, Deputy Commissioner of Jalandhar, described the north of the Jalandhar tahsil as the tract where the chohs, the shallow hill streams from the Siwaliks, spread out over the country. The seed came down in the floodwater from the hills, and since the plant flowered and seeded in the district, much of it was also self-sown there. J. R. Maconachie, Deputy Commissioner of Gurdaspur, found it growing very densely on waste land along the river, in backwaters and on the banks of the nullahs, chiefly in the northern tahsil near the hills. Other witnesses put it on the banks of brooks and rivers and in old river beds that stayed damp, or in tracts watered from the hills.

Cultivation history

Excise reports

A history of the Punjab excise system up to 1884, printed in 1931, states that the plant grew wild in large quantities in the Himalayas and in the plains next to them, and that this growth in the sub-montane tracts supplied most of the bhang used in the other districts of the Punjab, where the climate was generally too dry for the plant to grow wild. Hoshiarpur produced it in considerable quantities.

In his memorandum of 1893 for the Commission, the Commissioner of Excise, T. G. Walker, put the yearly consumption of bhang in the districts of the Punjab at a little under 4,000 maunds, all of it the leaves of the wild plant. Its transport from the districts where it grew to those where it was consumed was controlled by passes, but no duty was levied on it. Apart from a few plots grown by fakirs in one or two western districts, he knew of no cultivation of the plant for drugs. He could give no estimate of the wild growth: it was "a mere weed" scattered about, and as much was taken as the districts and the Punjab states needed, the rest probably being left to die down. Across the Yamuna, the Commissioner of Excise of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, T. Stoker, recorded bhang imported from the Punjab, chiefly from Jagadhri, Kalsia and Ambala, with some from Amritsar and Hoshiarpur. He put the trade down to the contractors' links with the Punjab, since his own provinces had plenty of bhang.

The Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94

The Commission found the spontaneous growth so free and vigorous that it could be called wild. It took the frequent occurrence of the plant along the foot of the mountains to be beyond doubt, although witnesses disagreed about how dense and abundant it was. It placed the wild growth only in the Himalayas and in the belt below them. Kapurthala and Patiala were the only states of the plain from which spontaneous growth was reported, and the Commission expected it in the parts of those states that fell inside the belt. Further south the growth held on in Amritsar, Lahore, Karnal and Shahpur. At Amritsar, where the Commission's members saw a dense growth in the public gardens, it put the plants down to seed thrown away from the bhang drunk in the city.

Gurdaspur and Pathankot. J. B. Hutchinson, Commissioner of Lahore, had seen the plant growing chiefly in the Pathankot tahsil, on the ridges between fields, and largely in the Gurdaspur tahsil, along the roads. He called the growth "common, very common", dense in some places. Maconachie found it growing largely in the submontane villages on the Ravi; he said that it was never cultivated in Gurdaspur. Sodhi Ishar Singh, an Extra Assistant Commissioner of Hoshiarpur district, said that bhang leaves were collected from the wild plant in great abundance in Gurdaspur, amounting to hundreds of maunds.

Hoshiarpur and Una. Lala Ganesh Dass, a pleader of Hoshiarpur, said that there was hardly a village in the district without wild hemp round its fields. Bhang was not cultivated there, but it was sent from Hoshiarpur to Ludhiana, Ferozepore, Maler Kotla and other districts. Lachman Das, a merchant in the Ladakh trade, named villages where the wild hemp grew: Sham Churasi in the Hoshiarpur tahsil, Mukerian, Jhinjea and Badal in the Dasuya tahsil, Ambota and Gaget in the Una tahsil, and Nadaun in the Garhshankar tahsil. Bedi Sujan Singh, an honorary magistrate of Una, found it abundant in Hoshiarpur district, especially on the banks of the Swan stream. Ibbetson wrote that the bhang of Ambota in the Una tahsil was "especially famous", and he quoted a verse which he translated as "He who drinks Ambota bhang forgets to tie his loin cloth."

Jalandhar. Ibbetson said that the plant grew "in enormous quantities" in the northern part of the Jalandhar tahsil, and that he was writing from the middle of a tract where many thousands of acres had bhang springing up all over them. It came up with the spring crops, and much of it was weeded out and fed to the cattle. Most of the supply came from plants too small at harvest to be caught by the sickle. Once the crops were cut these often grew to six or seven feet and flowered and seeded between the middle of May and the end of June. A field of good soil left uncultivated could be covered within two or three years by a thick growth that was very hard to get rid of. He found it still more plentiful in Hoshiarpur.

Ambala, Ropar and Kalsia. The Chief of Loharu, giving evidence for the native states, named the Naraingarh, Ropar, Kharar and Jagadhri tahsils of Ambala district and Una, Garhshankar and other places in Hoshiarpur district among the places where the plant grew spontaneously. Arjan Singh, who had been excise officer at Ambala, said that it was very abundant in Ambala district and grew mostly close to the hills in the Jagadhri tahsil, from where it was largely exported under passes that he had issued. Sardar Bahadur Lachmi Sahai, an Extra Assistant Commissioner who had served in Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur, added some villages of the Kalsia estate in Ambala district.

Harvest and trade

In Hutchinson's account, the contractors employed coolies to collect the leaves for sale as bhang and paid only for their labour. From Gurdaspur the bhang went to Jhang, Montgomery and Multan, and probably to Lahore and Amritsar. Lachmi Sahai said that the cultivators cut the plant from their own land, but that in most cases the excise contractors had it gathered by paid coolies; the zamindars took nothing for it, because it did not grow on their cultivated fields. In Ibbetson's account the plants in Jalandhar were cut by Chamars and other village labourers. The stalks went for fuel in the village bakeries and the leaves were sold to the contractors at about four annas a maund. The first rain spoiled the standing plant. Jawala Bhagat, a licensed drug vendor of Hoshiarpur, said that labourers reaped the self-sown plants and sold them to the contractors at four or five maunds to the rupee. In his account the landowner was glad to have the plant reaped and the land cleared.

For the farmers the plant was also a weed. Bedi Sujan Singh said that it damaged the crops and that cultivators destroyed the plants on their land. Maconachie thought that the growth could be confined to a narrow strip against the hills, in the north of the Pathankot tahsil, and stamped out elsewhere, though whether that would pay was, he said, another question.

W. Coldstream, Deputy Commissioner of Simla, wrote that "in the Simla district (as generally in the Punjab submontane)" it was commonly grown for its fibre and made into rope, and that rope and bhang were made from both the cultivated and the wild plant.

Growing Areas

No growing areas documented yet.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.

See also

• Bhang
• Bhimbar
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Rohilkhand
• South Asian Gene Pool
• Upper Doab
• Western Himalayas
• Yarkand charas trade