Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)

Title page of the report, printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, in 1893

Title page of the report, printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, in 1893

Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá

Publication

Author	David Prain(1857–1944)
Language	English
Composed	June 1893
Published	1893
Publisher	Bengal Secretariat Press
Place	Calcutta
Volumes	1
Total pages	79, after a two-page covering letter

Cannabis Content

Volume	(entire report)
Pages	pp. 1–79
Chapter	Part I, "Ganja as an article of commerce" (13 chapters and a summary of results); Part II, "Ganja as an article of excise" (nine chapters)
Plates	none
Regions documented	The licensed ganja tract at Naogaon in Bengal; comparative notes on ganja from Orissa and Central India and on charas from the Himalaya and Central Asia
Varieties described	None distinguished: the report treats Indian hemp and fibre hemp as one plant
Preparations	Ganja (flat, round and chur); siddhi or bhang; charas; majum
Uses documented	Smoking; drinking and eating; licensed cultivation, manufacture, storage and excise; religious use at Durga Puja; medicinal use
Taxonomic significance	Treats Indian hemp (Cannabis sativa var. indica) and fibre hemp as one plant with no botanical characters to separate them; describes the khasia plants of the Bengal cultivators as barren females

Access

Digital facsimile	View at the National Library of Scotland
Original held at	National Library of Scotland, India Papers (shelfmark IP/6/RC.6)

Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá is an official report on ganja and the other drugs made from the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, written by the botanist David Prain for the Board of Revenue of the Lower Provinces of Bengal and printed at Calcutta by the Bengal Secretariat Press in 1893.^{: title page, covering letter} Prain, then Curator of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sibpur, compiled it during a deputation from 18 March to 17 June 1893 and dated his covering letter 21 June 1893.^{: covering letter}

He drew the report up as a supplement to Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Gánjá in Bengal, the report of 1877 by Hem Chunder Kerr.^{: covering letter} Its first part treats ganja "as an article of commerce". It draws on Prain's observations in the licensed cultivation tract at Naogaon (the Ganja Mahal) and on his experiments and calculations on the manufacture, storage and taxation of the drug. The second part treats ganja "as an article of excise" and reviews the plant's botany, history, chemistry, physiological action and use.^{: 1, 38}

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission opened its list of questions with Prain's definitions of ganja, charas and bhang^: 59 and quoted the report in its account of cultivation in Bengal.^: 62–63 In its closing chapter the report describes the use of ganja as "widespread and innocuous" and the harm from its abuse as "greatly exaggerated".^: 75 As an administrative document of its period, the report also records how an officer of the colonial medical service characterised the drug's cultivators and users, in terms that include the racial and religious generalisations of the time.

The report spells the drug gánjá and calls the plant hemp. This article uses the forms ganja, bhang, charas and majum. Quotations keep the report's spellings.

Origins

Prain (1857–1944) was a surgeon-captain in the Indian Medical Service when the Board of Revenue gave him its instructions, in its letter Excise No. 295B of 18 February 1893.^{: covering letter} He later told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission that he had not previously "been specially interested in hemp".^: 303

The Board's letter set five points of inquiry: the waste under the existing system of manufacture, the best way to obtain the drug's active principle, the best means of preserving ganja, the effect of keeping it under existing conditions and "the effect of gánjá as an article of excise". Prain was also to report on any other points of interest. His deputation began on 18 March 1893. It was first limited to two months and was then extended by one more month, to 17 June.^{: covering letter}

Prain acknowledged help from the officers in charge of the ganja mahals at Naogaon and from the Chemical Examiner's Department in Calcutta. He had also consulted Surgeon-Major C. J. Warden, the government's medical storekeeper, at every stage of the chemical work.^{: covering letter} Warden drew up the shortened programme of chemical analysis that the report follows.^: 58

The covering letter describes Kerr's report, submitted to the Board on 2 April 1877, as "exhaustive". Prain did not repeat its facts. Where he had gathered information that added to Kerr's, he gave a reference to the passage it affected.^{: covering letter} For the same reason his accounts of cultivation and manufacture are brief outlines.^{: 11, 13} The letter also warned that only the first point could be answered at once. Conclusions on the second and third would take a year and those on the fourth three years. On the last, a definite opinion "must long be delayed": it was a subject on which "sentiment and preconceived opinion have influenced the interpretation of facts".^{: covering letter}

The report

The report runs to 79 numbered pages after the covering letter. Part I, "Ganja as an article of commerce", has 13 chapters and a summary of results. Part II, "Ganja as an article of excise", has nine chapters. Thirteen numbered tables set out figures and classifications. The last of them, "The employment of hemp", stands above Prain's signature on p. 79.^{: 1, 38, 79}

Chapters of the report, with the page on which each begins

Part	Chapter	Heading	Page
I	I	The source and nature of the gánjá resin	1
	II	The narcotic articles obtained from hemp	3
	III	Siddhi, or bhang	5
	IV	Charas	7
	V	Gánjá	8
	VI	The cultivation of gánjá	11
	VII	The manufacture of gánjá	13
	VIII	The weight and bulk of ganja	17
	IX	The possibility of reducing the bulk of the ganja-crop	21
	X	Estimation of duty leviable on gánjá	23
	XI	Modifications of the process of manufacture	26
	XII	The physical changes that occur in gánjá	28
	XIII	The chemical changes that occur in gánjá	31
		Summary of results	34
II	I	Description of the hemp-plant	38
	II	History of hemp	39
	III	Historical notices of the effects of hemp	44
	IV	The chemistry of gánjá	48
	V	Details of a chemical examination of gánjá	55
	VI	Physiological action of hemp	62
	VII	The use of hemp	66
	VIII	The abuse of hemp	69
	IX	General resumé	74

Cannabis as documented in the report

The plant

Prain held that the plant which yields ganja is the one that yields hemp fibre. He rejected the separation of an Indian variety (Cannabis sativa var. indica) or of a distinct Indian plant: "There are no botanical characters to separate them".^: 1 With very rare exceptions, he noted, hemp bears its male and female flowers on separate plants, the condition botanists call dioecy.^: 1 He explained the resin as a reserve the plant lays up for its seed. In the plains of India, where fertilisation is prevented, the resin stays on the female flower-heads "as a sticky exudation". In the Western Himalayas and Turkestan it comes to the surface early, so charas can be collected without stopping the plant from setting seed.^: 1–3

Kerr had called the cultivators' khásiá plants "hermaphrodite" and recorded that they bore no flowers. Prain found that they "flower more copiously than any other plants in the field". In his account they are female plants that seem incapable of setting seed and carry no resin, "barren females".^: 2 The plant grown for ganja was transplanted and widely spaced. It usually stood 1.2 to 1.5 metres (4 to 5 feet) tall and branched into a cone "somewhat resembling a small cypress". Once its lower branches were cut it looked like "a boxwood bush trimmed in the old Dutch fashion". Prain described the male plant as having "no trace of even a rudimentary female flower". He noted that cultivated female plants often bore some abnormal male flowers.^: 38–39

Products and grades

The report distinguishes three narcotic articles.^: 3 Siddhi, bhang, subji and patti are names for the dry leaves, "whether male or female and whether cultivated or uncultivated". Siddhi was the name best known in Bengal and the official one there, while bhang was the most general.^{: 3, 6} Charas is the resin collected on its own. Ganja "consists of the dried flowering-tops of cultivated female hemp plants which have become coated with resin in consequence of having been unable to set seeds freely".^: 3–4

Bhang was ground to a paste and drunk, usually with spices. It was also the basis of the sweetmeats called majum. Charas and ganja were smoked.^{: 6, 8, 11} Users of charas, Prain reported, preferred the hand-rubbed resin of Nepal and Garhwal to the Central Asian kind, which was beaten from reaped plants onto cloths.^: 7–8

Two sorts of ganja were manufactured and three kinds were sold. Flat ganja (cháptá) was trodden underfoot and sold either on the branch as "large flat" or broken into "flat twig". Round ganja (goli), about a fifth of the crop, was rolled. The flower-tops detached from either sort made broken ganja, chúr, also called rorá.^: 9–10 Prain insisted that chur was not a different substance: "Chúr is gánjá; all gánjá has to be broken, that is, becomes chúr, before it can be used."^: 10 He described the ganja made in other parts of India, among them Orissa and Central India, as genuine but inferior. There, he wrote, the male plants were removed later and less thoroughly. The drug was also dried with less care.^: 10

Cultivation and manufacture

A ganja plant ready for cutting at Naogaon, photographed in February 1894 for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

Because Kerr had described the cultivation in full, Prain gave only "the briefest outline" of it. Ganja cultivation, he wrote, was "practically confined" to North Bengal.^: 11 Seed saved from the previous crop was sown in a nursery towards the end of August. The seedlings were planted out at about five weeks old. The fields were weeded in mid-October, the lower branches were trimmed in mid-November and the plants were irrigated three to six times. Flowering began in early January and the harvest ran from mid-February to mid-March.^: 11–12 The crop was grown "rather after the manner of a garden than of a field crop".^: 12

Prain had not seen the poddars at work. These "special men", he wrote, "profess ability to recognise the sexes long before the plants are mature". They went round a field "three or perhaps four times during a season" and broke over the plants they rejected.^{: 4, 12} He found no normal male plant in any field he visited. What he did find were female plants with a few abnormal male flowers, which the cultivators watched for themselves once flowering began.^{: 4, 12} He called the practice "a purely empirical one" that in the ganja tract "has become an art".^: 12 The cultivators considered the resin-bearing plant "the nobler of the two" and called it mardá (male); the pollen-bearing plant was to them mádi (female).^: 5

Hemp exhausted the soil. A plot lay fallow or under pulses and mustard for two years after a crop, so no more than about a third of the ganja land could be under hemp in any year. Sugarcane, which the cultivators appeared to find nearly as profitable and much less troublesome, seemed to be slowly displacing it.^: 12–13

Flat ganja was trodden on mats by men who held each other's shoulders for balance. Round ganja was rolled underfoot by men holding a horizontal bamboo, then pressed and rolled by hand.^: 13–14 Prain identified the black coating on the treaders' soles as "pure charas". The cultivators washed it off and threw it away. Prain was "convinced that the substance is not collected, and is not smuggled".^: 16 He estimated that at least 10 per cent of the resin was lost in this way.^: 17 He differed from Kerr, on what he called almost the only point between them, over the twigs rejected in making round ganja. Kerr counted them as wastage; Prain agreed with the dealers that the rejections improved the drug.^: 15

Storage, bulk and duty

The cultivators kept their ganja at home until it was sold. It was then weighed at the ganja office before export.^: 17–18 Prain wrote that on close investigation "it becomes clear that no smuggling occurs". Officers' time had nonetheless been spent more than once on disproving claims that it did, so he thought it worth showing that the government could store the crop itself.^: 18

To reduce the space the crop needed, he turned ganja into chur and compressed it in a tincture press into round cakes an inch (about 2.5 cm) thick, each weighing 20 tolas.^: 21 He proposed square cakes four inches (about 10 cm) across, which would pack into old kerosene tins. For the large machines that the work would need, he preferred hydraulic pressure of the kind used to bale jute.^: 23

Duty was then charged at fixed rates per seer, with the "large flat" grade as the basis. Prain argued that each grade should pay according to its share of flower-tops, with chur as the unit of calculation. By his tables the fixed rates had lost the government revenue on round ganja and on chur. In the poor season of 1891–92 the government "lost more than twice as much as it did in 1890-91".^: 23–26

Deterioration and chemistry

Prain compared samples of the crops of 1889–90 to 1892–93 from the government warehouses (golahs) in Calcutta and from Naogaon, with samples of Gurjat ganja from Orissa.^: 28–29 Stored ganja lost its smell and stickiness and turned from green to brown.^{: 28, 37} Alcohol extracted about a quarter of the weight of the powdered fresh drug. Prain took this to show that the estimate of 20 per cent by O'Shaughnessy "is not too high", against the 4 to 6 per cent that the Chemical Examiner, Dr. Macnamara, had reported in 1872. The extract of the oldest samples had practically no effect.^: 31–32

By extracting the drug with a series of solvents he placed its narcotic principle in the non-volatile part of the petroleum-ether extract, "of the nature of a fixed oil". He suggested that the oxidation of this substance into an inert resin explained the loss of strength. He also found that the traces of alkaloid in ganja did not account for its effects.^: 33–34 He tested extracts on cats.^{: 56–58, 63–64} Part II also prints, verbatim, a précis of the observations of Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel E. G. Russell. It includes the case of a peon who had smoked one pipe of ganja every evening for 16 years without increasing the amount.^: 65–66

History of hemp

Prain reviewed the history of hemp because he found most earlier accounts "somewhat misleading". He placed the plant's native home in southern Siberia, "indigenous in the Kirghiz steppes".^: 39 In his account the plant reached India as a source of fibre and developed its narcotic property there. It then travelled back to Central Asia as a narcotic, by way of Persia.^: 41–42 He took the Sanskrit name śaṇa (s'ana in the report) to be the same word as the Latin cannabis and the English hemp. He rejected the idea that cannabis was borrowed from Arabic.^: 43 He also doubted that the word assassin derives from hashish.^: 44

Use and abuse

Prain wrote that the chief use of hemp was to give "staying-power during severe exertion" or to relieve fatigue after hard labour. He put it in the same category as tea, coffee, cocoa and kola, as "a valuable food-accessory". He found no way to measure how many people used it, because the habit was held in disrepute and users would not admit to it.^: 66–67 He suggested that the contempt for the drug and its users was a reflection of an older contempt for those who grew hemp for fibre.^: 47–48 In Bengal, he recorded, families who did not ordinarily use siddhi prepared it on a particular day of Durga Puja. Every member of the household, guests included, had at least to touch it with a finger and put a drop on the tongue.^: 68

He defined abuse as the use of hemp to produce intoxication.^: 69 He described religious mendicants who drank repeated doses of bhang to reach a frenzy taken for possession. Others, among them fakirs, smoked a single large dose of ganja for its sedative after-effect.^: 70–71 In his view the asylum returns reversed cause and effect in such cases, recording men as insane from ganja when their insanity explained their use of it.^: 71 The Bengal asylum records, which in some years credited ganja with 30 per cent of admissions for insanity, were in his words "an instance of a half-truth". He also described how the cause of an admission came to be entered.^: 77–79 He found no good evidence that hemp led to unpremeditated crime.^: 72 Reported cases of drugging with ganja were, he thought, probably mistakes, with the hemp preparation serving as a vehicle for other substances, chiefly dhatura.^: 74

The report also carries the racial and religious generalisations of its period. It describes the drug's effects as varying with a "racial idiosyncracy" between European and Indian subjects. It says that frenzy induced with hemp before "enterprises of difficulty and danger" had "usually happened in the case of religious fanatics of the Muhammadan faith".^{: 63–64, 77}

The general summary rates the use of hemp as a food-accessory "beneficial", as a stimulant "harmless" and as an intoxicant "apt to impair digestion, especially if taken as bhang".^: 75 It concludes:

Like any other stimulant or sedative narcotic, gánjá may, therefore, either be used or abused. As in the case of other similar substances, the use here is widespread and innocuous; the abuse, though dangerous, is very limited; the harm that results from its abuse has been not only greatly exaggerated, but much misunderstood.^: 75

— Prain, Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá, p. 75

Findings and recommendations

The summary of results answers the Board's first four points.^: 34–37 On waste, Prain held that neither the twigs rejected in manufacture nor chur were waste. The only serious waste, he wrote, was the resin left on the makers' feet and hands, "at least 10 per cent. of the whole resin in the drug". Leaving the plants to over-ripen and pressing the flower-tops mechanically would reduce it, a change he thought "would probably be found advisable in the event of Government growing its own hemp as a source of medicine".^: 34–35

On the active principle, he found the stalks and twigs unnecessary. Cakes of pressed flower-tops would need "a space of only 2½ cubic feet per maund", against up to 6½ cubic feet for the grades then exported. Some dealers and cultivators expected pressed ganja to spoil, so he stored cakes in the Calcutta warehouses and deferred a final opinion until April 1894.^: 35–36 On preservation, he proposed pressing the flower-tops into cakes and sealing ganja in tins. Tinned and untinned cakes were stored for examination between 1894 and 1896.^: 36–37 On keeping, he concluded that ganja a year old kept "a considerable narcotic effect", while at two years it was "practically valueless" and at three "quite inert".^: 37

Prain sent the Board a further report on 27 April 1894, printed with his evidence to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The tinned samples had acquired a fermentation smell like that of Gurjat ganja. As a commercial article the tinned cakes were "valueless". He concluded that the proposal to tin newly made ganja "must be definitely abandoned". If the Board took over the management of the whole crop, he still advised turning it all into chur and pressing it into cakes, but not offering the cakes for sale beside the familiar forms.^: 306–307

Reception

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission noted that the report "was issued when the Commission began their inquiries".^: 15 It introduced its list of questions with definitions "borrowed from Dr. Prain". The witnesses had generally accepted them, but the Commission found that they "require some explanation".^: 59 Among the botanical evidence it relied on, it cited Prain's view that hemp is not native to India. It quoted his statement that fibre hemp and narcotic hemp could not be separated botanically, with one by George Watt, as "the most recent scientific views".^: 15–16 It corrected his description of the plant on two points. He had not noted that the colour of the stem varies. At Khandwa the Commission found plants that looked male but bore a few female flowers or seeds, where Prain had written that male plants showed no trace of a female flower.^: 16–17

For its account of cultivation in Bengal the Commission drew on Kerr's detailed report, on "a brief outline" by Prain and on a monthly sketch by the Collector of Rajshahi. It quoted Prain on the work of October and November and on the abnormal male flowers "which the poddar could not possibly have foretold".^: 60–63 It found "no evidence" that ganja cultivation was held in contempt, "a point which Dr. Prain has discussed at pages 47 and 48 of his report".^: 63

Officials who wrote memoranda for the Commission compared local practice with the report. H. V. Drake-Brockman, officiating Commissioner of Excise in the Central Provinces, wrote that the adnaria plants removed at Khandwa "seem to be identical with" the abnormal female plants described by Prain. He added that the moria plants there "probably correspond" with the Bengal khasia. C. Benson, Deputy Director of the agricultural branch in Madras, wrote that cultivation in the Kistna district differed entirely from "the practice in Bengal, according to Dr. Prain's description". The memorandum from Jaisalmer State held that ganja there came from the "male plant (not female as explained by Dr. Prain)". It added that the kinds of ganja described after Prain in the Commission's questions were "neither known nor sold" in the state. T. Stoker, Commissioner of Excise in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, had "not been favoured with a copy" of the report. He had been told that Prain had "pronounced bhang to be more harmful than ganja". The report itself calls the excessive smoking of ganja "physically less unwholesome than the excessive drinking of bhang".^: 71

Prain gave written and oral evidence to the Commission. He said he had begun the inquiry "with a preconceived idea, derived from copious assertion, that ganja was a pernicious drug, and that charas and bhang were harmless". In three months he had been "unable to find a single instance … of any evil effects arising from the use of any of the three products of hemp".^: 304 He called the chemical part of the report "partial and inconclusive". His comparisons of smoking and drinking hemp, he said, rested on Russell's paper and on hearsay rather than on cases he had observed. He had taken bhang himself and was "rather disappointed with the result".^: 305 Writing to Prain in November 1893, the secretary of the Royal Society's pharmacological committee called the report "voluminous" and "of the greatest value to any one who is thinking of working on the subject".^: 305–306

Utathya Chattopadhyaya's 2018 dissertation on Naogaon cites the report. It states that G. Rainy, author of a 1904 report on the manufacture and smuggling of ganja, "deeply disagreed with Prain's calculations of land-use under ganja in Naogaon".^: 93

Legacy

Plate I of Prain's 1904 memoir. Figure 2 shows solitary female flowers in place of the lowest clusters of male flowers, the feature he later identified as the poddars' guide.

Prain wrote in 1904 that the inquiry of 1893 had started his interest in Cannabis. A considerable number of the malformations of the flower recorded in his memoir of that year had been noted during the inquiry. His drawings of them were shown to the Linnean Society of London on 15 November 1894. He had since revisited the Bengal cultivation tract and grown plants at the botanic garden to test his observations of 1893.^: 2 In 1893 he had arrived after the male plants had been removed. He returned "a few years later" at the right season and identified the poddars' guides as "the often abortive, solitary female flowers" of the male plant.^: 4

In 1924, as the Home Office considered a South African letter to the League of Nations about dagga, Malcolm Delevingne recommended consulting Prain. Chattopadhyaya describes Prain as someone who "had in 1893 written a full report on cannabis cultivation in Bengal". According to Chattopadhyaya, the botanist Ronald Good also noted that Prain "remained the final authority on cannabis".^: 256–257

Editions and availability

The report was printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press in Calcutta in 1893.^{: title page} A copy in the India Papers of the National Library of Scotland (shelfmark IP/6/RC.6) is digitised in the library's collection A Medical History of British India. The library also publishes the collection's page images and text as open data, which it describes as "free of known copyright restrictions". The digitised copy is complete, ending on p. 79 with Prain's signature.^: 79

See also

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

External links

• Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá at the National Library of Scotland

Ganja Mahal Naogaon Bengal Presidency Flat ganja Round ganja Chur ganja Bhang Charas Majum Smoking Oral preparations Licensed cultivation Excise Religious Medicinal Government report