Ganja
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Ganja is the cured flowering and fruiting tops of cultivated female cannabis, prepared for smoking. It is one of the three preparations around which the cannabis economy of India and Bangladesh has been organised since at least the eighteenth century, alongside bhang, the leaf preparation, and charas, the separated resin. The three are distinguished by the part of the plant used: ganja is made only from a cultivated crop from which male plants have been removed and cannot be made from wild growth.
In Bengal the licensed crop was worked into three commercial forms, flat, round and broken or chur, which differed in how the harvested tops were pressed and in how much woody stalk they carried. Colonial excise taxed them at different rates and the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 used the Bengal grades as the reference against which the products of other Indian provinces were compared.
The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act defines ganja by plant part. The boundary that definition draws has been litigated in the Indian courts. Indenture carried its use beyond South Asia, to Natal and to the Caribbean.
Name
Gañjā is attested in Sanskrit as a name for hemp. Monier-Williams records the feminine gañjā in the sense "hemp", citing the Bhāvaprakāśa, alongside senses of a tavern and of a drinking-vessel, especially one for intoxicating liquors; the masculine and neuter gañja carries the unrelated senses of a treasury or jewel room, a mine, a station of cowherds and a mart where grain is stored for sale.[1]
The same entry records gañjā as a variant of guñjā, the unrelated plant Abrus precatorius, so an occurrence of the word in a Sanskrit text does not by itself establish a reference to cannabis.[1]
Definition and plant part
The three-fold division of ganja, bhang and charas was already established when the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission took its working definitions from the botanist David Prain's Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá and set them at the head of its chapter on cultivation. Prain defined ganja as the dried flowering tops of cultivated female plants, coated with resin because they had been unable to set seed freely; charas as the resinous matter which forms the active principle of the plant when collected separately; and bhang, also known as siddhi, subji and patti, as the dry leaves of the plant, whether male or female and whether cultivated or uncultivated.[2]: 3–4 The commission added that the word "cultivated" often had to be read out of the definition of ganja, since wild female plants also yielded it.[3] Whether a crop yielded charas, it inferred, depended on the quantity of resin in the flower heads and on the economy of extracting it rather than on any quality inherent in the resin.[4]
The commission found that ganja of good quality required some cultivation and tending, but that ganja of an inferior kind could be made from spontaneous or casual growth, while bhang was taken from wild and cultivated plants alike.[5][3] In modern terms ganja is the drug taken from dried female flower buds; removing the males before they shed pollen is what makes the difference in quality.[6] Present-day usage in India keeps the division: ganja is the dried flower buds or fruits of the female plant, charas the resinous exudation and bhang a paste of the matured leaves.[7]
Statutory definition
In India the term is defined by statute. Section 2(iii) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 defines "cannabis (hemp)" in three limbs, of which the second reads:
(b) ganja, that is, the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops), by whatever name they may be known or designated;[8]
The exclusion the definition carries has been litigated. In Shiv Kumar Mishra v. State of Goa the Supreme Court of India rejected an argument that seeds and leaves should be deducted from the weight of a seizure, holding that where the material seized consisted of leafy and flowery parts together, the seeds and leaves fell within the definition "since the seized Ganja was accompanied by the flowery parts of the plant". The court added that nothing in the Act requires moisture content to be excluded and that the weight is the one taken at seizure.[9]
Because the statute defines cannabis by plant part, the leaf preparation falls outside it.[8] State excise law follows the same line. The West Bengal excise rules of 2003 list bhang among the categories for which a retail licence may be granted, and refer to ganja shops only as erstwhile premises, since converted to the sale of foreign liquor.[10]
Grades
Bengal worked the licensed crop into three forms, which the excise administration taxed as distinct articles. Hem Chunder Kerr's 1877 report for the Bengal government describes each from direct observation in the growing tract.
Flat or chāptā ganja was made from plants cut in the morning once the dew had lifted. The tops were dried on a cleared floor called the chātor, cut into lengths of one to two feet with the flowerless twigs and the lower bare stalk discarded, exposed to the dew overnight, then bundled and laid on a mat in a circle roughly 14 feet round with the tops pointing inwards, where four or five people trod them flat while holding each other by the shoulders.[11] Prain set out the relationship of the grades more exactly: two sorts were manufactured and three varieties sold, one of the three occurring in two states. Flat ganja left on the branches, which were cut to two feet or two feet six inches, was baled "large flat"; the same product broken into twigs about a foot long and tied into small flattish bundles of about a quarter-seer was "flat twig".[2]: 9
Round ganja was made from plants cut in the afternoon. It was rolled underfoot in two courses, ekmaldi then domaldi, by workers ranged in two rows steadying themselves on a horizontal bamboo bar, then finished by hand three to five twigs at a time and tied into bundles of about 100. Kerr called the process "manipulation, or, more correctly speaking, pedipulation".[11] Prain, who spells the two courses ekmalái and domalái, records that round ganja was always less leafy than flat, that its final dressing to remove the leaf was done by hand, and that only a fifth of the whole crop was prepared in this way.[2]: 9, 14
Chur or broken ganja was not a separate manufacture. It was the breakage from the other two processes, the flower fragments that dropped as flat bundles were tied and as round twigs were rolled, kept aside because they could not be pressed back onto the spikes. Because it consisted principally of female flowers with their resin and carried no stalk, Kerr recorded that it held weight for weight more narcotic matter than flat and round ganja, "which are made up of nearly one-half of woody stalks". The word means broken or powdered, and the product was also known as rorā. Excise recognised the difference in a duty differential: four rupees on chur against three on round ganja.[11] Prain, citing Kerr, repeated the name rorá in 1893 but recorded that it was very rarely used, and set aside a view then in circulation that chur was a substance closer to charas than to ganja, with the narcotic in a different chemical condition; his footnote attributes that view to George Watt's Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. The narcotic of charas and of ganja is the same thing, he wrote, and chur differs from ganja neither physically nor chemically: "Chúr is gánjá; all gánjá has to be broken, that is, becomes chúr, before it can be used."[2]: 10
Consumers were fixed to one grade.[original research?] Kerr found that in the flat-ganja districts of Bhagalpur and Monghyr smokers held round ganja too strong to use, while in Birbhum, which took the round sort, a wholesaler of 25 years' standing told him buyers thought flat ganja full of leaf and that it burned the eyes. Kerr dismissed these preferences as of no value, attributing them to habit and prejudice.[11]
Outside Bengal, ganja was also bought and sold under trade names. In the North-Western Provinces and Oudh the Bengal drug was known as baluchar and the ganja of Khandwa and the Gwalior State as pathar; in the retail trade there pathar sold at 1½ annas a tola and baluchar at 6 annas.[12]: 110 According to the Commissioner of Excise there, a little Nepal ganja also came in,[13] and the Commission put its price at up to 35 or 40 rupees a seer, against 20 to 30 for baluchar.[14]: 136 Samples of Sind ganja sent from Karachi for chemical analysis came in two kinds, labelled "first kind known as Panvel ganja" and "second kind or Sholapur ganja",[15] and a deputy collector in Sind said that the province's ganja was imported from Panvel, in the Thana district of the Bombay Presidency.[16]
Manufacture
Ganja comes from the pistillate plant, a point Kerr's report had to establish against the growers' own usage. The cultivators called the drug-bearing plants mardā, male, and held that the plants they called mādi should be searched out and destroyed before flowering or they would cause the crop to run to seed. Kerr referred the question to Dr King of the Imperial Botanical Gardens and to Mr Clarke, who reported from the cultivation around Naogaon that "the ganja plants are now in full flower, and in these cultivated fields I could find no male plants at all: every plant of some thousands must have been female".[11]
Male plants were pulled before they flowered, by specialists the cultivators called poddar or parakdar and, in English, ganja doctors. They walked the fields in November, broke the stems of the males and left the farmers to uproot them, repeating the round two or three times; a former ganja doctor interviewed by Rahman and colleagues said that males had round, sparse leaves and wide branch spacing, while pre-flowering females were taller and more branched and carried white hairs on the leaves.[6] Kerr gives the cultivators' field mark as "one or two rounded bristles, which in the male plant look much thicker than those in the female ones", a difference not visible on the khāsiā plants, which were never touched except by mistake and were left in the field to wither; he also lists the poddar's fee among the cultivation expenses advanced to a share-cropping tenant.[11] Kerr glossed the khāsiā as hermaphrodite "in the ordinary as opposed to the botanical sense of the word". Prain rejected the reading in 1893: the plants flower more copiously than any others in the field, he found, and are in reality females which, though to all appearance organically perfect, set no seed and deposit no resin, and which he called "barren females".[2]: 2
How completely the crop was kept unpollinated changed over the life of the system.[original research?] Kerr treated the destruction of the males as removing "the source of the pollen, which is absolutely necessary for impregnation", while noting that a few always escaped and that seeds were "by no means rare" in ganja.[11] The farmers who worked the last generation of the licensed system describe a deliberate limit: about 40 per cent of the seedlings were pulled, and enough male plants were left standing to produce seed for the following year's sowing, for the Ganja Society office and for food.[6]
Harvest ran through February and March. A powerful sun was treated as indispensable: cultivators would not cut on a cloudy day, and plants dried over a fire instead took on what Kerr called an unnatural darkish colour.[11] Manufacture happened in a fenced yard under supervision, with a single gate and straw screening the work from outside view, and finished ganja was graded before it left.[6]
The Bengal licensed system
Cultivation in Bengal was confined to a compact supervised zone in the north of the province, administered as the Ganja Mahal and centred on Naogaon, which the district gazetteer describes as the licensed source of ganja for the greater part of British India.[17] The commission's province-by-province survey nonetheless treated Bengal as one production system among several rather than the whole, alongside smaller industries in the Bombay Presidency, the Central Provinces, the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, Sind and Madras.[18] The crop moved from the tract through a licensed wholesale system into the wider Bengal trade,[19] and from 1917 the growers' cooperative known as the Ganja Society held the cultivation monopoly.[6] Before Act II (B.G.) of 1876 there was no legal bar on growing the plant; from the Act's first season cultivators had to hold a licence from their district collector. Kerr, searching for breaches, found a single unlicensed grower.[11]
The tract fell on the eastern side of the 1947 partition, and cultivation continued in what became Bangladesh until 1987, when it ceased on the country's commitment to international narcotics control.[20] Utathya Chattopadhyaya's Ganja Matters covers the commercial and imperial history of the tract at length.[21]
Consumption
The commission found ganja used principally for smoking, in a pipe, whereas bhang was drunk; in practice this separated the two.[22] Writing on cannabis in north Indian village society in the 1970s, Khwaja Hasan set the three preparations against one another as socially distinct and argued that their use carried religious sanction through an association with Shiva where alcohol was governed by caste prohibition.[23] The commission's chapter on social and religious customs records ganja smoked in Shiva's honour by ascetics and offered at temples and melas across Bengal and beyond.[24]
Ganja also had uses outside devotion. The missionary-scholar P. O. Bodding recorded gã̄jã as an ingredient in ten of the medical prescriptions he collected among the Santal people and as a substance demanded as an offering in the ojha's spirit-possession practice.[25]
Outside Bengal
According to a former ganja doctor interviewed by Rahman and colleagues, some Naogaon ganja doctors were hired to train growers in Nepal; the authors write that cultivation and production around Kathmandu and Butwal were greatly influenced by them.[6] In Natal, ganja smoking among Indian indentured labourers drew two official attempts at prohibition that came to nothing. A medical officer asked for a ban in 1884, and the Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885 to 1887 asked the Governor in Council to use his powers under section 70 of Law 2 of 1870 to bar the possession and use of the hemp plant by indentured labourers. Opinion was divided and no rule was issued in 1884, and none appears to have followed the 1887 request either, so Natal still had no law controlling cannabis at the time of Union, while the Cape Colony had prohibited it under Act 34 of 1891.[26]
Ganja is still made under the name outside South Asia. In the Phu Phan hills of northeastern Thailand, growers whose accessions were collected in 2025 dried and cured whole branches in semi-darkness in outdoor sheds before bagging. The name also travelled beyond South Asia. The presence of ganja in Jamaica is commonly attributed to the Indian indentured labourers brought in to work the sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery, some 33,000 of whom arrived between 1838 and 1917, and it reached Trinidad by the same route, sold there in licensed East Indian shops until its use was prohibited.[27]who? The South Asian grading travelled with the word. In Jamaica ganja remained the second of three grades, above bhang and below the most potent grade, for which Jamaicans used the term kali, a Hindi word for buds.[28]
See also
- Bhang
- Cannabis cultivation
- Cannabis in colonial India
- Charas
- Ganja Mahal
- Ganja Society
- Hashish
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
- Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganjá in Bengal (1877)
- Sinsemilla
- Cannabis in West Bengal
- Cannabis in South Africa
- Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India (1975)
- Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (1940)
- Cannabis in Nepal: An Overview (1975)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (new, greatly enlarged and improved ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. gañja, gañjā – via Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Prain, D. (1893). Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. V, "Methods of cultivation and matters connected therewith", paras. 151–154, pp. 59–60 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. II, "Important points connected with the natural history of the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa)", paras. 23–24, pp. 17–18 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. XIV, "The policy of hemp drug administration", paras. 564–567, pp. 272–273 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Rahman, A.M.D.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G.; Nemoto, K. (2023). "Traditional cultivation and the production system of cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 67 (4): 99–109. doi:10.11248/jsta.67.99.
- ↑ Karki, P.; Rangaswamy, M. (March 2023) [published online 15 August 2022]. "A review of historical context and current research on cannabis use in India". Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. 45 (2): 105–116. doi:10.1177/02537176221109272.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985(Act No. 61 of 1985), 1985, section 2(iii).India.
- ↑ Shiv Kumar Mishra v. State of Goa. Supreme Court of India (23 February 2009). Criminal Appeal No. 316 of 2009, arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 8552 of 2008.
- ↑ Government of West Bengal, Excise Department (29 July 2003). West Bengal Excise (Selection of New Sites and Grant of Licence for Retail Sale of Liquor and Certain Other Intoxicants) Rules, 2003 (PDF) (Report). Notification No. 800-EX, Kolkata Gazette, Extraordinary; rule 4.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 Kerr, Hem Chunder (1877). Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Gánjá in Bengal. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. doi:10.15026/10837 – via Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Library. Read in the reprint in East India (Consumption of Ganja) (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1893), pp. 94–154; paragraph numbers are Kerr's.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", paras. 289–291, pp. 109–111 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VI, "Preparation of the raw drugs from the cultivated and wild plant", para. 272, pp. 102–103 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VIII, "Extent of use and the manner and forms in which the hemp drugs are consumed", paras. 354–364, pp. 135–138 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Report by Mr. David Hooper, Government Quinologist, Madras, on the results of analysis of hemp drugs". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. p. 197 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Khan Bahadur Kadirdad Khan Gul Khan, C.I.E., Deputy Collector, Naushahro Sub-division". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Sind witness no. 4, p. 243 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ O'Malley, L.S.S. (1916). Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. ch. XII, pp. 134–144 – via archive.org.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Mills, James H. (2003). Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press – via archive.org.
- ↑ Rahman, A.M.; Nemoto, K.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G. (2022). "A history of cannabis (ganja) as an economic crop in Bangladesh from the late 18th century to 1989". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 66 (1): 21–32. doi:10.11248/jsta.66.21.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VIII, "Extent of use and the manner and forms in which the hemp drugs are consumed", paras. 415–429, pp. 154–158 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Hasan, Khwaja A. (1975). "Social aspects of the use of cannabis in India". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 235–246. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.235.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IX, "Social and religious customs", paras. 431–450, pp. 159–166 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Bodding, P.O. (1925). Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore. Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. 10. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Part 2 (1927), pp. 229, 231, 235–237, 241, 246, 264, 341 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Paterson, C. (2009). Prohibition and resistance: a socio-political exploration of the changing dynamics of the southern African cannabis trade, c. 1850 – the present (MA thesis). Rhodes University.
- ↑ Prince, Raymond; Greenfield, Rochelle; Marriott, John (1972). "Cannabis or alcohol? Observations on their use in Jamaica". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 1–9.
- ↑ Rubin, Vera; Comitas, Lambros (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. p. 18. doi:10.1515/9783110812077.