Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India (1975)
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| Author | Khwaja A. Hasan |
|---|---|
| Volume editor | Vera Rubin |
| Publisher | Mouton |
| Place | The Hague |
| Published | 1975 |
| Pages | 235–246 |
| Language | English |
| Regions documented | North India (fieldwork in a village near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh) |
|---|---|
| Preparations | Ganja and charas smoked with tobacco in a clay pipe (chilam); bhang eaten as balls or drunk as the thandai beverage |
| Uses documented | Recreational, religious, social |
| DOI | 10.1515/9783110812060.235 |
|---|
"Social Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in India" is a chapter by Khwaja A. Hasan, an Indian medical anthropologist, published in Vera Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (Mouton, The Hague, 1975, pp. 235–246).[1] Drawing on fieldwork in a village near Lucknow, it describes the place of cannabis in the social and religious life of Hindu village society in north India, and contrasts the social acceptance of hemp drugs with the disapproval of alcohol.
Hasan distinguishes the three Indian preparations of cannabis (ganja from the flowering tops, bhang from the leaves and charas from the resin) and argues that their use carried religious sanction through an association with the god Shiva, whereas the use of alcohol was governed by caste prohibition. He documents how the preparations were made and consumed, the part played by the bhagat or devotee, and concludes from his village survey that regular use and dependence were rare.[1]
Author
Khwaja A. Hasan was an Indian medical anthropologist whose fieldwork centred on villages of north India. His monograph The Cultural Frontier of Health in Village India: Case Study of a North Indian Village (Manaktalas, 1967) and a related study of Hindu dietary practice examined health, ritual and caste in the same region from which the present chapter draws its data.[2]
Ethnohistorical background
Hasan opens with a sketch of intoxicants in Indian history. He recalls the Vedic soma and its substitutes, and notes that the Dharmasutras condemned the drinking of sura (liquor) by a Brahman while saying little of hemp, so that liquor came to be associated with the lower castes. He traces the fluctuating fortunes of intoxicants through the Buddhist prohibition, the revival of Brahmanism and the medieval period, when some rulers drank and others, such as Aurangzeb, abstained.[1]
He then turns to the colonial and modern regulation of cannabis. The British, he writes, introduced excise taxation rather than prohibition, licensing manufacture and sale and restricting consumption by raising duties; the Royal Commission on opium of 1893 and, shortly after, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission gathered a mass of evidence on the prevalence and effects of both drugs. After independence, the Gandhian movement pressed for prohibition, and several states declared "wet" and "dry" districts or days, which Hasan says encouraged illicit distillation, poisoning from denatured spirit and the smuggling of ganja from Nepal.[1]
Cannabis, alcohol and caste
The chapter's central argument is that the use or avoidance of an intoxicant expressed caste values. Alcohol, Hasan writes, was absolutely prohibited to the Brahman, the highest varna, a prohibition he traces to the Vedic period, whereas among the Shudra and the communities he calls "untouchable" (now Dalit) it was used freely. Hemp drugs, by contrast, carried social sanction across the ranks because of their religious associations.[1]
He supports the point with a survey of a village he calls Chinaura, near Lucknow, carried out in 1959–1960. Of 62 Hindu respondents, 45 (75 per cent) had no objection to wine or country liquor, but 54 (87 per cent) had no objection to one or more of the hemp drugs, a difference Hasan attributes to the religious and cultural sanctioning of hemp. The key figure is the bhagat or devotee: a man initiated under a religious preceptor pledged to give up liquor, meat, onion, garlic and sexual activity, but not hemp, so that devotees and holy men were free to use ganja, bhang and charas while abstaining from alcohol. Hasan records that many lower-caste men over the age of about 40 became bhagats, and gives the case of a man of a sweeper caste who left a salaried railway job to become a devotee and gained standing thereby, higher-caste men joining his smoking circle in a way that ordinary caste rules would have forbidden.[1]
The religious sanction rested on the god Shiva, also called Shankar, who was believed fond of hemp drugs; they were offered to him on the festival of Shivaratri as "food of the god". Hasan notes the scholarly debate over whether the Vedic soma was itself cannabis, citing the identification of soma as the plant against R. Gordon Wasson's argument that it was instead the fly-agaric mushroom.[1]
Preparation and consumption
Hasan describes the preparations in detail. Bhang, made from the leaves, was eaten as small balls with sweets or drunk as thandai, a "cold drink" of almonds, pistachios, rose petals, pepper, aniseed and cloves ground on a stone plate, dissolved in milk with the bhang added and sweetened with sugar or jaggery; in the cities it was sometimes stirred into kulfi ice cream. He notes the drink's nutritional value in a protein-poor diet and the sociability of its hour-long preparation, in which family, caste or neighbourhood friends gathered, although the Shudra and "untouchable" castes held their own gatherings apart from the twice-born.[1]
Ganja and charas were mixed with tobacco and smoked in a funnel-shaped clay pipe, the chilam. Hasan sets out the etiquette of the smoking circle: four or five men sat together, a charred clay filter and a burnt ring of rope fibre were placed in the bowl, and the pipe was passed from hand to hand, held so that the lips never touched the clay and its ritual purity was preserved, which allowed men of different castes to share a single pipe. The first smoker offered the smoke to Shiva with a spoken invocation. Such gatherings, held on a raised platform outside a house, were an occasion to talk over crops, prices and marriages, and Hasan likens them to the "coffee breaks" of American life.[1]
Effects and dependence
On effects, Hasan is cautious. He notes that the physiological action of thandai and eaten bhang was unstudied, and that smoking ganja in its social setting involved only a single deep inhalation. He is sceptical of the criminological literature, in particular the claim by the Chopra brothers that even a single dose of ganja or charas could be responsible for a serious crime, asking how many users did not offend and how many offenders had never used the drug. He finds no evidence of physical dependence: use was mostly tied to festivals and ceremonial occasions, there was little desire to increase the dose, and in Chinaura, with a population of about 1,190, he counted no more than four regular users.[1]
Significance
Hasan's chapter is an early sociological account of cannabis in Indian village society and one of the sources bearing on Cannabis in India and, at the regional level, Cannabis in West Bengal. Its lasting contributions are the clear statement of the three-form ganja/bhang/charas taxonomy, the argument that hemp's social acceptance rested on the Shiva association while alcohol was governed by caste, and the empirical finding, unusual for its time, that regular use and dependence were rare in the village studied. The chapter belongs to the same "ganja complex" that Vera Rubin drew from the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in framing the volume.[1]
As with other chapters of the volume, its caste vocabulary ("twice-born", "untouchable", "lower castes") is that of its period; in this article those categories are given in current terms, with Hasan's own wording retained only where his argument turns on it.[1]
See also
References
External links
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 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.
- ↑ Hasan, Khwaja A. (1967). The Cultural Frontier of Health in Village India: Case Study of a North Indian Village. Bombay: Manaktalas – via U.S. National Library of Medicine.