Spread of cannabis to South Asia
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The spread of cannabis to South Asia is the question of how the cannabis plant and the knowledge of growing and using it came to the Indian subcontinent and the Himalaya, and of how the plant and its names travelled on from there. Whether it arrived at all is argued. Colonial botanists of the 1890s held that it had been brought into India from Central Asia,[1] while a synthesis of fossil pollen published in 2019 found pollen of the genus in India by 32,600 years ago.[2] Hemp is among the crops that appear at sites in northern India and Pakistan from the early second millennium BC.[3]
In Sanskrit the plant is bhaṅgā. Two verses of the Atharvaveda use the masculine bhaṅga; whether they mean hemp is disputed.[4]: 60–61 The Indologist Dominik Wujastyk concluded that "reliable references to cannabis do not date from before about AD 1000".[5]: 55 In the 19th century charas, the resin, came over the Himalayan passes from Yarkand in Central Asia.[6] Several authors trace the plant's movement on from South Asia to East Africa and to Southeast Asia, where the common names for it come from the Sanskrit gañjā.[7]: 12[8]: 64
Native or brought in
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 put the question "whether the plant is indigenous to the British Indian possessions" to the botanists. George King, Director of the Botanical Survey of India, called the so-called wild growth of India "an escape from cultivation". The Commission concluded that "the evidence of botanists, therefore, may be taken to exclude India from the area of indigenous growth".[1] It quoted George Watt, for whom the relation of the plant's Asian names to the Sanskrit "would seem to fix the ancestral home of the plant somewhere in Central Asia".[1] David Prain placed the plant's native range in southern Siberia and judged it only "an escape from culture" throughout south-eastern Asia.[9]: 39 In his account it was "carried eastward to India by some wave of migration subsequent to the earliest" and, "having reached India as a fibre-yielding species", developed there the narcotic property for which it was known.[9]: 41
I. C. and R. N. Chopra wrote in 1957 that in India it grew wild "throughout the Himalayan foothills and the adjoining plains, from Kashmir in the west to Assam in the east".[10] The botanist Hui-Lin Li argued in 1975 that the plant's medicinal use was known to the Neolithic peoples of north-eastern Asia and that "the great mobility of the nomadic tribes north of China apparently assisted the movement of the plant to western Asia and from there to India".[11]: 57 Writing on Nepal in the same volume, James Fisher found that "no one knows how long it has grown there or from whence it came". He thought it more likely to have come through India than directly from China, either "millennia ago" or with migrations from India from the 12th century.[12]: 248–249
John McPartland, William Hegman and Tengwen Long placed the evolutionary origin of the genus on the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau. In their synthesis of fossil pollen, "Cannabis pollen in India appeared by 32.6 thousand years (ka) ago".[2] The pollen comes from a core at Baneta in the Narmada valley of Madhya Pradesh, which begins at 32,600 years before present.[2]: ESM 1 McPartland and Ernest Small proposed in 2020 that the plant entered the Himalaya through the eastern Himalaya, a floristic province marked by an influx of plants from China, "hence into peninsular India". They called this a relatively recent arrival.[13]: 103 Nikolai Vavilov had named an Indian centre of diversity for Cannabis indica in 1935, beside a Central Asian one.[13]: 103
A whole-genome study of 2021 by Guangpeng Ren and colleagues placed the first domestication of the plant in East Asia (Domestication). One of its four genetic groups held mostly feral drug-type plants from southern China and from India and Pakistan south of the Himalayas. The authors wrote that the first archaeobotanical record of C. sativa in the Indian subcontinent "dates back to ~3000 years B.P., the species likely being introduced from China together with other crops".[14]: 3
Archaeological finds
Cannabis is reported from Alamgirpur, near Meerut, in the Mature Harappan phase (2500–1900 BC) of the Indus civilisation, in a dataset of the published plant remains from Indus sites. The entry comes from the excavators' preliminary report of 2013; the kind of remains is not given.[15] McPartland and colleagues' table of archaeological finds lists a single seed from Kunal in Haryana (4600–3500 BP), a single seed from Hetapatti near Allahabad (4500–3500 BP), seeds from Senuwar in Bihar (about 3300–2600 BP) and a seed from Kagbeni in Mustang, Nepal (2400–1900 BP).[2]: ESM 1
Chris Stevens and colleagues set the Senuwar seeds, dated 1400–700 BC, among the crops of Chinese origin that appear at sites in northern India and Pakistan from the early second millennium BC, with peach, apricot and Chinese millets. Charcoal from the earlier levels at Senuwar could be identified only to the hemp or nettle families. They wrote that "the origin of hemp is uncertain": the early finds in China and Japan support an East Asian origin, while most botanists had pointed to eastern Central Asia.[3] Rita Dal Martello and colleagues grouped the Hetapatti seed, of about 2000 BC, with larger seeds that may come from fibre crops. They placed the small Senuwar seeds with the small-seeded plants they link to the drug type. Whether any Indian find is older than 2000 BC, they wrote, "remains to be resolved".[16]: 512
Names
The linguist Michael Witzel listed Vedic bhaṅgā among the words that, in his view, speakers of Indo-Iranian took from the language of the Bactria–Margiana culture of Central Asia. In the same entry he allowed a derivation from the Sanskrit root bhañj, "to break".[17]: 34 The feminine bhaṅgā "does not occur in Vedic texts". The grammarian Pāṇini names bhaṅgā as a field crop, which Louis Renou took to be hemp.[4]: 60–61 The older word śaṇa is the fibre plant Crotalaria juncea in the later Sanskrit lexicons.[4]: 62
Gañjā appears much later. The colonial civil servant George Abraham Grierson, who searched the Sanskrit and Hindi books open to him for the Hemp Drugs Commission, wrote that "the earliest mention of the word ganja which I have noted is dated about the year 1300 A.D.". He found it among the names of the plant in the Rājanighaṇṭu of Narahari Paṇḍita.[18]: 246–247
The Chopras found "a strong presumption" that the Arabic benj and the Persian beng came from the Sanskrit and concluded that knowledge of cannabis "must have originated first with the Hindus".[10] Prain had made the same argument in 1893. In his account the plant reached "Malaya" later, under the other Indian name, gánjá, which had not travelled west.[9]: 41–42
Sanskrit texts
The older books of the Atharvaveda were composed about 1200 BCE.[19] William Dwight Whitney's translation of 1905 renders its bhaṅga as "hemp" in two verses, XI.6.15 and VIII.8.3.[20]: 503, 642 Grierson, who dated the text "say, B.C. 1400", wrote that the plant "is there mentioned simply as a sacred grass".[18]: 246 The medieval commentators read both verses differently. G. Jan Meulenbeld concluded that people in India "were probably acquainted with hemp as a fibre-yielding crop from early times", while whether they knew of its medicinal action in Vedic times was "still a matter of dispute".[4]: 60–61
The medical compendia did not settle it. Grierson placed the first mention of bhaṅgā as a medicine in the Sushruta Samhita. Meulenbeld examined each passage cited for that claim and concluded that "the early medical saṃhitās do not mention Cannabis, in spite of assertions to the contrary".[4]: 61 He placed "the earliest incontestable reference to Cannabis as a medicinal substance" in the Cikitsāsārasaṅgraha of Vaṅgasena, written in the 11th or 12th century.[4]: 64 Grierson had found that the intoxicating nature of the plant "seems to have been known" in the 10th century and "was certainly known in the beginning of the fourteenth century".[18]: 246 Wujastyk, building on Meulenbeld, traced the "golden age" of cannabis in ancient India found in modern books to works that "all seem to quote each other".[5]: 55
European accounts, 1563–1681
The Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta, writing at Goa, described bangue in 1563 in his Colóquios. He reported that Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat told Martim Afonso de Sousa that whenever he wanted at night to go to Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Arabia or Persia he had only to take "a little Bangue".[21]
The English trader Thomas Bowrey, in India between 1669 and 1679, wrote at Masulipatam on the Coromandel Coast that bangha grew in many places on that coast and in Bengal. Gangah was brought from Sumatra and sold at five times the price of bangha.[22]: 77–78 He took the two for different plants. His editor, Richard Carnac Temple, identified them in 1905 as two preparations of one plant, bhang and ganja.[22]: 78 The account is in A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679.
Charas from Central Asia
In 1894 the Hemp Drugs Commission called charas "practically a foreign article" in India. "The bulk comes from Yarkand through the Himalayan passes", it wrote, with a much smaller amount from other parts of Central Asia by the routes on the Afghan frontier.[6] The British Joint Commissioner in Ladakh wrote in 1881 that the charas of the Ladakh road came from Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan and that the charas of Bukhara reached India through Kabul to Peshawar and through Kandahar to Shikarpur.[23] The United Nations Secretariat dated Xinjiang's ban on the export of charas to 1934 and judged in 1953 that "the great charas traffic is now extinct".[24]
Seed from Central Asia came later. McPartland and Small write that Central Asian landraces were brought into Nepal in the 1970s and that by 1980 Afghan landraces were grown in southern Kashmir for sieved hashish, with escapes growing near the fields.[13]: 84
From South Asia outward
Several accounts make South Asia a source of the plant elsewhere. The geographer Chris S. Duvall holds that cannabis reached East Africa from South Asia (Spread of cannabis to Africa).[7]: 12 McPartland and Small, citing Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin, write that "South Asian germplasm was carried to Southeast Asia and East Africa by the 13th century".[13]: 104 On Mauritius gandia was "daily imported and openly sold" in 1840, when an ordinance banned its import, sale and cultivation.[25] The anthropologist Jean Benoist found in 1975 that Mauritians used the word ganja and that the plant's social uses there belonged "exclusively to the Indian domain".[26]: 228
East of the Bay of Bengal the names point to India (Spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia). Marie Alexandrine Martin found that the common names in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam derive from the Sanskrit gañjā and that the inhabitants themselves held that "it would be the Indians who brought in the plant".[8]: 64 In the Dutch East Indies the pharmacologist W. G. Boorsma reported in 1918 that the plant was grown and used on the coasts of Sumatra and in Aceh "in hoofdzaak door vreemdelingen" (mainly by foreigners), among them Klings and Bengalis.[27]: 327, 331
Plants also travelled west and across the oceans in the 20th century. Ren and colleagues write that drug-type cannabis reached North America at the beginning of the 20th century and later, in the 1970s, "from the Indian subcontinent".[14]: 3 The crossing of the Atlantic belongs to Spread of cannabis to the Americas.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 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. 19–22, pp. 15–17 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 McPartland, J.M.; Hegman, W.; Long, T. (2019). "Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 28 (6): 691–702. doi:10.1007/s00334-019-00731-8.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Stevens, Chris J.; Murphy, Charlene; Roberts, Rebecca; Lucas, Leilani; Silva, Fabio; Fuller, Dorian Q. (2016). "Between China and South Asia: a Middle Asian corridor of crop dispersal and agricultural innovation in the Bronze Age". The Holocene. 26 (10): 1541–1555. doi:10.1177/0959683616650268. PMC 5125436.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Meulenbeld, G.J. (1989). "The search for clues to the chronology of Sanskrit medical texts, as illustrated by the history of bhaṅgā (Cannabis sativa Linn.)". Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik. 15. Reinbek: Dr. Inge Wezler, Verlag für Orientalistische Fachpublikationen: 59–70. ISSN 0341-4191.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Wujastyk, Dominik (2002). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Herbal Medicine". In Salema, A. (ed.). Ayurveda at the Crossroads of Care and Cure. Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar. pp. 45–73. ISBN 972-98672-5-9.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 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.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Duvall, Chris S. (2019). The African Roots of Marijuana. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478004530. ISBN 978-1-4780-0394-6.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Martin, Marie Alexandrine (1975). "Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 63–76. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.63.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Prain, D. (1893). Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chopra, I. C.; Chopra, R. N. (1957). "The use of the cannabis drugs in India". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 4–29.
- ↑ Li, Hui-Lin (1975). "The origin and use of cannabis in eastern Asia: their linguistic-cultural implications". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 51–62. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.51.
- ↑ Fisher, James F. (1975). "Cannabis in Nepal: an overview". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 247–256. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.247.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144: 81–112. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Ren, G.; Zhang, X.; Li, Y.; Ridout, K.; Serrano-Serrano, M.L.; Yang, Y.; Liu, A.; Ravikanth, G.; Nawaz, M.A.; Mumtaz, A.S.; Salamin, N.; Fumagalli, L. (2021). "Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa". Science Advances. 7 (29) eabg2286. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg2286.
- ↑ Bates, J. (2019). "The Published Archaeobotanical Data from the Indus Civilisation, South Asia, c.3200–1500BC". Journal of Open Archaeology Data. 7 5. doi:10.5334/joad.57.
- ↑ Dal Martello, Rita; Min, Rui; Stevens, Chris J.; Qin, Ling; Fuller, Dorian Q. (2024). "Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 33 (4): 503–518. doi:10.1007/s00334-023-00966-6.
- ↑ Witzel, Michael (2003). Mair, Victor H. (ed.). "Linguistic evidence for cultural exchange in prehistoric western Central Asia" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers (129). Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Grierson, George Abraham (1894). "Note on references to the hemp plant occurring in Sanskrit and Hindi literature". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 246–249.
- ↑ Witzel, Michael (1997). "The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools: The Social and Political Milieu". In Witzel, Michael (ed.). Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts (PDF). Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora 2. pp. 280–281.
- ↑ Whitney, William Dwight (1905). Lanman, Charles Rockwell (ed.). Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā. Harvard Oriental Series. Vol. 8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
- ↑ Orta, Garcia da (1913) [1563]. Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India. Translated by Markham, Clements. New edition (Lisbon, 1895) edited and annotated by the Conde de Ficalho. London: Henry Sotheran and Co. pp. 53–56.
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 Bowrey, Thomas (1905). Temple, Richard Carnac (ed.). A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series. Vol. 12. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society – 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. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", paras. 293–295, pp. 111–112 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ United Nations Secretariat (1953). "The surprising extinction of the charas traffic". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 1–7.
- ↑ "Ordinance No. 2 of 1840". A Collection of the Laws of Mauritius and Its Dependencies. Vol. 4. 1867. p. 541 – via Google Books.
- ↑ Benoist, Jean (1975). "Réunion: cannabis in a pluricultural and polyethnic society". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 227–234. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.227.
- ↑ Boorsma, W.G. (1918). "Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië". Teysmannia (in Nederlands) (VI): 324–334.