Talk:Cannabis in Bengali Religion
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Page scope
The page covers cannabis in the religious life of the Bengali-speaking delta, now divided between West Bengal and Bangladesh: Shaiva worship and its shrines and festivals, the Bijoya custom and the other goddess festivals, the Tantric texts cited for and against the drug, household and village rites, ascetics and sects, Muslim fakirs and pirs, the songs of ganja smokers, educated opinion, and practice since 1947. The deity Trinath, the Bauls, the Bengali fakirs, Tantric use across India and Shiva each have their own page, and this page gives a short summary of each. Festival use outside Bengal is covered on Holi, Maha Shivaratri and Cannabis in Hinduism.
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Discussion
Sources
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Most of the page rests on questions 32 and 33 as answered by the Bengal witnesses in volume IV and summarised in chapter IX of volume I (paras. 431–438). Witness numbers, names and page numbers are those printed in the volume. The evidence of Abhilas Chandra Mukerjee (witness no. 63) runs over pp. 157–175 and is cited once, with page locators: the bhang customs are on p. 165, the ganja customs on p. 166, the classes of bhang drinkers on p. 162 and the songs of the ganja smokers on pp. 174–175.
- Opinions of witnesses. The Commission's witnesses disagreed, and the page attributes each view to the witness who gave it: on whether the shastras required hemp (Nyayaratna for, Dass Gupta, Quazi and Rai Chaudhuri against), on whether Vaishnavas used it (Mukerjee and Rai Chaudhuri yes, Devendranath Roy no) and on whether any custom existed at all (Gossain Mohendra Gir no).
- James Wise (1883) and H. H. Risley (1891) wrote as colonial ethnographers; their characterisations of fakirs and Bauls are quoted and attributed to them. Wise's account of the Madari order is itself second-hand ("according to a great authority").
- June McDaniel translates Bengali words for cannabis as "hashish". The page keeps her word in quotation and paraphrase; the underlying Bengali (ganja, siddhi or bhang) is not given in the passages cited.
- Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Ganja Matters (2026) is the source for the 1856 Holms letter and its reception (pp. 128–130), for Tarakeswar and Vaidyanath as pilgrimage centres (pp. 47–48) and for Trinath congregations in Bangladesh today (p. 181).
Gaps
- The page cites no modern study of cannabis at Tarakeswar or in the Gajan festival. Ralph Nicholas, Rites of Spring: Gājan in Village Bengal (2008), and Hugh Urban's work on the Kartabhajas cover both festivals and sects.
- The "Since 1947" section cites no newspaper reporting on the Bijoya drink, Shivaratri at Tarakeswar and Kolkata, or Kali Puja at Tarapith today.