Talk:Charas

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Page scope

The page covers the whole range of the word: resin rubbed by hand from the flowering tops in the Himalayas, resin beaten or sieved from dried plants in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran (where the word is chars or charas), the colonial trade and excise, consumption and present-day production. Moroccan chira is a separate term and is not treated as charas. Hashish, the Arabic-named resin of West Asia, North Africa and the modern market, is its own page. The manufacturing techniques have their own pages, Hand-rubbing and Dry sift, summarised here under {{Main}}.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

The colonial spine is the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report, vol. I, read in the 2010 Hardinge Simpole/National Library of Scotland reprint (the same edition as archive.org b32222920_0001). Where the text layer was garbled the page images were read on the Wellcome Collection's IIIF copy (the scan behind the archive.org item): pp. 93, 95, 98, 291, 299 and 300. The page image gives chahar mulhi and the Yarkand grades mushak, bahara, pai and kuppi.
The 1917 Kangra District gazetteer (pp. 173–174: the Kullu bonded warehouse, the six Hoshiarpur licensees, the duty of Rs. 14 a seer) is cited from a reading made on 31 August 2026. It has not since been re-checked against the page scan.
Prasenjeet Tribhuvan's 2018 article gives no dates for its fieldwork ("about fourteen months"), so the page gives the year of publication only.
The 20th-century trade rests on two articles in the UN Bulletin on Narcotics, both read in full on unodc.org: "The surprising extinction of the charas traffic" (1953), which prints no author and is attributed to the United Nations Secretariat by the Bulletin's own bibliography of 1954; and I. C. and R. N. Chopra, "The use of the cannabis drugs in India" (1957). Most of the 1953 article quotes the Government of India's annual reports to the United Nations; the page reports those quotations as the reports' words.
Hermann Kreutzmann's chapter of 2026 is in a volume of workshop papers published by the Fachinformationsdienst Asien (CrossAsia). Its peer-review status is not stated. It is used only for the Kashgar measures of 1936, which it takes from India Office records, and is attributed by name.
The statute texts were read on the issuing bodies' sites: the Dangerous Drugs Act 1930 and the NDPS Act 1985 on India Code (which has moved to indiacode.gov.in), the Single Convention on the UNODC site and in the UN Treaty Series, Pakistan's Control of Narcotic Substances Act 1997 on Pakistan Code. Nepal's Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act 2033 (1976) was read only in the Nepali text published by the Law Commission, re-hosted by Kathmandu Metropolitan City; its text layer is garbled, so sections 3(kha), 3(jha) and the proviso to section 4 were read on the page images. The English on the page is a paraphrase of that reading, not a quotation of an official translation, which could not be reached.
The Afghan cannabis surveys are cited from the 2009 report (April 2010). The 2010 and 2012 reports say the same about garda and the local name. The 2011 report could not be found on unodc.org.

Where the sources disagree

Himalayan and Central Asian charas. Prain (1893, p. 8) says habitual users "much prefer the Nepal and Garhwal article" and that it commanded a better price. The Excise Commissioner of the North-Western Provinces (IHDC vol. I, para. 294) says the people of Kumaon preferred Yarkand charas and could see no advantage in it but cheapness. The Nepal Darbar's answers (para. 272) say Yarkand charas was preferred in Nepal. Both views are on the page, attributed.
How the Central Asian trade ended. Three accounts, all on the page and attributed, none adjudicated:
- The 1953 Secretariat article infers ("It is evident") that the provincial government of Sinkiang prohibited the export of charas in 1934 on Chinese government instructions, records a Chinese announcement of 1936, has India reporting in 1938 that the large-scale trade had ceased and puts the last licit consumption in India in 1945 (49 kg).
- Kreutzmann (2026, pp. 80, 82) dates the decisive step to 1936: the Xinjiang export duty rose from Rs. 20 to Rs. 200 a pony load. In January 1936 the head of the Kashgar administration proclaimed the sale and export of opium, charas and wine prohibited.
- The Chopras (1957, pp. 6, 16–17) say the import was "entirely stopped by the Government of India" in about 1934–35 and that use had been prohibited since 1935. The same article's editor points readers to the 1953 article.
- A 1976 Bulletin review (Smart) restates the 1953 article with drift, dating the Sinkiang ban to 1936 and citing the article as pp. 1–14 (it runs pp. 1–7). It is not used.
The 1928 duty cut. The Government of India's report for 1928, as quoted in 1953, cut the duty "from Rs. 60 to Rs. 20 per seer". Kreutzmann gives the same figures per maund. The page follows the report. Rs. 14 a seer in 1916–17 (Kangra gazetteer) makes the per-seer reading the consistent one.
Religion. The Commission concluded in 1894 (para. 450) that charas "has not been shown to be in any way connected with religious observance". Khwaja Hasan (1975, p. 239) associates ganja, bhang and charas with "religio-social ceremonies among the Hindus". Both are on the page, attributed.
The word. Prain, citing Dymock's Pharmacographia Indica, gives a Sanskrit "skin" and a Persian "skin tied up at the corners" as a bag. Touw (1981) gives a Persian "leather bag for pressing hemp dust". Chouvy (2019) calls the word a metonym from leather pouches and says it first referred to sieved hashish, but his footnote rests on a seed company's blog post and Bouquet (1950). Bradford and Mansfield (2019) repeat the leather-pouch derivation without a source. Guba (2021) glosses "churrus" as "sanskrit", without a source; it is not used.
Narrow and broad senses. The UNODC's 2006 review glosses charas as "hand-rubbed cannabis resin". Balant et al. (2025) keep "charas" for "hand-rubbed resin from living cannabis plants" against "sieved hashish". The Afghan cannabis surveys, Bradford and Mansfield and Chouvy use chars/charas for Afghan sieved resin; McPartland and Small (2020) write "sieved hashīsh (nasha, charas)" for the Central Asian domesticate; the Commission used "charas" for both. The page states both usages, attributed. It follows the broad usage of the sources it cites. Bouquet (1950) goes further and treats charas, chira and hashish as one substance; that equation is not used, since this page treats chira as a separate term (see Scope).
Kashmir. Chouvy (2019) says hand-rubbing is not practised in Kashmir, where resin is sieved, without a source; McPartland and Small (2020, p. 85, after Clarke 1998) say Afghan landraces were brought into southern Kashmir by 1980 and grown for sieved hashish. Both are on the page, attributed.
Garda. The Commission took the Punjab word to mean dust; Chouvy derives the Afghan word from gard, dust in Dari and Pashto. The Government of India's reports of 1935–45 speak of "garda charas" smuggled from Gardez in Afghanistan. No source read connects the name with the town, so the page does not.
Always imported? The Chopras (1957, p. 7) call charas "always an imported commodity" while the same article describes clandestine preparation in hill areas of India and Nepal. The page does not use the "always imported" phrase.

Not used

Garcia da Orta, 1563. The live Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) says the Eighth Colloquy distinguishes charas among other preparations. In the 1913 Markham translation the word occurs only in the editor's footnote to the colloquy's first line (p. 53), not in Orta's dialogue, so this page makes no 1563 claim. The statement on that page is still to be corrected.
Alakbarov 2001 (medieval Azerbaijani manuscripts). Its description of charas repeats Prain's 1893 wording almost word for word without citing him, so it is not evidence of earlier usage.
Wikipedia's definition, that charas is made from a live plant and hashish from a dead one, is not supported by the sources. The Commission's Yarkand charas was beaten from dried plants.
Hamayun and Shinwari 2004 (charas at Tirah, Journal of Industrial Hemp) and Chauhan et al. 2024 (cannabinoids in 58 hand-rubbed samples from the north-western Himalayas, Journal of Forensic Sciences) are closed or blocked and were not read. Clarke 2007 (Darchula, Nepal) was verified in Crossref but not read.
Second-hand colonial quotations in modern works are not cited through those works: Traill 1828 ("chirras" among hill exports) via Joshi 2017, Caine 1890 ("churras" shops) via Mills 2018, Royle 1855 via Kloepfer et al. 2025. They are leads for tracing to the originals.
Weakly sourced claims: Chouvy's figure of about 5 grams of the best hand-rubbed charas a day (a magazine article), Chouvy 2022's statement that most of the world's hashish came from Xinjiang between 1860 and 1934 (no source), Axelby's report of a Cannabis Cup placing for Malana Cream in 1995 (a forum post and a seed company's page) and the UNODC 2006 review's unsourced sentence on the "hashish trail".
Kaplanian, L'économie du Ladakh 1847–1980 (HAL preprint, not peer-reviewed): its figures for the Yarkand charas trade (150 t in 1880, under 40 t in 1900; import taxes of 100 and then 200 per cent from 1893) are credited to Janet Rizvi's Trans-Himalayan Caravans, which was not read.
Bouquet 1950–51 (UN Bulletin): the Chinese Turkestan grades Rup, Tahgalim and Ganja and the collectors in leather clothing are unlocated in his text and unrepeated elsewhere. The report also equates charas with chira.
Pakistan's provincial acts (Sindh 2024, Balochistan 2026) define the resin as "the concentrated resin from the flowering tops of female hemp plants ... also known as charas, hashish". They were read but left out to keep the statutory section to the national definitions; they can be added.

Open items

The dictionary evidence for the word (Platts, Steingass, Hobson-Jobson, Watt) is still to be added to the Name section.
The Kangra District gazetteer, pp. 173–174, to be re-read against the page scan.
Nepal's Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act 2033: the official English translation, when the Law Commission's site is reachable, to check the paraphrase of sections 3 and 4.
Sources not yet read: Hamayun and Shinwari 2004 (Afridi Tirah), Chauhan et al. 2024 (cannabinoids in hand-rubbed samples from the north-western Himalayas), Clarke 2007 (Darchula), Rizvi's Trans-Himalayan Caravans, Matthee 2005 (Iran).

Images reserved in the article

Three images have places in the article but are not yet uploaded. Their file links are kept hidden in the page source and can be restored once the files exist:

File:Charas-rubbing-flowering-tops.jpg (Rubbing by hand): a photograph of a person rubbing the flowering top of a standing or freshly cut cannabis plant between the palms, in a Himalayan field. The caption names a place and year only where the photograph's source gives them.
File:Charas-trade-routes-1890s.jpg (The trade from Central Asia), a map to be drawn: a sketch map of the routes by which charas reached British India in the 1890s, as the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission's report describes them. Lines run from Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan in Eastern Turkestan through the Himalayan passes to Leh; from Leh to the Punjab by way of Kashmir and directly through Kullu to Hoshiarpur; from Bokhara through Kabul to Peshawar and through Kandahar to Shikarpur in Sind. Amritsar is marked as the chief depot. Only these places are labelled.
File:Charas-smoking-amritsar-c1870.jpg (Consumption): a gouache by an unknown Amritsar artist of about 1870, catalogued by the British Library as a depiction of charas smoking (Images Online, asset 159822). It is in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons holds it as "Gouache by an Amritsar artist depicting the smoking of Charras, a type of Indian hemp imported into northern India from Eastern Turkestan, circa 1870.jpg".