Talk:Mikir Hills

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Discussion for: Mikir Hills • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Mikir Hills is a Growing Area in the Shillong Plateau growing region. It treats cannabis in the hills of Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong districts, Assam: what the colonial excise record and the district gazetteers say of the hemp plant there, and its modern use by Karbi Anglong farmers. The districts as administrative units belong at Karbi Anglong District and West Karbi Anglong District.

Data verification

Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the area's extent, its status and the accessions and news items that belong to it here.

Discussion

Why the area is on the map

• J. J. S. Driberg, Commissioner of Excise for Assam, answering the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission's question 70 (Vol. IV, pp. 532–533), surveys the hill tracts bordering the Brahmaputra and Surma valleys, names the Mikir Hills among them, and concludes: "All these hill tracts are ganja-producing tracts". He names no village in the Mikir Hills and says nothing about them in particular beyond placing them east of the Jaintia Hills.
• Doley and others (2022), Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge 21(3), Table 4: pig farmers in the Lumbajong, Bokajan, Howraghat, Samelangso and Nilip blocks, surveyed from April 2016 to March 2020, chop raw and dried leaves of Cannabis sativa ("hemp/Bahang" in the column headed for common and Karbi names) into pig feed for inappetence. The paper does not say whether the plants are grown or gathered wild. Cannabis is not among the 21 wild plant species it lists as pig feed.
• B. C. Allen's Nowgong gazetteer (1905) says wild ganja grows very freely in the district and that its leaves are sometimes dried for a drink, without saying where in the district. Nowgong held only the western spurs of the Mikir Hills; Allen puts the greater part of them in Sibsagar district, whose gazetteer (1906) says only that wild ganja grows very freely in Assam.
• No source read reports cannabis cultivated or destroyed in Karbi Anglong or West Karbi Anglong since 2000. Searches of the English-language press found only seizures of ganja in transit and the burning of seized stock at Diphu.

How the border is drawn

• The border is a proxy: the present Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong districts, from their OpenStreetMap administrative relations, about 10,400 km² together. Together they cover the hill tract the colonial sources call the Mikir Hills; Dima Hasao (the North Cachar Hills) is left out, because no source read places cannabis there.
• The sources name the hills and the district blocks, not villages, so the districts are the unit.

Growing status

The status is Active: the 2016–2020 survey records farmers in five blocks of Karbi Anglong using hemp leaves from plants at hand. No source read says whether those plants are sown, and none says that the plant has gone from the hills.

Other sources read

• W. W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Assam, vol. I (1879), p. 191: in Nowgong district "Hemp and flax are not cultivated", in its list of fibre crops.
• Edward Stack and Charles Lyall, The Mikirs (1908): a search of the full text finds no mention of hemp, ganja or bhang; it does describe the Mikirs' use of opium.
• An ethnobotanical survey of three West Karbi Anglong villages (Das and others, 2023, Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge 22(3)) lists no cannabis.
• Not read: Kumar and others (2020), emergent Life Sciences Research 6(2): 60–66, on the ethno-veterinary knowledge of the Karbi; the full text could not be reached.