Talk:Upper Doab

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Discussion for: Upper Doab • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Upper Doab treats the historical cannabis growing area at the head of the Ganges–Yamuna Doab: the wild hemp of Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar, gathered for bhang and sold through the drug contractors in the 1880s and 1890s. The strip along the foot of the hills, with Saharanpur town, is the Western Terai; the districts east of the Ganges are Rohilkhand. The districts as administrative units are treated at Saharanpur District, Shamli District and Muzaffarnagar District.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the area is mapped

• The excise inquiry of 1883. Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar are among the fourteen districts where the hemp plant "grows wild, and is made into bhang" (Hemp Drugs Commission report, vol. I, para. 41).
• Stoker's memorandum for the Commission. Saharanpur is among the districts of profuse wild growth; Muzaffarnagar "perhaps may be added" (vol. III, para. 8, p. 25). Saharanpur is a chief bhang-exporting district with its own wholesale contract (para. 20, p. 28).
• The witnesses of 1893–94. D. F. Addis, Collector of Muzaffarnagar (witness 4); Ghasi Ram of Maulaheri, Muzaffarnagar (187); Nihal Chand, honorary magistrate of Saharanpur (178); Charanji Lal, drug contractor (258), who puts Saharanpur's bhang at 4,500 maunds a year.
• No source read for this page records hemp cultivated in these districts: the witnesses who answer the question all say there was none. The area is the plain that the 1883 inquiry and the witnesses name, below the Terai.

Growing status

The status is Historical: the evidence runs from 1883 to 1894, and no later source read for this page says either way whether hemp grows or is gathered here now. No field crop, eradication or bhang harvest since 2000 was found in these districts; the searches reached few Hindi newspapers.

Years grown

The infobox gives 1883 to 1894: the excise inquiry of 1883, which lists Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar, and the Commission's report of 1894, which finds the produce of Muzaffarnagar considerable (vol. I, para. 41). Both are years of record, not of a start or an end.

Why an area and not a region

The area is small once the Terai strip is taken out, and no smaller tract inside it has evidence of its own. It has no parent growing region: Rohilkhand lies east of the Ganges, and the Western Terai is a strip along the hills.

How the border is drawn

• The border is the union of three districts in OpenStreetMap, Saharanpur (administrative relation 1958012), Shamli (9539710) and Muzaffarnagar (1958011), less the ground already inside the Western Terai border, simplified: about 6,100 km². Shamli was a tahsil of Muzaffarnagar District before it became a district.
• About 1,100 km² of Saharanpur District, nearly a third of it, lies in the Western Terai and is left to it, with Saharanpur town. The Shivalik hills in the north of the district, above the Terai strip (about 540 km²), are not drawn: the area is the plain.
• Meerut is left out. An excise officer at Sardhana (witness 62) saw wild hemp in great quantity on the banks of the Ganges and Jumna canals and the Ganda nala in Meerut district, and Stoker calls Meerut's produce considerable. Against that, the Collector of Meerut (witness 16) knew of no cultivation, and a retired deputy collector of Meerut city (witness 55) found the plant "abundant in none" of Meerut, Aligarh and Jalaun. Meerut also lies south of the Commission's line, in the belt where it did not think the growth deserved to be called wild (vol. I, para. 42). It can be added if a later source shows more.
• In the general sense the upper Doab reaches further south, through Meerut and Bulandshahr. The area is drawn only on the districts the sources name, and the name should not be read as claiming the rest.
• The map point (29.57, 77.54) is a central point of the border; the border is not drawn from it.

Accessions

Saharanpur Botanical Garden 31 (1889), a herbarium sheet labelled as coming from Saharanpur district, has no collection point, so it is not placed on the map. It carries no growing area, because its label calls the plant a medicinal and fibre plant and does not record where or how it grew.

Sources

• Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Vol. I paras. 41–42, vol. III pp. 25 and 28, and the vol. V witnesses cited, all read on the page images. Charanji Lal's evidence is headed "Jagadhri, Saharanpur"; Jagadhri was in Umballa district.
• District administrations. The "About District" pages of Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur and Shamli, read on 20 October 2026. Shamli's page says it was a tahsil of Muzaffarnagar but gives no year for the new district.
• Nihal Chand, the honorary magistrate of Saharanpur, should not be taken for the Commission's member Lala Nihal Chand of Muzaffarnagar without a source that says they are one man.