Decriminalising Cannabis: Is it Time to Weed out Taboos and Embrace the Plant as India’s Cultural Gift to the World?

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This year marked the 50th anniversary of the Hindi film Aap Ki Kasam, J. Om Prakash’s directorial debut starring Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, and Sanjeev Kumar in an unconventional romantic drama. The film was a major success, aided no doubt by its memorable soundtrack, which featured songs by the iconic composer R.D. Burman and lyrics by the legendary Anand Bakshi.

Aap Ki Kasam’s biggest hit—and one of the most popular songs of its time—was “Jai Jai Shiv Shankar”, an upbeat, frolicsome romantic track sung by Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar, which blended romantic love and spiritual devotion in a mesmerising mix.

About halfway through the film, Kamal (Khanna) and Sunita (Mumtaz) visit a temple, where Kamal prays for the birth of a baby girl. As they exit, a man wearing a saffron robe and a japamala (prayer beads) greets them with “Jai Shiv Shankar”. With a cackle, he informs the couple that it is Sivaratri, the festival dedicated to Lord Siva, and offers them each a cup of a drink that he only calls “Shivji ka prasad”, an offering to be drunk in Lord Siva’s name.

Kamal and Sunita down their cups, and as they leave the temple, they find themselves laughing and cackling like the man with the japamala. But nothing is funny: the couple are clearly intoxicated by the prasad. A troupe of background dancers runs across the hillside, and soon Kamal and Sunita join them to break into song, which goes: “Jai Jai Shiv Shankar / Kaanta lage na kankar / Ki pyaala tere naam ka piya [Victory to Siva / Let neither thorn nor rock befall us / For I drink this goblet in your name].”

In the name of love? Or in the name of god? Either way, it does not take much imagination to guess that the goblet was most likely filled with bhang. Bhang is a paste obtained from grinding the leaves and stems of cannabis, an indigenous plant that grows abundantly across the Indian land mass. In many places, bhang is usually enjoyed after dissolving it in a refreshing beverage, like lassi or thandai, or it is added to sweets such as laddu and halwa.

Cannabis: Cultivation, consumption, and culture

In 2020, former Narcotics Commissioner Romesh Bhattacharjee estimated that cannabis, also known as hemp, is cultivated in nearly 60 per cent of the country’s districts. Despite its ready availability, however, many parts of the plant remain illegal for consumption, trade, and cultivation, including the “fruiting tops” that are consumed (often by smoking) in the forms of ganja (marijuana or weed) or charas (hashish).

It would be a little over a decade after Aap Ki Kasam that the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act would formally recognise cannabis (among other narcotics such as heroin, cocaine, and LSD) and brand it as illicit. But bhang, which includes the plant’s “legal” components, falls outside the purview of the Act, and States have since been allowed to make their own rulings on it under national guidance.

Cannabis is the second most consumed “controlled” substance in the country, after alcohol. A 2019 survey published by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment concluded that about 2.8 per cent of all citizens reported having used cannabis in the previous 12 months, the majority of whom had consumed it in the form of bhang.

Cannabis is rich in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the plant’s principal psychoactive compound. In its chemical structure, THC is similar to anandamide (ANA), a fatty acid neurotransmitter found in the human brain, which is part of our endocannabinoid system.

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Named after the Sanskrit word ananda, meaning joy or bliss, anandamide regulates many physiological and cognitive processes in the body, including appetite, mood, pain sensation, and memory. It also provides us with the “high” of good feeling: the ecstasy of a long run, the bliss of sex.

Bhang: A serving of spiritual bliss

A little serving of bhang, then, can provide a shortcut to that bliss, as the THC binds with our system in the guise of ANA. For a more accurate representation, a little more time should have passed after Kamal and Sunita’s first sip of the prasad—half an hour or an hour—before their perception of the world shifted markedly. Their senses would be heightened, dilated. They would see a full palette of the greens on the hillside, lose themselves in the tiniest iterations of passing time between seconds, and hear each declaration of “Shiv Shankar” echo in the chambers of their mind.

Bhang holds special significance with the mythology of Siva, the Supreme Lord of the Hindu trinity, who is the protector and transformer. In the grand story of “samudra manthan” (churning of the cosmic ocean), the warring devas and asuras discover “amrita”, a mythological elixir of immortality. But this discovery also leads to the emission of “halahala”, a lethal poison. Siva heroically swallows the “halahala” to save the gods, but the poison is so potent that it turns his neck blue, thus earning him the moniker Neelkantha, or the blue-throated one. Legend has it that to cool his throat burning with the venom, Siva turned to bhang for some respite. He has since been associated with the blissful and sometimes meditative “highs” of the substance.

In another legend, while wandering in a field alone, Siva falls asleep under the hot sun and awakes under a cannabis plant. He consumes some cannabis and finds an instant shortcut to bliss. Thousands of years after this tale, Saivites, and many others, still evoke the Supreme Lord before inhaling a puff of cannabis from their chillum (pipe), saying: “Bam Bhole!” or “Har Har Mahadev!”

In his “Note on the Religion of Hemp”, as part of the report of the 1893-94 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, James M. Campbell, Collector of Land Revenue and Customs and Opium, Bombay, wrote: “The Hindu poet of Shiva; the Great Spirit that living in bhang passes into the drinker, sings of bhang as the clearer of ignorance, the giver of knowledge. No gem or jewel can touch in value bhang taken truly and reverently. He who drinks bhang drinks Shiva…. The mere sight of bhang cleanses from as much sin as a thousand horse-sacrifice or a thousand pilgrimages.”

Holi revelry

The linkage with bhang extends far beyond Siva and Sivaratri. On Holi, along with the usual celebration of spring, colours, worship, family, song, and dance, it is common for a bhang-laced preparation to be consumed by Holi revellers across social strata: rich and poor, men and women, young and old.

In some temples dedicated to Siva and Vishnu (and their avatars), devotees are known to present bhang as an offering. Siva bhakts in Ramdevra in Rajasthan assemble every year to take part in a bhang-drinking competition. During the Sikh festival of Hola Mohalla, some members of the warrior Nihang sect consume a bhang-inspired tipple called Shaheedi Degh, which is a traditional drink made of almonds, black pepper, sugar, water, rose petals, cardamoms, and cannabis.

In the unique Holi festivities in Barsana in Uttar Pradesh, devotees don the guises of Krishna and Radha for a celebration of colours, dancing, and bhang.

The consumption of bhang, ganja, and charas is inexorably linked to the Kumbh Mela too. The Kumbh is held every 12 years, rotating between four pilgrimage cities, and last attracted over 90 lakh visitors to Haridwar in 2021. Among the many devotees of Siva, Vishnu, and other deities, cannabis use is common at this grand festival.

Spirituality and romance

In Aap Ki Kasam, the playful romance between Kamal and Sunita is not quite unlike the innocent frolicking often associated with representations of Radha and Krishna. As the song progresses, the characters express appropriate responses to the bhang experience. “Kandhe pe sar rakh ke tum mujhko sone do,” sings Sunita, to which Kamal responds, “Masti mein joh chahe ho jaaye hone do.” She says she wants to go to sleep, and he replies that they should do whatever they wish in the enjoyable flow of the moment. They are stoned—that popular expression for a feeling of being a little disconnected from reality, a little lost in sensory bliss.

“Jai Jai Shiv Shankar” continues to enjoy unabated popularity decades after its release as a song that finds itself in the comfortable confluence of both spirituality and romance. In 2019, the song was remixed and updated for a new generation for the film War. Sung by Vishal Dadlani and Benny Dayal, the remix was repackaged as a Holi song, featuring the actors Tiger Shroff and Hrithik Roshan in the throes of a highly acrobatic dance-off.

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This time, “Jai Jai Shiv Shankar” was followed by “Aaj mood hai bhayankar” (The mood is dangerous today). With a “zaraa zaraa nasha” (little bit of intoxication), the men implore each other and the rest of the shindig to “jitni bhi hai sharam dil se nikal de” (free the hearts of all shame). If there was any subtlety left, it was soon shed with the lines:

Ho do do round laga ke

Sau sau pound uda ke

Ho vilayati bhang chadha ke

Nachenge hero ban kar

(Let’s have a few more rounds

Let’s waste a few hundred pounds

Let’s drink some foreign bhang

We’ll dance like heroes)

Why waste money on foreign bhang when India has many millennia of expertise of local preparation? But I digress.

Cannabis and song and dance

Holi is often a good excuse to let the inhibitions go, to allow for fun and frolic that may otherwise be frowned upon in conservative communities. In the song “Rang barse” from Yash Chopra’s Silsila (1981), a traditional bhajan is reimagined as an upbeat folk song, after a little shot of bhang by Amitabh Bachchan’s character.

In the 1985 superhero film Shiva Ka Insaaf, Jackie Shroff is Bhola (alter ego Siva, of course) in the cannabis-blended song “Bhang jamaye rang zara se”, another R.D. Burman creation. In 1997’s Koyla, Madhuri Dixit appears in the song “Bhang ke nashe mein kho gaye hum” (I am lost in the intoxication of bhang) while dancing on a hillside around a dozen children.

In the first half of Ayan Mukerji’s Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013), the characters depicted by Deepika Padukone, Ranbir Kapoor, and others take a life-affirming hiking trip to Parvati Valley, a lush region in the Himalaya range of Himachal Pradesh known as the country’s apple belt, which is also the source of some of the world’s most famous charas.

For much of this trip, Padukone’s character, Naina, is portrayed as a stereotypically conservative and shy young woman. But she finds romance in her travels and is allowed to let go fully of her inhibitions in the Holi-themed track “Balam pichkari”. She is now sexualised: glasses off, hair down, hips gyrating, carefree in the intoxicating blend of love and bhang.

Sung by Shalmali Kholgade, the first verse goes:

Itna maza kyun aa raha hai?

Tune hawa mein bhang milaya?

Dugna nasha kyun ho raha hai?

Aankhon se meetha tune khilaya?

(Why am I having so much fun?

Have you mixed bhang in the air?

Why am I twice as intoxicated?

Did you feed me sweets with your eyes?)

There is a clear connecting thread that ties cannabis with both religious festivity and freedom of mind, an unlocking of one’s inhibitions that could be as much a spiritual experience as it is a romantic one.

‘Dum maro dum’

Arguably, the country’s most famous cannabis anthem is “Dum maro dum”, another R.D. Burman composition from Dev Anand’s 1971 directorial debut, Hare Rama Hare Krishna. The film is a sort of anti-drug morality tale produced during the height of the Western counterculture hippie movement that emerged in the 1960s in the form of anti-war crusades, free love, psychedelic music and media, and rising interest in Eastern spirituality and philosophies. The use of psychedelic and psychotropic drugs tucked in neatly within this cultural niche, as part of a larger rebellion against authority.

In the movie, Dev Anand stars as Prashant, a man who goes to Kathmandu in search of his sister Jasbir, or Janice, played by the 19-year-old Zeenat Aman. Zeenat Aman’s breakthrough role of a wayward, weed-smoking, broken-hearted hippie won her the Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award that year, a performance that was memorialised by “Dum maro dum”. Here, Janice sings and gently sways (backing vocals by Asha Bhosle and lyrics by Anand Bakshi) in the middle of a crowded, multicultural epicurean gathering, where men and women smoke and pass chillums among each other, play music, smoke, drink, kiss, party. It is hedonism at its very best.

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R.D. Burman’s composition here—disco, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—is rooted deep in the psychedelic themes of its time. Each “dum” uttered is an evocation to a breath, the strength to live, or to a “dum” from the chillum—a deep puff inwards of the charas smoke—a common phrase uttered by cannabis smokers. Bakshi’s lyrics make no secret of the ties between the THC high and the high of devotion, as the chorus goes:

Dum maro dum

Mit jaaye gham

Bolo subah shaam

Hare Krishna Hare Ram.

(Take a puff

Erase your sorrows

Say it day and night

Praise to Krishna, praise to Ram)

Unlike the happier response to bhang as experienced by Kamal and Sunita in “Jai Jai Shiv Shankar”, the world of “Dum maro dum” is far more nihilistic, highlighted particularly by the song’s haunting rhetorical questions:

Duniya ne humko diya kya?

Duniya se hamne liya kya?

Hum sabki parvah karein kyon?

Sabne hamara kiya kya?

(What did the world ever give to us?

What did we ever take from the world?

Why should we worry about anyone?

What has anyone ever done for us?)

Zeenat Aman recollects

In an Instagram post in September, Zeenat Aman shared the fascinating backstory of the song: the “hippy extras” featured in the song were invited by Dev Anand “to pack their chillums with hashish in beautiful Nepal” along with the bonus of payment, food, and the opportunity to be in a Bollywood film. She added: “Dev Saab wanted authenticity in this sequence. My character, the drug-addled Janice, had to really look stoned. And the easiest way to achieve this was to partake in the hippy offerings! So, there I was, still in my teens, gamely taking long pulls from their chillum take after take.

“By the time we wrapped the day’s work I was high as a kite! I was in no state to return to the hotel in that happy, dizzy and slightly gormless haze. So, some of the team members packed me into a car and took me on a drive to a beautiful vantage point. There in the cold mountain air, I contemplated the Himalayas and slowly, peacefully came down from my high.”

The “hippy offerings”, it can be safely assumed, were most likely charas, a blissful “dum” of hashish similarly enjoyed by Siva bhakts around the country.

Zeenat Aman’s memories from half a century ago point to a less complicated time in our pop culture, where god and love cuddled up in the same intoxicating cocktail. But despite this welcoming embrace of bhang, components of the same cannabis plant are illegal for recreational use in the country. And for every iconic moment on screen memorialised in trippy Holi and Sivaratri celebrations, there is a darker side of the story, where no one in the country—from farmers to film stars—is safe from the court of public judgement and the ruthless hand of the law.

Aryan Khan and the law

On October 3, 2021, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) announced the arrest of Aryan Khan, the 23-year-old son of Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. Aryan was among those who were part of a high-profile rave party aboard a cruise ship off the coast of Mumbai nabbed by NCB officers who had boarded the ship and discovered drugs, including charas. No drugs were recovered on Aryan, yet he was picked up and slapped with charges under the NDPS Act. Denied bail, he spent several weeks in judicial custody. The NCB’s case rested upon the drugs recovered from Aryan’s friend Arbaaz Merchant: a total of 6 grams of charas, probably worth just a few chillums worth of “dums” puffed at a filmset, hardly worth more than a few thousand rupees. But owing to the high profile of the accused, the case was sensationalised by the news media.

Aryan and the others were portrayed as symbols of a depraved society, floating dangerously away from the so-called conservative culture or sanskar of the country, and as “nepo babies” who would finally taste justice suffered by the common man.

Aryan Khan was finally granted bail by the end of October that year. The following year, the NCB dropped charges against him and against the five other suspects, pointing to a “lack of sufficient evidence” in the original probe.

But the damage to the Khans’ reputation was already done, and the authorities were able to flaunt that no amount of social or financial clout was above their jurisdiction. Aryan Khan’s arrest was the only the star-studded tip of the iceberg of a larger, pan-Indian war against the illicit cannabis trade, where the most penalised offenders have often been small-time users, farmers, or middlemen.

Mumbai and cannabis

In Mumbai, which has the highest number of NDPS cases, most of the individuals arrested are consumers of cannabis. A 2020 study in Mumbai by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy concluded that “nearly every person arrested and convicted for cannabis consumption in the city was a daily wage worker and a slum/street dweller”. It added: “These drug offenders are sentenced to minor imprisonment and/or fines ranging from Rs.100 to Rs.8,000. This demonstrates how the law, though meant to be applied uniformly across social and economic strata, disproportionately targets the poor and further marginalises the already vulnerable.”

According to reports from various drug law enforcement agencies, over 4.7 lakh individuals were arrested under the NDPS Act from 2018 to 2023. One can safely assume that most of those penalised for cannabis likely dealt with the plant in its ganja or charas form.

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Bhang, of course, is an exception: no doubt, being Lord Siva’s favourite allows it some special advantages. There are other sources in ancient Indian scripture that exalt bhang’s resourceful properties. The most popular of these is credited to the Atharva Veda, likely compiled around 1200-1000 BCE and which forms the basis of much of the Ayurvedic system of medicine.

It states: “To the five kingdoms of the plants which Soma rules as Lord we speak/Darbha, hemp (bhang), barley, mighty power: may these deliver us from woe” (translated by Ralph T.H. Griffith).

The text refers to the mythical healing (and perhaps intoxicating) drink soma, which is another definition of “amrita”, the elixir of immortality.

An ancient tradition

It is no surprise that ancient Indians aligned so closely with the cannabis plant: it was one of the earliest crops to be cultivated by humans with the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago.

Historians have found that the Aryans introduced its consumption to the Indian subcontinent between 2000 and 1000 BCE. In much of Hindu mythology, forms of the cannabis plant (bhang and others) are also referred to as vijaya, meaning victory or triumph.

Across Indian history, cannabis formulations have been recommended by Ayurvedic practices for their medicinal properties, including in the 8th century Sanskrit medical text Sushruta Samhita, for conditions such as fever, diarrhoea, menstrual pain, anaemia, epilepsy, and nerve disease.

In 1839, the Irish physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy presented an influential paper titled “On the preparations of Indian Hemp or Gunjah (Cannabis Indica)”. After years of clinical trials in the Bengal area, O’Shaughnessy claimed that in hemp, his profession had “gained an anti-convulsive remedy of the highest value”.

By the end of the century, the British government’s Indian Hemp Drugs Commission—in a wide-ranging study that included O’Shaughnessy’s work as well as religious use of cannabis among Hindu users—concluded that “the moderate use of hemp drugs is practically attended by no evil results at all”.

20th century taboos

In the 20th century, however, led primarily by the derision of lawmakers in the US, marijuana was villainised and presented as a taboo substance, and its “no evil” reputation was shed to prop it up instead as an anti-social drug. American propaganda films such as Reefer Madness (1936) further maligned this plant.

The US’ “Marihuana Tax Act” of 1937 officially classified marijuana/cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, beginning a period of federal prohibition that continues to this day. More nations followed the US lead in banning or controlling the crop, including India, where the NDPS Act was formally passed in Parliament in 1985.

In the past few decades, ironically, it has been the US that has led in cannabis research, decriminalisation, and legalisation. Scientists, doctors, and activists in the US and elsewhere have discovered the many medicinal properties of cannabis, for everything from chronic pain, epilepsy, neurogenerative disorders (like Alzheimer’s disease) to nausea, managing the side effects of cancer-related chemotherapies, and much more.

Modern change of heart

Around 50 nations around the world have legalised medicinal cannabis, while others like Uruguay, Canada, Germany, and some States in the US have decriminalised the use of cannabis for recreational purposes to various degrees. Meanwhile, reports said that the industrial hemp segment worldwide is expected to reach a projected revenue of $16,754.8 million (close to Rs.1.4 lakh crore) by 2030.

It is the THC component of cannabis that is often prescribed for severe medical conditions or used for the recreational purposes of getting high. However, a less intoxicating compound in the plant called cannabidiol (CBD) has found more widespread acceptance as an essential component for medical purposes.

CBD does not cause the high of cannabis by itself but has proven to be a useful compound for medicines that tackle anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain, and more. CBD is permitted in India, and in recent years, there has been a major spike in medical startups investing in this space, with products that include massage ointments, lip balms, energy drinks, seed oils, and even anti-anxiety medicine for pets. With growing awareness of CBD as a separate entity from THC, some market research reports have predicted that the industry in India would grow close to Rs.2,500 crore over the next five years.

The tragic case of Sushant Singh Rajput

In fact, the biggest spike in the interest in CBD actually arose from a tragedy. In June 2020, 34-year-old rising Bollywood film star Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead by suicide at his home in Mumbai. Various reports went on to show that Rajput showed signs of clinical depression and bipolar disorder in the months leading up to his death. Authorities discovered that a few individuals in Rajput’s orbit—including his talent manager and his girlfriend—helped him get access to CBD oil to deal with his condition. A maelstrom followed, as his girlfriend and others in the entertainment industry were hounded by an overzealous media and by Rajput’s fans for allegedly abetting his suicide.

In the feverish witch hunt, little room was left for the distinction between the legalities of the various chemical products possible from cannabis. Rajput’s alleged cannabis use—in CBD form or as ganja/charas—were labelled as the cause of his problems and not, perhaps, as an assistive balm to his pains.

However, despite the largely negative coverage of the incident and its aftermath, the next few months “clocked the highest sales for the industry in some manner because a lot of people started talking about CBD”, according to Delzaad Deolaliwala, chairperson of the Pan India Medical Cannabis and Hemp Association.

The NCB charged Rajput’s girlfriend, the actor Rhea Chakraborty, for receiving and delivering marijuana to him, and later arrested her on the charge of abetment of suicide. What followed was a trial by media as most national news channels sensationalised the story to unbelievable levels.

Nation of contradictions

What does one make of these contradictions? India has always been a nation of grand paradoxes, where erotic sculptures are carved into temple walls while young couples are harassed for holding hands in a park; where vegetarianism and the love of the bovine are loudly preached even as the majority of the population are meat-eaters and the nation is one of the world’s largest exporters of beef; where the garb of spirituality can make all the difference between cannabis seen as an offering to the gods, or a dark, sensational crime. In recent years, some States like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh have proposed and enacted liberalised laws for the controlled farming of hemp, taking the initial steps towards legalising the use of this indigenous crop for profit. However, these are still minuscule efforts, and many activists and advocates around the country are hoping for more such laws, and decriminalisation so that the plant may be used for industrial, scientific, medicinal, and some recreational purposes.

This approach would enable enforcement agencies like the NCB and the Border Security Force, and State excise departments to concentrate their efforts on tackling larger challenges, such as dismantling synthetic drug smuggling networks and addressing violent crimes.

Irrespective of how it is perceived and its legal status, cannabis is so ubiquitous in the country that it simply cannot be ignored. For thousands of years, the plant has thrived naturally across much of the subcontinent, deeply intertwined with human communities and traditions. It has been used in various forms: as an Ayurvedic medicinal tonic, hemp for clothing and livestock care, a source of nutritious seeds, an offering in religious rituals, bhang for festive thandai, or as a flower smoked for recreational purposes.

Also, it has been the inspiration for a lush garden of music and cinema. A number of films have attempted to tackle the “marijuana question” over the past few decades, usually to inconsistent results.

Cannabis appears in a kaleidoscope of adventurous roles: as intoxicant, healer, sacred offering, and more. Just like many other nations in the world, what we need, perhaps, is a reconsideration of the taboos associated with the plant, to reconcile its many contradictions and to understand the plant as one of India’s indigenous cultural gifts to the world.

“Jai Jai Shiv Shankar” concludes with a happy crescendo; for Kamal and Sunita, the high eventually tapers off, leaving them behind in a world slowly shuffling towards its structure again. “Kuch bhi ho, lekin maza aa gaya meri jaan,” Kamal sings at the end. (Come what may, but we had great fun, my love.)

Karan Madhok is author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India and the novel A Beautiful Decay.

“}]] Despite its religious and cultural significance, and a tradition dating back to ancient times, cannabis continues to be vilified. Perhaps we should revisit the taboos around the plant, recast its role as an intoxicant, healer, sacred offering, and many more, and present it as one of our cultural gifts to the world.  Read More  

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