It had been an extended period of penance as I waited for the right season of harvest, for the ideal village in the ideal valley, to earn the trust of the guides shepherding me forward. It had been a long drive further away from urban civilization, a trek up another hill, and a hidden crevice by the hillside that took us on a detour and back up under the sun again.
And then, I arrive at the motherlode.
Acres upon acres of the greenest, cleanest weed I have ever seen, over bugyals (meadows) coruscating golden in reflection under the afternoon sun, stems that are ten, twelve feet tall, with leaves and buds that bloom above to even greater heights. The meadow is surrounded by glaciers, resting at an altitude of over 2,100 metres above sea level. Each plant here in Uttarakhand’s Urgam Valley is generously well-endowed, grown naturally with little or no human interference, with flowering tops of the female plants so rich with trichomes that one can hardly help but simply reach over and rub a little resin off.
Praveen, the ‘bhang collector’ who has led us here, tells me that the local maal is called sulfa. He tells me that it’s the best in the state of Uttarakhand. I’m aware that it’s some of the best in the world.
I can hardly believe that I made it. Accompanying me today are a half dozen college students from Mumbai—all nineteen, twenty-year-olds—who are staying in the district for a month-long study of the organic farming and social conditions of the region, as well as the potential of industrial hemp. At the meadow, some of the students rip off the leaves from the cannabis stems and take dramatic photographs with the great mountain ranges in the background. One of the young women makes an Instagram reel of the experience, enhanced with the soundtrack of the theme song to the Netflix series Narcos.
‘You guys should cherish this,’ I say, suddenly feeling like the responsible elder, giving an unsolicited advice to the youth. ‘It’s not the type of thing you’ll get to see often in your lifetime.’
In 2016, Uttarakhand became the first Indian state to introduce a policy for the industrial farming of hemp. ‘Hemp’, for the practical purposes of this policy, is the low-THC version of the cannabis plant, the type that can potentially be used for industrial purposes—fibres for textiles, ropes, etc.,—rather than as an illicit, psychoactive substance. Growing in wild thick shrubs without much restraint across the hillside of this state, the crop is colloquially referred to as, simply, ‘bhang’ (not to be confused with the usage of bhang elsewhere in this book, referring to only the legal parts of the plant as defined by the NDPS Act).
Only farmers native to the state can procure a licence to legally grow industrial hemp in Uttarakhand. The license process, however, can often be a Kafkaesque headache of bureaucratic roadblocks, dead ends, and U-turns. Let’s say, you, Dear Industrious Uttarakhandi Farmer, have found the right plot of land, paid off the right people, ordered the seeds, and now have that elusive hemp-farming licence in hand. It’s a maze of trouble that you’ve had to suffer just to grow a plant that could grow naturally, without any active effort, in your own backyard. Well, there are more webs that await disentanglement. The new law in Uttarakhand is extremely specific: only varieties of the plant with less than 0.3 per cent THC are allowed to be legally grown, and only for ‘industrial’ purposes. The ‘0.3’ number is borrowed from the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 of the US Department of Agriculture—which deemed that only a product sufficiently weak in THC would be free from the burden of being deemed a ‘controlled substance’ (i.e., an evil drug). Keep it below that miniscule amount, and you’re helping to usher in an exciting new industrial revolution; go up to 0.4 per cent, and…Sorry bhai, you’re now a mini drug kingpin.
The natural state of cannabis in this region is far more psychoactive, with THC levels reportedly between 5 to 10 per cent. Even for farmers with the best of intentions, it is damn near impossible to even determine if the seed will produce a low-THC crop, much less have any influence on lowering the THC levels themselves.
The sulfa that I discover in Urgam Valley is unrestricted by the shackles of policy and botanical chemistry. It’s too strong to be legal; and yet, despite occasional crop destruction exercises by the local authorities, its existence is too persistent to be completely eradicated.
It had taken some convincing to urge Praveen to guide us up here. He—and many more in the villages below—are more paranoid than usual about any outsiders visiting to enquire about the popular local crop; just two weeks before my visit, there had been a police raid from the district headquarters, where many bhang crops were cut, fields were burned, and suspected farmers were arrested.
But, I wonder, how much could they possibly destroy? Cannabis grows everywhere here. Praveen tells me that wherever I see the droppings of a goat, I’ll soon see a bhang plant.
And there’s goat shit everywhere, too.
The state borderlands of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh are the heartland of India’s ‘Red Corridor’: a homebase for armed insurgent groups, rampant with frequent violent clashes against India’s security forces. Many villagers are hired as mules to smuggle out bricks of an enchanting strain of local ganja cultivated nearby, forming the backbone of the largest and most lucrative trafficking rings in the country.
That strain is called Sheelavathi.
The name Sheelavathi is borrowed from a character in a number of ancient Hindu texts. Known as a chaste woman, dutiful wife, sometimes even called the ‘ideal woman’, Sheelavathi’s tale appeared in the 1874 poetic work Sheelavathi Naalu Vrutham by Kunjan Nambiar. Her story was further popularized in the 1967 Malayalam film Sheelavathi (directed by P. B. Unni). Leave it up to a group of stoned men—I’m guessing—who had the first puff of this variety of ganja some decades ago, and (probably) wisecracked, ‘Yes, she’s perfect. This ganja is the ideal woman. She…she is Sheelavathi.’
Also known as ‘Rajahamsa’ or ‘Kalapathri’, the Sheelavathi is a close hybrid of the Idukki Gold. In the past ten to fifteen years, as farms in Kerala were destroyed and cultivators were arrested or chased away, production moved north with ganja experts now choosing to buy land in the AOB region.
I remember first encountering this part of the country when I visited some friends in Bhubaneswar and Vizag in 2008–09. Together, the four of us took a taxi from Vizag up to the picturesque retreat town of Araku in the Agency area, driving through a shroud of cool, winter brume. We had barely settled into our hotel rooms when our taxi driver returned with a plastic bag filled with fresh ganja from a nearby farm. The maal would likely be worth tens of thousands of rupees now—but all those years ago, the farmers simply let him take all he could carry in his own hands for free.
We didn’t know that it was called Sheelavathi in those days, and we didn’t understand the politics between the Adivasi, the Maoists, the mafia, and the police who encounter this growing black market. We did discern, however, that this weed gave a heady yet refreshingly clean high; the type that completely opened those anandamide floodgates, but did so without even the slightest hint of a headache or heaviness caused by impure or laced maal. We named it ‘Flying First Class’; as in, a feeling of soaring above the clouds in satin-clad luxury.
Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company
Book: Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India
Author: Karan Madhok
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Pp 407, Rs 999
