The Atharva Veda, composed between approximately 1500 and 1200 BCE and forming one of the four foundational texts of the oldest surviving religious and philosophical tradition on earth, contains a verse that no cannabis prohibition law has ever managed to repeal. Book 11, Chapter 6, Verse 15, in standard Sanskrit-English translation, reads as follows: "To the five kingdoms of the plants which Soma rules as Lord we speak. Darbha, cannabis, barley, mighty power: may these deliver us from woe." Five plants. Named together. Ranked together. Given together. Cannabis — referred to in the Vedas as bhang — sits in the Vedic text alongside Soma, the divine drink of the gods, and barley, the agricultural foundation of ancient civilisation. The plant that Mauritius's Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 classifies in the same category as heroin was, in the world's oldest surviving literature, classified alongside the sacred and the sustaining.

bhang ganja charas three names Sanskrit cannabis India Vedic tradition three thousand years colonial prohibition

The Sanskrit language gave cannabis three distinct names, each referring to a different preparation of the plant, each with its own documented therapeutic and spiritual application. That a single plant required three names in the oldest surviving body of human literature is itself evidence of the depth and complexity of the relationship between the Indian civilisation and this plant across millennia. The three names are bhang, ganja, and charas.

Bhang refers to the leaves and seeds of the cannabis plant, typically prepared as a drink — ground with water, spices, milk, and sometimes nuts into a ritual beverage. Bhang is the preparation named directly in the Atharva Veda. It is consumed at the festival of Holi across the Indian subcontinent and at Mahashivaratri — the Great Night of Shiva — in a practice that has continued without interruption for more than three thousand years. The preparation is legal across most of India today under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985, which specifically excluded bhang from the definition of cannabis at the insistence of the Indian government, which recognised that prohibiting it would constitute a direct assault on millennia of religious and cultural practice. Mauritius, which inherited its legal framework from the British colonial administration, made no such distinction. The Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 does not ask whether the cannabis is bhang prepared for a religious festival. It opens a file.

Ganja refers to the flowering tops of the female cannabis plant — what contemporary pharmacology identifies as the resin-rich portion with the highest concentration of therapeutic cannabinoids. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894, the most comprehensive scientific study of cannabis ever conducted by any government before the 20th century, distinguished ganja from bhang and charas in its analysis and found different patterns of use, different social contexts, and different therapeutic applications for each preparation. The Commission spent two years studying all three across the Indian subcontinent. Its conclusion across all three was consistent: moderate use caused no significant harm, and prohibition would cause more harm than the substances themselves.

Charas refers to the hand-rubbed resin of the cannabis plant — what is known in contemporary usage as hashish. It is produced by rolling fresh cannabis flowers between the palms until the resin accumulates. The practice of charas preparation is documented in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, and Afghanistan across centuries of continuous tradition. Charas from the Malana valley of Himachal Pradesh is among the most documented traditional cannabis preparations in the world, produced by the same method in the same region for at least several centuries of verified record.

Three names. Three preparations. Three thousand years of documented use. The colonial administration that arrived in India and eventually prohibited all three did not prohibit them because the science said they were dangerous. It prohibited them because international pressure from the 1925 Geneva Convention, driven by Egyptian and later American diplomatic lobbying, made prohibition the path of least institutional resistance. The science — assembled by the Commission the colonial government itself commissioned — said the opposite of what the law subsequently enacted.

Shiva cannabis bhang Hindu god sacred plant Vedic religion Mahashivaratri Parvati mythology spiritual

Of all the theological dimensions of cannabis in the Indian tradition, the most documented and the most enduring is its association with the God Shiva — the Destroyer, the transformer, the third member of the Hindu Trimurti alongside Brahma and Vishnu. The association is not incidental or metaphorical. It is textual, ritual, and three thousand years old.

The Shiva Purana, one of the eighteen major Puranas of the Hindu tradition, describes Shiva as the Lord of Bhang — Bhang ka nath. The text describes how Shiva, wandering in the forest after a dispute with his family, rested beneath a cannabis plant and consumed its leaves, finding in it the restoration of his divine energy. From that moment, the plant became sacred to Shiva and his devotees. The mythological account is not merely a story. It is the origin narrative of a living religious practice that continues today across a billion-person civilisation. Sadhus — the wandering ascetics of the Hindu tradition — consume bhang and smoke cannabis as part of their devotional practice, understood as the consumption of the substance of Shiva himself. At the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious gathering on earth, sadhus consume bhang openly as a sacramental act. The Indian state does not arrest them. The Mauritian state, operating under a law passed in 2000 and shaped by a colonial legal inheritance, would.

The association of cannabis with Shiva extends beyond mythology into pharmacology in a way that is directly relevant to the scientific arguments this edition presents. Shiva in the Hindu cosmological system is the principle of transformation — of destruction in the service of regeneration, of the dissolution of old forms so that new ones may emerge. The endocannabinoid system, as modern neuroscience has documented, performs precisely this function at the cellular level: it regulates the brain's capacity to dissolve established neural patterns — including the traumatic loops of PTSD, the rigid pathways of addiction, and the over-excited circuits of epilepsy — and allow new patterns to form. The ancient theological intuition about this plant and the modern scientific documentation of its mechanism are, at a structural level, saying the same thing. The Vedic tradition named the plant after the principle of therapeutic transformation three thousand years before the science could explain the mechanism.

Ayurveda cannabis medicine Charaka Sushruta Samhita ancient Indian medical texts therapeutic use documented

Beyond the Vedic theological tradition, cannabis is documented in the ancient Indian medical literature with the same clinical precision that characterises the Ayurvedic system at its most rigorous. Ayurveda — the system of traditional Indian medicine whose name translates as the science of life — is one of the oldest documented medical traditions on earth, with texts that predate the Common Era by several centuries.

The Charaka Samhita, one of the two foundational texts of Ayurvedic medicine, dated to approximately 300 BCE though drawing on earlier oral traditions, documents cannabis as a therapeutic agent. The Sushruta Samhita, the other foundational Ayurvedic text, also documents cannabis — referred to as vijaya, meaning the one that gives victory — in its materia medica. Both texts document cannabis as useful for stimulating appetite, relieving pain, inducing sleep, and treating digestive conditions. These are precisely the therapeutic applications that modern clinical medicine has validated in peer-reviewed studies across the 20th and 21st centuries. The ancient Indian physicians did not have the conceptual framework of the endocannabinoid system or the vocabulary of cannabinoids. But they documented the clinical effects with sufficient accuracy that the modern pharmacologist reading the Sushruta Samhita recognises exactly what the ancient physician observed.

The continuity between the ancient Ayurvedic record and modern clinical pharmacology is not coincidence. It is the accumulated result of thousands of years of systematic observation of a plant whose therapeutic properties are consistent, reproducible, and real. The science did not discover what cannabis does. It explained what three thousand years of documented observation had already established.

Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1894 cannabis study British colonial government suppressed report prohibition recommendations

In 1893, the British colonial government of India commissioned the most comprehensive scientific and social study of cannabis ever undertaken by any government anywhere in the world. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission was convened in response to growing calls, primarily from temperance movements in Britain, for the prohibition of cannabis across the Indian empire. The Commission was tasked with studying the cultivation, preparation, trade, use, and effects of cannabis across the subcontinent and recommending whether prohibition was warranted.

The Commission's work was extraordinary in its scope. Over two years, it gathered testimony from 1,193 witnesses — doctors, administrators, religious figures, cultivators, traders, consumers, and law enforcement officers — across every region of British India. It produced a report of seven volumes and 3,281 pages, published in 1894. The report examined the physical effects of cannabis use, the psychological effects, the moral effects, the social effects, the economic effects, and the religious and cultural dimensions of the plant's use across the Indian subcontinent.

The Commission's conclusions were unambiguous. On the question of physical effects, it found that moderate use of cannabis produced no significant physical harm. On the question of mental effects, it found that moderate use did not cause insanity and that the association between cannabis and mental illness was not supported by the evidence. On the question of moral effects, it found that moderate use did not produce moral degradation. On the question of whether prohibition was warranted, it found that prohibition would be unjust, unenforceable, and more harmful than the substances it sought to prohibit, because it would drive use underground, destroy livelihoods, and constitute an assault on religious and cultural practices of deep antiquity and broad social significance.

The Commission's recommendation was against prohibition. The British colonial government noted the recommendation and did not act on it immediately. Then, under mounting international pressure following the 1925 Geneva Convention, the colonial administration moved toward restriction and eventually prohibition — overriding the conclusions of the most comprehensive study of cannabis it had itself commissioned. The seven-volume report, available in libraries and now digitised, was effectively buried. It has never been cited in a Mauritian parliamentary debate. The Meridian cites it now.

colonial erasure cannabis knowledge India British prohibition Frantz Fanon post-colonial internalisation cultural suppression

The erasure of three thousand years of Vedic cannabis knowledge did not happen by accident. It required active institutional effort across several decades. The 1894 Commission report recommended against prohibition. The 1925 Geneva Convention added cannabis to international controls despite the Indian government's objections — India was a British-administered colonial territory at the time, and its objections carried the weight that colonial territories carried in international negotiations, which is to say, very little. The 1961 UN Single Convention placed cannabis in Schedule IV — the most restrictive category — without citing the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission's findings. The ancient Vedic tradition, the Ayurvedic medical record, and the most comprehensive government study of cannabis ever conducted were all set aside. The prohibition narrative required a clean slate. The colonial administration provided one.

What Frantz Fanon described as the post-colonial internalisation of the colonial order is directly visible in the cannabis question. The nations that inherited British colonial legal frameworks — including Mauritius — inherited prohibition not as the conclusion of their own scientific or cultural deliberation but as a pre-packaged institutional assumption. The Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 was not the result of a Mauritian parliamentary study of cannabis. It was the result of a political moment following Kaya's death in custody, constructed on a legal framework that had itself been constructed on international prohibition pressure that had itself overridden the conclusions of a study the British had commissioned in 1894 and chosen not to follow. The Mauritian citizen who is provisionally charged for cannabis possession in 2026 is paying the institutional price of a decision made in Geneva in 1925, which overrode a scientific recommendation made in Simla in 1894, which documented a tradition that had been continuous in the Indian subcontinent since the Vedas were composed three thousand years ago.

cannabis knowledge recovery Vedic tradition Mauritius Indo-Mauritian community bhang ganja colonial suppression

The colonial erasure of Vedic cannabis knowledge was never complete. The bhang tradition survived in India — legally, openly, at public festivals, in the hands of sadhus who were never arrested for it. The Ayurvedic texts survived in libraries. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report survived in the archive. The knowledge was not destroyed. It was suppressed, marginalised, and excluded from the official discourse that shaped the laws.

In Mauritius, the Vedic connection to cannabis is particularly significant. The Indo-Mauritian community — descended from the Indian indentured labourers who arrived in Mauritius between 1834 and 1924 to work the sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery — brought with them the cultural, religious, and botanical knowledge of the Indian subcontinent. They brought the bhang tradition. They brought the Shiva connection. They brought the understanding of cannabis as a sacred plant named in the Vedas. And they brought it into a colonial legal framework that had, by the time of their arrival and across the decades that followed, progressively criminalised the very knowledge they carried.

The Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 — passed one year after Kaya, a Creole musician, died in police custody for publicly advocating cannabis decriminalisation — does not distinguish between the bhang of the Vedic tradition and the synthetic cannabinoids that are genuinely killing young Mauritians. It does not distinguish between the sacramental use of a plant named in the oldest surviving body of human literature and the commercial trafficking of genuinely dangerous substances. It treats them all the same. In doing so, it does not merely criminalise a plant. It criminalises three thousand years of documented human knowledge, a living religious tradition, and the inherited botanical wisdom of a community whose ancestors brought it across the ocean on ships that were themselves a form of colonial coercion.

This is the second article in Chapter One of The Colonised Plant: The Cannabis Edition, June 2026. The next article in this chapter examines the Egyptian intervention at the 1925 Geneva Convention — the afternoon that turned five thousand years of medicine into international contraband.