Photos by Andrea de Franciscis.
Approximately
8,900 feet above sea level, perched high in the Himalayas among jagged
snow-capped peaks, is a small Indian village overlooking a valley. It
has a population of about 800 people and can only be reached on foot. It
is a three-hour hike from a drivable road along a steep path up the
mountain. Here, women give birth at home, and distances are calculated
in hours spent walking. Medicine is made of plants, roots and cow urine;
cooking is done on wood stoves; and the woods are used as an outhouse.
There is no central market — just a few shops that sell soap,
cigarettes, vegetables, rice and rubber galoshes. And in the mountains
surrounding the village, ganja grows wild.
Suraj
walks through tall stalks of ganja, (the Indian term for cannabis). His
fields lie about 10,000 feet above sea level, on steep slopes and
plateaus in the mountains, a long walk from the village.
The villagers say that a good season is when the police only
show up once or twice with machetes and weed killer to destroy their
cannabis crops. Twice is only a drop in the ocean: it’s almost
impossible for the authorities to counter the illegal farming that takes
place here.
A
shepherd walks his herd downhill as winter is approaching. It will take
him up to three weeks to reach the valley, where he will wait until
spring to go back.
Suraj, a local cannabis farmer in his mid-thirties (his name has
been changed for his protection), was still a young boy when his father
would take him down in the valley to herd their flock. Suraj disliked
being a shepherd — sleeping outdoors and walking for weeks in the woods
was never something he enjoyed. When his father died about 20 years ago,
although job prospects are scarce and the large flock would have
yielded a good return, Suraj decided to give up the sheep and cultivate
his family’s land instead.
A Nepali worker rubs the strains of the live cannabis indica to make charas.
About half the citizens of this village, which will not be named
in this article for the villagers’ protection against police
retaliation, make their living by manually extracting a valuable resin,
known as “charas,” from the live plants of
cannabis indica, a
flower that is native to India. It is a risky life that Suraj lives,
making money in a country where marijuana use is widespread and
tolerated, but its cultivation is illegal.
A
local man picks off the charas he just rubbed in his hands. The process
of producing charas, compared to the more widely used technique of
“beating” and “filtering” dry plants to produce other types of hashish,
takes more time, but produces higher quality resin.
In the 1970s India became a popular tourist destination for
Westerners leading an anti-conformist lifestyle. They arrived on
overloaded busses all the way from Europe to camp on Goa’s beaches in
the South. They traveled to the Himalayas, following the Hindu holy men,
or
babas, on mystical, spiritual paths. Eventually, the
“hippies” arrived in Suraj’s village. “Children up in the Himalayan
villages still refer to tourists as ‘hippies,’” says Suraj, a smile
breaking over his face. “It is the only word they know for stranger.”
A man smoking a chillum, the traditional pipe for charas, surrounded by his family.
Hindu monks from all over India go to the Himalayas to meditate,
leading an ascetic lifestyle, traveling from one holy place to another,
surviving on alms. Back in the ’70s, the locals were already smoking
pot, but it was the monks who first perfected the technique of making
charas from the live plants. Both the locals and the hippies began
imitating them, rubbing the big strains in their hands to extract the
shiny resin, and the technique caught on. Today, this same practice is
used to produce large amounts of charas each year.
The view of the snow capped mountains from one of the few shops of the village, which sells basic groceries.
Suraj, who learned to make charas from a French man, sells his
product to foreigners — Israelis and Europeans mainly, but also more and
more to wealthy students from Delhi and Mumbai. The demand is steadily
rising, and more fields are converted to cannabis each year. The valley,
with its guesthouses packed with backpackers every spring, has become
something of an “Amsterdam of the East.”
Business is on the rise — peasants now prefer it to apples or
beans, as it is clearly more profitable. Cement is slowly replacing the
stone, wood and cow dung of which houses in the village were built.
A village house made in the traditional local style is lit with a feeble light under the starry sky of the Himalayas.
Cannabis indica grows in many parts of India, particularly in
the Himalayas, making it difficult for the authorities to trace the
producers, who have been planting their fields at higher and higher
altitudes to escape police raids. In addition to this, policing and
trafficking mechanisms are bypassed through widespread corruption at all
levels; thousands of families survive on the illegal production of
charas with few legal problems. However, although the precious resin can
cost up to 20 euro per gram in Europe, cannabis farmers retain only
minimal profit margins. Dealers and traffickers make the biggest profit
from the illegal business, while farmers are forced to operate in the
shadows. Moreover, they risk a minimum sentence of 10 years if caught
cultivating cannabis or trafficking large quantities of charas, and can
be sentenced to death for repeated offenses.
Stripes
of fire burn the mountain next to the village in one of the biggest
blazes in years. Fires are common at the end of the dry season; this one
was exceptionally large.
In 1961, when India signed the cornerstone treaty of the UN drug control system—known as the
Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,
which criminalized the use and cultivation of marijuana in
participating countries—Indian society did not actually seem ready to
abandon the use of cannabis, which dates back to sacred Veda texts and
has been part of Hindu rituals and festivities for centuries. In 1985
India passed the controversial
Act on Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances
(NDPS), which criminalized cannabis like hard drugs but failed to
actually combat production and trafficking. Along with prices,
production and trafficking exploded as a reaction to the increasing
demand on the international market.
A farmer stares over the mountains and above a cloudy sky after the rainfall has disrupted his work.
“The obligation to eliminate cannabis in countries where there
was widespread traditional use is a clear example of the colonial
background of the Convention, and a violation of indigenous and
religious rights. It would have never passed nowadays,” says Tom
Blickman of the Dutch think tank Transnational Institute (TNI). “The
NDPS effect has been the criminalization of cannabis consumers and
producers, in a country where its use — for medicinal, spiritual and
recreational purposes — is millennial. It was also obvious that cannabis
eradication would have been impossible.”
Despite the snow and chilling cold, singing and dancing goes on in the village square on the occasion of a wedding.
“Before the ban, cannabis in India was regulated as it is today
in some states in the U.S.”, says Blickman, referring to it as “a system
of cultivation, production and sale regulated by licenses and taxes.”
But the debate on legalization is still a taboo in India, and despite
the plant being so widespread, there are no precise estimates on the
amount of cultivation and resin production. India has never conducted an
accurate survey — not even for the purposes of providing statistics to
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which tends to have the
strongest grasp of drug statistics around the world.
A
sacrificial goat tries to escape during a wedding; on the left, the
bride, wearing traditional wedding bracelets, is surrounded by the
relatives.
“Cannabis grows wild in nearly 400 out of the 640 districts in
India,” says Romesh Bhattacharji, a former narcotics officer in India
and one of the most authoritative voices promoting the revival of a
debate over legalization in the country. “The 1961 Single Convention is
an unnecessarily severe and falsely optimistic treaty,” he says. “It is
on this fragile basis that the NDPS, our draconian legislation on
narcotics, was conceived. Since then, illegal trafficking and addiction
have only increased.”
The
river that flows through the valley is named after a Hindu goddess
(whose name is withheld in this article to protect the local farmers
from police retaliation), an indication of the huge role that religion
plays in the valley, and in the lives of the villagers.
Two
men carry loads of freshly cut cannabis bundles uphill from the fields,
which are a several hours’ walk from their homes. They’ll rub them to
make charas later at home.
A
group of children play near the fields with bows and arrows made out of
cannabis stalk. They hang around the fields while their parents are
harvesting.
A
farmer’s family works in the house, where they collect dry plants they
did not manage to rub before snow came. They will be used to produce
another kind of hashish.
A boy looks out over the valley from the wooden balcony of his family home at the end of the harvesting season.
Maria Tavernini is an Italian freelance journalist, writer and sailor, currently based in New Delhi.
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