Tripping on the high road

Bhang Journeys

Author: Akshaya Bahibala

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Price: Rs 299   

Pages: 176

“Ten years go by like this. You wake up. You roll a joint. You smoke it. You go to the beach. You meet a bunch of friends, old friends, joint friends, and sometimes a few hippies, White folk. You roll some more joints. Or fill and fire some chillums. You drink some beer or swig Old Monk rum and hang out at the beach or under a banyan tree and you smoke. Rinse. Repeat.”

So begins Bhang Journeys by Akshaya Bahibala as he chronicles his addiction to marijuana and writes about individuals across his home state, Odisha, whose lives, in some or the other way, ceaselessly orbit around bhang, ganja and opium, all products of the marijuana or cannabis plant

It is a slim book. Interlaced with personal memories and people stories are recipes for bhang sharbat and ladoos, studies on the medicinal value of cannabis, as well as government data. Bahibala begins by narrating those ten years spent in and around Beach Road and other hotspots in Puri where his days passed in chasing short-lived highs. 

It was only after leaving Puri that he was able to begin a journey of rehabilitation, which, of course, was not straightforward: “I had no option but to get a job to survive… The road to recovery wasn’t easy. Simply deciding to quit drugs didn’t cure me overnight of low confidence and an almost paralyzing fear of everything around me.”

The book then pivots into a section titled A Bhang-Ganja Journal. A Brahmin owner of a government bhang shop shares his woes and extols bhang’s health benefits. He is not the only one singing its praises. Bahibala finds online blogs and research papers that look at the issue. He also talks to traditional medicine practitioners who prescribe it. Later, he seeks out a master sharbat maker to ask after some of his  recipes, bhang lassi being one of them. 

Cannabis has a storied past in Odisha’s history across class and occupation until the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act came in 1985. 

We get to know that ganja is a crucial ingredient in the Trinath mela, a puja that occurs every Sunday across the state to honour the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva: “[Lord Trinath] is the god of the poor. He’s a homely god. You don’t need brahmins to do His puja. In our village, we don’t have brahmins but still we have Trinath Mela. Anyone can perform his puja.”

It is here that  Bhang Journeys takes a small digression and dedicates a few chapters to opium, a “related, popular drug”. Mostly composed of anecdotes, Bahibala explores the government-run opium de-addiction programme in which individuals dealing with addiction were issued opium cards through which they could buy subsidised opium, in strict accordance to prescribed dosage, at excise offices. There are first-person narratives from current card holders as well as one from a daily wage worker responsible for making these opium tablets for the government supplemented by an old article on the ban of opium and a reproduced facsimile of an actual opium card. Together, they provide a riveting view of how bureaucracy shapes up around what become deemed as ‘societal ills’ over time.

As part of his research, Bahibala visited excise departments across Odisha and talked to officials there to understand how they combat illegal cannabis farming, particularly for the purposes of harvesting ganja, the dried buds and flowers of the marijuana plant, for the  drug market. 

A report on the destruction of ganja plants stated that it was centred on six districts of the state in particular, and so Bahibala accompanied the excise departments on its raids deep into the wildernesses where surreptitiously cleared forests hid vast plantations. Most of the time, the tribal people involved in the upkeep of these plots loudly protested the destruction, engaging in verbal warfare as well as fisticuffs. For them, it was a matter of their livelihood and a way to gain the requisite capital to improve the status of their families.

In reality, they did not make much money even though the whole enterprise demanded their intensive labour and handed off a massive portion of the associated risk to them. It was the middlemen and the kingpins who got all the wealth and none of the danger: “During the season, one kilogram of ganja fetches Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000; by the time it gets to a city like Mumbai or Bangalore, it can be around Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,00,000 per kilogram in the open market.” No wonder the tribal people feel helpless when these farms are destroyed. It is a wonder that the resulting anger does not boil over more frequently. The officials also seem to be playing fast and loose with the rules; if they  are not directly involved in the production in the first place, they often take confiscated material for themselves.

While the book is fascinating and a trippy read, it is too often a surface-level primer. It is billed as a personal narrative but those sections are scattered and work as a framing device. 

Bahibala tends to rely too much on secondary sources wholesale, which creates a discernible tonal shift in between chapters and across sections. Still, these are pardonable flaws in a work that is otherwise accessible and informative, especially in the context of Odisha. 

Ultimately, Bhang Journeys is at the entrance of a rabbit hole, and could catalyse a desire to have a more comprehensible understanding of cannabis consumption in India.

The reviewer is Editor-at-Large at Asymptote Journal and a Books Editor at Inklette Magazine