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

Published : Nov 27, 2024 09:49 IST - 23 MINS READ 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. 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. Thousands of years after this tale, Saivites, and many others, still evoke the Supreme Lord before inhaling a puff of cannabis from their chillum, 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. ‘Dum maro dum’ Arguably, the country’s most famous cannabis anthem is “Dum maro dum”, another R.D. 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?