( 4 )
3. Gánjá consists of the dried flowering-tops of cultivated female hemp
plants which have become coated with resin in consequence of having been
unable to set seeds freely. The formation of seeds is prevented by the destruc-
tion of all the male plants. Special men—poddars—who profess ability to re-
cognise the sexes long before the plants are mature, go round a field three or
perhaps four times during a season, selecting what they say are male plants;
any that escape notice during the earlier visits are detected at a subsequent one.
How these men distinguish the plants I cannot say; I have not yet had oppor-
tunities of seeing them at work. The remarkable thing is that the work
is well done, for though the cultivators also go daily round their fields
looking for male flowers, it would appear that they rarely find a male plant
which has been overlooked; they not infrequently do, however, find female plants
with a few abnormal flower spikes, or sometimes a whole branch, bearing only
male flowers ; less often, and still more difficult to notice, they find plants on
which one or two of the flowers on a spike are males, the rest being females.
Even when fully grown the plants that bear such flowers are, in habit and
general appearance, exactly like the other females ; it is not therefore
surprising that, even if the poddar is the expert he claims to be, these should
escape detection. Indeed, the fact that some of these abnormal plants do
escape notice—often up to the time when the plants are being reaped—while by
no chance is a normal male plant to be found in a field, seems to show that the
poddar is able to distinguish the sexes before the flowers begin to appear.
The care with which male plants are removed has already been incidentally
evidenced by Mr. C. B. Clarke who, speaking of the cultivation at Naogaon,
says :—" In these cultivated fields I could find no male plants at all ; every
plant of some thousands must have been female." 1 I n t h e c a s e o f a f i e l d o f
about a bigha in extent, which early in the season had passed out of the owner's
care, and which consequently had not received the two latest, and one would
imagine most necessary, visits by the poddar, a. careful examination was made
by me to test the point. From the calculations accepted in the gánjá office and
given in Mr. Kerr's Report, 2 t h i s f i e l d , i f w e l l c u l t i v a t e d , s h o u l d h a v e c o n t a i n e d
nearly 2,500 plants; allowing for the losses caused by inattention, it must still
have contained from 1,800—2,000 plants. Yet the whole field did not contain
a single male plant, and only one abnormal female plant with some male flowers
on it was found. The evidence is not of course conclusive as to the efficiency
of the poddar' s earlier visits, for the cultivators of neighbouring fields may
have searched for any males contained in this one and uprooted such as
they happened to find. But as they do not attempt to destroy the males which
spring up spontaneously throughout the gánjá tract on way sides and in waste-
places, situations where the plant is very common and in which the sexes occur
in about equal numbers, it is unlikely that they had done so. During my visits
to the gánjá mahals I did not succeed in finding a single normal male plant in
any field ; the number of abnormal female plants with a few male flowers varied
somewhat. They were never common, three plants of the kind in a field of about
a bigha and a quarter being the largest number found in one field. As many
as twenty fields were searched on one occasion without finding a single plant
of the kind.
Careful, however, as the cultivators are in removing male plants, it is
impossible to find a single female, excepting those that are khásiá and func-
tionally defective, that has no ripe fruits. One noticeable feature in connection
with this is that it is always the flowers of a particular situation that first set
seeds. Besides the flowers that are borne, four or five of them in line, on short
spikes that spring from the branches of the flowering-top, there are always at or
near the bases of these spikes, single flowers springing immediately from the
branches. These flowers, which are thus the most completely hidden of all
in the flowering-top, are the ones that open soonest and are the ones that are
fertilized in all gánjá plants and that ripen seeds even when none of the others
succeed in doing so. The number of fruits formed, however, is usually very
small as compared with the total number of flowers on each plant. There is of
course nothing very surprising in the fact that seeds do get set, for though it is
not too much to say that probably not a single male plant is left in any field
1L
e t t e r q u o t e d b y
H . C . K e r r ,
R e p o r t ,
p . 8 .
2 H. C. Kerr, Report, p. 31.