Kozhikode: Cannabis plants are easy to spot in India, growing wild on the sides of roads and highways. It’s use, though, is far more controversial – while often associated with Hindu festivities in its bhang form, other uses of marijuana, seen as more recreational, are looked down upon or ridiculed. Medicinal marijuana hasn’t seen the kind of interest in India that it has in other parts of the world, despite the region’s age-old relationship with the plant.
Writer and journalist Karan Madhok’s book Ananda is a deep-dive into the cannabis plant – what it is, what it does, and how Indian society looks at and reacts to it. From cultural representations in Bollywood over the years to the different strains grown across regions to laws that criminalise marijuana along with other drugs, Madhok’s exploration navigates the world of ganja in India.
At the sidelines of the Kerala Literature Festival 2025, Madhok spoke to The Wire about what he found. Edited excerpts from the interview follow.
What drew you to researching cannabis? How did you decide where you wanted to travel and how you were going to report it?
The seed of this idea came from my editor, Aienla Ozukum of the Aleph Book Company. This is my second book, I’d written a fiction book before this. I think she had been searching for someone to do a ganja book in India for over a decade. Obviously this is a plant that has such a close relationship with India, but I feel that most of the approach towards it had either been overly academic, or overly from the spiritual angle. I don’t think that somebody had done a – I won’t say neutral, but just a true, curious exploration of this plant. And so she pitched the original ganja idea. But then I think the book that has resulted is not something she had imagined, because I took that idea in my own direction. I wanted to touch base in a completely different, holistic way, and honestly it became a very personal book. It actually became the most personal thing I’ve ever written.
In terms of the places I went to, so I already knew a little bit, even before I started this book, about the places that are famous hotspots. So of course Malana Cream, everyone had heard of it, Idukki Gold, everyone had heard of it. I’d already spent some time in my 20s in the Andhra area, and at that time I didn’t realise, but now it has become a major hub for illicit ganja growth. I had networks of friends in the northeast, in Nagaland and Manipur, specifically people who dealt with harder drug addiction, heroin addiction, but often heroin and ganja cross paths a lot in these areas. So that’s how I ended up there. This is how I chose the locations where I would travel to; I think I ended up travelling to eight or nine different states during this journey, so to say.
Tell me about the title, why Ananda?
Karan Madhok
Anand: An Exploration of Cannabis in India
Aleph Book Company, 2024
Initially, the working pitch title was just ‘Ganja’, or ‘The Story of Ganja’. But I really didn’t want this to be a ganja book, because ganja just means one part of the plant. The plant has so many different things. The plant has ganja and charas, but it also has the bhang, which is legal in India. Also the stems make up hemp, the hemp industry, which is a huge industry, and the medicinal industry is a huge growing industry. So I was trying to look at a way of telling the cannabis story as the story of the plant more than just the story of the fruiting top, the ganja part of it.
The book ended up being called Ananda – and I spoke about this in the introductory chapter – because we have these neurotransmitters in our brains, the anandamide. They were named by this scientist because they are responsible for a lot of feelings of joy or bliss from our bodies. And what THC, which is the main psychoactive compound of cannabis, does is that it recreates that bliss. The example I often give is that I like to run, I’ve done marathons. Then you get a runner’s high. The THC in cannabis gives you a high without the work, so to say, it’s a shortcut to that bliss. And so for me, then that bliss became my focus.
I wanted to write a book about ananda and of course cannabis is the main fulcrum of it, but a lot of the ananda I find is through travel and friends and family – and through just present tense experiences of being alive. So that is the way I approached this book.
You say, in what I assume was a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, that like the Constitution, cannabis is secular. Could you explain what that means?
Yes, yes, like the Constitution is supposed to be secular, cannabis is also supposed to be secular (laughs). The stereotype for cannabis in India is that it is used by the babalog, by the Hindu sadhus, and that is true – the Hindu sadhus do use bhang and ganja a lot, the kumbh mela is going on now and every kumbh, the entire cannabis industry in India, even the legal cannabis industry, has a huge shift because the supply and demand completely changes; the kumbh is a major hotspot for this. So of course that was the initial stereotype. But the more I researched, I realised that cannabis has been used culturally by Muslims, it’s been used culturally by Buddhists, it has been used culturally by Sikhs. Even though both in Buddhism and Sikhism there’s a big taboo against it, in some forms, in small forms, hemp and cannabis is used.
And then of course it’s been used in various forms all around the country, in Hindu festivals in the north, in similar festivals in the northeast, in the south – there’s more taboo about it in the south, but it still exists. So I think that’s what I meant by the fact that it’s secular, that it doesn’t just belong to one religion or one people, it is a very cross-cultural, cross-India kind of plant.
You’ve written about the criminalisation of cannabis and who that really imapcts. Could you talk about who faces the brunt of laws like the NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) Act?
One of the examples I used is that I spent a lot of time in the Andhra-Odisha border regions, that’s where now the maximum amount of illicit ganja is grown under the nexus of protection by the mafia, by the Naxalites, and honestly the BSF (Border Security Force) too, they often turn their eye. The people who end up getting arrested are usually the most disenfranchised, it’s usually the tribal people in that region. I spent some time with the people of the Bonda tribe, and they’re considered to be one of the most disenfranchised tribes in the whole country. The Bondas and other tribes nearby, they themselves are not huge users of ganja. I think their vice is the local alcohol. But they are in the cross-culture of this trade, where they cultivate the plant and they transport the plant, and it’s often them who are arrested. Very rarely do you find the head honcho at the top of the pyramid getting arrested. It’s always a lower level, the mules.
I wanted to highlight this fact – and this is again very similar to the rules of cannabis in the US, where half the states it’s very legalised, half the states you can get arrested for having a little bit of weed. Just to keep the prisons filled, it’s almost always the most disenfranchised, the minorities who end up filling these prisons for cannabis use, while people associated with white-collar crimes, or people who commit crimes what are more rich man’s crimes, so to say, are not arrested as often.
Cannabis growing in the Parvati Valley. Photo:
Narender Sharma, Blue Particle Solutions, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What do you think explains the contradictions in how Indian society sees cannabis? It’s either portrayed as something spiritual or enlightening, or it’s a mode of debauchery.
The contradiction stems from our history of it. Historically, India was very pro-cannabis, whether it was for religious purposes or for medicinal purposes. And honestly, when the Vedas were written, the mention of cannabis in the Atharva Veda is from a completely medicinal perspective. Of course these Vedas have become scripture, and we look at them as these books which are supposed to be holy books. But the Atharva Veda, for example, was a medicinal book.
So India, the Indian people, had a relationship with this plant for millennia, and I think it shifted with colonisation. For the English, this wasn’t an indigenous thing; for them it was a foreign drug and they looked at it as beneath them. The same way that they looked at Indians as beneath them, they looked at the vices of Indians as beneath them.
They didn’t have the same attitude towards alcohol because they were used to alcohol. Alcohol to them was something that the working-class British person consumed, but the working-class Indian person – that vice was dirty for them. So I think we were left with that colonial hangover.
That was one half of it, and the other half was the Americans. The Americans, again using racial policies towards marijuana which they applied towards Mexicans, African Americans and Filipino Americans, they then made that into a taboo. The Americans were among the first in the world to push for control of cannabis among other drugs, and I think the rest of the world then just followed their lines.
Suddenly in the last few years, we’ve been seeing CBD products openly available in the Indian market, which is not something we saw even five years ago. Their advertised purposes include treating joint pain and insomnia, for example. Do you think things are changing?
The change in CBD is happening. It is happening a bit slower [than in other places], it’s happening a little too late, but it is happening – you know, things that will happen in India in Indian Standard Time. That is to be expected, right?
But even the CBD industry is very careful to not use the direct reference or advertise too much that this is cannabis/ganja. They will use other language. They often use the term ‘vijaya’. Vijaya is a Vedic term for the same plant, but because it’s got the spiritual connotations, that word is more acceptable, people think “utna kharab nahi ho sakta (it can’t be that bad)”.
The CBD industry is now, I feel, going to be a huge market. Every single future market research in my Google alerts about cannabis tells me that that by 2030-2035, India is going to be one of the biggest CBD markets in the world. Because it is a medicinal solution that offers fewer side effects. In India, this is a natural resource that we have more than anywhere else in the world. Canada is one of the world’s biggest cannabis markets, but there’s more cannabis growing wild in Uttarakhand alone than all of Canada. That is insane to me.
So I think this is going to be a huge market, and it’s already becoming one – a lot of people are getting into the CBD race. I couldn’t believe it, when my book was launched in Delhi, it was sponsored by a CBD company. They showed up and they gave out free CBD samplers. When I started researching this book 2.5-3 years ago, I could never imagine that someone would openly be doing this, but here we are, so things have changed quite a bit.
