Himalayan landrace charas – Garhwali not ‘Malana Cream’

This is a photo I took of some hand-rubbed Himalayan charas while ‘strain hunting’ back in 2009. Digging through old files, I finally stumbled upon the original jpeg.

A lot of cannabis sites have used the image and claimed it shows ‘Malana Cream’ or some other more recent rebranding of the famous hashish from Kullu and Parvati valleys in Himachal.

In fact, these charas braids are from a mountain village above one of the upper tributaries of the Ganges River in the Indian province of Uttarakhand – several hundred kilometres distant from Kullu and Parvati, and closer in many ways to Far-West Nepal. Braiding charas in this way is characteristic of Garhwal, Kumaon, and neighbouring districts of Nepal such as Dharchula – but not of Himachal.

The name of the river here is the Bhagirathi, and the village that produces this charas sits high over a hot spring en route to the most revered source of the Ganges at Gangotri, below Gaumukh Glacier.

The charas itself is quite different from the Malana type. Heavily perfumed and hashy, this is nevertheless harder resin with coarser aromas. It delivers a sharply ‘zingy’ stimulating effect that evens out into a long-lasting, warmly luminous buzz. The Pahari men of these valleys will toke bidis of this stuff while tending fields and livestock at 1500 to 3500 metres altitude – and higher.

A friend I went trekking with described the charas of Uttarakhand as a more ‘rustic’ product, which is a nice way of putting it. There’s an authenticity to this old-school charas, and for all its flaws, its effect is just so much nicer than the increasingly dopey ‘Dutchified’ offerings from around Malana.

Sadly, the inevitable is already underway – enterprising foreigners and cosmopolitan Indian kids from cities such as Delhi and Bombay are bringing hybrid seed and seed from Parvati Valley up to Garhwal, driven by the astronomical prices fetched by ‘Malana Cream’ (pick a name of your choice) among an increasingly affluent clientele. Sticky means money.

Some people – seldom the farmers themselves – will be making a tidy profit. But as those numbers tick up in their bank accounts, and chains of zeros and ones flow across the ether, diversity disappears fast from one of our most ancient crops. Hybridization is how cannabis goes extinct, and traditional cannabis varieties are being hybridized out of existence.

With those old Himalayan landraces goes a swathe of possibities, not just for cannabis itself but for the types of experience cannabis can create. People lucky enough to have tried this type of old-school charas will know what that means.