Behold, a 128-year-old sample of ganja!
If you believe the Internet, the sinsemilla technique was developed in the 1970s by Mexican cartels.
But check out this botanical sample of ganja from 1896. This material was collected in Berar Province in central India and came via Kew Gardens to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. A friend snapped the photo on a recent visit.
‘Ganja’ is the original name for sinsemilla or semi-sensi – i.e., seedless or very lightly seeded female inflorescences of cannabis, typically for smoking, though the product is often chewed in paan mixes.
Far from being a 20th Century innovation, the technique of roguing out males to produce a crop of seedless cannabis buds was likely extant at least half a millennium before ‘Mexican cartels’ were even a thing.
The method we know as the ‘sinsemilla technique’ was already strongly implied in a medieval Sanskrit alchemical compendium. Its compilers were Nāth Shaiva alchemists based at Srisailam (Mailkarjun), a temple complex in the jungle highlands of Southeast India, about 180 miles inland from the Bay of Bengal. The text is named the Ānandakanda (आनन्दकन्द) or ‘Root of Bliss’ and dates to at least as early as the 15th Century – and perhaps as early as the 12th.
This is the Indic knowledge that Mexican mafiosos were ultimately drawing on when they upped their game in the 70s. They had plenty of incentive to do so when a product such as Thai stick fetched weight-for-weight many multiples the price of gold on the American market.
Together with ganja, knowledge of the sinsemilla technique will have arrived in the ports and plantations of the Americas with marginalized figures from the east such as Indian indentured labourers (‘coolies’) and lascars (block-hired crew from east of the Cape, mostly Muslims), who brought their predilection for the herb with them on voyages around the world during the Age of Sail.
In regions with a long history with ganja such as tropical South and Southeast Asia, even folks who don’t themselves indulge are aware that it’s essential to identify and cut down males to raise a crop. My most recent experience of this was while chatting with a grandma in a village in Central Laos, none of whose family cultivated or even consumed cannabis, yet who readily volunteered to impart this crucial ganja know-how.
You might notice that the description at Pitt Rivers uses the name ‘bhang’. ‘Bhang’ in this context is a generic term for any drug-type cannabis, whether sinsemilla (ganja), resin (charas / hashish), or the most basic product in the form of leaf and seeded inflorescences for use as edibles (bhang).
Berar is a former province of India that became part of what’s now Maharashtra. This region includes Bombay (Mumbai), which is the port through which most Indian ganja was exported to the wider world during the Age of Sail. That’s the era during which ganja and the tropical landraces (Sativas) necessary to produce this product were globalised, over the course of a couple of centuries becoming – until our new era of Indica–Sativa hybrids – the most widespread form of drug-type cannabis domesticate.
Ports to which taxed Maharashtran ganja was shipped from Bombay include Zanzibar, Aden, Marseilles, Liverpool, and London. From the docklands of Britain, much of this product then made its way to the Caribbean. Crucially, this was just the taxed trade in cannabis drugs.
Because India and neighbouring producing states such as Nepal and Afghanistan hosted a thriving untaxed market, and smuggling of charas and ganja was rife across the almost unpoliceable ranges of mountains, river networks, deserts, and oceans that made up India’s internal and external borders. Often the product on the ‘black market’ was not just cheaper but much higher quality than that at government-licensed outlets.
128-year-old ganja – seedless or very lightly seeded inflorescences of a tropical landrace from Maharashtra, India (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford)
Another photo of this sample was uploaded to Reddit and is shown above. Evidently, this is at very least semi-sensi, but by the looks of it is most likely truly seedless sinsemilla.
To this day in South and Southeast Asia, you can encounter batches of ganja that are entirely devoid of seeds. In large weights of unpressed buds I bought in the 2000s in regions such as Vientiane, Laos and Nashik, Maharastra there was not a single seed to be found. For someone who loves good traditional herb yet also wants to collect authentic old-school ganja landraces before they vanish, this was both a blessing and a curse.
