To go with the new chat with Aussie Gunja Man here’s a great painting of stoned yogis from 1780s Rajasthan.
Satirical paintings of ascetics (Hindu or Muslim) in states of extreme wastedness were a long-running theme in India by the 1700s, continuing a Persianate genre of ‘folks getting really high in parks’ that has its roots in 1500s Herat, Afghanistan.
The dreadlocked figure smeared in ash and sat on a charpoy in a reed hut is a senior Shaiva yogi, red-eyed and toking on a narghile (water pipe). The figures ranged about are his entourage, totally dined, smoking narghiles or preparing brews of bhang.
The role of the animals in the scene could be interpreted through the Sufi teachings of the Nafs (human self or soul). At the baser levels of the Nafs is the Nafs al-Hayawaniyyah, animalistic urges, impulses, and desires, which seek immediate gratification in the pleasures of food, sex, possessions, and ‘drugs’ such as opium and cannabis.
At the centre of the scene is a more ambiguous, polyvalent symbol of Persianate mysticism: the green parrot. Perhaps its presence is intended to leave open a question much-debated in the Indo-Persianate world of the time: is the ‘gyan‘ (trance, high, or knowledge) brought about by cannabis never more than a mere illusory parroting of realization or can the experience be a conduit to authentic mystical intoxication (mastī)?
As discussed in the podcast, this painting is among the earliest in the genre where people are shown smoking cannabis. The earliest references from literature to cannabis smoking appear about a century earlier: 1640s Persia for charas and 1670s South India for ganja. All postdate the introduction of tobacco to Eurasia from the Americas.
