Part memoir, part documentary, and part travel reportage (in no clear proportion), publisher and bookseller Akshaya Bahibala’s debut book Bhang Journeys tells tales of malady and well-being, all tied to the same source: cannabis.
Bahibala begins with an engrossing account of his ignorant-but-blissful entry into the world of drugs, the adventures and misadventures which follow, and then, eventually, the difficult recovery from being a “slave” to cannabis for ten long years. At a mere thirteen years of age, Bahibala came across Beach Road in his hometown of Puri, in Odisha. There, white tourists from Germany, Russia, France and elsewhere, their naked bodies, their varied languages, and their substance-driven lives—all of these pulled him in. “But the beach kept calling me,” he writes, after leaving university halfway and returning to Beach Road—his chosen university—where “one of the greatest institutions” was the “Government Bhang Shop”. This shop, like a “library”, was a ready supplier of knowledge and materials for use to all curious dabblers and veterans alike. It dealt in both bhang, the dry leaves of the cannabis plant, and ganja, the dry buds and flowers of the cannabis plant—the former is legal in India and the latter, not. It is here that Bahibala’s “education” properly began and a new routine came in motion:
Wake up. Have a joint. Take a shower. Walk to Beach Road or take a ride on your bike to the Government Bhang Shop. Buy a tola for Rs. 50. Roll a joint in front of the Bhang Shop. One with Shiva in an auto rickshaw, one with Bulu standing on the roadside next to the tea stall, one with Jimmy-the-foreigner … one with Sipu … Another joint with some French woman, and one with a Japanese guy … Nicely stoned, return to room. Make one more joint. Go to sleep on a mattress on the floor.
Each day brought more of the same, until the morass of cannabis began to feel almost fatal to him and quitting it remained his only shot at any stable ground.

It is here that the book shifts gears: the memoir ends and the documenting of the stories that surround him begins. Bahibala’s writing on cannabis often exudes the spirit of a former lover who is cautious and wilfully distant, but also forgiving, nostalgic, and, above all, still curious. “What a world it was, what a world it is…,” he writes, like a sigh, more than fifteen years after he parted ways with Beach Road. Alongside enduring memories, it is also his ambition to offer more than just his own experience and to bring other voices together in one book that compels Bahibala to reach outside of himself and find other stories about the production and consumption of bhang, ganja, and even opium across Odisha.
In his “Bhang-Ganja Journal”, he writes of an owner of a government-approved bhang shop glorying in upholding his “family tradition” of selling bhang, a substance he holds in higher regard in comparison to alcohol:
… bhang makes people calm and peace-loving, unlike alcohol, which is a menace to society. After consuming bhang people become believers in non-violence, if someone slaps them on one cheek, they will turn the other cheek.
Then, there is the master sherbet maker of Puri who talks about bhang not being an addictive if one knows how to consume it:
It is to be taken in small quantities to help you digest the food after a good meal and sleep well after a long, hard day’s work … All those stupid people who take it in daytime to use it as a drug have spoiled the good name of bhang.
And in his “Opium Journal”, a son boasts of his late father who was married twice and had eighteen children, “all healthy”. “Opium,” he proclaims, “makes a man strong.” What follows the journals are Bahibala’s excursions into the ganja fields of Odisha. Here, he accompanies the Excise Departments of various districts during raids on illegal ganja plantations and becomes witness to the rage of the local populace. An indigenous woman in the district of Malkangiri curses the ganja-cutting party:
“May your wives be widowed! May your children fall dead just like my ganja plants cut down by your machines.”
Yet, despite the many raids, ganja remains largely within reach. When a bus Bahibala is on halts at a stop, the smell of ganja suddenly fills the air. He looks around and his eyes fall on a group of young men smoking up.
These stories are not what most people will be told, Bahibala writes. They are far from the “official or even popular narrative.” In putting such insightful stories beside each other, Bhang Journeys illuminates a subdued subculture of drug consumers and cultivators in India. Sincere and gripping, this genre-bending book remains loyal to telling the wide array of lesser-known stories that are all powered by cannabis.
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