Bhajan circles in Kathmandu

A bhajan is a devotional song, sung together rather than performed to an audience: one voice leads, the group answers, and a harmonium, a tabla and small hand cymbals keep the time. In Kathmandu, bhajans brought people together to sing Hindu devotional hymns. Anthropologist James Fisher’s account in Cannabis and Culture (1975) describes evening gatherings where some singers and musicians also shared ganja in a clay pipe. Farmers and businessmen could spend the day working and the night in devotional company.

This was a practice among householders, distinct from the religious lives of wandering sadhus. Fisher presents it in a deliberately provisional overview of cannabis in Nepal. His account documents a setting in the period around prohibition; it does not establish how common cannabis smoking is in Kathmandu’s bhajans today, or suggest that all devotional singing involves it.

Hymns after the working day

Fisher reported at least half a dozen more or less public gatherings taking place nightly in Kathmandu. The same people tended to return. Repeated attendance made the meetings part of ordinary social life, rather than exceptional festivals arranged around cannabis.

They met in or near temples, in satals, or pilgrimage shelters, and in private houses. Singers and musicians sat on the floor. The hymns were usually in Hindi, although the participants themselves spoke Newari or Nepali. Devotional language and everyday speech could therefore differ within the same gathering.

The religious setting was not exclusively Shaiva. Fisher names Bhim Sen, Ganesh, Machendranath, Vishnu and Sarasvati among the deities worshipped at these meetings. An association between cannabis and Shiva should not erase the broader range of devotion he described.

A pipe offered, not required

The ganja passed among the participants in a chilam, a clay pipe related to the chillum. Fisher understood accepting it as an expression of devotional fellowship. He explicitly says that participation in smoking was not obligatory.

That distinction changes the meaning of the scene. People gathered to sing and worship; sharing cannabis was one possible act within the gathering. The account gives no grounds for defining a bhajan as a cannabis ceremony, or for assuming that a person who declined the pipe had refused the religious occasion.

Fisher connects the practice with bhakti, devotion. This is his interpretation of the pipe’s place in the meeting, rather than evidence that cannabis was necessary for devotion or produced a particular spiritual state in everyone.

Fellowship with boundaries

Participants could belong to several castes, but the shared pipe did not dissolve hierarchy. Fisher says that the lowest castes were excluded from sharing it. Women sometimes joined the singing, while rarely, if ever, smoking in the gatherings he described.

His account also distinguishes respect for a devotee from approval of heavy cannabis use. A layman described as a ganjari, someone using ganja excessively, could attract mild disapproval even where the devotional gathering was familiar and publicly known.

These details resist a picture of unrestricted communal equality. Fellowship existed within social rules governing who could share, what conduct was admired and what behaviour drew criticism.

The singing goes on

The circles outlived the cannabis market. In 2015 the writer Srizu Bajracharya sat in on the morning bhajan at Jan Bahal, near Asan bazaar, for ECS Nepal. Its leader, Man Krishna Wawa, had sung there for more than forty years, and had taken over the group when he was young; he played the harmonium, a companion the tabla, and the rest followed. The first song was always for Ganesh, then the singing moved on to Govinda, Kali, Shiva and Saraswati, much the range of deities Fisher had listed. Asked what he got from it, Wawa said he sang because he enjoyed it and came away feeling serene. The feature worried that the old songs and the stories behind them were being forgotten. It says nothing about cannabis, and the photographs of the group show none: whether any of today’s circles still pass a chilam, as some did in Fisher’s time, is not known from it.

A record at the edge of prohibition

Nepal cancelled cannabis cultivation and trading licences in July 1973. Fisher distinguishes this closure of the commercial market from a prohibition of use, which had not yet followed when he wrote. The broader Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act came in 1976.

The chapter identifies a devotional practice, not a statutory religious exemption. Nor does it trace the later enforcement history of these particular circles. Its contribution is a record of householders’ religious sociability in Nepal, beside the better-known stories of ascetic smoking and Kathmandu’s tourist hashish shops.^[1][2]