Sadhus and the chillum

Sadhus are Hindu ascetics who have left family and property behind. Among those devoted to Shiva, smoking cannabis is part of the religious life: an offering to the god, an aid to meditation, and a bond between the men who share the pipe. India and Nepal prohibit charas and ganja, but the enforcement described at religious gatherings has sometimes allowed sadhus to smoke openly.

Who smokes

The custom is prominent among Shaiva orders, but is not confined to them. James Fisher’s interviews at Pashupatinath, reported in 1975, found cannabis-smoking sadhus from a wide range of Hindu sects. The Naga sadhus, the Aghoris and the Tantric Bhairava sects are said to smoke freely as an integral part of their practice. What they smoke is charas, the hand-rubbed resin of the Himalaya, or ganja. Charas is venerated by some as an aspect of Shiva himself.

Lay devotion surrounds it. Fisher described Nepali households keeping plants to offer cannabis to passing sadhus, an act considered meritorious. His account also distinguishes ascetics from householders at Kathmandu’s bhajan gatherings: sharing the pipe there expressed fellowship, but was optional. The singers worshipped several deities, not only Shiva.

The pipe

The chillum is a straight cone of clay, or sometimes of soft stone. A pebble-sized plug of clay sits in the bore as a filter, the charas is packed above it, often with tobacco, and a cotton cloth covers the mouth end.

Before it is lit, the names of Shiva are called out.

The same pipe travelled. A chillum-style pipe spread to Africa, and the Rastafari of Jamaica use one in their own sacrament.

The gatherings

The custom is most visible when the sadhus assemble: at the Kumbh Mela, the great bathing festival, at the Gangasagar fair in Bengal, and at Maha Shivaratri. On that night cannabis is offered to Shiva in temples.

The largest Shivaratri gathering is at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu. Crowds of sadhus travel there from all over Nepal and from India, keep the night vigil, and bathe in the Bagmati river.

Nepal: from handing it out to looking away

Until the 1970s charas was sold in Nepal by licensed dealers, and Kathmandu became the last stop of the hippie trail. Under foreign pressure the government cancelled the licences in 1973 and enacted a broader prohibition in 1976.

The temple took longer to change.

Year	What happened at Pashupatinath
Until 1995	The temple trust gave the sadhus cannabis at Shivaratri, drawn from the Home Ministry’s confiscated stock
1995	The practice ended on the instruction of King Birendra, according to the trust’s director
2018	Trust and police announced that visitors caught smoking would be arrested. Sadhus stayed exempt, but were told not to sell or offer it to visitors. Police said they had detained about 300 people for cannabis in the five months before

The exemption is a matter of practice, announced by the police and the trust. Nepal’s Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act does, curiously, allow the government to hand confiscated cannabis to makers of medicine, which is close to what the trust was doing.

India

India’s act of 1985 bans charas and ganja with no religious exception. The only concession is that the leaf, bhang, lies outside it. Photographs from the melas show sadhus smoking in the open all the same.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}