Jahangir orders bang sales stopped in the bazaars

Jahangir’s memoir records a direct order against selling bang in the bazaars during his fourth regnal year. It is an early example of a cannabis restriction issued by a Mughal ruler, preserved in his own account of government. The wording makes the object of the order unusually clear: market sales.

What the emperor ordered

In Alexander Rogers’s translation, revised by Henry Beveridge, the entry says that bang and buza were considered injurious and should no longer be sold in the bazaars. Buza is separately identified as rice spirit. The same passage orders the abolition of gambling and describes the commands as stringent.

The distinction between the two substances matters. The parenthetical identification as rice spirit belongs to buza; it does not turn bang into an alcoholic beverage. Keeping the terms separate also avoids an error that can arise when an imperfect transcription merges or substitutes the names.

Dating the passage

The order appears on printed page 157 of volume I of the 1909 edition. Its surrounding section begins with the fourth New Year after Jahangir’s accession, which the translation places in March 1609. The intervening entries proceed through the months of that year.

The order itself is introduced as occurring on a Friday, the twenty-second, after a reference to Shaʿban. This record uses the year 1609 rather than supplying an independently unverified Gregorian day. Describing it simply as a decree of 1610 would overlook the chronology in the cited edition.

A sales restriction

The passage does not state that every cannabis plant was to be destroyed, that possession became a separate offence, or that all private consumption was forbidden. It also gives no cannabis-specific prison term, fine or corporal punishment.

Those omissions define the limits of this account. A prohibition on public sale can be historically significant without establishing the full legal treatment of cultivation, household use or medicine. The accompanying gambling order places it within a broader intervention in public conduct.

An order and its implementation

An imperial memoir supplies evidence that the ruler claimed to have issued a command. Assessing implementation would require additional administrative records or independent observations of markets after the order.

The event therefore appears in the history of India as Mughal context. It does not establish uninterrupted prohibition across the territories of the later Indian state, or justify a continuous score change extending from 1609 to the present.^[1]