Cannabis in South Asian Medicine: From the Vedas to Delhi's Courts

October 4, 2026

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Walk into a government-licensed shop in Jaipur and you can buy a bhang drink over the counter. That's not a loophole or a relic of some lax enforcement regime -- it's the tail end of a medical tradition that's been running, mostly uninterrupted, for roughly three thousand years. Cannabis in South Asia didn't arrive with hippie trail backpackers in the 1960s or get smuggled in through colonial trade routes. It was already there, named and categorized and written into the foundational medical texts of the subcontinent, long before most of the plants we now consider staples of Western herbalism had names at all.

In Sanskrit it's called Vijaya -- the victorious one -- and it shows up in the Atharva Veda as one of five sacred plants, placed in the company of substances that ancient compilers clearly considered worth preserving for posterity. That's a strikingly high bar. And right now, that same plant is the subject of an active case before the Delhi High Court, where judges are weighing how far India's modern narcotics law should bend to accommodate a medical practice older than the law itself, older than the nation-state, older than most of the pharmacological categories we use to talk about it today. The line from Vedic compilers to Delhi High Court judges isn't a revival story. It never stopped.

Vijaya in the Vedas: cannabis as sacred plant

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The Atharva Veda is one of the oldest texts in Hinduism's sacred canon, generally dated by modern scholarship to somewhere around 1200 to 1000 BCE, and it names cannabis as one of five sacred plants -- bhanga, as it's rendered there, alongside soma and a handful of others whose precise botanical identities scholars still argue about. What's not in dispute is the company it kept. These weren't throwaway herbal footnotes; they were plants considered significant enough to anchor religious and medical thinking for a civilization that was, at the time, among the more sophisticated in the world.

What the classical physicians actually prescribed it for

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By the time you get to the classical Ayurvedic canon, cannabis has a defined clinical job description. The Sushruta Samhita and the Charaka Samhita, the two texts that still anchor Ayurvedic medical training today, list cannabis as a nervine tonic, an analgesic, and a digestive aid -- not a vague wellness herb, but something prescribed for specific complaints. Physicians reached for it to manage pain, calm anxiety, reduce inflammation, and treat what they classified as neurological disorders, decades of accumulated clinical observation encoded into formulas long before anyone had a word for cannabinoid receptors.

Bhang, ganja, and a 1957 UN report on malaria country

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Classical practitioners also weren't treating cannabis as one undifferentiated substance -- they split it into preparations with distinct jobs, a distinction that still structures Indian drug law today. Bhang, made from the leaves and stems, was consumed as a drink or ground into a paste, used traditionally to settle digestion, bring down fever, and ease anxiety. Ganja, the dried flowering tops, carried more concentrated potency and got reserved for chronic pain, nervous disorders, and insomnia -- a 1500 A.D. text called the Dhurtasamagama specifically names ganja as a soporific and an appetite stimulant, language that reads almost clinically by the standards of its era.

Nepal's parallel tradition and Maha Shivratri

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A 1957 bulletin from the United Nations on cannabis use in India adds a layer of documentation that's easy to overlook: it recorded cannabis, smoked or drunk, being used as a prophylactic against malaria in endemic regions of the country. The same bulletin noted that bhang beverages functioned as a popular household remedy for gonorrhoea and for dysuria -- painful urination -- the kind of domestic, un-glamorous medical use that rarely makes it into mythologized accounts of sacred plants. In the sub-montane and Terai tracts of what's now Uttar Pradesh, local practice held that bhang specifically, not ganja, was the more effective anti-malarial preparation, a distinction that suggests this wasn't superstition applied indiscriminately but a body of folk pharmacology with its own internal logic about which preparation did what.

How India regulates it now: Schedule E1 and bhang shops

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Nepal ran a largely parallel track. A review published in Natural Product Communications in May 2026 traces cannabis's long-standing role inside Nepal's own Ayurvedic healing tradition, where its use is framed around restoring balance between body, mind, and spirit -- the same conceptual architecture that underpins Ayurveda across the subcontinent. That framework intersects most visibly with public life during Maha Shivratri, the festival honoring Shiva, when cannabis consumption becomes traditional and is widely tolerated even where formal law is less permissive. Nepal and India share enough of the same Ayurvedic DNA that the medical reasoning lines up closely, but the two countries have diverged sharply on how formally that tradition gets written into enforceable drug law -- a gap that's become more pronounced as India's own regulatory system has grown more bureaucratized.

Inside the Delhi High Court case reshaping the debate

India's current regulatory answer is a layered one. Ayurvedic cannabis medicines fall under Schedule E1, overseen by the Ministry of AYUSH and licensed through state Excise Departments, meaning these are legal pharmaceutical products -- but only available against a valid prescription, not off-the-shelf herbal supplements. The legal foundation underneath all of this is a carve-out in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, which explicitly excludes leaves and seeds from its definition of cannabis. That single exclusion is what makes bhang legal and what allows leaf-derived Ayurvedic formulations like Vijaya to be manufactured at all. On the ground, that translates into government-authorized bhang shops legally operating in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Assam, and West Bengal, with states like Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh going a step further by actively encouraging hemp and medicinal cannabis cultivation as agricultural policy rather than merely tolerating a legacy carve-out.

Strip away the ministry acronyms and licensing schedules and what you're left with is a strikingly old pattern repeating itself: bureaucracy catching up to practice rather than inventing it. Schedule E1 prescriptions and leaf-based bhang carve-outs are just the current vocabulary for distinctions Ayurvedic physicians were already drawing a thousand years before the NDPS Act existed in any form.

That's why the Delhi High Court's July 2026 deadline is worth watching closely rather than filing away as routine litigation news. The Union of India's own argument in the January 23, 2026 judgment -- that no complete ban exists, pointing to the medical and scientific cultivation proviso already sitting in Section 8 of the 1985 Act -- amounts to an admission that the legal scaffolding for broader medical use is already there, waiting on political will rather than legal invention. The case, brought by the Great Legalisation Movement India Trust, founded in 2014 by Viki Vaurora, pushed the court to order the Union government to actually consult scientific, medical, and civil society stakeholders rather than let the question sit unresolved indefinitely. A June 29, 2026 update confirmed that review was still tracking toward its deadline.

Whatever the Union government decides, it will mostly be formalizing something that's already been quietly true in villages across Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh for generations. Readers following this should check in on whether that July 2026 decision has actually landed -- this is a legal picture genuinely in motion, not a settled one, and the gap between what the law says and what communities have practiced for three thousand years is exactly the space regulators are now being asked to close.