The Hindu Clone: A Legendary Lost Cut Rediscovered

These excerpts were taken from a long and wide ranging conversation. We felt that letting Gene drive was the best way to present the information.

Mean Gene:

"Going into the mid ‘80s, the seed trade in Amsterdam took off. Sam the Skunkman taking things like haze and skunk and sacred seeds to Europe, which I understand was his work. They had a Hindu kush, which I'm not sure if that's the same Hindu kush that I would have or if it would be the one that came from Neville from a similar time period, in the mid '80s.

There was also a guy close to where I live who went to Afghanistan and brought back a lot of seeds. Those got spread around a bit more and worked into different things. They were full of all these different types, and they named them by the colors because that's what stuck out. 

There was a blue they called Blue Indica, there was a green, and one that finished yellowish gold, purple and black. They all got named like that. Some of what he brought back wound up in some of my stuff, like my Grape Soda Skunk and my Pina.

One that I had gotten had been named the Dirt over the years because it had a really earthy smell that they loved. The Burmese/Indica hybrid I mentioned earlier turned into what they called Purp. My buddy took the Dirt and Purp, mixed those together. That wound up in a bunch of my stuff."

"Back in those days you could grow any seed that would finish and give you weed that wouldn't mold or die and it was worth the same price so keeping keeping clones was a weird thing to do in the '80s. So it's interesting to me that people started to keep these clones. I think that was when people started coming back and asking for a certain strain again growers realized that people would maybe pay a premium, even in the '80s.

Going back to the '80s, I only knew of a few clones. There was a "Purple" that was from Legett. There was the Hindu, and then there was a clone that my mom planted from seed and then cloned right at the end of the '80s. Other than that, I never really heard of clones much back then. It was mostly a seed culture. You could make some seeds every year, plant them and you get a bunch of weed and you mix it all together and it goes for the same price.

A lot of my work is a mix of those various things. All of that early stuff wound up in my breeding."

"In '92-'93 the the indoor era came in. I was down in Sonoma County and I remember indoor becoming more common and people being like, “Yeah, we'll take the indoor, but we're going to pay a couple of hundred less a pound because it's indoor.” People initially thought it was an inferior product. It's not what everyone was used to. It looked weird. It seems anemic and fake and the color's too light, the resin's too white, and all this stuff that now, is what everybody wants.

At that point clones were becoming more popular and consistent looking pounds were in demand and people were starting move a lot more volume. It still wasn't so much of an issue of which clone it was, just that it was high quality. So people would grow things like Salmon Creek Big Bud, Trainwreck and Mr. Nice Guy. There were these certain clones that people grew that they knew would be reliable and produce as much weed as they could, as fast as they could.

Then people got Urkle, Sour and then OG. Each one of those waves, it was all people could sell. In the days of the Urkle, the Hindu was the parallel hot thing because Granddaddy Purp and Purple Urkle and the whole Bay Area went really crazy for what they called Grapes, which was just anything in the realm of Purple Urkle and Granddaddy Purp. At the same time, LA only wanted Kush, and very few people had it, the OG Kush guys, all the guys who everyone knows about now with Josh D and Cypress Hill and these other dudes who were in that circle, they had the kush's.

The people who were buyers in L.A. eventually discovered that up here we had something that was the same as Bubba or Master Kush that we called Hindu, and people were producing it alongside Urkle. It had hung around because it was so good and people loved it. It wound up hanging around long enough that when the kush craze started in LA, we still had it up here. When people connected the dots, they went, Wow, okay, so this is another kush. They would take it to L.A. and sell it as Bubba Kush."

"The Hindu Kush that I have came from a clone that's probably from this area and its the oldest clone that I know of. My buddy Ted from Canna Country, I think he probably graduated 1990. He remembers starting high school here, coming from Legett and he recalls having already been seeing and hearing about the Hindu clone for a while before he ever started coming to school here. So that would put it at least as far back as '88, and more likely, probably '86, somewhere in there. 

It's hard tell if it would be from Sam the Skunkman’s Hindu from Sacred Seeds, or if it would be Neville's Hindu. I think it's probably a Neville's Hindu because of the time frame. Also, it seems to have a lot in common with some of the Northern lights stuff.

The Hindu that I have I believe to be either the parent of whatever wound up making Bubba kush, or something parallel, meaning Bubba kush has a mother, and that mother was a sister or a mother or a daughter or something of this Hindu clone. 

The time frame puts the Hindu clone significantly ahead of Bubba. It's one of those things that's been around up here as far back as I know of any clones being kept because in the weed growing business, there wasn't really an incentive to keep clones unless people really wanted to grow indoor and have a really even canopy or finishing time or because they were attached to a plant because they just really liked it for the effects or the flavors."

"The Hindu was common all the way until the cookies craze. When that came in, it killed Sour, and then it slowly killed off OG. By the time Gelato came, the nail was in the coffin for Sour and OG. They weren't good production products anymore. It was also the death of the Hindu clone…it disappeared. I was so used to it being accessible that I hadn't bothered to keep it because it wasn't good for what I was doing at the time, which was growing these really big outdoor plants.

The Hindu for a long time was this Holy Grail clone because I had bred with it...I loved it. All my buddies love to smoke it. It was the weed when somebody grew it indoors, the real heads would be like, screw it, I'm going to buy a quarter pound of this for my head stash because someone had a nice batch of it. Even though I got 100 pounds of some other stuff, I’m going to go ahead and grab a nice chunk of this so I have this Hindu to smoke on because it's super tasty, super smokeable with a great, really relaxing high. It makes you feel really good, but it's not dull. It's not sleepy. It has a euphoric feel good high."

"I had a buddy who I had asked for years because he kept it longer than everybody and passed it around a little more. I just kept asking him, ‘Hey, you got any leads on that?’ and he never did. Then my other buddy's partner hit me up at and was like, Hey, we got this Hindu, and I was like, Damn, can I get it? They were like, "Yeah, but don't give it to everybody because we're trying to see we can create a market again."

I just wanted to breed with it, so they gave it back to me. My buddy who gave it to me ended up growing it and was like, I don't know if it's the same Hindu. I was like, Dude, it's the same. I mean, as soon as I saw the little bit of underneath that didn't get enough light and it got a little bit of popcorn that budded on the bottom, it has the most distinct smell, where if you know it, it just It just slaps you in the face when you smell it.

I don't know if they even kept it because it's one of those plants that you don't really... You almost have to know what it is to appreciate it."

"For me, it was one of the best cuts from back in the day. It's the oldest clone from my area that I know of. People say pre-98 Bubba. This is pre-Bubba, Bubba. This is the type of weed that predates all the others.

The way that it produces a lot of resin indoors, it just turns completely white. It looks fuzzy, but it has heads. It makes good hash. It's one of the few things around here from the whole big wave of years and years of all these things coming and going. And remarkably its still here.

From the mid to late '80s all the way until probably 2010, it was still being produced. It's the only clone I know that goes back so far and then has come forward so far.

When I post things about it on social media, people are like, 

"Oh, man, I remember that one from back in the day. I used to get it from so and so." 

I'm like, This is that one. This is the Hindu that people just call Hindu, not Hindu kush. It's not a Hindu Kush seed line. There's a whole lot of those. It's this one clone that just... They used to call it Hindu Indu. That was her nickname. People who knew that one, that was what it is.

I consider it an important plant and why when I got it back, I made as many S1s as I could in a little session and made a bunch of outcrosses to see what worked with it because its in Root Beer, it's in Jaro, it's in Sky Cuddler Kush, Sky Cuddler Double Kush. There's a whole bunch of things that I have put the Hindu in. Then when I wanted to work with it further I just didn't have it. It wasn't available. I looked through things to try to find it and breed it back and lean in that direction. I had reasonable success, but never quite what I really wanted.

These feminized crosses, it pops out and it's that old friendly place that you remember if you remember it. 

That's the story of it."