Fr. 51.50

Ganja Matters - Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

English · Paperback / Softback

Will be released 05.06.2026

Description

Read more










A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent. Ganja Matters follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits among people. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and "drug-ness" of cannabis, Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis.

About the author










Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor of the journal The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.

Product details

Authors Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Publisher University Presses
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Release 05.06.2026
 
EAN 9780520425699
ISBN 978-0-520-42569-9
Illustrations 11 b-w illustrations, 2 maps
Subjects Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories
Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous

NATURE / Plants / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Imperialism, India, Colonialism & imperialism, Colonialism and imperialism, Asian History, HISTORY / Asia / South / India

Customer reviews

No reviews have been written for this item yet. Write the first review and be helpful to other users when they decide on a purchase.

Write a review

Thumbs up or thumbs down? Write your own review.

For messages to CeDe.ch please use the contact form.

The input fields marked * are obligatory

By submitting this form you agree to our data privacy statement.