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

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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: Hardback
• Release: 05.06.2026
• EAN: 9780520425682
• ISBN: 978-0-520-42568-2
• No. of pages: 304
• 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