Ganja Matters : Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chattopadhyaya, Utathya.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (317 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2026.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front cover

Luminos page

Half title

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph-1

Epigraph-2

Contents

Illustrations

Note on Transliteration and Maps

Introduction: The Pursuits of Cannabis

Chapter 1 - A Troubling Subject

Chapter 2 - A Small Peasant Commodity

Chapter 3 - An Excise State

Chapter 4 - An Insurgent Body

Chapter 5 - A Subaltern Deity

Chapter 6 - A Cooperative Experiment

Coda: Ganja and the Nation

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Back cover.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Chattopadhyaya, Utathya Ganja Matters

ISBN:

9780520425705