Abstract
<jats:p>Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from Cannabis sativa L. In British India, colonial administrators sought 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 incongruities between regulatory efforts to pursue the plant and people’s leisurely, devotional, rebellious, and creative pursuits. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant generated and co-constituted empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the burdensome criminalization and “drug-ness” of cannabis, Chattopadhyaya puts the plural, multidirectional, and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis. “Utathya Chattopadhyaya traces the remarkable journey of Cannabis sativa, revealing its surprising facets as a historic commodity of India and the British Empire. An exhilarating and important study.” — Sudipta Sen, author of Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River “Ganja Matters is the book about drugs, South Asia, and the British Empire that we have been waiting for. By focusing critically on a humble plant, Chattopadhyaya brilliantly reimagines religion, labor, and resistance.” — Susan Zieger, author of Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space “Complex, dense, and wide-ranging, this book is poised to shift paradigms in global and imperial history.” — Rebecca Lemon, author of Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England “An incisive and exciting study that departs from the vast majority of cannabis histories to interrogate the material, social, and symbolic life of cannabis plant matter.” — Thembisa Waetjen, Professor of History, University of Johannesburg Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.</jats:p>