http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
empire and the pursuits of cannabis in British India
xvi, 296 pages : illustrations (black and white), maps (black and white) ; 24 cm
"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"--
Introduction : the pursuits of cannabis -- A troubling subject -- A small peasant commodity -- An excise state -- An insurgent body -- A subaltern deity -- A cooperative experiment -- Coda : ganja and the nation.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license. To view a copy of the license, visit. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2026]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license. To view a copy of the license, visit.