Available From UC Press

Ganja Matters

Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

Utathya Chattopadhyaya

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.

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.

"In this incisive and exciting study, Utathya Chattopadhyaya departs from a vast majority of cannabis histories that have focused on the 'drug-ness' of this substance and instead interrogates the material, social, and symbolic life of cannabis plant matter."—Thembisa Waetjen, Professor of History, University of Johannesburg

"Ganja Matters is deeply innovative in its ability to foreground the histories of intoxicant commodities and other nonhuman actors in colonial political economy. 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

"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

"This book traces the remarkable journey of Cannabis sativa, revealing its many surprising facets as a historic commodity of India and the British Empire—as a sacred offering and profane intoxicant, a supposed agent of both spiritual awakening and madness, a catalyst for rebellion, and ultimately an exemplary object of national reform. An exhilarating and important study."—Sudipta Sen, author of Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River

304 pp.6 x 9Illus: 11 b/w illustrations, 2 maps

9780520425682$95.00|£80.00Hardcover

Jun 2026