Ganja matters (2026)

Ganja Matters

Ganja Matters

Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

Publication

Author	Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Affiliation	University of California, Santa Barbara
Publisher	University of California Press
Place	Oakland
Published	2026
Status	Published
Edition	1st
Pages	316
Language	English

Coverage

Subjects	Colonial cannabis policy, Excise and taxation, Bengal ganja cultivation, Multispecies history, Subaltern religion, Colonial labour
Relevance	Social history of colonial ganja regulation in Bengal, the heartland of South Asian landrace ganja

Access

ISBN	9780520425682 (hardback), 9780520425699 (paperback), 9780520425705 (ebook)
DOI	10.1525/luminos.276
Open access	Read free

Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India is a social history of cannabis in colonial South Asia by Utathya Chattopadhyaya, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The University of California Press published it in June 2026. The open-access edition, in the press's Luminos programme, carries a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licence.^{: copyright page} Against the run of cannabis historiography that has concentrated on the plant's twentieth-century criminalisation, Chattopadhyaya treats ganja as plant matter at the heart of colonial political economy, arguing that the cannabis plant co-constituted the histories of empire, gender, subalternity and labour under British rule in South Asia.

Author

Chattopadhyaya is a historian of empire, capitalism and intoxicants, and coeditor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. His prior published work on cannabis includes a 2019 study of dagga prohibition in southern Africa that traced the imperial circuits of drug knowledge between 1893 and 1925, a 2022 article on the legal and linguistic framing of cannabis in colonial India, a 2023 article on ganja and gendered bodies in colonial India, and a 2024 chapter on excise as a sacral binding mechanism in a Bloomsbury volume on biocultural empire. The monograph draws these threads into a single argument and adds the labour-history vocabulary Chattopadhyaya has developed in parallel work on E.P. Thompson and the internationalist tradition.

Argument

The book takes ganja as plant matter rather than as a drug. Chattopadhyaya proposes matter as a category more fundamental and capacious than "drug", one that unites otherwise disparate archives and holds plant and human history together.^: 11 The term is drawn from feminist materialism and from the word's own history, through the Latin mater and materia and through the verb "to matter", so that ganja names at once the physical substance the plant is composed of, the several intoxicants made from it and something of consequence to the people and institutions that handled it.^: 7–8

That framing is set against a historiography Chattopadhyaya describes as organised by the twentieth-century criminalisation and medicalisation of cannabis, which the book sidelines in order to begin with the licit and polysemic life of the plant and its material forms.^: 7 Scholarship on drugs in South Asia has, on this account, lacked both a theory of colonialism and attention to the materiality of the products grown and manufactured in India. In claiming a global scale it has historicised Western perceptions of intoxicants rather than the intoxicants themselves.^: 5

Ganja and bhang are treated as unstable nouns whose meanings shift with context. The book discards the technical separation between them, calls both ganja products and sets charas aside as resin deserving separate treatment.^: 8 Chattopadhyaya keeps ganja irreducible to Cannabis sativa L., following Projit Mukharji's caution against retrobotanising indigenous plant names with Linnaean ones, and treats the space of difference between ganja and cannabis as a site of scrutiny in its own right.^: 17

Colonial science fixed ganja as the flowering top of the female plant, bhang as the leaf and charas as the resin. The book reads that triplex as an instance of "liberal biology", a mode of thought that individuates organic bodies through rational-seeming separations imposed on relational and systemic networks, reducing a complex bodily system to three abstract categories matching the plant's commodified forms.^: 10 The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 is read in the same register. Its questionnaire was built on David Prain's threefold typology, and its conclusion drew on James Anthony Froude for an argument about public morality and on John Stuart Mill for one about general conscience. The Commission rejected prohibition while recommending stronger taxation, standardisation, licensing and antismuggling work.^: 14–16 On Chattopadhyaya's account it met a wide spectrum of languages, nomenclatures and relational experience, then displaced that spectrum to the margins of a three-name classification that delimited the plant's governability.^: 17

The wider claim is for a multispecies imperial history. Following Antoinette Burton, the book treats empire as an objective and a horizon rather than a stable location and argues that the materiality of cannabis regularly broke through imperial logic as the plant's gender variance spilled over Linnaean binaries, as excise administrators struggled with statistics, prices and nomenclature and as cultivators pressed the state for concessions.^{: 13, 17} Chattopadhyaya stretches the long nineteenth century to span 1770 to 1940 and follows the material biographies of ganja across eastern, northern and central British India.^: 12

The six chapters carry the argument through separate histories. The first sets the colonial effort to define cannabis biologically against what the book calls the ecumene of the ganjakhor, the world of proverbs, fables and songs in which the experience of intoxication was described. It works outward from the 1877 report by Hem Chunder Kerr and from George Watt's admission that the vernacular names could not be separated with certainty.^{: 20–21, 25–31} The second is an agrarian history of Naogaon and the Ganja Mahal, the tract around the town in Rajshahi district, where ganja was a small peasant commodity in Shahid Amin's sense, grown and manufactured in smallholding households whose sale of it serviced intergenerational debt, on land opened to settlement after the Bengal famine of 1770 and worked with Santal labour.^{: 21, 60–63} The third argues that an excise state emerged from the encounter between peasant producers and revenue officials: ganja was taxed as a superfluity under a principle inherited from Dutch and English fiscal practice, yet the same state protected, extended and managed its circulation.^{: 21–22, 92–94}

The remaining chapters turn to culture, devotion and cooperative economics. Chapter four traces the bhang-drinking Hindustani subject through the periodical culture of the Indian Rebellion of 1857–59, arguing that the racialised, Islamophobic and gendered association of cannabis with irrational violence was settled in print before asylum officials reached the same conclusion in the 1870s and that addiction's older sense of submission to religious devotion is the right frame for that history.^{: 22, 118–122} Chapter five recovers Trinath, a deity who appeared in Bengal in the 1870s and spread through Bihar, Assam and Orissa. Trinath's worship required no temple, priest or canon, admitted Hindu and Muslim devotees and turned on passing a single ganja pipe around the congregation across caste boundaries; the tradition, in the book's formulation, was not quite respectable and yet not unpopular.^{: 22–23, 146–153} Chapter six reads the de facto producers' strike of April 1916, when no cultivator in Naogaon applied for a licence, together with the monopoly award that followed, as the ground on which the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society ploughed ganja profits back into schools, scholarships and Hindu and Muslim sites of worship, until the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930, Congress prohibitionism and the Depression curbed its ambitions.^{: 23, 183–184}

The coda follows ganja into the provincial legislatures created by the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935 and into the constitutional politics of prohibition, where Harendra Coomar Mookerjee's writings prefigured the nationalist mainstream's view of ganja and bhang.^{: 23, 222–225} It closes on the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985, which names ganja and charas but leaves bhang unnamed, shielding cannabis leaves in a zone of exception through what Chattopadhyaya calls a palpable absence in the letter of the law.^{: 225, 227–228} Chattopadhyaya presents the narrative detail itself as part of the argument, on the ground that ganja's material pasts have had little scholarly attention.^: 23

Sources and method

The research rests on government records held in India, Bangladesh and the United Kingdom. Chattopadhyaya lists the National Archives of India in New Delhi, the National Archives of Bangladesh in Dhaka, the National Library in Kolkata together with the West Bengal State Archives, the India Office Records at the British Library and the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew.^: 261–262 The series consulted are largely fiscal and administrative: abkari and opium branches, excise, revenue and land revenue, agriculture, co-operative departments, judicial and legislative papers, police intelligence and the reports on native newspapers.^: 261–262 To these are added the British Library's Vernacular Tracts and Endangered Archives Project collections and, in Dhaka, the Jessore Collection and the Rajshahi Division District Records. Digital collections at the Wellcome Trust Library and the National Library of Scotland are also listed.^: 261–262

One holding in that list is not an institutional archive. Chattopadhyaya worked in the record room of the Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Co-operative Society at Naogaon, drawing on its photograph album, its annual meeting folders and its public distribution pamphlets.^: 262 A photograph taken by the author in 2017 shows the room shuttered. Its caption records that water damage, infestation and crumbling paint have destroyed much of the Society's archive.^: 221 The book reports that documents in the record room have been destroyed while successive court cases over the buildings remain stalled.^: 229

The colonial reports at the centre of the story are read against their own grain. Kerr's 1877 report on ganja cultivation and trade, Prain's 1893 report and 1904 morphological paper, Watt's Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, the published volumes of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and the district gazetteers and settlement reports are treated as evidence about the administrative thinking that produced them as much as about cannabis.^{: 25–31, 36–39} Chattopadhyaya writes of inverting the regular grain of the archive's certitude and names Ann Laura Stoler's Along the Archival Grain among the models for the book's approach to imperial history.^{: 30, 239} The Commission's evidence is handled as a record with a known shape of absence: women, workers, peasants and low-caste people are not among its voices, although the book argues that ganja's polysemy among the poor percolated into the responses anyway.^: 15

Bengali-language print carries much of the local detail. The serialised chronicle of Naogaon by Kalimohan Chakrabarti, a moneylender-accountant for the Balihar Rajbari estate who began publishing in the weekly Hindu Ronjika in 1910 and continued in the Noakhali Sammilani, was collected as Ganjar Golpo by the Kazi Press at Naogaon in 1913 and supplies the ganja-burning scene that opens the book.^{: 1, 60} Khan Saheb Mohammad Afzal's Naogan Mohkumar Itihash, published at Bogra in 1970, supplies the ganja workers' song used as an epigraph and the account of what partition did to the trade.^{: vii, 228, 261} Kalinath Chaudhuri's 1901 history of Rajshahi and four editions of the Trinather Pancali printed between 1874 and 1924, held in the British Library's Vernacular Tracts collection and at the National Library, carry the devotional material of chapter five.^{: 59–60, 148, 263–265} Proverb and folklore collections are used as sources in their own right, among them G. H. Damant's Dinajpur legend of the two ganja-eaters, S. W. Fallon's dictionary of Hindustani proverbs and John Christian's Behar Proverbs.^{: 25–26, 264}

Newspapers and periodicals form a separate body of evidence. The bibliography lists more than thirty British, Irish, Indian and United States titles. Chapter four argues that periodicals constitute an archive of empire that captured cannabis through a constellation of associated meanings drawn from military campaigns, anticolonial rebellions and ethnographic observation.^{: 122, 262–263} The illustrations have two sources. One is a series of photographs of the Naogaon fields and manufacturing yards taken in February 1894, credited to the Survey of India Office in Calcutta and the Wellcome Library. The other is photographs taken by the author.^{: 8–9, 79–85, 148, 221}

The book's conventions are set out in a note on transliteration and maps. It declines the Library of Congress romanisation standard on the ground that it emphasises Sanskritic roots and retains the phonetic pronunciation of the spoken word instead, using phonetic forms when quoting a source and Sanskritic forms in analysis. Anglicised names are left uncorrected in direct references to sources, weights and measures are given as approximate contextual equivalences in footnotes and numbers follow hundreds and thousands instead of lakhs and crores. The words "ganja", "bhang" and "charas" are not italicised, because the book treats them as socially embedded categories, and all translations are the author's unless noted.^: xv Caste terms are retained as the primary sources give them, with Dalit used in specific cases as a capacious though anachronistic descriptor for the mixed oppressed-caste gatherings of pre-1930s Bengal.^: xv–xvi The book also declines the large-scale map of British India common in colonial reportage. One of its two maps shows the rivers and towns of the Ganja Mahal against present-day Indian and Bangladeshi boundaries; the other places the Gangetic warehouse towns on current districts and divisions without drawing the Radcliffe Line.^: xv–xvi

The book took fifteen years and grew out of a doctoral dissertation directed by Antoinette Burton at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.^: 231 Chapter one expands the 2023 Indian Journal of Gender Studies article and the 2022 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs article, chapters three and five develop the 2024 Bloomsbury chapter and chapter four extends a 2022 article in English Language Notes.^: 233 Research in Bangladesh included conversations in Naogaon alongside the archival work in Dhaka.^: 233 Chattopadhyaya states the limits of the account directly, writing that stories of taste, meaning, science and surveillance remain to be told and that many of Naogaon's own stories remain untold.^{: 23, 228}

See also

• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Cannabis in West Bengal
• Cannabis in Cooch Behar State
• Cannabis in Bengali Religion
• Cannabis in Bengali culture
• Cannabis in Rajbanshi culture