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Talk:Ganja matters (2026)

Discussion page of Ganja matters (2026)
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Discussion for: Ganja matters (2026) • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope
Ganja matters (2026) is the Book page for Utathya Chattopadhyaya's social history of cannabis in British India, published by the University of California Press in 2026.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and unresolved identifications here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

The book's quotation of Prain's 1893 report

Ganja Matters quotes and paraphrases Prain's 1893 report in two places where its wording departs from the report itself. The report's text is in the National Library of Scotland Data Foundry dataset, and the passages concerned can be compared on its page images.

  • p. 36. The book gives Prain as writing that the cultivator "considers the sex that produces this intoxicating substance the nobler of the two, calling it marda or male". The report (p. 5) reads "considers the sex that produces this substance the nobler of the two and calls it mardá or male". The word "intoxicating" is the book's, and the sentence is reworded.
  • p. 37. The book has the poddars walking "thousands of bighas" "four times", and says they "had finished just days before he arrived". The report (p. 4) says they go round a field "three or perhaps four times during a season", and that Prain had "not yet had opportunities of seeing them at work".

Neither passage is quoted on this page, and articles that need Prain's words should take them from the report rather than through the book. The correction has already been made on Poddar (rev 18684).

This is a note about how to use the book, not a criticism of it in article voice: the book's own argument does not turn on either wording. Éloise 07:23, 18 September 2026 (+07)