Ganja matters (2026)
More actions
| Author | Utathya Chattopadhyaya |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| Publisher | University of California Press |
| Place | Oakland |
| Published | 2026 |
| Status | Forthcoming |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 316 |
| Language | English |
| 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 |
| ISBN | 9780520425699 (paperback), 9780520425685 (hardcover) |
|---|
Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India is a forthcoming social history of cannabis in colonial South Asia by Utathya Chattopadhyaya, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1][2] The book is published by the University of California Press in June 2026, with a free open-access edition through the press's Luminos programme.[1] 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.[1]
Author
Chattopadhyaya is a historian of empire, capitalism and intoxicants, and coeditor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.[1][2] 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,[3] a 2022 article on the legal and linguistic framing of cannabis in colonial India,[4] a 2023 article on ganja and gendered bodies in colonial India,[5] and a 2024 chapter on excise as a sacral binding mechanism in a Bloomsbury volume on biocultural empire.[6] 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.[2]
Argument
Sources and method
Reception
As a forthcoming title the book has not yet drawn formal academic reviews.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India". University of California Press. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Utathya Chattopadhyaya". Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (2019). "Dagga and Prohibition: Markets, Animals, and the Imperial Contexts of Knowledge, 1893–1925". South African Historical Journal. 71 (4): 587–613.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (2022). "Reading Cannabis in the Colony: Law, Nomenclature, and Proverbial Knowledge in British India". Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. 36 (2): 201–37.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (2023). "Bodies that Cohere: Notes on Ganja and Gender in Colonial India". Indian Journal of Gender Studies. 30 (1): 55–77.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (2024). "Ganja and the Godhead: Plant Matter and the Sacral Binds of the Excise Principle in British India". In Frost, Samantha; Mawani, Renisa; Burton, Antoinette (ed.). Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 109–34.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)