Utathya Chattopadhyaya - University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Migration, Co-operation and the Politics of Ganja: The Global Iterations of an Asian Intoxicant, 1840-1940

The plant scientifically known as cannabis indica is historically indigenous to Central and South Asia. It is consumed in India in three forms – ganja, bhang and charas, with ganja serving as the common referent for the plant itself. The taste for and techniques of utilising the hemp plant’s intoxicating properties have been transmitted over centuries across urban and rural South Asia. Under British imperial rule, ganja was commoditised from a disparately cultivated substance into an agrarian cash crop. Ganja products, manufactured in Rajshahi in eastern Bengal, circulated across markets in eastern India, Burma, Southern Africa and the Caribbean, and competed with established charas/hashish markets in the Western Indian Ocean. My broader dissertation connects the economic and cultural history of Rajshahi ganja to circulation networks in the Indian Ocean World to analyse how contingencies posed by trans-colonial migration, international discourses of co-operation, debt and agrarian capital, and the global politics of imperial order constituted the experiences of those engaged in ganja production, consumption and trade.

This paper will explore three iterations of globality in the commodity history of cannabis. First, I will explore the material trans-coloniality of Rajshahi ganja in the nineteenth century by locating how techniques of production and cultures of consumption travelled between colonial sites through networks of indentured labour migration, from Bengal to Natal and the Caribbean. Second, I will argue that the commoditisation of Rajshahi ganja under the colonial state was made possible by the successful but limited introduction of co-operative farming in the 1910s based on discourses of thrift, community savings, and social reform rooted in co-operative experiments and ideas of agrarian modernization in turn-of-the-century Germany, Egypt and Ireland. Third, I will argue how the global criminalization of cannabis consumption at the League of Nations was fundamentally undergirded by concerns of mining and plantation capital and threats to British policing in core cannabis markets such as Egypt, South Africa and India.

I will end with reflections on how theories of capitalism and globalization are enriched through complex colonial trajectories of understudied commodities and the relevance of coloniality in South Asia to the contemporary legal and political debates on marijuana decriminalisation in the world.

Please send any questions or comments to: bighist@berkeley.edu