Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India" (U California Press, 2026)

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: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

(University of California Press, 2026) is an open-access book that

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. Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of