https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/karmakoalapodcast/episodes/2026-09-11T23_53_01-07_00
New titles about cannabis keep on coming and when i found out about.. Ganja Matters: Empire & the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. I knew i had to speak to Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya.
We talk about the connections between the British from the early days of the East India Company to full British rule in the 19th century.
Because hemp was still so important to economies around the world we find, unlike the present day, the conversation was based around economics and specifically taxation rather than moral panics.
I hope you enjoy learning a little more about the hemp cannabis history of the 19th and early 20th century.
Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya.
Background & Research
- Current Role: Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and coeditor of the journal The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.
- Education: Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2018).
- Fields of Study: Modern South Asia, the British Empire, agrarian history, commodity history, and the history of drugs. [1, 2, 3]
Major Work
Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India (University of California Press, 2026): An open-access social history examining how colonial administrators in British India sought to tax and regulate cannabis, while exploring the plant’s role in shaping labor, gender, empire, and everyday devotional practices
I research, study, and teach the social and cultural history of modern South Asia (1765-1947) and the British Empire in the modern world (1830-1960) and work in three inter-related areas: social histories of agrarian life in South Asia, histories-from-below of the British Empire, and critical histories of addiction and drugs.
My ongoing research on the comparative and global history of drugs, agricultural commodities, labor, and imperialism in the 19th and 20th century connects situated agrarian histories of South Asia with imperial histories of law, taxation, and knowledge. I focus on labor, gender, caste, species, and race as critical themes of analysis that build on materialism and anti-imperialism in social history, political economy, multispecies thinking, and plant studies. My current work examines how rural geographies, agrarian social life, sacral cosmologies, imperial print culture, and practices of state formation were continuously shaped by substances and pursuits of intoxication.
My undergraduate courses include introductory surveys of South Asian history, commodity history, and upper division classes on public culture which combine a focus on commodities and capital, drugs and medicine, labor history, peasant politics, popular culture, social movements, and gender and empire. My graduate-level courses cover global and transnational approaches to South Asian history, empire and decolonization, historical methods, and the history of the Indian Ocean World.
I am the author of Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India (Oakland: UC Press, 2026), the e-book for which is available open access on Luminos OA. I am also an editor of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (University of Chicago Press) and collaborate on multiple ongoing projects on addiction, plant studies, multispecies methods, and archival preservation.
Research and Teaching Interests:
- Modern South Asia
- British Imperial History
- Drugs History
- Agrarian Studies
- Commodity History
- Indian Ocean World/World History
- Plant Studies
- Internationalism and Marxism
Current Projects:
- Bombay: Empire, Urban Drugscapes, and the Cultural Politics of Drugs 1947-95
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/ganja-matters/paper