Reading Cannabis in the Colony: Law, Nomenclature, and Proverbial Knowledge in British India

Indian legal regimes that regulate cannabis use a three-part nomenclature of “ganja,” “bhang,” and “charas” as distinct South Asian intoxicants produced from particular parts of the plant—namely, and correspondingly, the flower, leaf, and resinous matter. This typology was institutionalized within the imagined colonial space of India with the intensification of liberal empire. This article explores the inconsistent history of naming conventions alongside polyvalent and relational notions of the experience of intoxication in British India to ask what knowledge was displaced to install a modern cannabis taxonomy suited to institutional medicine, policing, and revenue accumulation. In doing so, it revisits the rich collection of proverbial knowledge in the judicial archive of cannabis that illuminated variable contexts, specific social relations, and articulations of intention, deterrence, and discernment. It argues that the debris of socialized knowledge about meanings of intoxication can spur the imperative to think decolonially about cannabis in India.