By Ayesha Munawar
Cannabis consumption in South Asia was a factor in the British Empire’s violence during the 19th century, says UC Santa Barbara historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya.
An image of South Asian rebels tied to cannons during the 1857 rebellion against the British East India Company was presented by UCSB History professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya over Zoom last week.
“Cannabis was the key to challenging the legitimacy of Indian sovereignty,” Chattopadhyaya told an audience over Zoom last week.
In India, cannabis, known as “bhang,” contributed to raising awareness among South Asian rebels against the rule of the British East India Company during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is an assistant professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and talked about his research on “Cannabis in South Asia” during the last installment of an Asian American Studies Collective series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, an asssistant professor of History at UC Santa Barbara who researches South Asia.
He studies the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism and agrarian commodities, and is currently writing a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
Specifically, cannabis consumption was common and took many forms, emboldening the local rebels, Chattopadhyaya said. Britain imposed taxes on forms of cannabis, in part to stem the threat to the British rule. “Cannabis was indeed a revenue object in India that was more systematically enveloped into British rule,” Chattopadhyaya said.
The plant cannabis sativa produces an intoxicating resin that courses through its stock, its leaves and through its flowers, Chattopadhyaya said. Cannabis, along with the various ways it is made, has circulated across different regions, and ethnic and cultural groups.
The way South Asian cultures consumed bhang was either as a loose and dusty powder or the cannabis leaves were steeped with milk.
“In South Asian history, different social groups have harnessed the plant’s intoxicating power into diverse substances and commodities,” says Chattopadhyaya.
As bhang became a term of reference in Swahili, English, and Portuguese, the way it was used was also dependent on its cultural context.
British troops punishing South Asian rebels whose revolt can be tied to cannabis consumption. The illustration by Vasily Vereshchagin was part of UCSB historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya’s virtual presentation last week.
In his research, Chattopadhyaya discovered that European doctors, pharmacologists, botanists, and chemists struggled to classify cannabis, whether it would be categorized as an intoxicating property, a chemical composition, or be adapted to medical use.
“Bhang was commonly made from cannabis leaf. The term bhang, however, has traversed multiple Indian languages as a category,” Chattopadhyaya said. “For most of the 19th century, [scholars] had worked really hard to produce a full glossary of different words for cannabis in South Asian languages.”
Ayesha Munawar is a fourth year UCSB student majoring in Communication. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.