About

Utathya Chattopadhyaya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2018. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of modern South Asia from 1765 to 1947, as well as the history of the British Empire in the modern world from 1830 to 1960. His work interrelates areas such as social histories of agrarian life in South Asia, histories-from-below of the British Empire, and critical histories of addiction and drugs. Chattopadhyaya's ongoing research explores the comparative and global history of drugs, agricultural commodities, labor, and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasizing themes like labor, gender, caste, species, and race, with a focus on materialism and anti-imperialism in social history, political economy, multispecies thinking, and plant studies. He examines how rural geographies, agrarian social life, sacral cosmologies, imperial print culture, and state formation were shaped by substances and practices of intoxication. As an educator, he teaches courses on South Asian history, commodity history, and topics related to public culture, commodities, drugs, labor, and empire, and he is also an editor of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. His scholarly contributions include a monograph on cannabis in British India and numerous articles on colonial capitalism, imperial culture, and drug history, reflecting his expertise in the social and cultural dimensions of imperial and South Asian history.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Art
• Literature
• Ancient history
• Biology
• Archaeology
• Management
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Zoology
• Anthropology
• Geography
• Classics
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

  2026-01-01

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 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. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and “drug-ness” of cannabis, Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Colonial Capitalism and British Imperialism

  2024-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 8. Talking History

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

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

  The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law

  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.

  PublisherDOI

• Cannabis: Global Histories ed. by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills

  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Cannabis: Global Histories ed. by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills Utathya Chattopadhyaya Cannabis: Global Histories Edited by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2021. Across fifteen essays, Cannabis: Global Histories arrays important ongoing research on cannabis substances like marijuana, hashish, dagga, gol, bang and ganja using case studies of particular actors, organizations, and intersections of policy and consumption practices. State policy, circulatory networks and medical research serve as focal points for the essays, most of which concern solely the twentieth century. Essays that mobilize cannabis towards textured accounts of colonial racial structures, incongruities of state building and messy complexities of experimental psychology stand out in the collection. David Guba Jr. deftly uses the enthusiasm of physicians across Europe and the US for Jacques-Joseph Moreau’s hashish research in the 1840s to show that “taming” cannabis pharmaceutically for cures, and ingesting it to study induced mental states, together reproduced Orientalism and popularized anti-Arab stereotypes under French imperialism. Drawing on Liat Kozma’s work, Haggai Ram analyzes antagonisms in the League of Nations’ Subcommittee on Cannabis (1934–1939).i In that inter-imperial space, against rehearsed racialized fantasies of Arabs, Mexicans and Black Americans, historically given to cannabis addiction, Thomas Russell channeled his experiences in Egypt’s Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau to situate hashish use as more immediately modern. Mobilizing the fellaheen as hardworking but enfeebled by diseases caused by largescale irrigation infrastructure, Russell switched from longstanding racial taxonomies to provisional causalities. Ram argues that concealing even such limited antagonisms and debates also foreclosed subsequent knowledge of alternative and Indigenous epistemologies of cannabis. Experiential epistemologies lead Maziyar Ghiabi to the “rhetoric of smoke” in Persian. In postrevolutionary Iran, Ghiabi examines cheti, a state of mind suited to repetitive and laborious work, and na’shehgi, one of confidence and vivacity, as contrasting complementary modalities of intoxication. Distinctions of class in gol and hashish use, separated also by women’s tastes, have developed under a state that, while rhetorically strict on cannabis, remains more occupied with meth and heroin use among the poor. Earlier, in postrevolutionary Mexico, a poor person’s search for happiness in fantasy had animated Dr. Leopoldo Viniegra’s nonconformist advocacy of legalized marijuana. Isaac Campos carefully situates complex case records from Viniegra’s psychological practice and his famous 1938 speech against post-1930 US panic over cannabis-induced violence and madness. He argues that revisiting structuring factors like harsh poverty, domestic violence and simultaneous consumption of other intoxicants can enable us to rethink questions of harm, psychosis and intoxication in a forthright and systemic perspective. Like Expoweed in Mexico today, confluences of big business and cannabis also shape African states such as Kenya and Lesotho where, as Neil Carrier shows, agribusiness models and Indigenous reclamations of African medicine are deciding debates on future policy even as cannabis remains illegal de jure yet legal de facto. Cannabis also materializes fascinating internal contradictions of emerging nation-states. Gernot Klantschnig recounts how, in 1960s Lagos, musicians such as Fela Kuti and Orlando Owoh gave cannabis meanings very different from those held by older returning soldiers from theaters of World War II like Burma and India. By 1965, even as psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Lambo selectively offered poverty and detribalization to explain higher cannabis use, General Ironsi’s military state seized on popular fears of children smoking cannabis to enact the strictly prohibitionist Indian Hemp Decree (1966). In South Africa’s settler colonial context, Thembisa Waetjen foregrounds cleavages that complicate colonizer-colonized frameworks and asks how and why the Union of South Africa came to push for international cannabis prohibition in the 1920s. Waetjen skillfully historicizes dynamics of African respectability and patriarchy in Natal’s Native Affairs Department debates, the studied indifference of gold mine overseers in the Witwatersrand and tensions between the Cape Colony’s pharmacists and dagga farmers, that fissured the ground on which Smuts’ Union state ultimately erected a homogenizing racialized model of criminal prohibition. Circulatory networks and the porosity of borders illustrate intersections of cannabis and state formation in other sites. Jamie Banks uses circuitous histories of imperial careering and indentured servitude to show how asylum officials like Robert Grieve in 1880s...

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• A Primer for Rebellion

  English Language Notes · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract This essay explores how the British imperial archive of cannabis addiction in the mid-nineteenth century was shaped by ideas of religious devotion, ordinary leisure, and anxieties arising from revolt and rebellion. It asks how cannabis was discursively constituted as ubiquitous in India and subsequently cast as a conduit to anti-imperial violence in narratives of imperial counterinsurgency. In colonial India, British imperial strategies of knowing the plant’s intoxicating power indexed together several devotional and laboring bodies, among whom the figure of the Indian rebel occupied a unique globally legible location. Revisiting the popular reportage and writing on the Indian Rebellion, this essay argues that cannabis was materialized through the rebel’s body as the rationale for victory, loss, and disorder to ultimately inform and reveal how the reproduction of race and gender shaped the insurgent and counterinsurgent logic of cannabis use under empire.

  PublisherDOI

• Bodies That Cohere: Notes on Ganja and Gender in Colonial India

  Indian Journal of Gender Studies · 2022-11-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay explores what might result if histories of empire and colonialism took the material relationships of human and plant bodies as a fundamental framework. Gender both structured, and was reproduced through, various relationships shaped by collisions between British imperialism and the natural and social worlds of colonial India. Taking up the mutually constitutive formation of the sexuality of a plant body and the body of the sex worker in colonial India, this essay attempts to analyse gender more expansively beyond human bodies marked by colonial rule. It examines how labour, performed as sex work as well as floral sex work, formed an axis around which gendered relationships could cohere over time. It argues that placing the plant, its sexuality and its scaffolding botanical frameworks on the one hand, and anxieties of colonial patriarchal arrangements on the other, can further complicate and deepen a historical analysis of colonialism in South Asia.

  PublisherDOI

• Histories of a Radical Book: A roundtable conversation on empire, colonialism, and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class

  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Histories of a Radical BookA roundtable conversation on empire, colonialism, and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Fortado, Clare Anderson, Caroline Bressey, Ann Curthoys, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Utathya Chattopadhyaya CA: Antoinette, Stephanie: Histories of a Radical Book is an absolutely fascinating volume. Most historians have engaged with E.P. Thompson's work in one way or another, and yet beyond a general nod to "history from below" before now those of us working on empire and colonialism have not systematically engaged with it. So, I want to ask you: what does his The Making of the English Working Class have to do with empire? AB: Thanks for this question, Clare, which is obviously key for readers of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. At the most basic level, empire is and has been constitutive of all aspects of modern British social, economic, political and cultural life (at the very least), so it's important to think with Thompson's book in that context. It's meaningful that he doesn't engage with any imperial contexts in the book, even though the industrial revolution itself was entangled in systems of slavery and emancipation and as well as imperial power. Of course, scholars who followed after The Making took up many of its silences, including Ron Ramdin, who wrote The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain as a dialectic response. The fact that Thompson can apparently "not see" empire in his book reminds us of how comparatively recent calls for and practices of decolonizing British history are. And as our new preface suggests, the links between whiteness, working-class identities and Black history across the globe have been consequential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories, in ways that make it all the more critical to be reminded of how and under what conditions empire and its legacies shape these struggles, even as the long reach of imperial power and material impact is often subordinated (especially in contemporary narratives of the history of White supremacy). The time is ripe for a larger revisiting of these questions. CB: As Antoinette says, the time is certainly ripe for a revisiting of these questions, but how such questions will even be framed in Britain seems to be painfully fraught. I am writing this as a so-called "culture war" becomes a seemingly established way of framing how histories of the empire and its legacies should be researched, discussed and made public in Britain. The toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in the summer of 2020 seemed to signal the start of a reckoning for Britain with its colonial past, but the debate that has been unleashed feels that it could become something akin to Australia's "History Wars" that Ann speaks to below. The controversy in response to the toppling of Colston was an indication of how painful any open conversation would be. For some, the downing of the statue seemed to come as wholly unexpected, an event that emerged suddenly and disrupted public discourses on public and narrative history and reshaped the urban landscape of Bristol and its public realm in unforeseen and deeply uncomfortable ways. It was for them, apparently, the start of something, of a rocking of the status quo, of retaliation, something that could be talked through and down with a conversation. For others, particularly audiences in Bristol, it was simply the most recent moment in a long history over the battle for what kinds of histories were remembered and memorialised in the city's urban landscape. The downing of Colston prompted renewed attention on attempts to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking the High Street in Oxford and one of the ways the BLM protests were made local in the city was through renewed calls for the fall of Rhodes. On 10 June 2020, two days after Colston's downing, crowds in Oxford chanted "take it down" beneath Rhodes' statue. They were resurrecting a 2015 campaign when a group of students, inspired by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign launched in South Africa that year, had sought to have the statue removed as...

  PublisherDOI

• Benjamin Breen. Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. Early Modern Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $34.95 (cloth).

  Journal of British Studies · 2021-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Talking History:

  Berghahn Books · 2020-11-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Clare Anderson

  1 shared

• Caroline Bressey

  1 shared

• Stephanie Fortado

  1 shared

• Isabel Hofmeyr

  Stockholm University

  1 shared

• Ann Curthoys

  1 shared

• Antoinette Burton

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2024 Margaret T. Getman Service to Students Award, UC Santa…
• 2023 Faculty Fellowship, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center…
• 2022 University of California Regents Humanities Faculty Fel…
• 2021 Faculty Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societi…
• 2020 UC Santa Barbara Faculty Career Development Award