Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A Primer for RebellionIndian Cannabis and Imperial Culture in the Nineteenth Century

A Primer for RebellionIndian Cannabis and Imperial Culture in the Nineteenth Century 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png English Language Notes Duke University Press

A Primer for RebellionIndian Cannabis and Imperial Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Download PDF
21 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/a-primer-for-rebellionindian-cannabis-and-imperial-culture-in-the-mpOag3K17X
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Regents of the University of Colorado
ISSN
0013-8282
eISSN
2573-3575
DOI
10.1215/00138282-9560243
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

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.

Journal

English Language Notes – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2022

References

  • Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century
    Anderson, Clare
  • The Transportation of Narain Sing: Punishment, Honor, and Identity from the Anglo-Sikh Wars to the Great Revolt
    Anderson, Clare
  • City of Dreadful Night: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta
    Banerjee, Sumanta
  • A Hint
  • Abject to Object: Colonialism Preserved through the Image of Muharram
    Brown, Rebecca
  • Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s ‘Black Man’ and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy
    Burton, Antoinette
  • The Traffic in Opium
  • Empire and Locality: A Global Dimension to the 1857 Indian Uprising
    Carter, Marina Bates, Crispin
  • Indian Bhang
  • Naogaon and the World: Intoxication, Commoditisation, and Imperialism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1840–1940
    Chattopadhyaya, Utathya
  • Lecture on the Opium Traffic
  • The Effects of Bhang
  • The Indian Mutinies
  • The Leaguer of Lucknow: Havelock’s Last March
  • The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India
    Dirks, Nicholas
  • The Battle of Bareilly: Desperate Attack by Fanatical Mussulmans
  • The Present State of India
  • Imperial Parliament
  • The Rebels at Bareilly
  • The Indian Revolt: Origin and History of the Bengal Mutiny
  • Multiple Meanings of 1857 for Indians in Britain
    Fisher, Michael
  • Rebel or Revolutionary? Representing Nana Sahib and the Bibighar Massacre in English- and French-Language Texts and Images
    Frith, Nicola
  • ‘Englishness’ on the Imperial Circuit: Mutiny Tours in Colonial South Asia
    Goswami, Manu
  • The Action on the 14th before Delhi
  • Letters from Delhi
  • Bareilly in 1857
    Hussain, Iqbal
  • The Attack on Bareilly
  • Nana Sahib
  • The Wahabis in the 1857 Revolt: A Brief Appraisal of Their Role
    Khan, Iqtidar Alam
  • The Mutiny Novel: Creating the Domestic Body of Empire
    Lakshmi, Aishwarya
  • The Fall of Delhi
  • India
  • India: Another Great Victory
  • Second Mutiny at Neemuch
  • Delhi
  • History on Its Side: Narratives of ‘Malaysia’ and Beyond
    McCollom, Joanie
  • East Indies
  • London
  • Capture of Nana Sahib
  • Entrenched Camp Guard, Cawnpore
  • Race and Religion in India
  • Indian Affairs
  • The Etymology of the N-Word: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North
    Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur
  • Children, Emotion, Identity, and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens’ Calcutta Diaries
    Robb, Peter
  • On the Rebellion of 1857: A Brief History of an Idea
    Robb, Peter
  • Nana Sahib
  • The Anticipated Outbreak at Oude
  • The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India
    Stephens, Julia
  • A Note on the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Rohilkhand
    Usmani, M. S.
  • Vengeance against England: Hermann Goedsche and the Indian Uprising
    Wagner, Kim Carter, Marina Bates, Crispin
  • Nana Sahib in British Culture and Memory
    Wallace, Brian
  • Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century
    Anderson, Clare
  • The Transportation of Narain Sing: Punishment, Honor, and Identity from the Anglo-Sikh Wars to the Great Revolt
    Anderson, Clare
  • City of Dreadful Night: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta
    Banerjee, Sumanta
  • A Hint
  • Abject to Object: Colonialism Preserved through the Image of Muharram
    Brown, Rebecca
  • Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s ‘Black Man’ and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy
    Burton, Antoinette
  • The Traffic in Opium
  • Empire and Locality: A Global Dimension to the 1857 Indian Uprising
    Carter, Marina Bates, Crispin
  • Indian Bhang
  • Naogaon and the World: Intoxication, Commoditisation, and Imperialism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1840–1940
    Chattopadhyaya, Utathya
  • Lecture on the Opium Traffic
  • The Effects of Bhang
  • The Indian Mutinies
  • The Leaguer of Lucknow: Havelock’s Last March
  • The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India
    Dirks, Nicholas
  • The Battle of Bareilly: Desperate Attack by Fanatical Mussulmans
  • The Present State of India
  • Imperial Parliament
  • The Rebels at Bareilly
  • The Indian Revolt: Origin and History of the Bengal Mutiny
  • Multiple Meanings of 1857 for Indians in Britain
    Fisher, Michael
  • Rebel or Revolutionary? Representing Nana Sahib and the Bibighar Massacre in English- and French-Language Texts and Images
    Frith, Nicola
  • ‘Englishness’ on the Imperial Circuit: Mutiny Tours in Colonial South Asia
    Goswami, Manu
  • The Action on the 14th before Delhi
  • Letters from Delhi
  • Bareilly in 1857
    Hussain, Iqbal
  • The Attack on Bareilly
  • Nana Sahib
  • The Wahabis in the 1857 Revolt: A Brief Appraisal of Their Role
    Khan, Iqtidar Alam
  • The Mutiny Novel: Creating the Domestic Body of Empire
    Lakshmi, Aishwarya
  • The Fall of Delhi
  • India
  • India: Another Great Victory
  • Second Mutiny at Neemuch
  • Delhi
  • History on Its Side: Narratives of ‘Malaysia’ and Beyond
    McCollom, Joanie
  • East Indies
  • London
  • Capture of Nana Sahib
  • Entrenched Camp Guard, Cawnpore
  • Race and Religion in India
  • Indian Affairs
  • The Etymology of the N-Word: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North
    Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur
  • Children, Emotion, Identity, and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens’ Calcutta Diaries
    Robb, Peter
  • On the Rebellion of 1857: A Brief History of an Idea
    Robb, Peter
  • Nana Sahib
  • The Anticipated Outbreak at Oude
  • The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India
    Stephens, Julia
  • A Note on the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Rohilkhand
    Usmani, M. S.
  • Vengeance against England: Hermann Goedsche and the Indian Uprising
    Wagner, Kim Carter, Marina Bates, Crispin
  • Nana Sahib in British Culture and Memory
    Wallace, Brian