Plant Life and Imperialism: Histories of Cannabis in British India

Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. He is a scholar of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and comparative colonialism in world history. His research 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. His work brings histories of multispecies entanglements to bear upon categories of social history, such as class, race, caste, gender and the body using critical materialist and anti-imperial approaches to history.