Volume-XI, Issue-VI, November 2025 |
From India to Westminster: The British Encounter with Cannabis in India and the Making of Imperial Drug Policy (1800–1930) Smt. Saptaparna Maitra, Assistant Professor, Dinabandhu Mahavidyalaya, Bongaon, Kolkata, West Bengal, India |
Received: 08.10.2025 | Accepted: 07.11.2025 | Published Online: 30.11.2025 | Page No: 62-68 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.11.issue.06W.157 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
This article examines the complex British encounter with cannabis in India from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, tracing how colonial governance, metropolitan science, parliamentary debate, and medical practice shaped its global fate. Although cannabis—known locally as bhang, ganja, and charas—had deep cultural and medicinal roots in South Asia, British officials framed it as a “discovery” and reinterpreted its uses through imperial scientific and administrative lenses. The article begins with William Brooke O’Shaughnessy’s influential Bengal experiments, which introduced “Indian hemp” into Western therapeutics. It then explores the colonial state’s excise regimes, the anxieties over “hemp insanity,” and the fiscal-moral dilemmas that culminated in the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1893–94). The Commission’s vast inquiry emphasized regulation over prohibition, balancing indigenous practices with imperial control. Meanwhile, scientific circles in London, particularly through the Royal Society’s networks, debated cannabis’s therapeutic potential even as its clinical reliability waned. Parliamentary debates reflected missionary and temperance critiques, but ultimately relied on the Commission’s moderate conclusions until the international narcotics regime of the 1920s shifted policy toward prohibition. The article also considers parallel developments in Egypt, South Africa, and the Caribbean, where racialized labor politics shaped harsher restrictions. By situating cannabis at the intersection of medicine, empire, and global control, the article demonstrates how pragmatic regulation in India gave way to twentieth-century prohibition, highlighting the contingent nature of drug policy within imperial frameworks. | ||
Keywords: Cannabis Regulation in Colonial India, Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1893–94), Imperial Medicine and Narcotics Policy, British Colonial Governance and Cannabis, Global Prohibition and Empire |