Opium Consumption and Experience in India: From the Earliest to Contemporary Times

Opium Consumption and Experience in India offers a "cultural biography" of opium in the subcontinent. It spans the Raj and India after independence. The book examines the "social lives" of opium in India, beginning as a commodity in the sixteenth century to its social transformation and singularization in the eighteenth century, and its decline from the mid-nineteenth century to obsolescence in the twentieth century to new "paths and diversions" in our own times. The book attempts to illuminate how opium came to occupy a central place in the "cultures of consumption" and also in the socio-economic and political life of a people. How did opium become embedded in a social ethos where it not only served as a social lubricant but soon morphed into a narco-identity for the people of India. The identification of India as a land of "great opium eaters" spawned the propaganda of a "civilizing mission" that ushered in a new era of material exploitation and political domination. This had a significant impact on the development and regulation of opium and its use.