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

By Kawal Deep Kour

Opium Consumption and Experience in India offers a "cultural biography" of opium on 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, exploring its social transformation and singularization in the eighteenth century, and chronicling its decline from the mid-nineteenth century to obsolescence and the new "paths and diversions" of our own times. The book attempts to illuminate how opium came to occupy a central place in India's "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. As Dr. Kour demonstrates, this had a significant impact on the development and regulation of opium and its use.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1680536168
• ISBN13: 9781680536164
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"