Overview

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.

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9781680536164

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Kawal Deep Kour holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. A drug abuse prevention specialist, she is currently Director of the South Asian Drugs and Addictions Research Council and a former board member of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP). She is the author of History of Intoxication: Opium in Assam, 1800-1959 and many other publications.

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