
Opium Consumption and Experience in India
From the Earliest to Contemporary Times
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Note of Thanks
- Glossary
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. In the Durbar of the Padshahs and the Rajas
- Chapter 2. âTaste making and Trend settingâ
- Chapter 3. âthe sovereign remedy, the home-vaid -Opiumâ
- Chapter 4. âNow you take it for a moment and enjoy itâ
- Chapter 5. Afimkhors, Amalis and Kanias
- Chapter 6. âProhibition would be zulumâ (pain)
- Chapter 7. Opium Mania: the dreadful plagueâ - A Reconsideration
- Chapter 8. The War on Opium (and Drugs) Shaping Indiaâs Drug Policy, 1947-2023
- Epilogue
- Appendices
- Bibliography