Opium Consumption and Experience in India

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 Indias 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.