The Question of Intoxication in 19th Century Colonial Bengal

The paper explores how political, social, and cultural changes shaped the different trends of intoxication practices in 19th century colonial Bengal. At the onset of East India Company's colonial rule in Bengal, the administration and its collaborators worked out modalities of profit-making from drugs-trade, especially through processing and export of opium. On the other hand, the colonial regime - that is, both administration officials and their social counterparts like missionaries - tightened control over intransigent social categories like Faqirs and Sanyasis. The intoxication practices of the Muslim and Hindu holy men became a key focus of the regime in classification, vilification, criminalization, and exclusion of these groups. Meanwhile, the privileged Babu class was transitioning in their use of intoxicants: subaltern addictions like ganja was vying with more aspirational and anagogic addictions like wine that facilitated assimilation into putative 'civilization'. Following a surge in consumption under the civilizational aspiration, a discursive backlash with both secular and revivalist undertones rolled back the intoxication practices.