Bodies That Cohere: Notes on Ganja and Gender in Colonial India

Abstract

This essay explores what might result if histories of empire and colonialism took the material relationships of human and plant bodies as a fundamental framework. Gender both structured, and was reproduced through, various relationships shaped by collisions between British imperialism and the natural and social worlds of colonial India. Taking up the mutually constitutive formation of the sexuality of a plant body and the body of the sex worker in colonial India, this essay attempts to analyse gender more expansively beyond human bodies marked by colonial rule. It examines how labour, performed as sex work as well as floral sex work, formed an axis around which gendered relationships could cohere over time. It argues that placing the plant, its sexuality and its scaffolding botanical frameworks on the one hand, and anxieties of colonial patriarchal arrangements on the other, can further complicate and deepen a historical analysis of colonialism in South Asia.