Abstract
This essay explores Gandhi’s representations of opium as indicative of the addictive nature of the colonial relationship in India. It also shows how the opium trade had an impact on Gandhi’s redefinition of food. Some submissions to the 1893–94 Royal Commission on Opium in India refer to De Quincey and reading De Quincey’s Confessions alongside Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Guide to Health reveals how both authors grappled with questions of dependency and selfhood in relation to modernity. I also discuss Gandhi’s representations of pleasure and opium alongside Altaf Hussain Hali’s (1837–1914), whom Gandhi admired as a reformist Urdu poet. Opium and intoxicants were a site on which colonial and postcolonial agency were both imagined and compromised in Gandhi, De Quincey and Hali.
Introduction: Self-rule and opium
For Gandhi, self-rule was not an abstract political ideal; it required an embodied practice on a daily basis. Hence many of his works reflect on diet, digestion and hygiene. The subtitle of Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of my Experiments with Truth (1927–29), draws attention to the experimental nature of nationalism, in which basic categories such as civilization, truth, sexuality and food were interrogated and re-worked, and to his search for ‘Truth’ as encompassing his experiments with dietetics, celibacy, hygiene and ‘nature cure’. As Joseph Alter has argued, Gandhi conceived of morality as a problem in which ‘Truth’ and biology were equally implicated and in Gandhi’s works ‘the biomorality of public health pitted the biology of race against a dietetics of vegetarianism’. 1
For Gandhi, diet provided the means by which to effect moral change on a large scale. Inevitably, then, he was concerned with the effect of intoxicants and stimulants on the possibilities of self-rule. In his first seminal work, Hind Swaraj (1909, ‘Indian Self-Rule’), the question of drugs emerges a number of times. In his criticisms of modern medicine in Chapter 12, he argues that modern medicine in effect creates a dependency on drugs. In the final chapter, he asserts that medicinal drugs deal with the effects of illness rather than its causes, and doctors should deal with the latter, rather than ‘pamper [patients] by giving them useless drugs’.
2
But Gandhi goes further than this; for him drug addiction is a metaphor for Indian dependency on British colonialism. One of the key ideas of Hind Swaraj is that Indians are themselves responsible for colonial rule; political responsibility begins with the self-realisation that ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them’.
3
By focussing on being victims, Indians displace the responsibility of colonial rule onto the category ‘British’. Here Gandhi uses the similes of drug dealing and drug addiction to explore this question of self-colonisation: In order to become rich all at once, we welcomed the [East India] Company’s officers with open arms. We assisted them. If I am in the habit of drinking Bhang, and a seller thereof sells it to me, am I to blame him or myself? By blaming the seller shall I be able to avoid the habit?
4
It was after the advent of the railways that we began to believe in distinctions, and you are at liberty now to say that it is through the railways that we are beginning to abolish those distinctions. An opium-eater may argue the advantage of opium-eating from the fact that he began to understand the evil of the opium habit after having eaten it. I would ask that you consider well what I have said on the railways.
5
The references to opium are part of a larger discourse in Hind Swaraj on intoxication. Briefly, for Gandhi colonial modernity has an intoxicating and drug-induced effect on its subjects. Trocki has argued that exotic chemicals and drugs were the sine qua non of capitalism; without drug economies capitalism would not have come into being. The British empire, the opium trade and the rise of global capitalism were linked.
6
Gandhi does not use the word ‘capitalism’ in Hind Swaraj; however, he uses the distorted mode of intoxicated self-justification as a simile for subjects’ relationships with modernity: ‘Those who are intoxicated by modern civilization are not likely to write against it. Their care will be to find out facts and arguments in support of it, and this they do unconsciously, believing it to be true’.
7
Here intoxication is associated with an unconscious agency which disrupts the possibility of a reflective relationship with modernity. Gandhi also associates Indians who advocate anti-colonial violence with this form of intoxication, thereby drawing on stereotypes of drunken violence.
8
At the same time, he uses the notion of intoxication to represent colonialism’s impact on the British themselves. Part of Gandhi’s concern is to search out alternative forms of personal energy and strength from conventional ones; in his view, an artificially induced intoxicated energy characterises colonial power.
9
In a problematic formulation, which is laced with anxiety about masculinity, he extends this conception of intoxicated energy to the likely British reaction to passive resistance: It is likely that you [the British] will laugh at all this [passive resistance] in the intoxication of your power. We may not be able to disillusion you at once, but, if there be any manliness in us, you will see shortly that your intoxication is suicidal, and that your laugh at our expense is an aberration of intellect.
10
Gandhi’s references to opium were obviously resonant because of the role of opium production in maintaining British rule in India and in its eventual dominance over China and Hong Kong. From 1773 to 1917, it was the official policy of the colonial government to grow opium in India for sale in China. 11 In India, opium revenue was paid directly to the government in Calcutta in cash or negotiable Bills of Exchange, or was paid into the East India Company treasury in Canton to finance its China trade. Land revenue was larger in terms of revenue but land and salt taxes were collected in small amounts and passed through intermediaries who took a cut. Opium was the largest item of export up to the 1870s and dropped to second behind cotton and cotton products only in the late 1870s. 12 Moreover, as Trocki has pointed out, the opium trade created a string of dependents, not just the drug addicts themselves, but also those addicted to the profits of the trade, to the sense of moral superiority acquired by condemning the drug habits of others, and finally to the ‘political and social power gained over society through the mechanisms of controlling drug use’. 13 For Gandhi, the metaphor of colonialism as drug addiction also extended to the British themselves, who were just as addicted to the colonial relationship as Indians were. The discourse of drugs and intoxication suggests, then, that colonial power, if not hallucinatory, at least has an element of the illusory in it. Once Indians realise that they are in fact responsible for colonial rule, what looks like British strength is shown to be borrowed strength, made possible by the collective dependency habits of Indians. Moreover, this colonial strength is created by the energising effects of intoxicants on colonisers and the enervating effects of opium on the colonised, and as such, this strength is substance dependent. As Gandhi categorically states, the English ‘are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them’. 14
In Gandhi’s Guide to Health (1921), opium is referred to as a powerful example of an addictive intoxicant leading to the loss of collective and individual self-rule. Here he gives the example of China: ‘Have we not seen a mighty nation like the Chinese falling under the deadly spell of opium, and rendering itself incapable of maintaining its independence?’. 15 The reference to China may also have been polemically strategic because it reminds Gandhi’s readers of the British involvement in creating this ‘deadly spell’ precisely when the British government, its delegates to the League of Nations, and the British press stressed how conscientiously Britain was adhering to the 1907 treaty. It was by this treaty that it had agreed to reduce the annual Indian export of opium to China by 10%, thereby trying to counter criticisms of British India’s responsibility for China’s condition. 16
Other nationalist leaders, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, also refer to the role of opium in British colonialism. In his The Discovery of India (1946), Nehru reflects on the possibilities of pan-Asianism after colonialism. One section of the Discovery is dedicated to the historical, religious and cultural connections between India and China, where he discusses the accounts of Chinese travellers to India in the ancient and medieval world. This is contrasted with the present condition of India under British rule and the effects of the opium trade and wars between the East India Company and China in the first half of the nineteenth century. 17 As Trocki argues, for 300 years one of the purposes of European trade with Asia and other parts of the globe was to monopolise the delivery of desired substances such as tea, coffee, spices, tobacco and sugar to the European market. European trade with Asia was a one-way flow of exotic chemicals. But opium was the exception in that it was marketed primarily in Asia; opium was essential in changing the balance of economic and political relations between India, China and the West. 18 For Nehru, the opium trade and wars were a good example of the disruptive geopolitical effects of colonialism, which hindered the development of mutually beneficial relationships between China and India. For him, decolonisation would lead to the renewal of contacts between the two countries. 19 India’s isolation is the consequence of British imperialism, since the British ‘barred all the doors and stopped all the routes that connected us with our neighbours in Asia’. Instead India was brought ‘nearer to Europe’ and especially to Britain, but as Asia emerged from European domination, India’s separation from Asia would be overcome. 20
Opium and food
For Nehru, then, European colonialism and events like the Opium Wars and opium trade re-mapped Asia. Gandhi does not articulate this kind of cartographical imagination about opium. There is however a cartography of diet and consumption in his Guide to Health in which he maps the world’s population in terms of its food intake and dietary habits: vegetarians in India, China, Japan and parts of Europe, the mixed diet of the English and the affluent classes of China, India (both Hindu and Muslim) and Japan, and the exclusively meat-eating diet of ‘the uncivilized [sic] peoples of the frigid zones’. 21 Here and throughout the text there is a link made between the corruption of diet and richness, both in terms of food and monetary wealth, 22 as well as changes in sartorial habits. 23 He also criticises notions of Indian hospitality and re-thinks the spiciness of Indian food, trying to break the association between Indian diet and its stereotypically rich flavours. 24
In fact, opium also plays a role in Gandhi’s reflections on food. Gandhi aims to re-define the term ‘food’ itself: Under the term ‘food’, we include all the things that are taken into the body through the mouth, - including wine, bhang, and opium, tobacco, tea, coffee and cocoa, spices and condiments. I am convinced that all these articles have to be completely eschewed, having been led to this conviction from my own conviction, and partly from the experiences of others.
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Moreover, the status of opium as a food that was eaten in India became culturally charged. In 1882, Sir George Birdwood reiterated his view expressed in his Catalogue of the Vegetable products of the Presidency of Bombay (1865) that opium was a useful dietary supplement for the vegetarian population in India and that it aided digestion because vegetarian diets were not suited to the human body. 27 Sir William Roberts, who was appointed to evaluate the Commission, had suggested in his own published works that dietary custom was an expression of biological destiny, and meat-eaters and alcohol-consumers were key contributors to global progress. Alcohol and tobacco were the opposite of what the anti-opium lobby claimed. The fact that Japan was the only Asian nation as ‘developed’ as Anglo-European societies was taken to be proof of the benefits of alcoholic beverages. He also implied that other stimulants had beneficial consequences for the brain and nervous system. 28 Witnesses, including several Indian doctors, who appeared before the Commission in India also argued that opium was a food, and that it provided nourishment to people who subsisted on a vegetarian diet. 29 Not surprisingly, given his own views, Roberts concluded that eating opium was beneficial for Indians. 30 He also claimed that enclaves of Indians had evolved different reactions to the drug over many centuries of use; these were now a consequence of genetic endowment and were very different from the responses of Europeans to the drug. For him, Indians’ higher tolerance of the drug than Europeans was ‘congenital’. Roberts’ evaluation justified the continued production and distribution of opium in India and therefore had important political and economic consequences for the British Indian provinces. 31 Gandhi’s reflections on opium and other stimulants in his writings on diet and vegetarianism, 32 his search for alternative notions of strength, and his scepticism about the concept of progress, 33 need in part to be read against this pro-opium colonial discourse in India on opium as a food and its role in colonial thinking about race, diet and progress.
Gandhi’s interrogation of the relationship between medicine and opium is also significant in the context of this Commission, since one of the justifications made to the Commission for the use of opium was its properties as an anti-malarial drug. 34 Opium slipped between the categories of medicine and poison. It was precisely this ambiguity in the category of medicine that Gandhi exploited in his critique of modern medicine. 35 As in Hind Swaraj, Guide situates intoxicants such as opium as part of a larger discourse about personal and collective energy. There may also have been a sexual dimension to Gandhi’s discourse on opium and intoxicants. In Guide, wastefulness and luxury in foods are linked to wastefulness and the loss of energy in sexuality; over-indulgence in sex and in eating go hand in hand and celibacy harbours and cultivates energy just as a Gandhian diet does. 36 The linking of opium with sexual desire was part of the pro- and anti-opium trade arguments in the late nineteenth century. Some in the anti-trade lobby argued that opium was an aphrodisiac and encouraged immorality. As a defender of the trade, Sir George Birdwood dismissed this, arguing that those who claimed this ‘had little idea what morality means in Eastern Asia – much less immorality’. 37 In subsequent years, pro-traders used this point of view to argue for the harmless nature of opium. Roberts also rejected the view that opium increased sexual appetite. 38 In broader terms, India was seen in the West as a site of drug consumption which reflected distinctive vices and a lack of moral restraint. 39 Gandhi’s linking of food with sexual appetite and his concerns about stimulants and intoxicants are therefore part of a bio-moral narrative that stressed the ability of Indians to control themselves when it came to stimulants and sex. This narrative weighed against the belief that Asians have weak sexual self-control and lax sexual morals, and so the argument that opium would sexually corrupt them was invalid, since they were already sexually corrupt. Hence for Gandhi, stressing the ability of Indians to control themselves was crucial to countering this view.
De Quincey in India
Interestingly, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) was referred to in a number of presentations to the British government on the opium trade. Reading De Quincey’s text alongside Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Guide to Health reveals how both these authors grappled with similar issues of dependency and selfhood. In its memorial presented to the British government on 30 June 1890, the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT) demanded British officials should pressure the Chinese government to halt opium production in China; simultaneously, the Indian government should constrict poppy cultivation (especially Malwa opium) in the native (princely) states of Central India, and the Chinese should be encouraged not to import this opium to offset the decreased amount of the drug manufactured in British India proper. In a paper at a Royal Asiatic Society meeting in March 1891, G. M. Batten responded to this memorial, and in doing so he referred to Thomas De Quincey who had shown that users of opium did not descend into a soporific torpor. On the contrary, he pointed out that De Quincey took the drug before going to the opera because it increased his mental activity and appreciation of music. The moderate use of opium by a person in good health had benefits. 40 Similarly, a member of the Indian Medical Service, Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel A. Crombie, read a paper at the Calcutta Medical Society in May 1892, in which he referred to De Quincey’s opium experiences. For him, De Quincey proved that the effects of alcohol were much coarser than the effects of opium; opium induced keener mental awareness and more focused energy than comparable amounts of alcohol. 41
In a general way, placing Gandhi alongside De Quincey might help us focus on some salient and perhaps intriguing points about colonialism, opium and authorship. Both Gandhi’s and De Quincey’s autobiographies were confessional, Gandhi’s transgressively so given his frankness about his sexuality. 42 De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in 1822, three years after the defeat of the Mahratta confederacy in the Third Anglo-Mahratta War (1817–19), which established the British as the paramount power in the subcontinent. Gandhi’s Autobiography was published less than a decade after the first mass all-India campaign of protest, the non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, when the British were losing their grip on India. However, they share some preoccupations, chief of which is the question of dependency on substances like opium. This dependency on drugs slips into grappling with the larger issue of a dependency on colonialism and its consequences. Both writers are also self-experimenters 43 who are concerned with the intimacy of interiority in relation to crisis-ridden terms like ‘English’ and ‘Indian’. For De Quincey, the ‘orient’ keeps invading iconic English landscapes like the Lake District, while for Gandhi the key issue is whether an Indian self can ever really disentangle itself from a British self, given that so many powerful groups of Indians are ‘half-Anglicized’. 44 As De Quincey puts it, ‘whenever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other’. 45 This ‘law of antagonism’ and recurring mutual implication seems to govern the relationship between the ‘orient’ and ‘England’ in his Confessions, and ‘British’ and ‘Indian’ in Gandhi’s Autobiography. Furthermore, in De Quincey the boundaries between his interiority and the external world are often blurred. The Malay he meets in the Lake District appears to be a discrete person, but the Malay also ‘fastened afterwards upon my [De Quincey’s] dreams’. 46 Reading De Quincey can be disorientating as we move between the inner landscape of dreams and hallucinations to observations on external landscapes and cityscapes. In this context, it is not entirely clear whether the Malay was an actual person whom De Quincey encountered in the Lake District or a phantasmagoria. In Gandhi, the boundaries between interiority and the public realm can also be similarly porous as when he felt there was a partial link between the riots in Noakhali in eastern India in 1946 and his own personal failings in self-purity and brahmacharya, after which he reduced his food intake even more and tested his resolve for chastity further. 47 Other almost hallucinatory causal links include seeing the Bihar earthquake of February 1934 as ‘divine chastisement’ for the sins of untouchability. Gandhi’s assertion of links like this was criticised by Rabindranath Tagore on the grounds of its causal linking of ‘ethical principles with cosmic phenomena’. In response, Gandhi reiterated that ‘visitations’ such as drought, floods and earthquakes were connected to ‘man’s morals’. 48 Thus, in De Quincey, we have the racialised narcissism of the colonial drug addict, and in Gandhi the deliberately politicised narcissism of the anti-colonial satyagrahi, whose constant endeavour to reduce himself to ‘zero’ 49 can be paradoxically self-magnifying.
These are general linkages only, but they suggest in broad terms how towards the beginning and towards the end of formal British rule in India these two authors grappled with similar issues of intoxicants, consumption, selfhood and dependency. For both, colonial expansion was associated with forms of addiction that were tied to distinctive notions of embodied selfhood and fears of hybridization. As we have seen, Gandhi saw colonial modernity through the lens of addiction and intoxication. One historian has suggested that mass consumption as it exists in modern society began with drug addiction and that opium was the catalyst of the consumer market, the money economy and even of capitalist production in nineteenth-century Asia. 50 Alina Clej has argued that De Quincey’s narration of his addiction speaks to the larger question of the addictive nature of modernity itself. In her argument, intoxication, whether in a strict medical sense or in the less technical meaning of strong excitement, is central to the ways in which literary modernity functions and defines itself. 51 Gandhi’s critique of addiction and his own insistence on not being original as the author of Hind Swaraj, as well as his emphasis on the text as a jointly produced and team-authored event, 52 might be seen as a form of literary counter-modernity. His eschewal of originality as a literary virtue and of substance dependence are part of his critical distanciation of modernity.
Gandhi, opium and transnationalism
Insofar as Hind Swaraj crosses both linguistic and geographical boundaries, Gandhi’s counter-modernity was transnational as well. It was published in Gujarati in 1909 and in an English translation by Gandhi in 1910; the text was therefore a multilingual event. Its publication in South Africa by Gandhi’s own press reflects the enabling role of the diasporic experience in defining Gandhi’s key anti-imperial ideas. The manuscript was written by Gandhi while on board a ship, sailing between England and South Africa, so its inception is testimony to the importance of the experiences and ideas of travel to the political consciousness of Indian nationalist writers.
53
Gandhi’s book was also a response to the debate amongst Indians outside India on the justifiability of violence against imperial rule. It participated in a global exchange in which Indian revolutionaries in North America, such as Taraknath Das (1884–1958), the Russian novelist Tolstoy, and Gandhi were interlocutors. The text draws on European history for its own purposes, with one of its chapters on Italy drawing inspiration from its unification for India.
54
The appendix lists texts by Plato, Mazzini, Tolstoy and Ruskin, drawing together authors in a globalised intertextuality which crosses linguistic, cultural and regional boundaries.
55
This intercontinental and collaborative refashioning of a regime of ideas and texts can also be read against the background of the intercontinental networks of opium trade and production; as Gregory Blue puts it, born with Britain’s Asian empire and lasting to within two decades of Indian independence, the long nineteenth-century opium trade can be seen as a multinational, collaborative institution that bound Indian peasants, British and Indian governments, a vast mass of Chinese consumers, and an array of Western, Parsee, Sephardic, and most of all Chinese merchants together in an immense revenue-generating system.
56
As historians have pointed out, there was also a convergence between global temperance movements and Indian nationalism when it came to opium and alcohol consumption. However, there was a crucial difference between the SSOT’s stance on opium and Gandhi’s and Indian nationalists’ views. The SSOT was not critical of imperialism as such, and the majority of Anglo-European missionary voices against the drug trade did not protest against the European presence in Asia. Their concern was to change the nature of imperialism because opium dependence prevented Indians from coming to Christ. 57 Clearly, then, Gandhi and these evangelicals approached opium from different angles, but their positions did overlap in one area. The SSOT presented opium as dangerous because it did not respect national and racial boundaries; it subverted some of the key distinctions on which colonial rule in India was based. 58 The anxiety about opium subverting boundaries is also articulated in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), in which the opium-induced unconscious theft of the Indian diamond by Franklin Blake raises the fear of an unconscious colonial agency undermining British social order, especially for key agents who should be doing the work of detection to protect that social order. The Indian diamond and its repeated ‘thefts’ also threaten to subvert the clear distinctions of ownership and property which from the perspective of colonialism were one of its most important contributions to India. 59 Moreover, the Indian diamond’s very presence in England threatens to undermine the security of distance between the colonial metropolis and South Asia. One of Gandhi’s concerns is to disentangle a British self from an Indian self by recovering agency. For him, too, opium addiction as a master metaphor for the colonial relationship is suggestive of how crucial cultural distinctions and an authentic ‘Indianness’ and its agency can be lost, hence the need to reconstruct and re-imagine it through the patient sobriety of texts like Hind Swaraj.
Gandhi, Hali and pleasure
Gandhi’s perspective on opium, intoxicants and stimulants also needs to be seen in terms of a larger shift in attitudes towards pleasure in Indian reformist thought from the late nineteenth century onwards. In 1905, Gandhi produced a series of biographies comprising stories of heroes as models for his readers in South Africa; most of these were Europeans. Three, however, were Indians and one of these was the Urdu poet Altaf Hussain Hali (1837–1914) whose work he described as dealing with the ‘duty of Muslims in the present age’. 60 In his Musaddas on ‘The Flow and Ebb of Islam’ (1879), Hali holds the hedonistic lifestyle of Muslim aristocrats partly responsible for the decline of Islamic civilization in India. He mentions in particular their addiction to intoxicating drugs such as hemp, cannabis and opium. 61 There is an echo of this in Gandhi’s Guide to Health, when immediately after referring to the Chinese losing their independence through the ‘deadly spell of opium’ he mentions Indian landowners who have lost their jagirs [grants of land] through the ‘same fatal influence’. 62 Hali’s Musaddas inspired a number of poetic analogues written from the perspective of Hindu civilization, in which the decline of the latter is also lamented and the causes for this are explored. 63 However, as I have argued elsewhere, the lifestyle of the degenerate aristocrats in Hali’s poem has an energetically anarchic side to it which cannot be smothered by the poem’s anti-hedonistic polemic. The sharply defined moral rhetoric of the Musaddas amplifies the ludic quality of pleasure; it flirts with that quality in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of reading the text itself. 64 Gandhi’s texts, however, do not display the same kind of ambivalence to this species of pleasure. This may be because of the quality of passive resistance itself: his texts take a passively non-confrontational route of resistance to pleasure, and as a result these pleasures are not magnified in the critiquing of them.
Pleasure also played a key role in British colonial fears about creolization. After the ‘White Mughals’ gave way to more circumscribed views about British relationships with Indian society, Indian cultural pleasures of art, dance, music, sex and drugs were seen as potentially dangerous sites of cultural creolisation. Questions of pleasure also figured largely in the philosophic radicalism which shaped influential strands of British colonial ideology from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards. For utilitarianism and Bentham’s felicific calculus, what constituted pleasure and how it could be measured were important questions when considering the role of social affections in the development of more equitable social orders, whether in Britain or in India. 65 As with Gandhi and Hali, for these philosophers of pleasure sobriety of thought and writing were prerequisites for being able to think about pleasure and its consequences. 66 However, the key category in Gandhi’s texts was violence not pleasure; he was a theoretician of (non-) violence, while Hali, on the other hand, was a poet of (anti-) pleasure.
Drugs and alcohol
Gandhi’s engagement with opium is also part of a larger concern with the role of psychoactive substances in Indian nationalist thought. Discourses about alcohol played an important role in Indian nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, nationalists had labelled alcohol as foreign to India. 67 In December 1924, the Indian National Congress (INC) annual meeting at Belgaum adopted a resolution to the effect that ‘the drink and drug habit of the people’ was used by the Government of India as a source of revenue, and this was detrimental to the ‘moral welfare of India’ and of the ‘whole world’. 68 Alongside this cultural and moral argument economic factors were also key, since the colonial state generated revenue from liquor; nationalist agitation for prohibition therefore aimed a blow at the colonial state’s finances. During the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930–31, INC activists and volunteers picketed liquor shops. In the picketing guidelines of the INC, Gandhi added the suggestion that picketers should go into drinkers’ homes to make the case against alcohol consumption. 69 In this period, key tensions emerged between temperance-nationalists and Indian drinkers; drinkers had to choose between joining the emerging nation or continuing in their habit, and drinking was also associated with political apathy. 70 As with opium, drink also became a signifier of larger meanings. As Colvard puts it, the resistance of drinkers to nationalist temperance was seen as an ‘expression of the agency of anthropomorphized drink itself’. 71 There were also sensitive caste dimensions to the nationalist temperance movement since temperance and the advocacy of prohibition could be interpreted as an imposition of upper caste social norms on lower castes. 72 At the outset of Congress’ essay into provincial government in the late 1930s, Gandhi had insisted that prohibition should be central to the Congress’ plans in government. The Congress Working Committee’s decision in August 1937 that all Congress Ministries should work for prohibition within three years was called by Gandhi its ‘greatest act’ since its formation. 73 In 1937 when the INC formed ministries in the provinces, it worked towards total prohibition in Madras, Bombay, United Provinces, Central Provinces and Bihar. 74 In the 1930s, drinking came to be seen as an act of disloyalty to the concept of free India and Gandhi played a key role in the emergence of this perception. 75
Conclusion
Opium, then, was a slippery signifier of freedom, responsibility and agency in colonial India. The Hindu nationalist R. B. Lal Chand (1852–1912) wrote of how the Hindus of India are seized with sleeping sickness of a very dangerous type. Wrapped up in fantastic reveries of imagination like an opium-eater we continue to act the part in life of a Sheikh Chilly, and to revolve on ideas of a “united Indian nation”, the rights of a “British citizen”, colonial form of government, and other nonsense of the same genus and nature.
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Opium remains one of the sites on which postcolonial agency is both imagined and compromised in India. The equation of an India free from a dependence on drugs and drink with national freedom itself and what it means to be Indian is articulated in the Indian Constitution. Pt. IV of the Indian Constitution deals with the Directive Principles of State Policy. These principles are non-justiciable and are designed, in B. R. Ambedkar’s words, to ‘give certain directions to the future legislatures and the future executives to show in what manner they are to exercise the power which they will have’.
77
Art. 47, Pt. IV reads as follows: The State shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties and, in particular, the State shall endeavour to bring about the prohibition of the consumption except for medicinal purposes of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.