Let’s be blunt. If you have written a whole book about cannabis, the inevitable question will come. Karan Madhok knows the one. And he is ready for it, patient like a pinch hitter for that final-stage yorker. Halfway through our engaging conversation about his intriguing new book, out in December 2024—Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India—I tap dance around it.
“Any consciousness-expanding experiences?”
Madhok, bemused at my attempt, cuts to the chase: “Are you trying to ask me if I took cannabis? Well, my answer is: At no point in the writing of this book have I broken any law.”
Two years ago, Madhok’s first novel, A Beautiful Decay, about the post-death reflections of a young Indian immigrant in America, announced him as a wry and philosophical voice, switching between punchy vernacular and high-style prose. Even before its release, he and his publisher, Aleph Book Company, were already brewing the next idea: a creative exploration of our country’s long and colourful entanglement with, as he writes in one early chapter, “ganja, charas, weed, vijaya, bhang, pot, grass, hemp, maal, sab kuch milta hai”.
In India, if cannabis abounds, so do the clichés around it. Madhok has tried his best to avoid all of them. His book is far from just a one-note groovy diary of a stoner, although it kicks off with his first tryst with bhang. Mystical drug-fueled epiphanies are treated with the skepticism that they richly deserve. Neither is an encyclopedic bible his goal. Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India melds a cannabis trail across India with Madhok’s personal history and the drug’s infinite contradictions in Indian society, from its deep cultural roots to its precarious and, often disreputable, legal and social stature.
“I am not an expert on any of this, so I want to make that clear. I want to put my explorations out on paper, then let people discover, and make up their minds for themselves. I’m making up my mind as the book progresses too,” he explains.
Cannabis occupies a strange duality between the sacred and profane in our public discourse. The chasm that separates the blissed-out sadhus of Varanasi, who are celebrated, from the average weed-smoker, threatened with legal action, is vast. Madhok hopes to flesh out the more nuanced middle ground through this book. “When it comes to cannabis, ganja or bhang in India, there are two polarised camps,” believes Madhok. “One camp comprises the people who are completely against it… this is just a bad drug, capital D, [if] you have this, your life is spoiled… put everybody in jail, right? And the other side believes that this is [Lord] Shiva’s substance… a new-agey thing, where it can solve all of life’s problems.”
In recent years, the latter camp has been driving a movement to make the drug acceptable, and ultimately, legal across the country, loosely led by an initiative called the Great Legalisation Movement India (GLM India). Some characters from this collective, such as GLM India founder Viki Vaurora, are in Madhok’s book, as are health experts and medical researchers delving into the plant’s medicinal benefits, and the workers, who toil away on cannabis farms, probably the most underserved and underrepresented in this drug’s story.
“For the chapter on Sheelavathi [a popular cannabis varietal], I went up to the Bonda Hills in Odisha, home to the Bondas, a group of Adivasi people who have been used [by local cartels] to traffic the drug,” reveals Madhok. As Bonda youngsters detail the difficult circumstances that compel them to turn reluctant drug mules, he concludes that, for years, India’s illegal cannabis trade has been kindling violence against this disenfranchised borderland community, “scapegoated in the ongoing skirmish between lawmakers and lawbreakers”.
In a few chapters, Madhok contends with the most influential shaper of public opinion around cannabis—Bollywood and pop culture. There are contemplations on the happily hippie vibes from “Dum Maro Dum” in Haré Rama Haré Krishna (1971) and on the dark drug-shaming and finger pointing that followed actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death in 2020.
Now that the book is finally wrapped, Madhok is glad to be back spending time with his wife and young daughter in Washington D.C. (USA) where he lives these days. Chasing cannabis around India took him away from them often and his pangs of fatherhood often intermingle with this odyssey, as do a niggling sense of rootlessness, something he dealt with in his previous work as well.
“At this point, I feel like an outsider in most places,” says the 40-year-old, whose family hails from Varanasi, also the setting of his next book, something he is tight-lipped about. “I feel like I do not fully belong to any place, but I take it as a positive thing, which keeps me curious.” Wandering from one familiar place to the next, walking through the doors of perception, one by one.