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Sea of Poppies
The locale shifts unceasingly from the poppy fields on the banks of the Ganges to the wide open seas and the intricate and dark arteries of the opium trade in China. Though a compelling story, the novel still remains at a deeper level a fictionalized account of the political history of the opium trade, the uses and abuses of various forms of opium, of the indentured labour that was carried to the Caribbean islands, Mauritius and Fiji as well as an interesting comment on cultural history through references to the culinary practice in India, to superstition and religion, to marriage and costumes, to legal system and sexual practices. A former slave ship is on its way to Mauritius carrying indentured girmitiyas or coolies. Notwithstanding, the voyage offers new beginnings and, in the argument of the merchant-nabob, Benjamin Burnham, a kind of freedom from the burden of brutal history that is ridden by clashes of caste and custom and constrictive family affiliations. Imperialism taken as liberty underpins his discourse. Deeti will be rescued from becoming sati by Kalua, an outcaste who marries her. But they are now free on the wide open seas slowly edging towards a different future. The backdrop is provided by the opium wars of China, a place that became the victim of British callousness, first by turning the Chinese into drug addicts by selling them opium and then by waging a war when the emperor banned its use. On the Indian side, the East India Company exploited poor farmers by forcing them to turn fertile land to poppy cultivation, thereby denying them the right to subsistence farming. Ghosh has turned out a novel of somber brilliance, offering an amazing blend of sympathy and cynicism, irony and joviality that so dexterously relates to history and reason as well as is hauntingly evocative of the colonial period through the use of native words like thug, pukka, sahib, mali, lathi, dekko, Dosootie shirt, zerbaft brocade, and jooties. As in the African novel, many words are beyond the grasp of the reader, but they do help in setting the ambience of time and space. Bhojpuri jostles with Bengali, and Hindustani with Anglo-Indian and English, Creole with pidgin giving the reader a sense of the panorama and cross-section of communities that are in the process of migration. As Mr. Doughty remarks: "Wait till you hear the barnshoot bucking in English—like a bander reading aloud from The Times." The novel is indeed an in-depth detailed study of a bygone age of sea travel and of the people of the east and the west confronting a world of complex political disruption. It is through the common story of the diasporic travelers who can one moment relate to one another, and the next enter into murder or rape, an experience of camaraderie and conflict that throws light on the colonial history of the land they feel they are leaving behind. This confusion of colonial history finds a parallel in the denouement where a storm takes over the ship. The lascars abandon the ship including Jodu, Neel, Ah Fatt and Kalua; the first mate dies and the chief characters stand on the deck looking at the longboat disappearing far away in the horizon. The novel ends abruptly with the message that instead of a resolution the travelers are happy that they are still on a journey, a promise of some hope of a never ending quest. Ghosh’s new novel turns out to be an enduring achievement, written as it is by a pure literary virtuoso who can be easily ranked with Milan Kundera or Garcia Marquez who are past masters at capturing our darkest, deepest human passions of greed and brotherhood, deception and treachery, coarseness and cruelty, violence and fellow consideration.
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Through
its narrative of displacement in which we see a conglomeration of
Indians and westerners—a rustic widow Deeti, a mulatto American
freedman, Zachary, a French stowaway, Paulette Lambert, head of the ship’s
crew of lascars, Serang Ali, with a face that "would have earned
the envy of Genghis Khan", a bankrupt Raja, Neel, sailors and
coolies and convicts—Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies gathers
together a varied crowd in the ship, Ibis, that sets sail across the
"Black Water" after its journey down the Hooghly. Sea of
Poppies, the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy is an
experience of dispersal and fragmentation around 1838, a period of
clashes between the rulers and the ruled and the year of the first Opium
War with China. The modernist referent of truth, society, meaning,
power, history and reality gives the text a vast affiliation with the
colonial world of the mid nineteenth century when these ‘jahaj-bhais’
complete with their memories and desires, disenchantment and hope, will
carve out a future in the distant islands to which the ship is carrying
them. Moving towards the Bay of Bengal, this assortment of travelers
from around the world will experience the horrors of the practice of
sati, of mutiny, of rape, sex and intrigue.