Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh

Read and Download Ebook Flood of Fire... Flood of Fire Amitav Ghosh PDF File: Flood of Fire... 1 Read and Download Ebook Flood of Fire... Flood of Fire Amitav Ghosh Flood of Fire Amitav Ghosh It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war. One of the vessels requisitioned for the attack, the Hind, travels eastwards from Bengal to China, sailing into the midst of the First Opium War. The turbulent voyage brings together a diverse group of travellers, each with their own agenda to pursue. Among them is Kesri Singh, a sepoy in the East India Company who leads a company of Indian sepoys; Zachary Reid, an impoverished young sailor searching for his lost love, and Shireen Modi, a determined widow en route to China to reclaim her opium-trader husband's wealth and reputation. Flood of Fire follows a varied cast of characters from India to China, through the outbreak of the First Opium War and China's devastating defeat, to Britain's seizure of Hong Kong. Flood of Fire Details Date : Published 2015 by Murray ISBN : 9780719569005 Author : Amitav Ghosh Format : Hardcover 616 pages Genre : Historical, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Cultural, India, China Download Flood of Fire ...pdf Read Online Flood of Fire ...pdf Download and Read Free Online Flood of Fire Amitav Ghosh PDF File: Flood of Fire... 2 Read and Download Ebook Flood of Fire... From Reader Review Flood of Fire for online ebook Divya Sarma says Amitava Ghosh's conclusion of the Ibis trilogy is epic. I stumbled on Sea of Poppies, almost as my first Ghosh book, and then read River of Smoke in breathless anticipation. But that book, good though it is, seemed a bit stalled, almost waiting for more action to happen. Most of the principal characters from Sea of Poppies were missing, and although Bahram Moddie was a compelling character in himself, I longed for Deeti and Zachary, Jodu and the rest. Well, most of them return in Flood of Fire, in unexpected forms. Zachary is back, and while he was clearly the most likely hero of Sea of Poppies, here he gradually becomes a sort of anti-hero. And yet, you never lose your sympathy for this character. Like Babu Nob Kissin Pander says, he is the symbol of the Kali Yuga, the age when the world drowns in the pursuit of profit. Zachary's gradual seduction into the power plays, is initiated, surprisingly by an actual seduction by Mrs. Burnham. But even as he turns dark, even as he blackmails Mrs. Burnham and her lover Captain Mee and eventually drives them to suicide, even as he betrays Ah Fatt (freddie) and causes his death, when it is finally revealed that he has floated a firm in partnership with Mr. Burnham, you only sigh for him and hope he somehow survives the partnership. What we will remember about Zachary is the protectiveness he showed towards Paulette, the hug he gives to console Raju (Neel's son), who serves as his 'kidmuttgar' for a brief while in this book. Mrs. Burnham's emergence as a major character is somewhat surprising, since she functioned almost as a comic aside in the first book. She emerges as a seductress supreme in the way she initiates Zachary into many pleasurable practices. But the backstory of the tragic romance with Captain Mee and her eventual suicide seems to be rather cliched. One would have thought she had the wherewithal to deal with Zachary's blackmail and emerge stronger from it. The other surprising major character is Shireen Moddie. If you read River of Smoke, she would be a fairly unsympathetic character, someone who has bound Bahram to her natal family, someone who never gave Bahram any love or even respect, a credulous believer in 'godmen'. But the way she deals with Bahram's secret family, the mistress and son in Canton is surprisingly dignified. She acknowledges her own hurt and betrayal, but she is also strong and fair enough to recognize what is due to Ah Fatt (Freddie) as Bahram's son. She may not be able to give him any official status or even property, but her reaching out to him fulfills a deep longing in Freddie's life and her eventual insistence that Freddie be buried next to Bahram finally grants him his due. Shireen is the one who recognizes the rights of the half caste children spawned by the trade routes. She is a surprising mouthpiece considering her background as a upper class conservative woman, also considering she is in a sense a 'victim' of these practices. But as she tells her nephew Dinyar (another Parsee with a Chinese Family), "Children can never be brought into this world silently. They grow up, they learn to speak, and eventually they speak. You should remember this when you deal with your own children," you feel she has stuck a decisive blow for the likes of Freddie. It is therefore disappointing that in the very next paragraph she uses the threat of revealing about his Chinese children to his family, to get him to consent to her second marriage. You somehow dont expect her to instrumentalize these children to her own ends so easily. And the romance track between Shireen and Zadig lacks any verve and does nothing to the plot. Could not Shireen have remained an independent widow who was following her life. Was there a need to tie her down in matrimony again and that too to Bahram's best friend. For me the best parts of the novel however were the conflicting loyalties of the people in the war. Neel, for instance is an Indian, fleeing prison and is accepted by the Chinese and even helps their cause. But he does resent the scorn with which the Chinese treat the Indian sepoys. The Chinese dont think these sepoys are any threat to them, so Neel has a perverse pleasure when the sepoys rout the Chinese (his side in the war) in the PDF File: Flood of Fire... 3 Read and Download Ebook Flood of Fire... first skirmish. Again in an atmosphere when the CHinese population gets more and more xenophobic and start attacking 'aliens' including the 'black aliens' (as the Indians are called), there is delicious irony in the fact that a ship commanded by Jodu and some other Indians, with Neel on board, manages to damage a British ship of war. Nowhere is this conflict so movingly described as in the dilemma of Kesri Singh, Deeti's brother. As a professional soldier, he hates these Chinese defenders who prefer death to surrender, because they make him realize an uncomfortable truth, that he is practically a hired killer. At a time when he thinks death is upon him, he regrets the nature of his death, not as a soldier fighting for something he values, but caught in a war, where he practically sympathizes with the enemy and even feels for his own killers, who are only defending their village, something he himself would have done back home. Kesri's dilemma epitomises the question a Chinese officer asks Neel earlier in the book - Why do these Sepoys fight for the British? Kesri himself is a forerunner of another of Ghosh's characters, Arjun in the Glass Palace, an Indian officer who wonders why he is fighting for the British, as he makes a choice to join the Indian National Army during the second World War. Deeti herself, one of the primary driving forces of the first novel is almost completely absent in this novel, as she is in the previous one. But here at least, one feels her presence constantly here, as different characters - Kesri, Zachary, Maddow and Paulette- recall her and in a way she remains a crucial guiding force of the narrative. One doesnt miss her, because she is in everyone's minds and we know she is safe and settled in the Mauritius. To cut a long story short (and it is a really long story, not just this book but this trilogy itself), Flood of Fire is a fitting finale to a glorious, thrilling story of lives tied together by the Ibis, a scathing criticism of colonialism, and a glorious recreation of the multi-culturalism which emerged from an earlier era of trade. We, the internet and email generation, may find it surprising that even when communications took forever, people met, exchanged goods and ideas and constantly created vibrant new cultures. Tuck says here is a clear-eyed good review of this 600 page opium war/ingrez colonial india sage https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... this is the third book by ghosh of the characters and story lines set in india and china 1830-1841 , in where britain, by their ideas of liberty being their god given right, and their desire to make as much money as possible, when and where they can, thus any infringement of that liberty was not only against their rights, but god didnt like that infringement either. so they grew lots and lots of opium in india, shipped it to china, canton, ghuangchou specifically, sell it to chinese, makes lots and lots of money, get chinese goods too, and ship to india and england, and makes lots and lots of money off that too, and god smiles, she's SO happy for the angrez. mayhem ensues, and it's never really ever stopped. ghosh has done much research on this time period and place, built a cast of diverse characters (if somewhat too soap operaish at times for me) and ran with this epic historical saga.

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