Amitav Ghosh.qxd 6/5/2008 3:33 PM Page 2 Amitav Ghosh commanderMaster and Novelist, essayist and travel writer Amitav Ghosh is in top form with his new novel Sea of Poppies. Avtar Singh takes a look at the first instalment of the “Ibis trilogy” and finds a cracking nautical tale with a rock-solid moral core. Move over, Jack Sparrow. Photograph by Dayanita Singh. If, in a parallel authorial dimension, you were who is a talented but reluctant wrestler, a Ben- and even, on occasion, touch and smell and to run into an early nineteenth-century Ben- gali-speaking French girl and her boatman taste. The physicality of his imagination lifts gali Vaishnavite named Nob Kissin Pander foster-brother who happens to be Muslim, this novel above right and wrong, without who ships indentured people off to distant and sundry profane colonials and lascars. ever losing its moral core. lands for a living and channels his mystic aunt And that’s just the first hundred pages. The praying British opium trader with a to the point where he thinks he’s started grow- So you’ve noticed: the potential for trans- taste for flagellation finds his mirror in the ing breasts: which prominent Indian author’s gression is immense, and in this book, the upper-caste subedar who readies to rape his creation would you think he was? Amitav characters don’t so much cross the line as nephew’s widow with a belaying pin. Pander Ghosh probably wouldn’t top the list. But in pole-vault across it. In so doing, they change is first the agent of Halder’s entrapment and Sea of Poppies, part I of the “Ibis trilogy”, themselves and the way the world sees them. then the angel of his release. Moments of Ghosh pulls off a most remarkable transfor- As Ghosh said, “I have always been fascinat- shocking brutality – and there are many of mation. In a novel that hinges on transgres- ed by the ways in which some people are able those – are interspersed equally generously sions and focuses on deep and often violent to reinvent some very basic aspect of their with those of love and tenderness. Even the change (both personal and social), the author being – not just class and caste, but also race justifications that the opium-runners gave for himself emerges from the heavy historical and and gender.” Those reinventions are both the doing what they did, fantastical as they are, intellectual shadow of his most recent works, structure and the theme of this novel. The cen- are presented in a straight manner. Tellingly cast anew as a writer who can inform, edify, trality of reinvention to Sea of Poppies begs enough, the English captain of the Ibis him- provoke and entertain. This is a barnstormer the question, though: was there actually so self tells a group of his compatriots that the of a book. When it ends, when you’re done wip- much of this going on back then? While only difference between them and other ing your palms and your brow, you’ll give acknowledging that hierarchies in colonial tyrants is the need to pretend that their depre- thanks that it’s only the first instalment in a dations are for a higher cause. “It is this pre- trilogy and there’s more to come. We actually tence of virtue, I promise you, that will never asked Ghosh in an email interview what he’d “The suffering inflicted be forgiven by history,” he says. It is equally think of a blurb that read “rattling good yarn”. telling that no Indian character ventures such His answer was simple: “I would be delighted”. on China through Indian a forceful denunciation of the trade. The novel itself follows the lives of a few We can, however, thank that particular his- people in the year 1838: the opium trade is in opium counts as one of torical moment for one of the chief pleasures full swing and its repercussions are being felt of this book, which is its language. Ghosh everywhere. An American slave ship (the the greatest crimes in has taken incredible pains to give each char- Ibis, for whom the trilogy is named) comes to Indian history.” acter a distinct voice, and the result of that Calcutta to be retrofitted to transport opium, effort is the blood of this book. There are at the behest of an English merchant who has British-Indian beauties to be savoured – a prospered off the trade. Among his debtors is India were pretty much set in stone, Ghosh did visit to the loo is to “drop a chitty in the dawk” a famous Bengali zemindar, Raja Neel Rattan point out that “certain individuals have (thank heavens for the unreliability of the Halder of Raskhali (naturally, he becomes the always been able to change their circum- post) – and the profanities of the lascars Rascally Roger). Upriver, the forced cultiva- stances… the stories of such people are inter- and other mariners and the Indian contingent tion of opium and the newly landless class it is esting irrespective of whether they are repre- will surprise many Ghosh fans. The frequent- creating is slowly forcing another sort of sentative of the historical moment.” ly unfathomable argot of the lascars collides export: indentured labour. The trickle of gir- That historical moment is outlined in great on deck with Bhojpuri, that breaks in turn mitiyas (from the “girmits”, or agreements detail by Ghosh. It is a matter of record that upon the shore of the nineteenth-century Eng- that they signed) is turning to a flood, as the opium trade enriched a few people (certain lish mariner’s polished and crystal-clear colonies deprived of the now-outlawed slave respectable Parsi families take heed, the trilo- invective. The same word is even spelt differ- trade turn to other sources of labour. The gy is heading towards China) and shagged ently in the mouths of different people: did Ibis’s maiden voyage from India will in fact be everyone else. As Ghosh said, “The suffering you even know that lascar came from lashkar, to convey a load of these girmitiyas to that was inflicted on China through Indian or ever think that chute and chut could be Mareech, or Mauritius. opium counts as one of the greatest crimes in interchangeable? Once you know, of course, The cast of characters includes a black Indian history, and I feel that we as Indians it all makes sense. It’s a superlative effort, mate from Maryland who is taken for a white need to acknowledge this aspect of our past.” the motivation for which Ghosh explained man, a Thakur woman in Bihar married to an The historical power of this novel comes from with a reference to his own taste for classical ex-sepoy who is currently an opium addict the way in which Ghosh populates that dis- Indian music. “For me, dialogue is an element and will soon be dead, an immense Chamar tant reality with people we can see and hear of what would be called ‘alankaar’ (ornamen- 14 www.timeoutdelhi.net June 13 – 26 2008 Amitav Ghosh.qxd 6/5/2008 3:33 PM Page 3 Amitav Ghosh tation) in Indian aesthetics… Words are to everyone in the book is chasing that particu- ing of the waves. Is there a nautical side to language what notes are to music: just as it is lar dragon, to a greater or lesser degree. But Ghosh? “Yes,” he said. “Water plays a very impossible to love music without loving water too has a huge role to play. For the large part in my imaginative life.” He learnt to musical notes, it is impossible also to be a migrants, crossing the “black water” is the sail on the open sea for this book, and said reader, in the full sense, without loving final frontier, beyond which the old certain- that the experience added a lot to the novel. words, in all their variety and occasional ties needn’t hold. To the lascars and the other What would he think, then, if this book were obscurity.” It’s a pretty heavy metaphor for mariners, it is the field on which their lives to be placed on a list that includes such water- what could just be an author’s delight in the play out. Everyone in the book is tied to the borne classics as Treasure Island, The tools of his trade, but with a book this good, water, either by birth, circumstance or effort, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the you can allow him that. and in either expectation or resignation. Even Pirates of the Caribbean? There remains, finally, water itself. The the descriptions of life on the sea are alive “I would be pleased beyond measure.” big symbol of the book is the poppy, sure, and with the cracking of the sails and the break- Sea of Poppies, Viking, Rs 599. June 13 – 26 2008 www.timeoutdelhi.net 15.