Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh; Viking Penguin; Price: Rs.599; 512 pp
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Undulating sea-waves crested with vivid red poppies on the cover of Amitav Ghosh’s highly acclaimed new novel evocatively draw the reader into a startling history of trade and migration, imperial greed and colonial debasement. The “vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean” that comes to Deeti in a rural hamlet in northern Bihar, relentlessly draws out her story across miles of poppy fields lining the embankments of the holy Ganga, to a passage on the old-fashioned schooner, the Ibis, that sails from Calcutta across the kala-pani towards the island of Mareech (Mauritius).
The novel is structurally divided into three distinct segments — Land, River and Ocean. It maps the journey of the Ibis as it hoves into India and drops anchor off Ganga-Sagar Island in the Bay of Bengal, in March 1838. Soon it sets sail down the Hooghly and out to sea again, with a shipful of passengers whose personal histories become intertwined with the history of nations — the East India Company’s opium trade with Maha-Chin (China) and the British Empire’s surreptitious commerce in human cargo, coolies and indentured labour (girmitiyas) who were transported with convicts, thugs and other low life to the Empire’s island prisons and plantations stretching from Fiji, Mauritius, Africa and all the way to the islands of the West Indies.
As the author recounts the individual histories of the ship’s passengers, Ghosh’s training as an anthropologist enables him to transform Sea of Poppies into an intimate study of human ethnography, culture and language. The complexity of life in the multi-ethnic and multicultural diasporic communities of colonial India is revealed through strange turns of events that shape and mould the fates of ordinary people such as Kabutri-ki-ma, the chamar Kalua as also of nabobs like Benjamin Burnham whose fortune steadily peaks as he moves from the payrolls of others, drawing his monthly tuncaw, to acquiring articles of indenture as a free merchant, transforming into a bidder for transportation of convicts and then at the opium auctions of the East India Company.
A tour de force of history, politics, races and cultures, the narrative begins a year before the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars (1839-1842), in 19th century Calcutta. As the city grew and trade prospered, it became a vast melting-pot of people such as the mulatto American adventurer Zachary Reid and Paulette, nicknamed Putli or Puggly, the orphaned daughter of a French botanist torn between dutifulness to her well-wishers, the Burnhams, and her emotional bond with her foster, native brother, Jodu. The port city also harboured the lascars, a mix of varied ethnic origins, who devised a lingo of their own that comes tripping off the tongue of their chief, Serang Ali.
A compelling drama of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, revulsion and allegiance, is enacted against a vivid social canvas of entrenched customs of casteism and family honour, decadent zamindari opulence, oppression of subedars and gomustas heightened by sirkari or administrative interventions. Thus Deeti, married to an afeemkhor (opium-addict) who works in the Ghazipur opium factory, is violated by her husband’s brother under the surveillance of her own mother-in-law on her wedding night and is later rescued from her husband’s funeral pyre by the low caste Kalua. She elopes with him to find a new future abandoning the wind-swept poppy fields, her modest home and dark-eyed daughter to forge a new identity as Aditi, the bhauji of the indentured coolies or migrant labour aboard the Ibis. Far from the hills and plains of Bihar and Jharkhand, the action and violence spills out from the seams of the ship to be set adrift on the surging waves of the Indian Ocean.
The intrigues of Burnham sahib against Neel Ratan Halder of Rashkhali afford an insight into the oppressive decadence of the rajahs surrounded by their loyal wives and treacherous mistresses, dewans and retainers who bleed the zamindari and provide an opportunity to hawk-eyed English nabobs to annex their estates. Neel Ratan is tried and convicted by an English judge, imprisoned in Alipore Jail and then deported as an ordinary convict. He reels under the impact but matures from the effeminate babu that he was, into a man.
The Ibis represents a symbol — it demarcates a space and charts the story of a bizarre fusion of people who jostle each other, react to unfamiliar circumstances, interact without reference to caste or creed while nurturing their own eccentric dreams and fancies, desires, disappointments and ambitions. The crowd on the ship, coolies and convicts, lascars and crew, mates and captain — all uprooted from their past — are intent on forging new identities.
In the process, there are marriages and murders, public lashings and secret escapades, replete with the author’s keen sense of the complexity of the human condition. The gripping human drama aboard the Ibis involving a range of individualised characters is matched by Ghosh’s innovative use of language. Like Salman Rushdie’s bold experiments with the ‘Queen’s English’, Ghosh has a keen ear for the nuances of language and plays around creatively with the dialects of his numerous protagonists. The rhythms of Bhojpuri and Bengali, Hindustani and Laskari clink and mingle with pidgin phrases and chutney English spoken by the East India Company people.
Ghosh’s atmospheric novel — the first in the Ibis trilogy — offers a Babel of tongues, a potpourri of emotions, disrupted vignettes of colonial history and experiences of displacement that present a bewildering puzzle. The story is racy and compelling — full of surprises, and strange quirks of events that mark the voyage across unknown seas of the ship with its human cargo. The narrative ends somewhat mysteriously, and leaves the reader standing on the storm swept deck of the Ibis with Deeti, Paulette, Nob Kissen and Zachary watching a long boat filled with convicts and the condemned, disappearing in mid-ocean.
Though positioned as a novel, in reality this engaging narrative is a deeply researched initiative, which tells the untold story of the cultural histories of diasporic communities, and the bitterness of migration and exile they endured in the 19th century.
Jayati Gupta