: Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
Viking, Rs 599
Amitav Ghosh reveals a land hallucinating on opium and a galley of strangers in search of identities
It is a land hallucinating on opium — where drifts of white poppy flowers swathe the banks of the Ganga, where Deeti surreptitiously adds shavings of the dark akbari opium to achars to sedate her mother-in-law, where half-naked men with dazed eyes trample the ooze in enormous tanks at Ghazipur’s Sudder Opium Factory, where burra sahibs sell the dope in Maha-Chin and BeeBees slip in a little bit of laudanum before sleep, where butterflies circle the bleeding pods “in oddly erratic patterns” and monkeys hurry to lap up the effluent from the carcanna before returning to their stupefied scrutiny of the river. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first in the proposed Ibis Trilogy, is about the haze before the Opium Wars of the 19th century. It spreads from Benaras to Bihar, from Calcutta to Canton, from land to river to sea. And it drives a host of strangers to a refurbished slave galley sailing to Mareech, the penal colony of Mauritius.
The novel begins with the ship Ibis, which the light-eyed Deeti sees in an almost hallucinogenic vision as she takes a dip in the river, and incredulously the very moment the vessel touches the waters miles away. Three-fourths of the book is about the many criss-crossing journeys to the schooner — of Deeti, who escapes from the funeral pyre of her husband, an afeemkhor or opium addict; the gigantic Kalua, who becomes an indentured labourer with many others, for although slave trade is abolished, the East India Company “needs” to export coolies apart from opium; the frail zamindar of Raskhali, Raja Neel Rattan Halder, who becomes a convict with “forgerer, alipore 1838” tattooed on his forehead; the American freedman Zachary Reid who hides his black origins under a fair skin; and the orphaned daughter of a French botanist, Paulette Lambert. It is about how sahibs and sailors, gomusta and grihmitya, blacks, browns and whites become jahaz bhai-behn in the wooden mai-baap.
It is a grand narrative that gently reveals history, and how men and women shed the “last shreds of former being” with the keenest instincts of survival and without any ceremony. Even when the Ibis is docked, everything is in flux — lingo, dress and hierarchies of caste and race toboggan like cargo sliding in a...
