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SEA OF POPPIES
By
Amitav Ghosh
If The Glass Palace was a scathing expose of the British Empire, and its destructive influence on whole cultures, societies, and nationalities; the Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, gets under the skin of Empire to lay bare its greedy, stinking, rotten heart. However, the empire could not have lasted as long as it did without the active collaboration of willing partners from within the colonized people, who, for a few pieces of silver, were willing to mortgage their consciences, and the future of whole generations.
Taking advantage of the Mughals’ lack of knowledge, or even interest in seafaring, the British quickly established military superiority through their navies by establishing control over the vast coastline of India. Their control over the Indian Ocean provided the British with the means to generate riches beyond their wildest dreams. The plunder of royal treasuries, temples, and mosques, alone could not have contributed an unending, continuous stream of wealth to Empire. It needed something more to keep itself perpetually in power and pelf. And this treasure was found in two commodities; opium, and manpower. Both were renewable and therefore, inexhaustible. The British Empire was built upon the poppy that the Indian farmer was forced to plant in place of the normal food crops, and when the same farmer was reduced by this practice to absolute poverty and penury, he was drafted as an indentured labourer to work in the Empire’s sugar plantations in distant islands across the globe. The indentured labourer, or ‘girmitiya’ was nothing but a slave called by another name.
This is the historical background from which Amitav Ghosh has drawn a fascinating tale of heroic proportions. None of his characters is heroic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the cast consists of people drawn from the lowest dregs of society; illiterate and dispossessed peasants, chamars, decadent and bankrupt zamindars, convicts, East Asian sailors called lascars, the lower constabulary, minor accountants, and etc. Even the sahibs and their mems are cruel, conniving upstarts, revelling in their power over the wretched natives whom they have exploited through trickery and treachery.
But such is Ghosh’s mastery that he has written a story of epic dimensions; an Odyssey, truly Homeric in its vision, that by the time you come to the last page, the inmates of the Ibis’s dabusa, are no less heroic than the characters of Homer’s tale. Ghosh’s narrative style is leisurely; he lets the story pause when he wants to introduce his reader to some technical details, explaining the process of drawing sap from the poppies; manufacturing and packing of opium for transportation to distant lands; structure and construction of sailing ships of the early 19th century; and etc. The schooner Ibis is described in such complete detail that the reader can almost draw a sketch of the vessel. Like the Sundarbans in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Ibis is a major character in the story and not just a prop to dress up the stage for the human drama. However, these pauses, without being descriptive, enrich our understanding of the tapestry that Ghosh is weaving.
The other aspect of the novel is the language that Ghosh has used. Or perhaps, the correct word is “languages”. This is truly a “polyglot” novel, in which every character speaks in his/her native dialect, the girmitiyas in their Bhojpuri; the lascars in a tongue unidentifiable with any one language; the merchant ship officers in a corrupted indo-anglian dialect; the sahibs and mems of Calcutta in Anglo-Hindoostani, and the lone American freedman in his peculiar dialect of the waterfronts. It is a measure of Ghosh’s painstaking research and scholarship that his use of these diverse tongues does not get mixed up and each character speaks in the language of his/her origin. It is also ironic that the only person who speaks in proper English is the dispossessed zamindar/convicted forgerer Neel Rattan Halder. Sea of Poppies can be compared to that great American novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where too the protagonists are the dispossessed, forced to travel far from their roots for survival; the oppressors are the capitalists who use brute power, and a captive legal machinery to subjugate the ordinary folk; and the struggle between these two attains epic proportions. There is the folk tongue of Ma and her family from Oklahoma; and a different language spoken by the other characters. Perhaps there is no more devastating commentary on the injustice and inequity of the capitalist system than the act of Ma who asks her own daughter, Rose-of-Sharon, who has just lost her newborn child, to breastfeed a starving, unknown, adult male to save his life.
Like Steinbeck, Amitav Ghosh has a truly universal vision of humanity, and it shines throughout his works. He discovers in Bhojpuri a language without equal among “all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, in the expression of the nuances of love, longing, and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.” In one of the most poignant passages Ghosh writes: “How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted to the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”
The British Empire, like all imperialist regimes before or after it, was an evil dispensation, a violation of basic human rights, devoid of any respect for other cultures, their religions, their myths, social structures. Empire came with pretence of bringing enlightenment, and Ghosh deliberately puts this awareness among the colonizers in the head of the weak, opium-addled, Captain Chillingworth who says, “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” The captain himself turns out to be just another pretender when he takes command of the Ibis, and is incapable of delivering justice to the wretched of his ship.
Amitav Ghosh has told us that he is planning to write a trilogy on this subject. Perhaps he had Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy in mind when he embarked upon his journey. But with five of his main characters adrift on the seas in a longboat, and quite a few still left on the schooner, I suspect, there is enough potential for a more ambitious number. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to the sequel.
Thank you, Amitav, for giving us this beautiful book, and reminding us of how dearly we have paid for our freedom from Empire. The tragedy is that we appear to be relapsing into the same trap of colonialism, where the new girmitiyas are the IT professionals, and the opium-addicts are not the Chinese but our own elite and the middle-classes. The East India Company has been replaced by the corporate multinationals, the gomustas by the bureaucrats, and the zamindars by the politicians. Once more I fear for my people!
Thursday, August 21, 2008
ARUNDHATI ROY ON KASHMIR
Arundhati Roy’s recent statement on Kashmir, as quoted by The Times of India, that “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India” has raised a storm in the electronic and print media across the country. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to make a statement like this in today’s circumstances, where India, on the one hand, is completely at the mercy of self-serving, vote-bank politicians, while its neighbour, Pakistan, is re-experimenting with democracy with a known set of politicians who are no different from their coevals here. At the time of writing, there are 337 comments on The Times of India website, and these are, predictably, divided on religious lines. While a majority of Hindu commentators have roundly trashed her statement as anti-national, and questioned her mental credibility, the Muslim commentators have come in support of her views. This fact, by itself, should vindicate her observations. However, it is time that the question of Kashmir is debated widely, and dispassionately, as it is in the interest of world peace that a lasting solution is found to this problem.
From the moment the two-nation theory was conceived, there should have been no doubt in the minds of rational people that it would be inconceivable to keep Muslim-majority areas within the Indian union, especially those contiguous with Pakistan. It is too late now to question the legitimacy of the Radcliffe Line, and the subsequent merger of the princely states with the Indian Union. But the question of Kashmir was never settled, even after three wars were fought by the two neighbours in 1948, 1965, and 1971. India had an opportunity in 1971 to force a permanent settlement down the throat of Bhutto in Simla, but Mrs. Indira Gandhi, gloating in the adulation of an hysterical nation, and completely charmed by the wily Pakistani, not only returned the POW’s, but also frittered away the fruits of the famous military victory. The defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh was not followed-up by hard political thinking, and instead of making the country a secure nation, we have ended up by creating a stronger enemy on our western borders, unfettered by the need to keep a rebellious province, 2000 kms away, in check; while ending up with a more than hostile neighbour on the eastern front. Mrs. Gandhi could have made Pakistan accept the LOC as the international border between India and Pakistan, and the Kashmir issue could have been settled permanently. Even Sheikh Mujib could have been offered the choice of joining his fledgling state with India, combining the two Bengals together, and making him the Chief Minister of the new state. In the afterglow of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon Pakistan, the Indian Prime Minister was in a unique position to make the Indian people accept these decisions. On the other side, the people of Pakistan would also have accepted our terms under pressure from the families of the 90000 POWs. The people of Kashmir, always ambivalent and dissembling, would have had no difficulty in accepting the situation, and would have settled down to a life of languid lassitude.
However, as the saying goes, it is no use crying over spilt milk. Mrs. Gandhi, as subsequent events revealed, did not possess the skills and temperament of a thinking politician. Her deep sense of insecurity led her into the clutches of flatterers, charlatans, and plain crooks, who manipulated her for their own personal benefits. Within four years she had lost control of the nation. Misguided by her son and the coterie around him, she declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and almost created the same conditions in India as had existed in Pakistan. The moral ground was totally lost! And with that was lost the opportunity of making India a strong nation, respected and feared by its neighbours and the world at large. Bhutto, in the West, was overthrown by one Zia, and hanged; while Mujib, in the East, was assassinated with his family, on the orders of another Zia.
With the army once more in power in Pakistan, it lost no time in renewing its demand for Kashmir, but this time it infiltrated the small separatist element in the valley, and under the guise of creating a global Islamic society, took over the agenda of this fringe. The Kashmiris fell easily into this trap, and from 1989 onwards have been totally under the influence of the Islamic Jehadis under the control of the ISI. In the last two decades the Islamists have managed to practically cleanse the valley of its non-Muslim residents, both through murder, and intimidation. The Pandits and the Sikhs, already marginalized since independence, were anyway relocating in other parts of India and abroad. Educational and employment opportunities were very limited, and these were grabbed by the Muslims. Investment in institutions in Jammu province was negligible, while all the money poured into the state by India went to feathering the nests of the politicians of the valley, and financing projects for the benefit of their constituents.
The methodology of terror, intimidation, and murder employed against the hapless Pandits and Sikhs of the valley, was totally unnecessary, as they were no threat to the complete political and economic domination of the Muslim majority. The ethnic cleansing can be compared to the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem, and can be understood only in Jihadi terms. M.J. Akbar, in his book “Blood Brothers” writes: ‘Muslims are peaceful only when powerless’… ‘Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace. Bunk! There are two kinds of verses in the Quran, those uttered in Mecca and those uttered in Medina. In Mecca the Prophet of Muslims was not in power, so in Mecca he said things like, your religion for you and mine for me. But in Medina he became a king. What happened then? His Allah suddenly began to send verses saying that all non-Muslims should be slaughtered in a jihad…’Kashmir emphatically confirms this mentality and it is futile to expect the Kashmiri Muslim to ever feel that he belongs to a nation where Hindus are in a majority. The Muslim will always be more loyal to Mecca and Medina than to his own land. This is something the secularists are unable to see, and they continue to propound the myth that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in his "India After Gandhi” writes, 'Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.
Coming back to Arundhati Roy’s statement on Kashmir, I am assuming that she would like freedom to and from the Muslim-majority valley of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The people of Jammu have never been equivocal in their preference and we can believe that they would never want to be a part of Pakistan. The Ladakhis, I am afraid, have never been asked, and if given a choice, they could go either way. Islam is as prevalent as Buddhism in their province. Roy, in her proposal, is probably suggesting that India should do what Philip Spratt had suggested in 1952, with the modification that the Jammu province remains with the Indian Union, and the valley is given its cherished ‘azadi’. A referendum could be held in Ladakh allowing its people to determine their future.
It is my contention that an ‘azad’ Kashmir would only be as ‘azad’ as the Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir is today. David Devadas, in his excellent book ‘In Search of a Future – The Story of Kashmir’, writes in the epilogue, ‘Kashmir has not, despite education and wealth, transcended its hateful contempt-ridden past. Religious, sectarian and ethnic antipathies continue’. ‘Over five centuries of frequent chaos, exploitation and repression, the trust that any society requires – the willingness to set aside religious, sectarian, caste, ethnic or even personal interests for the collective good – is in tatters. Civil society bustles, but mistrust, so often evinced as ambivalence, constantly lurks. Kashmiris have deeply imbibed a consciousness of the illegitimacy of the state, its institutions and officers. Kashmiris feel they are right to blame the Indian state for fraudulent elections and weak democracy but New Delhi’s machinations are only part of the story. Kashmiris are loath to examine the roles of their leaders, the effects of their history and the state of their society…The unfortunate fact is that personal ambitions are foremost in the minds of many of Kashmir’s leaders – but no more than among most of Kashmir’s people.’
At the slightest pretext the Kashmiris of the valley are ready to storm into the streets, raising anti-India slogans, waving Pakistani flags, and engaging the security forces in pitched street battles. How then can we claim them as an integral part of India? If the transfer of a mere 100 acres of uncultivable land for the use of providing temporary shelter to Hindu pilgrims once in a year can cause so much turmoil in the valley, then how can we justify the billions that are being poured into Kashmir year after year? Isn’t Arundhati Roy justified in demanding that we Indians should get ‘azadi’ from Kashmir? Why are we continuing to be slaves to an idea which never existed in the first place? For heaven’s sake let us get rid of this yoke for ever. Let us leave the Kashmiris of the valley to make their own future and say, “good riddance”. But before that let us relocate the remaining few non-Muslims to a more hospitable India; for it is certain that they will either be forced to convert to Islam or be put to the sword in an “Azad Kashmir”. Hell, as Sartre would have said, ‘is the other’.
From the moment the two-nation theory was conceived, there should have been no doubt in the minds of rational people that it would be inconceivable to keep Muslim-majority areas within the Indian union, especially those contiguous with Pakistan. It is too late now to question the legitimacy of the Radcliffe Line, and the subsequent merger of the princely states with the Indian Union. But the question of Kashmir was never settled, even after three wars were fought by the two neighbours in 1948, 1965, and 1971. India had an opportunity in 1971 to force a permanent settlement down the throat of Bhutto in Simla, but Mrs. Indira Gandhi, gloating in the adulation of an hysterical nation, and completely charmed by the wily Pakistani, not only returned the POW’s, but also frittered away the fruits of the famous military victory. The defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh was not followed-up by hard political thinking, and instead of making the country a secure nation, we have ended up by creating a stronger enemy on our western borders, unfettered by the need to keep a rebellious province, 2000 kms away, in check; while ending up with a more than hostile neighbour on the eastern front. Mrs. Gandhi could have made Pakistan accept the LOC as the international border between India and Pakistan, and the Kashmir issue could have been settled permanently. Even Sheikh Mujib could have been offered the choice of joining his fledgling state with India, combining the two Bengals together, and making him the Chief Minister of the new state. In the afterglow of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon Pakistan, the Indian Prime Minister was in a unique position to make the Indian people accept these decisions. On the other side, the people of Pakistan would also have accepted our terms under pressure from the families of the 90000 POWs. The people of Kashmir, always ambivalent and dissembling, would have had no difficulty in accepting the situation, and would have settled down to a life of languid lassitude.
However, as the saying goes, it is no use crying over spilt milk. Mrs. Gandhi, as subsequent events revealed, did not possess the skills and temperament of a thinking politician. Her deep sense of insecurity led her into the clutches of flatterers, charlatans, and plain crooks, who manipulated her for their own personal benefits. Within four years she had lost control of the nation. Misguided by her son and the coterie around him, she declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and almost created the same conditions in India as had existed in Pakistan. The moral ground was totally lost! And with that was lost the opportunity of making India a strong nation, respected and feared by its neighbours and the world at large. Bhutto, in the West, was overthrown by one Zia, and hanged; while Mujib, in the East, was assassinated with his family, on the orders of another Zia.
With the army once more in power in Pakistan, it lost no time in renewing its demand for Kashmir, but this time it infiltrated the small separatist element in the valley, and under the guise of creating a global Islamic society, took over the agenda of this fringe. The Kashmiris fell easily into this trap, and from 1989 onwards have been totally under the influence of the Islamic Jehadis under the control of the ISI. In the last two decades the Islamists have managed to practically cleanse the valley of its non-Muslim residents, both through murder, and intimidation. The Pandits and the Sikhs, already marginalized since independence, were anyway relocating in other parts of India and abroad. Educational and employment opportunities were very limited, and these were grabbed by the Muslims. Investment in institutions in Jammu province was negligible, while all the money poured into the state by India went to feathering the nests of the politicians of the valley, and financing projects for the benefit of their constituents.
The methodology of terror, intimidation, and murder employed against the hapless Pandits and Sikhs of the valley, was totally unnecessary, as they were no threat to the complete political and economic domination of the Muslim majority. The ethnic cleansing can be compared to the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem, and can be understood only in Jihadi terms. M.J. Akbar, in his book “Blood Brothers” writes: ‘Muslims are peaceful only when powerless’… ‘Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace. Bunk! There are two kinds of verses in the Quran, those uttered in Mecca and those uttered in Medina. In Mecca the Prophet of Muslims was not in power, so in Mecca he said things like, your religion for you and mine for me. But in Medina he became a king. What happened then? His Allah suddenly began to send verses saying that all non-Muslims should be slaughtered in a jihad…’Kashmir emphatically confirms this mentality and it is futile to expect the Kashmiri Muslim to ever feel that he belongs to a nation where Hindus are in a majority. The Muslim will always be more loyal to Mecca and Medina than to his own land. This is something the secularists are unable to see, and they continue to propound the myth that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in his "India After Gandhi” writes, 'Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.
Coming back to Arundhati Roy’s statement on Kashmir, I am assuming that she would like freedom to and from the Muslim-majority valley of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The people of Jammu have never been equivocal in their preference and we can believe that they would never want to be a part of Pakistan. The Ladakhis, I am afraid, have never been asked, and if given a choice, they could go either way. Islam is as prevalent as Buddhism in their province. Roy, in her proposal, is probably suggesting that India should do what Philip Spratt had suggested in 1952, with the modification that the Jammu province remains with the Indian Union, and the valley is given its cherished ‘azadi’. A referendum could be held in Ladakh allowing its people to determine their future.
It is my contention that an ‘azad’ Kashmir would only be as ‘azad’ as the Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir is today. David Devadas, in his excellent book ‘In Search of a Future – The Story of Kashmir’, writes in the epilogue, ‘Kashmir has not, despite education and wealth, transcended its hateful contempt-ridden past. Religious, sectarian and ethnic antipathies continue’. ‘Over five centuries of frequent chaos, exploitation and repression, the trust that any society requires – the willingness to set aside religious, sectarian, caste, ethnic or even personal interests for the collective good – is in tatters. Civil society bustles, but mistrust, so often evinced as ambivalence, constantly lurks. Kashmiris have deeply imbibed a consciousness of the illegitimacy of the state, its institutions and officers. Kashmiris feel they are right to blame the Indian state for fraudulent elections and weak democracy but New Delhi’s machinations are only part of the story. Kashmiris are loath to examine the roles of their leaders, the effects of their history and the state of their society…The unfortunate fact is that personal ambitions are foremost in the minds of many of Kashmir’s leaders – but no more than among most of Kashmir’s people.’
At the slightest pretext the Kashmiris of the valley are ready to storm into the streets, raising anti-India slogans, waving Pakistani flags, and engaging the security forces in pitched street battles. How then can we claim them as an integral part of India? If the transfer of a mere 100 acres of uncultivable land for the use of providing temporary shelter to Hindu pilgrims once in a year can cause so much turmoil in the valley, then how can we justify the billions that are being poured into Kashmir year after year? Isn’t Arundhati Roy justified in demanding that we Indians should get ‘azadi’ from Kashmir? Why are we continuing to be slaves to an idea which never existed in the first place? For heaven’s sake let us get rid of this yoke for ever. Let us leave the Kashmiris of the valley to make their own future and say, “good riddance”. But before that let us relocate the remaining few non-Muslims to a more hospitable India; for it is certain that they will either be forced to convert to Islam or be put to the sword in an “Azad Kashmir”. Hell, as Sartre would have said, ‘is the other’.
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