SEA OF POPPIES

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!