The other characters in Sea of Poppies aren't so prescient, but most of them will similarly be forced to look beyond the small worlds they knew. |
All their destinies will be affected by the Ibis, a large schooner newly arrived on the shores of Calcutta and eventually bound for the Mauritius Islands, far across the Indian Ocean. The year is 1838, the high tide of the British opium trade with China, and the Ibis, formerly a slave-ship, is now being fitted for the export of the Empire's most profitable commodity. When it finally sets sail, its passengers will include an American freedman born of a white father and a slavewoman, a honey-tongued, Krishna-worshipping agent who believes that his life's work is to build a temple to a mother-goddess, a dispossessed Raja wrongly convicted of forgery, and a feisty orphan of European origin.
For many of these people, the ship "" likened to a giant womb "" becomes a vessel for rebirth, as personal compulsions drive them to cross the Black Water in the intimate company of strangers. As one migrant puts it, "From now on and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings "" jahaz-bhais and jahaz bahens "" to each other. There'll be no differences between us."
But many fears and prejudices, both trivial and momentous, have to be overcome. The women on the ship are bewildered to discover that they each had different methods of picking fruit or cooking spices, meticulously practiced "in the belief that none other could possibly exist". The exiled Raja contends with severe revulsion while cleaning up after an ailing, incontinent cellmate of foreign origin. When an impromptu wedding has to be organised on board, everyone is puzzled, because "with no parents or elders to decide on these matters, who knew what was the right way to make a marriage?" Fear of the unknown leads some travellers to recall descriptions of Lanka in the Ramayana and imagine that they are being taken to an island inhabited by carnivorous demons. Several unusual relationships are formed.
To read Sea of Poppies is to be repeatedly reminded of what a large and frightening place the world was a century and a half ago, and of the mental blocks that some people had to overcome in order to even converse with someone of a different caste or community. In fact, long before the Ibis sets sail, Ghosh prepares the reader for a truly multicultural experience, through the Asian sailors known as the lascars, who "came from places that were far apart and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese".
Ghosh is the most scholarly of fiction writers "" an anthropologist with a deep interest in the convoluted histories of people and places ""and the scholarship can occasionally interfere with his stories. Sea of Poppies has many balls in the air at the same time: this is a book about opium cultivation, on which much of modern India was built; the many travails of life on the seas; the uneasy relationship between British entrepreneurs and Indian noblemen; and about the very colourful language hybrids that were formed when people of entirely different backgrounds were forced to deal with each other. (Ghosh's fascination with speech variations is evident in his document "The Ibis Chrestomathy", which can be accessed at the website https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.ibistrilogy.com/.) But it also strikes a better balance between fiction and history than Ghosh's earlier historical novels, such as the long-winded Burmese saga The Glass Palace, and much of this has to do with the believability of characters like Deeti, the mulatto sailor Zachary, and the intrepid young boatman Jodu. Most of these people will reappear in the next two books in the Ibis Trilogy. Ghosh has admitted that he doesn't yet know where their travels will take them, but the journeys should be well worth following.
SEA OF POPPIES
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Amitav Ghosh
Penguin/Viking
Price: Rs 599
Pages: 512