, even as the author holds forth on links between languages and his latest book. "The idea of a fixity in language is so impossible and so unnecessary," says Amitav Ghosh, midway through our conversation. "Since childhood, we have always been told to 'use the correct English word', to 'speak properly', and we have developed a deep-rooted anxiety about the language. But English used to be much richer than that, and the process of 'purification' should be combated."
This is somewhat unexpected coming from a writer whose reputation for being very serious and scholarly precedes him, and whose own work "" characterised by uncomplicated prose as well as meticulous research "" combines the novelist's imagination with an anthropologist's attention to detail. Surely you'd expect such a writer to be more conservative?
Not at all. Not only is Ghosh much easier to talk to than I'd expected, his perpetually enquiring mind also means that he is willing to hold forth "" often very enthusiastically "" on a range of subjects.
And he is never so animated as when he discusses the complicated links between different languages; the provenance of words such as "baltee" (bucket); how the Oxford English Dictionary has eight different spellings for "khidmutgar" (servant), including "kismatgar" how "dumpukht" should be spelt as "dumbpoke" on restaurant menus; and how researching for his new book made him recall the "incredibly obscene, playful and innuendo-filled" jargon that he and his friends used in their boarding-school days.
To read Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the first novel in an ambitious trilogy, is to experience the fluidity of language in situations where people from different backgrounds are thrown together: how it shifts and adapts over time, colliding with other tongues, forming nervous alliances and variants.
Set in northern India, Calcutta and the high seas in 1838, during the British Empire's opium trade with China, this is the story of a large ship, the Ibis, sailing from the banks of the Hooghly towards the Mauritius Islands. Its passengers include a strong-willed young widow from a village in Bihar, a gomusta (agent) who believes that his life's work is to build a temple to a mother-goddess, an American freedman born of a white father and a Negro slavewoman, and a dispossessed Raja wrongly convicted of forgery.
For many of these people, the ship becomes a vessel for rebirth. On land, they had led parochial lives, bound to strictures of community, caste or religion; on the water they are jahaz-bhais and jahaz bahens, freed of many strictures.
But long before the Ibis sets sail, Ghosh has prepared the reader for a truly multicultural experience. Early on, we are introduced to the species of sailor known as the lascar, 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". It can be said of these sailors that the sea was their only nation, and Ghosh is clearly fascinated by their lives and legacies.
"The lascars were absolute pioneers," he tells me, "in that they were the first Asians to work in a Western industrial process. They worked with a cutting-edge modern technology "" at the time, nautical engineering was like aerospace is today "" and acquired a colloquial familiarity with European languages."
In fact, he thinks of the lascars as the equivalent in every sense of today's IT workers. "They faced exactly the same issues too; there was a systematic attempt to keep them out of the labour market "" they were paid a fraction of what white sailors got."
The lascari speech was a dizzying hybrid of slang words picked up and assimilated over time, and Ghosh is quick to point out that much of our modern vocabulary has come down through them. "At one point, 'banian' meant a sailor's tunic," he says, "It was only after the lascars cut off the sleeves of the garment that it acquired its modern-day meaning.
Similarly, the word 'kamraa' had a Portuguese root, and it were the lascars who first used it to refer to a ship's cabin. The influence they have had on our language is amazing, and we don't even know it."
In Sea of Poppies, we also meet a cross-section of Europeans who have been living or trading in India for decades, and who speak a diluted form of English that incorporates Hindi, Bengali or Bhojpuri words. "Where have you been chupowing yourself, Paulette?" a lady named Mrs Burnham asks the young orphan in her care. "He turned a ship oolter-poolter, which is considered a great piece of silliness amongst sailing men," says another character.
The book is replete with such usage, but what's equally notable is that Ghosh refuses to italicise the Indian bits or provide a glossary at the end. Further, he spells the local words not as an Indian reader would recognise them but to reflect the European accents with which they are spoken. So it's "dufter" rather than "daftar" (for office), "tuncaw" rather than "tankha" (salary), "kubber" rather than "khabar" (news). Even for a reader who knows the words, some of these passages require constant extrapolation.
"When I see Indian writers italicising words, I'm amazed," Ghosh exclaims, "because there are very few ordinary Hindi or Urdu or Bengali words that are not in the Oxford English Dictionary." He's in full flow now. "In our age of globalisation, there's this idea that English is becoming more expansive, but much the opposite is happening: in the 19th century, it was much more accepting of other influences, especially Asian influences."
"This is why I feel that if Asian writers like me are going to write in this language, then we must reclaim for it what it historically had."
The colourful speech patterns in Sea of Poppies are very apt for a book that is a panorama of different cultures, attitudes and belief systems circling suspiciously around each other "" more than a century and a half ago, when the world was still a very large and frightening place.
But then, much of Ghosh's work has dealt with amorphous boundaries (the title of one of his earliest and best-loved books, The Shadow Lines, has almost come to symbolise his major themes) and how people transcend these borders, in the process altering not just their own destinies but also, over a period of time, the history of the world.
Ghosh knows something about shadow lines himself, having regularly crossed the one that separates fiction and non-fiction; many of his novels, such as The Glass Palace and >I>The Hungry Tide, place imagined characters and stories against the backdrop of historical events. But he insists that he is, first and foremost, a novelist. "My basic interest is in stories and characters," he says, "In my historical novels I try to be faithful to the setting, but I would never confuse what I do with what historians do." So the fiction writer in him isn't locked in a painful struggle with the scholar? "Not at all "" the research is fun, I enjoy looking at documents. I began my career as a reporter and I like to have a notebook at hand, to figure out how things work."
In this he is similar to one of his great influences, the early American master Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick is one of Ghosh's favourite works. "Melville was inspirational for me, for the breadth of his view of the novel.
But actually, there are many other novelists, especially in the 19th century. Take George Eliot, or Dickens "" so much observation and detail about factories, about London street life. Historically speaking, one of the great things about the novel is that it has reported on real life."
It isn't uncommon for a Ghosh novel to briefly interrupt the story to provide a scholarly aside about, for instance, the symptoms of elephant anthrax, or the workings of the timber industry. Sea of Poppies contains a wonderful descriptive passage where an awe-struck character enters a cavernous opium factory in Ghazipur. What research was required for a scene like that one?
"It was pure luck," he says, "In the British Library's archives, I found a very rare book, published in the 1860s. It was called Notes on an Opium Factory, written by the superintendent of the Ghazipur Opium Factory as a tourist guide!" Ghosh also studied etchings and lithographs made by British artists of the time. "It's quite an imposing sight, you know, if you look at those rooms and the balls of opium in them "" it must have been millions and millions of rupees' worth.
You won't believe how rationalised the industrial process was, and this is decades before Henry Ford."
Ghosh's fascination for the nautical history of the 19th century also made writing Sea of Poppies a pleasurable experience. "The Indian shipbuilding industry," he says, "was absolutely on par with the Western industry, right up to the 1820s. In that era, a very large number of the Royal Navy's ships were built in Bombay and Calcutta.
Then the British, through a series of financial measures and laws, succeeded in destroying Indian shipbuilding. And one of the terrible things that has happened in India is the way the shipping industry has been ignored. As late as the 1940s, it was possible to send something from Bombay to Madras through coastal shipping "" it was easier and cheaper."
For Ghosh, the Ibis Trilogy represents a long-term commitment, but it's one he feels confident about. "I want to stick with these characters for a long time "" I want to write about their children and grandchildren." But aren't there other places on the map that the anthropologist in him would want to explore in his writing? "Not really. What interests me most is what the Russians call the 'near abroad' "" in this case, the ring around India, and the Indian Ocean."
It will take him a long time to complete the next two books in the trilogy, he knows, but he's in no hurry. "For me, writing is not about the publishing "" the publishing is the worst part! The best part is the pleasure of turning things over in my head."
