The opium connection

A readable account reprises a history that India has forgotten but China has not

That ultimate narcotic, opium, has been in the news ever since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. It was a major revenue-earner for the earlier Taliban regime. Even as it laid waste many a life all over the world, cultivating poppy, its source, was a life-saving occupation for innumerable dirt-poor farmers in that godforsaken land. The fear now is that this history may repeat itself.

This reviewer discovered another, more immediate, connection with Baroda (the review uses historic place names and spellings), where I live. A recent pamphlet to mark the 150th anniversary of India’s first modern narrow gauge railway line between Dabhoi and Karjan, two agriculturally important towns in the district, recalled that the original line was strengthened for steam locomotive haulage of two major crops of the hinterland, cotton and poppy seed, to Karjan on the main line to Bombay port for export to England in case of cotton and Canton in China for opium. I have been well aware of poppy cultivation in Madhya Pradesh, around Ratlam and Neemuch, more than 250 km away. I did not know that poppy was grown right here and that too under the benign eye of princely India’s most enlightened member, Sayajirao Gaekwad.

Opium and its narcotic effects have been known for millennia. Medicine men in ancient Rome prescribed it for relieving pain. They were also aware of its addictive nature and debilitating effects on users. But it counted rulers and nobility in various lands among its consumers. Mughal em­perors from Babur to Shah Jahan and their courtiers were also addicts. The local vai­dyas and hakims had very dilute and mild preparations even for infants suffering colic pain.

India had two major connections with putting opium on the political map, one rather roundabout and another, arising from it, very direct. Princess Catherine de Braganza of Portugal brought the Bombay and surrounding islands to England as dowry upon her marriage to Charles II in 1666. She also brought tea to England (news to me). It became almost instantly the preferred beverage of the court and the rich. The trouble was it had to be imported from China, and England had little to offer in return that the Chinese wanted except silver.

Throughout the next century, the East India Company tightened its hold on Bengal, culminating in the Battle of Plassey (1757) when Robert Clive’s 3,000 soldiers gained effective control of large swathes of the lower Gangetic plain all the way up to today’s Assam and Orissa. Even under Mughal rule, Bihar produced 4,000 chests (77 kg each) of opium annually. By 1773, the Company had arrogated the monopoly rights to opium to itself. It established an Opium Department, under whose aegis poppy cultivation eventually grew to half a million acres in the next 100 years. The department had a Benares agency and a Bihar agency, but poppy cultivation had spread to Malwa in Madhya Pradesh, under the control of the Holkars (and, as mentioned above, even to Gujarat under the Gaekwads).

Opium from eastern India was pro­cessed as a Company (later Crown) monopoly and shipped to China from Calcutta. The western opium was processed and traded by merchant houses in Bombay, also for shipping to China. Eventually, the British government gave up any semblance of monopoly and agency houses emerged in East India. Opium processors and traders included devout Gujarati Hindus and Jains, Parsis, respected Scottish Presbyterians and Jews. Their personal religiosity did not extend to compassion for either the exploited peasant compelled slave-like into poppy cultivation or the benighted Chinese whose addiction ruined their economy and lives.

The ruling Ch’ing dynasty, fighting sundry warlords within, was too feeble to resist the British attempts to sell more and more opium. Its periodic edicts banning opium import and trade had no effect. The mandarin Lin Tse-shu, the Commissioner for Canton, burned 20,000 chests of opium after issuing an order for its seizure in 1839. That was followed by the First War of Opium, which the British won and imposed severe conditions on the dynasty through the Treaty of Nanking that led to the perpetual surrender of Hong Kong. In the Second War of Opium, Britain was joined by its then arch rival France and Imperial Russia. The allied forces decisively routed China and sacked the Forbidden City. The Treaty of Tientsin (1858) extracted even more concessions, including legalisation of opium trade, rights to 10 ports, extensive reparations, and access to missionaries to the interior. Successive British parliaments readily bought into the argument that the country was fighting against the suppression of free trade. Notable Whig politicians including Thomas Macauley were swayed by such logic.

But that was not all. England also needed sugar. So it encouraged sugarcane cultivation in South Africa and the Caribbean, which it ruled. It had forsworn the slave trade, but had no qualms about transporting thousands of impoverished Bihari and Tamil farmers as indentured labour to these lands, which was slavery in all but name. This triangular arrangement led to the emergence of large trading houses and agencies. And vast fortunes for some Britons and Indians.

Thomas Manuel provides a very readable, but not necessarily comprehensive, account of all this and more, up to now, when poppy cultivation is outlawed in most countries except for medicinal purposes but opium continues to menace the world. He quotes the Chinese historian Tan Chung who pithily summarised the situation: The Chinese got the opium, the British got tea and the Indians got colonialism. But the book under review is not a historical opus, as becomes clear from the author’s credentials, journalistic more than anything else. So one must treat this as reportage, most likely inspired by Amitav Ghosh’s magisterial Ibis trilogy though not acknowledged as such. It is also not up to the mark in det­ails such as names and spellings, or dates.

India gained independence in 1947 and China became the People’s Republic under Mao Zedong in 1948. How the two countries progressed in the next 75 years is common knowledge. We have long forgotten colonial subjugation and all that went with it, but not, methinks, the Chinese the dual humiliation of enforced addiction to an evil substance and extraterritoriality. It probably extends even to the present. Could that be what drives Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic relentlessly to world dominance and never leave an opportunity to show India down, whether it is in military fields or diplomatic circles?