Opium’s shaping of world history “has been absolutely silenced”, according to novelist Amitav Ghosh, but it now has a voice in his ongoing Ibis Trilogy.
Amitav Ghosh, photo/Getty Images
The war on drugs has been won. Likewise the campaign against human rights abuses in China. But you won’t read about it in the paper, because it happened 100 years ago.
Actually, the Chinese first attempted to address the damage British opium dealers were doing to their society early in the 18th century; but it was nearly 200 years later that the British finally agreed to put a stop to the trade.
“It’s very interesting, when one looks at today’s failed war on drugs,” says Amitav Ghosh. “China was really the first country to deal with mass addiction. It was an engineered mass addiction, deliberately created by the British as a solution to an imbalance of trade problem, somewhat similar to the one America is facing with China at the moment.
“People often think it was the Communist revolution that put an end to opium addiction in China, but it was much earlier than that. It was an enormous social movement all across the country, and through popular initiatives they managed to bring addiction down within the space of two or three years. Does any country today have that kind of social cohesion?”
Ghosh has just completed River of Smoke, the second book in a trilogy of historical novels set on and around the Indian Ocean in the years leading up to the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. Opium looms so large in the series that I find, looking at my notes as I talk to Ghosh via Skype from his New York home, that I have fallen into the habit of calling it the Opium Wars Trilogy. It’s a fair enough description, as far as it goes. If you came to the books with the assumption they had been written to popularise the lost history of these wars for a modern English-language readership, you would find your expectations broadly met.
But Ghosh knew next to nothing about the opium trade when he began work on the first novel of the series, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Sea of Poppies (2008), and had no particular interest in it. His own name for the books is the Ibis Trilogy, the Ibis being an old slaving ship bought by a British trading magnate in India and repurposed to carry indentured workers across the Indian ocean to Mauritius. We follow the individual story threads of the workers, the ship’s three officers and the crew, until eventually each thread leads us to the Ibis, where Ghosh weaves them together into a little floating nation.
“It’s been on my mind for years, on and off, to write about India’s indentured workers and Indian sailors. Years ago, when I was a student at Oxford, I visited Alexandria, and I came across a bunch of Indian sailors who were wandering around the place, and they invited me to join their crew. The idea really appealed to me. And ever since then I’ve thought about what it means to be a sailor today, and in the past. Indentured workers – I guess my interest in that began when I was working on my novel The Glass Palace [2000].
“That book was mainly set in Burma, so that’s where I first encountered this whole history, and it led me back to the 1830s in India, when this enormous migration started. I’ve been pursuing the subject since then.”
The Ibis Trilogy first took real shape in Ghosh’s thoughts while he was researching the histories of indentured workers in Australia and New Zealand. “As you know, your part of the world had a whole lot of indentured people as well, in particular Irish people.” The Sydney harbour master’s office keeps crew and passenger lists for all the ships that came from England in the 19th century. Looking through them, Ghosh was astonished to find these ships were typically crewed by Indians. “By Indians, I really mean ‘lascars’ [a racial catch-all term for the mixed-origin crews plying the Indian Ocean in this period]. They were from present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, present-day East Africa, India, Iran. When I saw this, I became completely fascinated. It gave birth to so many ideas, so many narratives. I just started to think about what it must have been like to be on those ships.”
Opium came into the story by way of an almost stereotypical moment of pure inspiration. At the stage where all Ghosh had was a loose collection of story elements waiting for a story, he found himself meeting the eyes of a woman who did not exist, and wondering who she was.
“She came to me while I was thinking about something else, in the way that characters sometimes come to you. I just saw her face. I had such a vivid sense of what she was like, of her grey eyes. It was completely spooky. She claimed the book for herself, really. I thought of her right from the start as someone who’s forced into leaving the only place she knows. Which is this little village in rural Bihar, I knew that about her.
“It was in trying to work out why this would have happened that I began to understand that poppy cultivation was a factor in these migrations, and that’s when I really became interested in all that.”
It emerges early on in Sea of Poppies that the novel’s eponymous flower is a very labour-intensive cash crop. To have opium to sell to China, the British had to offer incentive payments to a vast rural Indian work force. “It was impossible to say no to them,” Ghosh writes in the book. “If you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn’t accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commission on the opium and would never let you off.” This is the great socio-economic tide that sweeps Deeti, Ghosh’s grey-eyed woman, away from her village and out to sea. It swept away a great many other things as well.
“It’s so strange, the history of opium – now that I’m deeply inside it, it strikes me as such an amazing thing that it’s so little known. It profoundly shaped world history, well into the 20th century. It’s a history that has been absolutely silenced, that’s all one can say about it. What was done to China, in particular, is one of the great historical crimes. No one discusses it in the West today. One so often hears Westerners berating the Chinese, in these very absolute terms, as though the West has always been the guardian of world morality. But anyone who looks at the opium trade cannot, simply cannot, believe that the West ever meant well by the rest of the world. It was pure aggression and greed, there’s no other way one can parse it. That history is still very much alive in China, by the way; the Chinese are very, very aware of it.”
Sea of Poppies is remarkable for its polyglot linguistic richness, with few of the characters having the same mother tongue, many of them speaking a mix of many languages, and the lascar sailors speaking their own private trading lingo, which no one speaks today. (Ghosh recreates it from a 19th-century dictionary written for English naval officers needing to communicate with lascar crews.) Very few readers will get through the book without pausing to puzzle over some of the dialogue. “I think one of the things people understand about the world we live in is that you can’t expect to understand everything. You really can’t. It’s a very complex and bewildering world. Language, if it promises to provide you transparency, is providing you with a false promise.”
In River of Smoke, the focus shifts from India and Mauritius towards Canton, the sole trading port open to non-Chinese in the pre-Opium War years. Ghosh more or less speaks all the languages he uses in Sea of Poppies, but Canton’s linguistic world was a new departure. “I bought myself a Teach Yourself Cantonese, and every morning I’d sit down and listen to the tapes. When you’ve lived a linguistically varied sort of life, you realise that each language has its own kind of mindset. Cantonese is very, very complicated, but you begin to get something of the feel for it. And it really is just such a delightful language, it’s so rich in slanginess and obscenities.”
It will be several years before publication of the third novel in the series – “I’m dying to find out what happens; I have only the most distant idea” – by which point he will have been writing about these characters for over a decade. “And you know, I think I’ll probably be working on it for much longer even than that, because frankly I’m just completely absorbed in the story. About five or six years ago, I realised this was going to be my life’s work … I want to grow old with these characters. I want to know their children, I want to know their grandchildren, I want their grandchildren to know each other.
“So when the trilogy is finished, there will most likely be more volumes. I think I will probably be working on this for a very long time.”
RIVER OF SMOKE, by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray, $39.99).