Amitav Ghosh, raised in Calcutta, educated in India, Egypt and England, now a resident

of his homeland and Brooklyn, has long been inclined toward sweeping, panoramic
novels such as The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide, works that successfully transport
readers to densely rendered locales.

With Sea of Poppies a work of astonishing ambition that was short-listed for the Man
Booker Prize, Ghosh has widened his aperture to take in a larger landscape enlightened
by discovery yet shackled by racial prejudice and immutable attitudes toward class and
faith. It’s one of the best 19th-century novels of the year.

Set in 1838 on the eve of the Opium Wars, Sea of Poppies begins with the arrival of the
schooner Ibis in Ghazipur on the Ganges, near the vaunted Benares poppy fields. A
former slave ship, the Ibis embarks on a journey promising freedom for some of its
human cargo and indentured servitude for others, setting out to Mauritius by way of the
Andaman Islands.

The universe described here is one of unwitting subjugation. Opium, the Ibis’ other haul,
proves an apt metaphor for the fate of many characters. The drug initially intoxicates,
serving as a palliative from daily suffering, until ultimately forcing bondage upon the
addict.

India is at the mercy of the ruling British and the East India Co. monopolizing the opium
trade while restricted by its own byzantine caste system, as oppressive as any tyranny.
Meanwhile, the Chinese risk bondage to the English through addiction.

The ship’s two prisoners mirror this quagmire. They’re educated and upper class: One is
an Indian raja who has fallen into debt to an Englishman, and the other is a Chinese
addict. Zachary Reed, the lone American in Sea of Poppies and its romantic hero, is an
octoroon, passing as white while shackled by slavery’s dark legacy, risking exposure at
any moment from the ship’s manifest.

Sea of Poppies grand love affair is with language. The book is drunk with words, phrases
both rich with 19th-century sailor-speak and rushing over regional boundaries. Language
is a river of the unknown, with characters as unaccustomed to one another’s language as
the reader is.

If ye’re born with a wooden ladle, Mannikin, it don’t matter if y’can eat the wind out o’a
topsail. There’s always the little Lord Mannikins and Hobdehoys and Loblolly-boys to
gammon the skippers, and pitch slum to the shipowners. Ne’er mind they don’t know a
pintle from a gudgeon, nor a pawl from a whelp, but there they are—at the weather end
of the quarterdeck, with Jack Crowle eating their wind.”

This heady, thick idiom requires patience despite Ghosh’s inclusion of “The Ibis
Chrestomathy”, allegedly written by the Indian prisoner, the aesthete Neel Rattan Halder.
“Words! Neel was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives
and destinies of their own. Why then were there no astrologers to calculate their kismet
and make predictions about their fate?”
The glossary is illuminating and maddening, witty but only half useful. Footnotes might
have been kinder. Ultimately, it’s best to surrender to the novel’s rush of words and carry
on, full throttle without brakes, seduced by the dizzying pleasure and otherwordly prose
that matches its subject.

Dickensian in scope, the novel renders a textured portrait of 19th-century India and the
shipping trade. Where it stumbles is in the limited breadth of its myriad characters.

The comedians are very silly. Villains are out of Nazi central casting, one given to torture
and humiliation, another prone to sexually charged masochism. The two pairs of lovers
are near flawless, recognizable literary constants, hidden by disguise and manufactured
identity. They’re exceptionally modern in their dismissal of racial and caste differences, a
theme Ghosh has explored in earlier works with more success.

Zachary’s star-crossed intended is the French “child of Nature” Paulette. She’s initially
“defeated by the impossibility of everything” but possesses the requisite pluck and
intelligence to propel her fate forward. As her father notes of her, “If she remains here, in
the colonies, most particularly in a city like this, where Europe hides its shame and its
greed, all that awaits her is degradation.” Then, he conveniently dies. Ghosh’s world, like
that of Dickens, is populated by orphans and outcasts untethered by home.

Sea of Poppies is the first volume of a proposed Ibis trilogy. The novel ends with a
longboat embarking off-course into uncharted territory with a crew of stowaways and
strangers. With any luck, Ghosh’s second installment will not only broaden the fertile
territory, but also enrich his characters so that they’re equal to the glory of his subject and
the ardor of his language.

Rating:

sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray £18.99, pp471

In Amitav Ghosh's remarkably rich saga, the first of three promised volumes, the sea of
the title is more like a flood and a man-made disaster at that: the compulsory cultivation
of opium poppies imposed on Indians by the East India Company (the book is set in
1838). The resulting drug was smuggled into China, which had in those days a huge
trading surplus and little need for legally imported goods, to the ultimate benefit of the
British balance of payments.

Deeti, the first character to be introduced, is a young mother living by the Ganges some
50 miles east of Benares. She grows poppies because she must (the destruction of the
rural economy is of no concern to the British), but though she is not in any conventional
sense a user, opium has infiltrated deep into her family life. The drug seems to bring a
moral numbness, not only to those who ingest it, but to those involved (however
unwillingly) in its production. The process of addiction is almost metaphysical - there
comes a point when only opium can make people forget the damage opium has done.

Around the opium factory, even the monkeys are stupefied, from drinking the waste
water. Inside, men waist-deep in tanks of opium tread it to soften the sludge, 'a host of
dark, legless torsos... circling around and around, like some enslaved tribe of demons'. At
this point, though, Amitav Ghosh is only clearing the decks for his story, which has
plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration -
and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment.

The British unheedingly break up traditional structures, but dislocation need not be
experienced as pure loss. The movement of the book, as shown by its three sections,
'Land', 'River' and 'Sea', is from fixity to flux, a running together of categories that once
seemed absolute. As the novel gathers momentum, having only one identity becomes like
having no identity at all. This is reflected in the language of the book. The narrative voice
has a period neutrality that can seem wan ('her vigil almost came to naught') where it isn't
enlivened with local terms. How's this for a CV, for instance? 'Starting as a serishta at
Gillanders, Nob Kissin rose to become, successively, a carcoon at the Swinhoe factory, a
cranny at Jardine & Matheson, a munshi at Ferguson Bros, and a mootsuddy at Smoult &
Sons.'

Spoken English takes on even more of the perfume of the native spices: 'There's a paltan
of mems who'd give their last anna to be in your jooties... there's a lot to be said for men
of that age. No badmashee at all hours of the night, for one thing. I can tell you, dear,
there's nothing more annoying than to be puckrowed just when you're looking forward to
a sip of laudanum and a nice long sleep...' That's a respectable Englishwoman talking, but
you'd hardly know it.

Sometimes, the caricaturally colourful lingo can become rather wearing. Mlle Paulette
Lambert, for instance, sounds like Hercule Poirot ('he was quite bouleversed'), while Nob
Kissin sounds like a Peter Sellers Indian ('I will do maximum best') and the lascar Serang
Ali recalls Charlie Chan ('China-side can catch one nice piece wife-o... make Malum
Zikri too muchi happy inside').

The character whose language is least adulterated is Raja Neel Rattan Halder, but that's
only an aspect of his weak grip on reality. The English with whom he deals mistake an
educated reference to Chatterton as being to 'Chatterjee'. The Raja has more familiarity
with 'the waves of Windermere and the cobblestones of Canterbury' than with his own
economic position. He has been lured into the opium business by the hope of huge profits
and when there's a downturn in the trade (a crackdown by the impertinent Chinese), he
becomes insolvent. Even so, he imagines he can ride out the crisis until he's accused of
forgery and transported for hard labour.

There's humour in the book, though Amitav Ghosh isn't naturally a comic writer. True,
comedy can sometimes be achieved by sheer willpower on special occasions (by Naipaul
for Biswas, say, or Thomas Mann for Felix Krull). It's just that comic scenes in Sea of
Poppies tend to coincide with tricky patches of plotting. Comedy and tragedy have
different standards of plausibility, just as civil and criminal cases have different standards
of proof. With tragedy, we expect a strict causal chain to be established between
someone's character and fate, while with comedy, the balance of probabilities is more
than enough, a disparity Ghosh is understandably keen to exploit.

The most impressive passages in the book are the closest to tragedy, though it becomes
clear that a new life can open up on the far side of disgrace. Raja Halder, who has always
imagined that he only followed caste rules out of social politeness, must eat food for the
first time in his life that has been prepared by unknown hands and override a wave of
disgust that he had never anticipated. The Raja's face is tattooed with his crime, the name
of the prison and the date. The tattooist takes pity on him and pushes a little ball of opium
between his lips to relieve the pain. The drug that has destroyed his life at last gains
admittance to his body and to his picture of reality.

Later, the tattooist whispers that he has watered down the ink, out of family loyalty. The
marks will fade after a few months. This is an exquisite image of the fancied permanence
of the marks the British made on India, but it has another aspect. What is 'written on your
forehead' in traditional Indian terms is your fate, but here fate washes off over time. In a
teasing reversal of cultural stereotypes, it is the British who are the fatalists, trying to
condemn others to their own fixity, and it's their colonial victims who make their own
destinies.