SEA OF POPPIES - Archival Platform

SEA OF POPPIES

For some time the anglophone publishing industry has been happy and eager to market the fiction
of the global south when that fiction takes form as magical realism, wherein the paranormal is
staged as the ordinary and the imagination frees itself from the familiar laws of gravity. Here, in
the (to us) remote corners of the undeveloped or developing world, the colors, smells and flavors
are more intense, life is more meaningful, and death seemingly a less absolute condition than in
the grey and rational industrial or postindustrial landscapes of the north, the cradle of modernity
and the origin of modern empires. Some have proposed a domestic source for magical realism in
Joyce’s Ulysses, whose foundational inspiration has been acknowledged by various European
and world authors. But through the second half of the twentieth century the genre became more
and more tropical in its associations. If the drawing room and the city are the primary sites of the
readers of these books, the books themselves tend to be set in the village and the jungle, such as
those that dominate the exemplary magical-realist ‘world novel’, Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), written in one ‘world’ language (Spanish) and translated into
English three years after its first appearance.

Franco Moretti speculates that this novel and others like it speak to the world-system
from the periphery in ways that would be impossible if they were set in Europe or North
America, thereby holding out the possibility of re-enchantment for our disenchanted world.1
Many of the hugely successful magical-realist novels that came after are written in English, many
by multilingual South Asian authors, and this has generated another, related series of debates

1Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London and
New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 233-50.

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trenchantly addressed some time ago by Aijaz Ahmad: what does it mean when such texts are
designated as third-world masterpieces by British and American metropolitan publishers and
accordingly repackaged for global distribution? What happens when none of the native Indian
languages have similar access to an international market? What is it to know India only by way
of the prizewinning novels of a Salman Rushdie?2 The novelists themselves (Rushdie included)
have often anticipated exactly these questions, and sought ways around the restrictive codes
governing their own reproduction as flag-bearers of third-world writing. One option is to offset
or combine the magical imagination with the hard rub of history. Another is to miscegenate the
language itself, to interrupt the clear flow of international English with the recalcitrant details of
unreadable words and untranslatable situations.

Amitav Ghosh has proved himself the master of both of these strategies while hanging on
to a conventionally charismatic framework of erotic romance and exotic adventure story leavened
with a good dose of the quasi-magical. In Circle of Reason (1986), his first novel, anything one
might be tempted to romanticize about the experience of migration– other faces, other minds– is
darkened by the depiction of the brutal conditions of South Asian laborers in the Persian Gulf.
The intimate Forsterian overtones of Anglo-Indian relations depicted in Ghosh’s The Shadow
Lines (1988) devolve into a devastating account of the Calcutta riots of 1964, events that have
been exorcised from the official memory of the response to the independence of Bangladesh,
requiring strenuous efforts at recovery and ‘proof’ by the traumatized narrator. Official memory
as the medium of nationalist propaganda is again the subject of In An Antique Land (1992),
where the long-buried coexistence of Jews and Muslims and Africans and Asians is gradually

2Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992).
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pieced together by an (apparently autobiographical) Indian social anthropologist supposedly
working on a dissertation on the peasant-farmer culture of the Nile delta. Here the matter of
language comes into full exposure. The fragments preserved in the Cairo Geniza collected by
British and American universities allow Ghosh (struggling with Arabic) to follow the trail of one
of history’s unknowns, the Indian slave of a medieval Jewish merchant who himself functioned
partly in Judeo-Arabic, a lost dialect of Arabic written in Hebrew script. Constant translation
and non-translation is the engine of this book, apparent in the serio-comic misunderstandings
Egyptian villagers entertain about India and in the state-sanctioned ‘disappearing’ of information
about the linguistic and cultural past– the shrines of the Tulu speakers of southwest India
overwritten by Hindu nationalists, and the shrine of a Jewish ‘saint’ in Egypt placed under armed
guard by a vigilant military apparatus. As the ordinary people of history are effaced from or never
included in the record, there disappears also a long history of relative toleration and cohabitation.
This tradition is by no means without violence but it is a violence not yet mobilized into a
component of nation-state political discipline in the modern manner. The Indian Ocean in the
Middle Ages is here recovered as a functionally ‘global’ culture whose history is largely
unknown in the popular imagination of the West, though it can be tracked in the vocabularies of
the world languages, for example in words like sugar and adobe. So too the modern history of
global politics is seen from the periphery, and from below (from ‘the south’), as we learn of the
terrible predicament of Egyptian migrant workers caught in Iraq during the First Gulf War of
1990-91.

There is historical research, both political and scientific, informing these books, which
thus lay claim to a historical reality that accompanies and anchors any magical moments. The

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scientific history of malaria research appears in The Calcutta Chromosome (1995); the biology of
the Irrawaddy dolphin figures in The Hungry Tide (2005), which also recovers the history of the
Bangladesh War and of the Morichjhãpi massacre of 1979. The Glass Palace (2000), although
Ghosh calls it unambiguously a novel and a work of fiction, is carried by a large-scale historical
narrative of British controlled Burma and Malaya from the late nineteenth-century through the
Japanese invasion of 1941 and up to the late twentieth century.3 Along the way it also brings to
life the story of those Indian soldiers who took up the nationalist cause led by Subhas Chandra
Bose, fighting with the Japanese against the British Empire: another piece of history little
remembered in the West, or indeed by many citizens of modern India.

In Ghosh’s most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, all of these themes and preoccupations
appear once again as the first volume of a promised trilogy on the nineteenth-century opium trade
and its effects on the lives of a group of variously ordinary people: a young widow, an American
sailor, a Krishna-worshiper who imagines himself as a woman, a heroic untouchable, a
Parsee-Chinese convict, an enigmatic lascar, a francophone orphan, a boat boy, a rajah bilked by
a ruthless British businessman, among others. ‘Alternative’ history is again central, and here it
takes form as the Ghazipur opium factory, details of whose workings are scrupulously
reassembled out of the nineteenth-century records of a former superintendent. The sordid story of
an imposed opium monoculture in Bihar, responsible for some twenty per cent of the wealth of
British India, is gripping, and has apparently been little studied. One could say, and Ghosh does
elsewhere say, that the British empire was sustained by opium, and the setting of this novel in the
1830s includes reference to the genesis of the war that was fought to impose (under the guise of

3Reviewed by Michael Wood in these pages: see LRB 19 April 2001.
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free trade) imported opium on China.
A second unfamiliar history staged in this novel is that of the Indian coolies shipped to

Mauritius in conditions that were as brutal as those of the middle passage in the recently
abolished Atlantic slave trade. Suitably enough, the ship that carries this human cargo is indeed a
former slave ship that does not need serious refitting for its new career in the Indian Ocean. What
is dramatized here– as it was in In An Antique Land and other novels– is a global economy
centered not on the North Atlantic but on the Indian Ocean, with its own world-changing
movements of commodities, money and people, its own brutalities and heroisms. For me, reading
Ghosh is like being made aware of those amazing stories of Chinese navies in the middle ages:
so important to world history, and so little known in the North Atlantic centers. For those born
into places ruled by and for the British, this is what history must have looked like. It is a
subaltern history, written from below, and should help to address the enormous ignorance that
remains even when condescension no longer necessarily dominates the cultures of posterity.

The sea of poppies is also a sea of languages, a mind-boggling array of (to most of us)
inscrutable words and phrases that various unremembered populations have devised to
communicate effectively in complex multlingual and multicultural circumstances. This has been
a prominent theme in south Asian fiction in ‘English’, brilliantly described and analyzed by
Bishupriya Ghosh (no relation of the novelist) above all in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small
Things (1997) and in some of Amitav Ghosh’s own earlier work.4 As Ghosh the critic shows,
Roy was concerned not so much to record what was or is spoken, in the spirit of documentary
realism, but to fashion a literary style probably not spoken by anyone but able to estrange her

4Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian
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Malayam-saturated characters from the all-too receptive conventions of global English. Sea of
Poppies starts out in Bihar, among characters who speak Bhojpuri. Ghosh the novelist does not
attempt to produce a literary amalgam of Bhojpuri and/in English, opting instead to transcribe
phonetically the occasional sentence with its translation alongside it, thus: “So late? she snapped.
Where were you? Kám-o-káj na hoi? (p. 6). So too with Bengali, Hindi and Arabic at various
points in the narrative. But what is Bhojpuri and why have so few outsiders heard of it? The
language seems to have a somewhat contested status: some claim it as a dialect of Hindi, others
as an independent language. The various websites devoted to its circulation and discussion use
phrases like “one of the popular languages of India” or “an Indo-Aryan language”. One of the
more scholarly sites speculates that it may indeed be more than one language, because its
significant dialect variations have not yet been thoroughly analyzed. Ghosh’s separation of
Bhojpuri from Hindustani thus has a polemical edge to it, and sets it apart as a ‘minority’
language at some implicit distance from the politics of Hindustani’s bifurcation into Hindi and
Urdu scripts and vocabularies. And yet this ‘minority’ language, which has through time been
written in several different scripts, is spoken by perhaps 150-180 million people today: by
Hindus, Muslims and Christians in India and Nepal, but also in South America, the Caribbean,
Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. In other words it is a dominant language of the
nineteenth-century migration (if that is the word) of Indian indentured labor all over the world. It
is thus arguably a major language whose existence is barely recognized because so many of its
speakers represent and result from the forced movements of uncelebrated or unremembered
people. Not for nothing does Ghosh call his coolies girmitiyas, the Bhojpuri word so many of

Novel (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 2004).
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them would have used to describe themselves. Not for nothing does the most educated man in the
novel, who can read and write in English, Bengali, Persian and Urdu, find himself transported
back to childhood by the Bhojpuri songs he heard from the household servants in a language he
was forbidden to speak (p. 366). We anglophones know a good deal about the Irish emigration
across the Atlantic, driven in part by the consequences of another monoculture, the potato. After
reading Ghosh’s novel it is impossible to ignore (or not to know of) the parallels with the effects
of the opium industry on the Bhojpuri speakers of Bihar.

But Bhojpuri is only one among Ghosh’s preoccupations with languages evident in this
book. Most prominent among them is Laskari, “that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the
water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese
calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil
catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows” (p. 96). For many other writers the open
seas have provided a language of unique particularity (the parts of the ship and its routines) and
demotic inventiveness: Fenimore Cooper, Melville and Conrad come immediately to mind along
with many lesser spinners of yarns. For Ghosh, the laskari phenomenon is at once linguistic and
political, a language which comes from everywhere and unites everyone: for “beneath the surface
of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of
boats” (p. 96). Free trade in economic terms is nothing more than a euphemism for its absolute
opposite: British dominance enforced by uninhibited violence. But the ocean currents and the
currents of language cannot be so easily controlled. Words circulate and interact not by way of
the will, even the will of the people, but because of the sheer unpredictable diversity of general
and particular idioms and their uses in place and time. Ghosh showed a serious interest in words

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in his 1992 book In An Antique Land, and in the career of the prodigious language-learner Alu
Bose, whose story sustains the narrative of The Circle of Reason. Here that preoccupation has
become an obsession. Sometimes it is a plot-device, as when one character in disguise gives
herself away by translating word for word into Bengali a figure of speech that exists only in
English (p. 361). Words embody the records of politics and history, but never just as history
written by the winners, just as they give expression to a present and possible future that cannot be
disciplined. So language standards, as Mikhail Bakhtin recognized and celebrated, are always
falling apart. Like Bakhtin in his great work on Rabelais, Ghosh also understands the peculiarly
fecund language games and transmissions that go on around the grotesque body, which here too
figures largely in the education of the protagonists into a broader and potentially universal
humanity. Not for nothing do nation-states exercise particular vigilance over what they designate
as obscenity.

Language has pride of place in this novel as a repository of the possible openness of
human relations that appears so rarely in the political interactions of states and the rivalries of
classes, castes and subcultures. As it is itself the medium and record of all sorts of histories,
some of them purely idiosyncratic, so it is the prophet of possible futures. The American edition
of Sea of Poppies, reputedly because of an editor’s advice, has something apparently not
published in the Indian edition: the 40 page ‘Ibis’ Chrestomathy, which records the
factual-fictional findings and speculations coming from one of the main character’s obsession
with “the destiny of words” (p. 473), a series of field notes and hypotheses which unsurprisingly
incorporates into its genealogy none other than “the present writer” (474). This is a process that
cannot end. It builds upon the labors of a number of nineteenth-century language experts, pays

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both serious and mocking homage to the OED, identified here as “the Oracle”, and offers
detailed and surprising etymologies of such now-familiar terms as balti, bandanna, and banyan.
Sometimes words listed here do not appear in the OED at all; this is especially the case with
not-so-respectable words like cunchunee, rawnee or pootli. Sometimes the OED definitions are
expanded or contested. The entry for balti is especially rich and detailed in comparison with the
OED’s rather minimal notation: a first-usage in 1982 and a location in the city of Birmingham.
Again, to accept the Chrestomathy’s case that ‘giving a damn’ derives from giving a dam (a sum
on money in Hindustani) is to open the doors to a whole history of contacts and borrowings
whose business it is that of the now-dominant language cultures either to sentimentalize or to
forget completely. The OED gives this one short shrift as a merely “ingenious” conjecture with
“no basis in fact”. But what is a fact and how would we go about confirming it? OED’s first
usage of ‘give a damn’ is Goldsmith’s in 1760– at exactly the time when British (East India
Company) rule over India is being consolidated. So is it a “fact” that there can be no derivation
from dam? Nineteenth-century English, it is suggested, was less repressive because more
recently exposed to such interlingual relations; many of Ghosh’s words can in fact be found in
the OED but are now quite unfamiliar to modern speakers and readers. Buried in one of his
etymologies is the ‘author’s’ injunction to the celebrants of world English: “Now that you have
the whole world in a stranglehold, your tongues are hardening, growing stiffer” (p. 495). And
yet the ‘author’s own hypothesis, that the language will not tolerate two imported homonyms or
synonyms simultaneously (p. 480), is itself often negated by the evidence of what has survived.

Does the reader then need to turn to the Chrestomathy several times per page while
following the story, rather as one gropes for a dictionary (and more than one dictionary) in trying

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to work through a poem by Paul Muldoon? As with Muldoon, the answer is yes and no: yes we
should and no we often don’t. All reading (though poetry less so) accepts a high level of semantic
redundancy: we can get the gist of a plot and the rough sense of an event without understanding
every word. We fill in likely senses of unknown words by a kind of mental multiple choice
exercise, interpolating possible meanings which can sometimes carry us through even when they
are wrong. With his strong recourse to romance and adventure as narrative principles, Ghosh
allows us to push on reading about what happens without fully understanding everything we’re
reading, and sometimes very much of what we’re reading. So we (if I may typify myself as the
average diligent while lazy reader) may well risk the comic miscomprehension that so many of
the novel’s characters enact in their ordinary conversations. To stop at every word that needs
glossing would be to slow reading down to less than a crawl. But the force of Ghosh’s prose is
that, while being massively entertaining and narratively compelling by using all of the tactics of
the best-seller, it never ceases to remind us that reading at a crawl is what we should be doing,
because in that imperative should there lies a commitment to a fuller understanding of the
histories of ordinary lives and ordinary labors, as well as of the potentialities of ordinary futures.

So is this after all a novel of magical realism? I think not. There is one concession to the
genre, and it is introduced right at the start, when Deeti has a vision of an ocean-going ship in full
sail, something she has neither seen nor heard of. The ship is the Ibis, on which she will be a
passenger at the end of the book. Ghosh otherwise manages his subaltern history without
recourse to the paranormal. There is some narrative forecasting, especially around the future
existence of Deeti’s shrine, and we know that some characters are going to live on; but this is
after all the first volume of a trilogy, and it is no surprise that we are encouraged to ‘watch this

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space’ in being reminded of forthcoming episodes. Ghosh’s efforts against the hegemonic silence
of colonial history– a history that has already happened in sugar cane fields all over the world–
are partly embodied in the vigor, ingenuity and deep human loyalties of his characters, whose
affiliations cross ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries and constitute a community of the
dispossessed. Some of them we know will make good, survive and even prosper, and we hope
(against the grain of any plausible history) for the survival of them all. Another effort against
silence is embodied in the etymological imagination that uncovers strange words, works them
into narrative, glosses them in an appendix which has a documentary life of its own, and makes a
bid for a more capacious global ‘English’ than can be contained within the standard dictionaries
which are themselves, according to the author of the Chrestomathy, becoming more and more
impoverished through time. Language can keep people apart, and has often done so. The violence
of the shibboleth is arguably more apparent through human history than is the happier ethic of
linguistic hospitality. Problems of translation and comprehension interfere with the romance
motifs in The Hungry Tide and make things hard for the narrator of In An Antique Land . But
here in this first of three novels the romance interests are very much alive, as perhaps accords
with a comic and positive view of the consequences of language differences. Ghosh remarks
elsewhere that “in the world of human beings, even defeat is a transaction”.5 The rediscovery of
lost words can produce intricacies and affiliations that seem almost magical. Ghosh’s faith in
words is a writer’s faith, but one that bears up under the test of close observation, of reading at a
crawl. Readers willing to crawl can find in these words a way to imagine histories that might
otherwise remain secret. Those with less patience will still come away with a vividly imagined

5‘The Anglophone Empire, The New Yorker, 7 April 2003.
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sense of the lives of others, and of their own ancestral complicities in their fates. Will the time
come when some or other politician, British or Indian, will apologize for the hardships of the
opium trade and the global movements of indentured labor? If so, it will only follow a process of
recovering and rendering unignorable a national memory in which Sea of Poppies will have
played a major part.

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