Seafaring and the opium trade were shaping influences on India, Amitav Ghosh tells Rrishi Raote, but Indians are not interested in that history.
Sailing is a really marvellous technology, you know,” says Amitav Ghosh who is meeting the press in a dim wood-panelled room in the belly — below decks, as it were — of an ultra-expensive Delhi hotel. “It’s eco-friendly and all of that, sustained the world for years. But the thing about sailing is that it’s completely dependent on language.” On a sailing ship, he explains, when an officer on deck yells an order to seamen high up in the rigging, that order must be instantly understood and executed by all “in a coordinated way”. Or else the ship could be in trouble.
Trouble is, in the mid-19th century in the Indian Ocean and Far East, the period and place in which Ghosh has set his two recent novels, Sea of Poppies (2009) and River of Smoke (released in India this Wednesday), there was no common language. Seamen even on European trading ships came from diverse regions. They were Bengali, Tamil, Goan, Arab, African, Arakanese, Malay, and so on. Collectively they were called lascars; even that word has a mixed ancestry — Persian and Arabic via Portuguese.
Inevitably, what developed was a universal sailors’ argot. Though nameless, this tongue was both widespread and economically crucial. Therefore, it had to be recorded. “Each part of every ship had a name,” Ghosh adds, “every rope, every join, every stay, every nail had a name; so for that you had to have dictionaries. Most of the major European nautical countries were publishing nautical dictionaries by the 16th century. For the vocabulary of the sea, in English alone, there’s a thousand-page dictionary written in the 18th century by an Admiral W H Smyth. It’s known [usually] as the Sailor’s Lexicon. And this is not the oldest.”
Read Ghosh’s latest novels and you’ll absorb sailor-speak with the story. His text is awash with lascarisms, not to mention a staggering range of other Asian words that made their way into what was then a resistless, fast-evolving colonial English.
The connecting thread of Ghosh’s story is a trading ship, a former slaver named the Ibis. It has been pressed into service to transport processed opium, grown in India to China, where the British sell the drug through the trading depot of Canton. But the Chinese emperor is angry at the effect opium is having on his subjects and his balance of payments. In Sea of Poppies, the Ibis, crewed by lascars, is filled with Indian migrant contract labour and sent to Mauritius. The experiences of the various people who come aboard provide the narrative engine, with the backdrop of the opium trade and colonial expansion. But there is a storm and some of the passengers are dispersed.
In the second book of the Ibis trilogy, River of Smoke, the action shifts to Canton, China, where the Ibis now awaits the outbreak of the Opium War by which England aims to force open China’s market. With the help of some new protagonists, including a Parsi agent, Ghosh explores life in the foreign commercial settlement on the verge of war.
Plainly the novelist needed many sources besides Admiral Smyth’s dictionary. “There are,” he says, “extensive treatments of Persian and Arabic seafaring [but] in the Indian case, as with most things Indian, the written record is very sparse and it’s really through its reflections in Arabic, Portuguese, that we get a sense of it.” The limited information is disproportionate to the impact he says seaborne life had on ordinary, everyday life — then as well as now. “I personally believe that lascars were responsible for enormous numbers of changes, innovations in English, in vocabulary, in costume. I wrote an article for Vogue magazine on the history of the banian, which I think is a lascari introduction to Indian life — you know, none of us can live without our banians now!” The humble balti, too, he says came to us via the lascars.
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“I spend a lot of time in the Greenwich Maritime Museum,” he says. “It has an amazing library filled with just incredible material. I’m told that all of the librarians there are reading my books.” The librarians have insisted that he come and give them a lecture, and the way he says this suggests that he’s as much flattered as he is embarrassed.
Ghosh spends part of the year in New York, where he uses the New York Public Library. His wife Deborah Baker discovered there a cache of letters to and from a female Jewish American convert to fundamentalist Islam, which she used to write her just-launched and well-received biography, The Convert. The couple also spend a portion of the year in Goa, in a village called Aldona half an hour’s drive from Mapusa. What is a cosmopolitan soul like Ghosh (Kolkata, Delhi, Oxford, Cairo, New York...) doing in a village?
“Aldona is an amazing place!” he exclaims. “It’s far ahead of the modern world. You know, six or seven years ago, it was proposed to build a cellphone tower. The people in Aldona, they put together a committee, they investigated everything about cellphone towers and they said no, this is a public health threat, and they refused to have it. Yesterday I read a doctor in the paper holding forth on this — Aldona knew this years ago. [...] Everyone in Goa is fairly well educated and they’re also extremely cosmopolitan. They keep themselves very well informed about public affairs and scientific developments — I mean, Aldona is way ahead."
This makes them different from Indians as a whole. “India as a civilisation has never been at all interested in looking outside. All those years, people were writing Sanskrit in Java and Cambodia, and they were reading Indian texts... The relationship was always one-way.” Why did he become interested in South-east Asia? “Bengal is very close to South-east Asia,” he says, “and in many ways it is South-east Asian, just even to look at. So that’s one of the reasons.” Another is that the region is almost invisible to Indians.
A consequence, he says, of Indians’ lack of interest in history is that the colonial experience begins to look more benign than it was. Opium, the original sin behind his characters’ exile (not their own sin, mind you, but that of the greedy English), caused suffering across colonised Asia. Ghosh connects it with the condition of modern Bihar, the forced migration, internal and overseas, of destitute farmers (Deeti, a lead character in Sea of Poppies, is such a migrant), the hypocrisy of Indian business which grew rich servicing British opium exports...
“I think if this had been the case in any Western country,” he says with force, “by now you’d have had 200 books about it. There are books about sugarcane, about indigo, about cotton, but [opium] was the most important sector of the economy and the only person writing about it is [historian] Amar Farooqui!” Like the ordinary person’s experience of 1857, opium is, says Ghosh, one of the areas of “extraordinary silence” in modern Indian history. And he is doing his best to people it with his characters and their stories.
