A history reclaimed

[1]

By Amitav Ghosh [2]

Rs 699

Over the last two decades, Amitav Ghosh has established himself as a writer of uncommon talent who combines literary flair with a rare seriousness of purpose. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, seemed very much in the Rushdie magical-realist tradition, but he has evolved considerably since then, notably in works like The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace, which deal movingly and powerfully with post-imperial dislocations in Bengal and Burma.

Three years ago, the publication of Sea of Poppies, his sixth novel (and the first of a projected trilogy), marked both a departure and an arrival. It saw Ghosh painting upon a much larger canvas than ever before, with a multitude of characters and an epic vision; and the novel was his first to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Though he did not win, the anticipation surrounding the second of the trilogy has remained high.
River of Smoke does not disappoint. Sea of Poppies ended amidst a raging storm, rocking the triple-masted schooner, the Ibis, and its colourful array of seamen, convicts and labourers sailing forth in the course of transforming their lives. We now learn that two other vessels have also been caught up in a similar (or perhaps the same?) storm: the Anahita, a sumptuously-built cargo vessel owned by the Bombay Parsi merchant Bahram Modi and carrying his biggest shipment of raw opium for sale in Canton, and the Redruth, a Cornish vessel with a cargo of unusual flora on which sails a Cornish botanist looking for rare plants, especially the mythical golden camellia, in China. A handful of characters from the previous volume re-emerge from the Ibis, notably the Bengal-raised orphan Paulette, who accompanies the botanist Penrose, and the dispossessed raja, Neel, who signs on as Modi’s munshi. But where Sea of Poppies mainly followed the opium trade down the Ganges to Calcutta and towards Mauritius, Ghosh now shifts his focus to the opium trade with China, centred on the coastal port of Canton. This ensures that River of Smoke is essentially self-contained, its narrative not needing familiarity with what has gone before.
At the end of Sea of Poppies, the clouds of war were looming, as British opium interests in India pressed for the use of force to compel the Chinese mandarins to keep open their ports, in the name of free trade. River of Smoke develops this theme. Bahram Modi (“Barry Moddie” to his British fellow-traders) is importing a huge consignment of Indian opium that he hopes will make his family’s fortune once and for all, and liberate him from the status of poor son-in-law of a rich family. But he is also exploring an alternative life in Canton, free from the rigid strictures of Bombay’s social hierarchies: here he is the successful entrepreneur with the best view from his office, the only Indian member of the Committee of the Western-led Chamber of Commerce in Canton and the lover of a Chinese boatwoman, Chi-Mei, through whom he has fathered a son he cannot acknowledge. Canton’s Fanqui-Town is where foreigners reinvent themselves amid the rich intercourse of commerce and miscegenation. It is also where the characters of River of Smoke plan to despoil an entire people in the pursuit of profit, until an incorruptible Mandarin, Lin Zexu, arrives in Guangzhou to stamp it out.
The author’s sympathies are largely with the Chinese, though it is impossible for the Indian reader to escape identifying with Bahram, a man of great but flawed humanity who inspires profound loyalty from his staff. The British traders’ hypocritical and self-justifying espousal of the doctrine of free trade in high-minded rhetoric is something else. “It is not my hand”, pronounces the British opium trader Burnham, “that passes sentence upon those who choose the indulgence of opium. It is the work of another invisible, omnipotent; it is the hand of freedom; of the market, of the spirit of liberty itself, which is none other than the breath of God”. There is much more of this self-serving cant, though the novel also gives voice to the handful of Westerners who resisted the trade, typified by a young homosexual American, Charles King.
Ghosh’s purpose is clearly both literary and political. His narrative represents a prodigious feat of research; one does not need the impressive bibliography of sources at the end of the volume to be struck by the wealth of period detail the author commands. Yet there is nothing artificial about this historical novel; he immerses you in its period till it seems real enough to be contemporary. His descriptions bring a lost world to life, from the evocatively-imagined life of the Canton factories, the intricacies of costumes and decor and the lovingly-detailed menus of fare on the opulent dining-tables of the era. At times, between the vivid descriptions of a riot on the maidan and the delightfully chatty letters of the gay Eurasian painter Robin Chinnery, River of Smoke reads like a cross between Gone with the Wind and a Victorian epistolary novel. And yet Ghosh has managed a stunning reversal of perspective. His ships, with the author’s fine feel for nautical niceties, sail in Joseph Conrad territory, through waters since romanticised by the likes of James Clavell, but whereas those writers, and so many others, placed the white man at the centre of their narratives, Ghosh relegates his colonists to the margins of his story, giving pride of place to the neglected subjects of the imperial enterprise — colonialism’s impoverished, and usually non-white, victims.
Ghosh portrays his characters with integrity and dignity; even those with walk-on parts enjoy well-constructed back-stories. If his Brits in Sea of Poppies — scheming, perverse and ruthless to a man — were largely caricatures, in River of Smoke they benefit from a much more rounded portrayal. He is particularly good at representing the distinctive voices of his characters; what sometimes seemed forced in the earlier book is natural and convincing in this one, exquisitely reproducing the new hybrid language resulting from the mongrel mating of tongues. Sometimes he does go overboard with his Hobson-Jobson; his prose is littered with words the average reader has rarely encountered, like (on page 509 alone) “swadders”, “buttoners”, “mumpers” and “mucksnipes”, all on the Canton maidan. Terms like “cumshaw”, “gubbrowed”, “girmitiyas”, “mudlarking” and “linkisters” are used so often that you tend to assume you should have known them all along. (Indians will have no difficulty figuring out the meaning of a house “as chuck-muck as any in the city, with paltans of nokar-logue doing chukkers in the hallways and syces swarming in the istabbuls”. But I wonder if other Anglophones will manage!) Yet it doesn’t really matter: the language brings in period authenticity and local colour, and as with any good vessel, you get the drift quick enough.
Despite the varied nationalities of his characters, the Indian reader can be left in little doubt about the author’s basic allegiance. This is an Indian novel, but one written by a 21st-century Indian, one who is both cosmopolitan and conscious of his heritage. His description of the “Achhas”, as Indians were called in Canton (because of their frequent use of that Hindustani word), is full of empathy. The description of No.1 Fungtai Hong, where they are based, vividly evokes the other world into which they have been transposed: “a world in itself, with its own foods and words, rituals and routines”, where Indians of motley origins, hailing from different regions, speaking different languages and ruled by different political dispensations, come together into a consciousness of their Indianness. “At home, it would not have occurred to them to imagine that they might have much in common — but here, whether they liked it or not, there was no escaping those commonalities.” The Chinese saw them as one, and “after a point you came to accept that there was something that tied you to other Achhas”. The emergence of an Indian identity in the China of 1838 is one of those delicious moments of historical recognition that Ghosh slips into his narrative.
There is even an Indian restaurant in Canton, run by a boatwoman who had grown up in Calcutta’s Chinatown; she serves “fare that an Achha could enjoy with untroubled relish, knowing that it would contain neither beef nor pork, nor any odds and ends of creatures that barked, or mewed, or slithered, or chattered in the treetops: mutton and chicken, duck and fish were the only dead animals she offered”.
If his historical judgments are largely subtly rendered, without any of the sledgehammer effect of retrospective moralism that a lesser writer might have employed, Ghosh is not above the occasional unsubtle cynicism. “Democracy is a wonderful thing”, Bahram observes to a British merchant. “It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages — and China too, of course.” Tendentious, and not worthy of a fine writer. However, the racism of the era — an obvious target — hardly features, to Ghosh’s credit, except when Parsis at a British dinner (which they have generously helped sponsor) are insulted by young Britons: “We gave all that money for the dinner and then they call us monkeys and niggers?”
With this trilogy, Ghosh has come a long way from the magic realism of his first novel. River of Smoke is written in an almost old-fashioned style, its prose straightforward and unadorned, its emotions deeply affecting. His trilogy is emerging, two-thirds of the way through, as a monumental tribute to the pain and glory of an earlier era of globalisation — an era when people came into contact and collision, intermixing costumes, customs, convictions, consonants, couplings and cash. Ghosh’s novels serve a larger cause, the reclaiming of a story appropriated for too long by its villains — those who, centuries ago, conquered (or imposed their will on) foreign lands, subjugated and displaced their peoples, replaced their agriculture with cash-crops that caused addiction and death, thrust addictive poisons on them for profit and enforced all this with the power of the gun masked by a rhetoric of civilisation and divine purpose.
“Do you think they will remember what we went through?” Bahram muses as he watches young Parsis in Canton wielding bat and ball. “Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives?... Was it just for this: so that these fellows could speak English, and wear hats and trousers, and play cricket?”
It is a haunting question. And there will be more, undoubtedly, when the final instalment of the Ibis Trilogy emerges. I can’t bear to wait.

The author is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency