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Amitav Ghosh explores uncharted territory in his new novel, Sea of Poppies, writes Avtar Singh

In Sea of Poppies, part one of his planned ‘Ibis trilogy’, Amitav Ghosh pulls off a most remarkable transformation. In a novel that hinges on transgressions and focuses on deep and often violent change (both personal and social), the author himself emerges from the heavy historical and intellectual shadow of his most recent works – such as 2004 novel The Hungry Tide and 2002 essay collection The Imam and the Indian – cast anew as a writer who can inform, edify, provoke and entertain.

 “I have always been fascinated by the ways in which some people are able to reinvent some very basic aspect of their being,” says Ghosh. “Not just class and caste, but also race and gender. Certain individuals have always been able to change their circumstances.”

These reinventions are both the central theme and the driving narrative force of his new book. Set in India the year 1838, with the opium trade in full swing and its repercussions being felt everywhere, Sea of Poppies centres on an American slave ship (the Ibis, for whom the trilogy is named) as it comes to Calcutta to be retrofitted to transport opium at the behest of an English merchant who has prospered from the trade. Upriver, the forced cultivation of opium and the newly landless class it is creating is slowly forcing another sort of export: indentured labour.

The cast of characters includes a black mate from Maryland who is taken for a white man, a Thakur woman in Bihar married to a native ex-soldier who is currently an opium addict and is very soon going to be dead, an immense Chamar who is a talented but reluctant wrestler, a Bengali-speaking French girl and her boatman foster-brother who happens to be Muslim, and sundry profane colonials and lascars. And that’s just the first hundred pages.

“I knew from the start that the stories I wanted to tell wouldn’t fit into one book,” says Ghosh of his decision to write a trilogy. “I didn’t want to hurry the pace artificially, and I wanted to be able to linger on the small pleasures – visual, culinary, sartorial.”

And linger he does, not just on the descriptions of evocative sights, smells and tastes, but on the dialogue of the characters. Ghosh has taken incredible pains to give each protagonist a distinct voice, and the results are delightful. There are British-Indian beauties to be savoured (a visit to the loo is to “drop a chitty in the dawk”) and the profanities of the lascars (East Indian sailors) and other mariners will surprise many Ghosh fans. The frequently unfathomable argot of the lascars collides on deck with the Bhojpuri language, which breaks in turn upon the shore of the 19th-century English mariner’s polished and crystal-clear invective. “For me, dialogue is an element of what would be called ‘alankaar’ (adornment) in Indian aesthetics,” says Ghosh. “Words are to language what notes are to music: just as it is impossible to love music without loving musical notes, it is impossible also to be a reader, in the full sense, without loving words, in all their variety and occasional obscurity.”

 Despite the detail in which he describes his characters, Ghosh is reluctant to paint broad stripes of right and wrong.  “It is true that I do not subscribe to a simple, Manichaean view of good and evil,” he says. “I’m more interested in the shades and complexities. But it is true also that the people who do evil things, always have their reasons – and the fact of this should not in any way mitigate the horror of what they do.

I was frankly amazed by the arguments that were used as justifications by British and Indian opium traders, many of who were deeply religious, God-fearing people. It was certainly not my intention to excuse or mitigate the horror of their views in any way, but as a writer, I feel that conclusions should not be thrust upon the reader: they should make up their own minds.”