Home Thoughts From the Near Abroad

A bookshelf full of Indian authors will reveal certain similarities. The concerns of many novelists are similar, focused on the middle class and above (or, as the novelist Nayantara Sahgal called one of her works, Rich Like Us). Beyond the million stories India itself has to tell, there will be fiction by and about the Indian abroad. And those novels will be about Boston and Manhattan, London and the Home Counties.

But Indians are everywhere, and Amitav Ghosh is one novelist who has consistently turned his gaze on what he calls India’s “near-abroad.” If not about his native Bengal itself—as were The Circle of Reason (1986), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) and The Hungry Tide (2004), they deal with India’s immediate neighborhood. In An Antique Land (1992) was literary anthropology about perhaps the first Indian abroad; Shadow Lines (1988) dealt with Bangladesh; his essays were called Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), and his novel, The Glass Palace (2006) was about Burma.

With his new novel, Sea of Poppies (released this month in the United Kingdom and India, and review of which will appear in the Sept. 2008 issue of FEER) Mr. Ghosh looks at Asia’s biggest nations—India and China—and how the opium trade linked the two. In doing this, once again, his focus remains on the marginal individual. Those who make the journey on a ship are driven by circumstances. Britain abolished slavery in mid-19th century, and the colonial empire needed a cheap, pliant labor force, which Indians were willing to provide in abundance, leading to what are today thriving Indian communities in the Caribbean, parts of Africa, the Indian Ocean islands and Southeast Asia. Mr. Ghosh writes about these people with sensitivity and compassion, directing his anger at the heartless colonial masters.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Salil Tripathi, a London-based writer and former REVIEW correspondent in Singapore, Mr. Ghosh expands on his themes. Excerpts:

ST: Among authors of Indian origin, you are among the few who have looked east for inspiration. Any particular reason why?

AG: My imagination has always been deeply engaged with India’s equivalent of the “near abroad.” Perhaps this was a reaction to the overwhelming Eurocentricity of the India of my childhood. It is simply a reality of Indian life that we are ever more closely linked with the Arab world and South East Asia—so many people have relatives, friends, siblings and so on, working in Dubai or Singapore. For me the discovery of these worlds happened independently of such connections and was perhaps all the richer for it.

ST: Another aspect that sets your fiction apart from that of many writers of Indian origin, is the focus on the marginal individual, one forgotten by history. What accounts for that interest?

AG: I am by nature drawn to people, events and things that lie outside the mainstream. This has been the case since I was very young, and I don’t know why it should be so. For example, what is considered iconic of contemporary India, Bollywood and cricket, don’t interest me at all. Fortunately, India is a place where completely different worlds can exist in close proximity, and one does not have to go very far to be in places that have no connection at all to contemporary modes of existence.

ST: Sea of Poppies is the first of a trilogy. Can you provide a glimpse of the direction the plot will take?

AG: The trilogy will follow the lives and careers of some of the characters. Indian migrants used to speak of people they had traveled with as jahaz-bhais, or ship brothers. The trilogy is thus the story of an extended family—one that is brought into being by the shared experience of being in a ship.

ST: How does the writing process work? Do you have a grand narrative in your mind before you start? Do you write stories as they emerge? As the plot becomes more complex, does that require you to keep going back to the earlier parts, to make sure everything is consistent?

AG: The “grand narrative” in this case is actually quite simple: it is just a journey on a ship. But when one thinks of the very different circumstances and trajectories that bring different characters into the same vessel that journey acquires many different dimensions—so many that it would be impossible to embark on the project if there wasn’t a basic simplicity and coherence to it ... If fiction were as inconsistent and random as life, readers would be hard put to follow what they were reading! ... The premise of my novel is a very simple one: it’s an account of a ship crossing the Bay of Bengal. But in real life, nothing is simple.

ST: Why the fascination with a ship’s journey?

AG: I have always loved sea stories. As a child I was fascinated by the Bengali sea-legend of Behula-Lakhindar, and as a schoolboy I devoured Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood series. Melville’s work continues to be a perennial source of inspiration, but I also love reading 19th century sailor’s travel-accounts, journals and the like. There’s a very rich contemporary tradition of nautical fiction too: William Golding’s Rites of Passage, Richard Hughes’ marvelous High Wind in Jamaica; Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers which is an absolutely wonderful book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, brilliant Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, and Barry Unsworth’s tremendous novel, Sacred Hunger. Somehow air travel doesn’t seem to produce great fiction, and as for the internal combustion engine, perhaps the best to be hoped for from it is Calvin Trillin’s magisterial novel about looking for parking spots in Manhattan (Tepper Isn’t Going Out).

ST: If you took an Indian today and placed him in the 19th century, what would it look like?

AG: To an Indian of today 19th century India is almost unimaginable: it is really hard to conceive of being confined to “Black Towns,” and to think that there were parts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras that you were excluded from because of your color. This is our past and we have to make our peace with it—but it is important that we do not sugarcoat it. It is no coincidence that it took 50 years of Independence before it once again became possible to see what India’s rightful place in the world might be: that is about as long as it takes for a country to awaken from a trauma.

ST: How do you respond to the way India and China have—at the margin—responded to the Opium War through cinema? The Chinese made a blockbuster film in the 1990s, and India had Mangal Pandey—“The Rising” in which opium trade appears only obliquely.

AG: India has completely forgotten its involvement in the opium trade. This is true even of historians. I know of several who have written about sugarcane and cotton. Yet opium, which according to some scholars, may have accounted for as much as half the wealth that accrued to the colonial government, has received very little attention. Only one contemporary Indian historian has written about this subject—Amar Farooqui. His work is excellent but he has concentrated, understandably, on only one aspect of this gigantic subject—that is the opium trade in Western India. But the bulk of the opium produced in India in the early 19th century came from the East—from Bihar. No one has dealt with this subject in any detail. Why? One can only speculate. One possible reason is that the writing of Indian history is still heavily influenced, through patronage and other means, by British institutions, which clearly have no interest into delving into this aspect of the past. Indians equally, for reasons of shame or guilt or whatever, prefer not to dwell on this. Mr. Farooqui once told me that he’d been trying for years to interest his research students in this subject but they just would not touch it. We’ve developed a vision of ourselves as straitlaced, spiritual, etc., and we’ve chosen to forget that much of modern India was actually built on this drug. Mr. Farooqui for example, has shown in his book, Bombay: Opium City that Bombay probably would not exist but for opium.