Clearing the fogs of history

For those who have been waiting with bated breath for the sequel to Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies or the second installment of his putative Ibis Trilogy, the early arrival of River of Smoke is good news indeed.

This trilogy explores the fascinating but woefully under-researched history of the so-called Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century. It is virtually unknown that India became the largest producer and exporter of opium under the British rule in the nineteenth century and that in large measure this financed the British Raj. The participation of Indians in the opium trade and the Imperial deployment of the Indian soldiers in the war against China is almost never discussed, especially in India. On this tragic enmeshing of Indian and Chinese histories, the silence of the Imperial and postcolonial histories is indeed deafening. The British Imperial triangulation of India and China in the Opium Wars constitutes a significant chapter in the complicated history of colonial modernity, another tenebrous moment in the dialectic of Enlightenment.

It is also interesting to note that Ghosh began, not with the intent of writing on the Opium Wars, but with the aim of exploring the various “departures” of indentured or Coolie labor from India to the distant parts of the world, such as the West Indies, Fiji islands, Mauritius etc. As he was researching the details of the complicated, cross-continental journeys of the Indian Coolies, he kept coming back to the opium-story, as it kept rearing its head time and again. It is indeed ironic that the silences of history became an insistent echo that this attentive writer of fiction couldn’t anymore ignore.

But, this isn’t the first time that Ghosh has lent his voice to break the conspiratorial silences within the recorded history in India. In his The Hungry Tide, he wrote about the Marichjhanpi massacre of the late 1970s, when the Bangladeshi refugees were brutally suppressed by the newly elected Communist Government in the northwestern state of West Bengal in India.

Ghosh, who hails from the Bengali Bhadralok, was born in Kolkata and has studied at various elite institutions, such as the Doon School, St. Stephen’s College and University of Oxford. As far as his social and intellectual formation is concerned, he belongs to the same milieu as the Bengali historians from the Subaltern Studies Collective and has often been viewed as a sort of literary counterpart to them. His reinvention of the form of historical novel - history from below in the form of fiction - is in this context a curious homage to the project of Subaltern Studies.