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Sea of Poppies Amitav Ghosh
“The truthis, sir, that men do whattheirpowerpermitsthem to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the differenceisonlythatwhenwekillpeople, wefeelcompelled to pretendthatitis for some higher cause. Itisthispretense of virtue, I promise you, thatwillnever be forgiven by history”. [AmitavGhosh, Sea of Poppies, 2008]
“The greatestIndianwriter in English” • Calcutta, India, 1956 • From Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran to west, and then back to India • History student in Delhi and anthropology student in Oxford • Comparative literature and creative writing professor in the USA • Writer, journalist, anthropologist
Famous achievements… or not. Commonwealth Writers’ Prize The Glass Palace “Best novel in the Eurasian section” 54th Jnanpith Award First Indian writer in English 2018
It is madness to think that knowing a language and reading a few books can create allegiances between people. Thoughts, books, ideas, words, if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed. [AmitavGhosh, Flood of fire, 2015] • XXthcentury’s second generation of authors • Age of Anxiety
Salman Rushdie (1947) Midnight’s Children (1981) Doris Lessing (1919-2013) The Golden Notebook, 1962 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature Martin Amis (1949) Time's Arrow, 1991 HanifKureishi (1954) The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990 Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) The Remains of the Day, 1989 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature
IBIS TRILOGY Sea of Poppies, 2008 River of Smoke, 2011 Flood of Fire, 2015
IBIS TRILOGY • First book: set in Bihar’s opium plantations and factories, Calcutta, and then in the Indian Ocean on the Ibis, a ship sailing to Mauritius with migrants, lascars and slaves on board. • Second book: the story focuses on Seth Bahram, a parsi opium merchant, who has to face the stop of economic transactions imposed by the Chinese government in 1839. • Third book: the increasing rattling situation crumbles: the “First Opium War” starts, and it will allow England to conquer Hong Kong and to set the purchase of opium which had been banished before.
The title and the structure • Characters are depictedaspoppyseedsemanating in large numbers from the field to form a blacksea, eachone with insecurities and uncertaintiesabout the future. • The plot is made of different sub-plots, which are alltied to the presence of a ship: the Ibis.
The plot • Zachary, the son of a whitefatherboards the Ibis in order to escaperacism. • A lot of incidentsoccur and take out the mostexperiencedmembers of the ship’screw. • Zacharybecomessecond in command. Once in Calcutta, he isbelieved to be a gentleman. • He is made second mate as the Ibis prepares for itsnextvoyage.
The plot • NeelHalderis a rajahwhosedynastyhasbeen in power for centuries in Rakshali. • He wants to sell hisestatesas a way to pay for debts he hasrun up investing in the opiumtrade with China. • BurnhamsuggestshavingHalder use hiszamindary to settle the loan, but he refusesasitis part of hisfamily’sancestralproperty. • Burnham and some of his friends organize a trial and Halderisaccused of forgery. He issentenced to sevenyears in prisoner in Mauritius, whichwillalsolead to the loss of his caste. • While in prisonHaldermeets Ah Fattwhois a half-Chinese, half-Parsi. Theyboth are put on the Ibis.
The plot • Paulette, a French orphangrew up in India with her best friend Jodu, whois the son of hernursemaid. • Burnhamand hiswife take her in, though the girl is more comfortable with Indian ways than with the Western lifestyle. • Pauletteisbeingpressured by Burnham to marryhis friend, JusticeKendalbushe. • Sheflees to Mauritius, looking for a better future.Jodu and Paulettebothtravel on the Ibis. Jodutravelsas a sailor, with Paulettedisguisedas a niece of one of Burnham’semployees.
The end As the stories of the differentcharacters continue, the Ibis becomes a sort of shelter for peoplewho are looking for a better future or betteropportunities. Some characters, includingHalder and Jodu, are headed for Singapore, whilePaulette, Deeti, and Zachary head for Mauritius.
The setting The banks of the Ganges:one of the mostsacredrivers to Hindus. Millions of Indians live alongitscourse and depend on it for theirdailyneeds. In Hinduism, itispersonifiedas the goddessGaṅgā. The authorcompares the Ganges to the Nile, the lifeline of the Egyptiancivilization, attributing the development of thesecivilizations to theseselflessbodies.
Destinations of the characters: Singapore • Mauritius
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND “The moment the vessel made contact with the sacred waters […] it happened in the second week of the March 1838, for that was when the Ibis dropped anchor off Ganga-Sagar Island, where the holy river debouches into the Bay of Bengal”.(Part I)
The novel is set in India in the 19th century and most precisely the story begins in 1838, when the Ibisarrives on the banks of the holy river Ganges and its second officer, Zachary Reid, “had his first look at India”. (Part I)
Back then the Indian subcontinent was under the control of the British East India Company, that ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India. Incorporated by royal charter in 1600, the private company was formed in order to trade basic commodities such as cotton, spices, silk, tea and even opium in the Indian Ocean region and later with Qing China.
In 1612 the boatsbelonging to the company arrived in Surat, in the modern state of Gujarat, whichwas the first commercial branch. On behalf of James I, in 1616 Sir Thomas Roe was sent to India to meet the Mughal emperor Jahangir in order to establish with him an exclusive commercial treaty.
Roe did not succeed in making the formal deal but he became friends with the emperor, so the company could later develop trading posts and strongholds in Surat, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The British traders gradually expanded their powers and their commercial operations, putting an end to the rivalry with the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French.
The turning point for the company was when it started to directly collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, paying an annual tribute to the emperor. In doing so, the British moved from the coasts to the villages and they soon started to be recognized as the military power while the Indian élites conducted a lazy and luxurious life.
The Mughal empire subsequently became weaker and weaker until its formal end came during the suppression of the Mutiny in 1858. In the same year, the company lost all its administrative functions and at the beginning of 1860 all its the possessions came under the control of the Crown.
CHARACTERS CHARACTERS
“Vwala! That one there with the three eyebrows? That’s Jodu, the lascar—he’d grown up with your TantinnPaulette and was like a brother to her. And that over there, with the turban around his head, is Serang Ali—a master mariner if ever there was one and as clever as a gran-koko. And those two there, they were convicts, on their way to serve time in Mauritius—the one on the left, his father was a big Seth from Bombay but his mother was Chinese, so we called him Cheeni, although his name was Ah Fatt. As for the other one, that’s none other than your Neel-mawsa, the uncle who loves to tell stories. It was only then that the tip of her cane would move on to the towering figure of Maddow Colver (Kalua), who was depicted standing upright, in the middle of the boat. […] There, vwala! That’s me (Deeti) on the deck of the Ibis with your Tantinn Paulette on one side and Baboo Nob Kissinon the other. And there at the back is MalumZikri—Zachary Reid, the second mate”. With the purpose of focusing on those personalities which can be identified as the most relevant in the book, we have decided to look at a specific image which appears recurrently in the novel and that will be completely developed by the author in the second book of the Ibis trilogy. We are talking about “Deeti’s Shrine”, which is mentioned at least 8 times in our book, even if his construction and accomplishment is entirely narrated in “River of Smoke”, from which we will derive an interesting summary of the main characters of our novel.
BABOO NOB KISSIN NEEL RATTAN HALDER PAULETTE LAMBERT AH FATT JODUMAIN CHARACTERS SERANG ALI DEETI ZACHARY REID KALUA
DEETI • Deeti is a young woman of an upper caste, who lives in a village about 400 miles from the sea. She is married to Hukam Singh, an Opium addict, who was wounded in battle. She has a daughter named Kabutri, who was actually fathered by her brother in law Chandan Singh, since she had been raped on her wedding night. When Hukam dies, she decides to commit sati on his funeral pyre, rather than marry Chandan. She is rescued by Kalua, an “untouchable” whom she once saved. Together with Kalua she leaves her village for Calcuttta. She boards the Ibis, along with him, to become an indentured laborer in Mauritius and to run away from his husband’s family, whose name had been sullied by her elopement with Kalua. PATNA CALCUTTA
“After seven years of marriage, Deeti was not much more than a child herself, but a few tendrils of white had already appeared in her thick black hair. The skin of her face, parched and darkened by the sun, had begun to flake and crack around the corners of her mouth and her eyes. Yet, despite the careworn commonplaceness of her appearance, there was one respect in which she stood out from the ordinary: she had light grey eyes, a feature that was unusual in that part of the country.” • “Was it because of the glow of Deeti’s pregnancy? Or was it because of her success in dealing with the maistries? Either way, it happened that more and more people took to calling her Bhauji: it was as if she had been appointed the matron of the dabusa by common consent. Deeti gave the matter no thought: there was nothing to be done, after all, if everybody wanted to treat her as if she were their older brother’s wife.”
PAULETTE LAMBERT Paulette Lambert is a young French woman who has been raised in an unconventional manner by her botanist father and her wet nurse, who is the mother of Jodu, Paulette’s childhood playmate and best friend. Mr. and Mrs. Burnham take Paulette in after her father's death. Paulette feels more at ease with Indian manners, food, and clothing than with Western ones, but the Burnham household fiercely disapproves. Paulette becomes determined to run away because of sexual harassment by Mr. Burnham and pressure to marry his friend, Justice Kendalbushe. She resolves to travel to Mauritius, as her great-aunt did, in the hope of finding a better future, in disguise as the Indian niece of one of the Mr. Burnham's employees, living among the coolies on the boat.
“At seventeen, Paulette was unusually tall, of a height where she could look over the heads of most of those around her, men and women alike. Her limbs, too, were of such a length that they tended to wave like branches in a wind” [..] since her arrival at Bethel, her diffidence about her appearance had been transformed into an acute self-consciousness: in repose, her nails and fingertips would seek out small blemishes and tease them until they became ugly blotches on her pale complexion” • “' Paulette took a deep breath. 'Baboo Nob Kissin – I propose to hold you to your words. In exchange for this locket I wish to obtain a passage on the Ibis.' 'Ibis!' Baboo Nob Kissin's mouth dropped open. 'You are mad or what? How you shall go on Ibis? Only coolies and quoddies may be accommodated on said vessel. Passenger traffic is not existing.' 'That matters nothing to me,' said Paulette. 'If I could join the labourers I would be content. “
“Although her ghungta was certainly her most important means of concealment, it was by no means the only one; she had also disguised her appearance in a number of other ways: her feet were lacquered with bright vermilion alta; her hands and arms were covered with intricate, hennaed designs that left very little of her skin visible”
ZACHARY REID Zachary Reid is the son of a white father and a quadroon mother. He is a young sailor from Baltimore who has left America because professional jealousy has led him to constant harassment by the American sailors. With the support of lascars and Serang Ali, the leader of the lascars, Zachary Reid has raised his soul above his station and the potential to progress to officer status, something impossible for him at home. Though Reid’s own background is not so different from that of the lascars, he is a foreigner, a man who has no known caste within Indian society, and Serang Ali treats him as a superior to the lascars. He is given the post of a second mate in the second voyage of the Ibis. NEW YORK
“Zachary Reid was of medium height and sturdy build, with skin the colour of old ivory and a mass of curly, lacquer-black hair that tumbled over his forehead and into his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were as dark as his hair, except that they were flecked with sparks of hazel: as a child, strangers were apt to say that a pair of twinklers like his could be sold as diamonds to a duchess” • “But Zachary had signed on with a mind to learning the sailor's trade, and he stepped on board with great eagerness, carrying a canvas ditty-bag that held little more than a change of clothes and a penny-whistle that his father had given him as a boy. The Ibis provided him with a quick, if stern schooling, the log of her voyage being a litany of troubles almost from the start. Mr Burnham was in such a hurry to get his new schooner to India that she had sailed short-handed from Baltimore, shipping a crew of nineteen, of whom nine were listed as 'Black', including Zachary.”
NEEL RATTAN HALDER Neel Rattan Halder is a rajah whose dynasty has been ruling the zemindary of Raskhali for centuries and a profiteer in the opium trade. He is materialistic, decadent and promiscuous. He has to pay the price for refusing to sell his estates to Burnham. He is framed for forgery and dispossessed from his royal palace, separated from son and wife and made to share a room with a stinking convict -Ah-Fatt- and now to aboard the Ibis as a convict. Neel is forced to break every prohibition dictated by his Hindu upbringing and his social class.
“Though not Brahmins, the Halders were orthodox Hindus, zealous in the observance of upper-caste taboos and in following the usages of their class: to them, the defilements associated with the preparation of food were anathema.” “This last part of the convicts' routine, Bhyro Singh was quick to appropriate: the pretence that they were a pair of plough-oxen and he a farmer, tilling a field, seemed to give him endless delight; he would loop their chains around their necks, in such a way that they were forced to stoop as they walked; then, shaking their fetters like reins, he would make a clicking, tongue-rolling noise as he drove them along, occasionally slicing at their legs with his lathi.”
KALUA Kalua is anUntouchable*. He takes Hukam (Deeti’s husband) to the factory in his cart each day, and he is the one who brings back Hukam’s body when he dies. He is a strong wrestler, rescued by Deeti from humiliation by some high caste Thakurs (feudal lords). In turn, he saves her from the funeral pyre of her husband. Together with Deeti, he leaves for Calcutta and then boards the Ibis to go to Mauritius. • *Dalitmeans "brokenpeople, they were formerly known as “untouchables”. Dalits live at the bottom of India's rigid social order known as the caste system: they are the manual scavengers, the removers of human waste and dead animals, leather workers, street sweepers and cobblers.The mere touch of a Dalit was considered “polluting” to a caste member. Thus, the concept of "untouchability" wasborn. • Kalua is a a member of the leather workers’ caste, hence an untouchable. Dalit woman in Mumbai, 1942
SERANG ALI Serang Ali is the leader of a lascar company, he is the only character in this group with a biography and with an emphatically cross-cultural knowledge. He functions as a paternal mentor to Zachary. SerangAli’s language is a pidgin version of English, which includes elements of the language spoken in the region he comes from. In the last part of the novel Zachary Reid becomes aware that Serang Ali is nothing but the father-in-law of Adam Danby, an infamous pirate and that, in all those months, the lascar had tried to realize on him Adam’s ambitions, since the pirate had been assassinated some years earlier with his whole family.
JODU JODU • Joduwas the son of a boatman; since its birth, its destiny had been closely intertwined with that of Paulette Lambert; since Jodu's mother had nursed Paulette as a newborn, the woman with his son were welcomed into Mr. lambert's house and the children had grown up as siblings. After the sudden death of Mr. Lambert, Jodu and his mother had returned to their native village where his mother had died after some months. We find him again in Clacutta intent on embarking on a ship as a common slacker.
BABOO NOB KISSIN A very pragmatic but secretly deeply religious Bengali agent of the wealthy British businessman Mr Burnham; he believes that he is gradually changing sex, becoming the avatar of the woman who was his spiritual mentor, his saintly aunt Ma Taramony.; he comes to believe that Zachary is an avatar of Krishna and Numerous plot developments are facilitated by him. • “Nowhere was this transformation more evident than in himself, for the presence of Taramony was so palpable within him now that his outer body felt increasingly like the spent wrappings of a cocoon, destined soon to fall away from the new being that was gestating within. Every day offered some fresh sign of the growing fullness of the womanly presence inside him – for example, his mounting revulsion at the coarseness of the maistries and silahdars with whom he had perforce to live: when he heard them speaking of breasts and buttocks, it was as if his own body were being discussed and derided; at times, his need to veil himself was so intense that he would pull a sheet over his head.”
AH FATT Ah Fattis an opium addict and inhuman character, is a bastard child of a Parsi father and Chinese mother form Canton. He looks for his father who spurns him to avoid ignominy. He is on trial in India and left in stinking state into a dark cell in Alipore. He shares his cell with Neel Rattan Halder. Initially they are at loggerheads but gradually they come closer to each other, boarding the Ibis towards Mauritius.
OTHER CHARACTERS: • Benjamin Burnham is an unscrupulous British merchant and he owns the Ibis and engages in the opium trade. Since the slave trade has been officially ended, Burnham has kept the Ibis intact and simply switched to the transport of exiled prisoners and coolies. Though Burnham is the son of Liverpool tradesman, his willingness to finance and manage these exploited wealth and a lavish lifestyle impossible for him in England • HukamSingh, the husband of Deeti, is a cripple who was wounded in battle. He is an opium addict working in the Ghazipur Opium Factory. When Hukam dies, Deeti plans to commits sati in his funeral pyre, to avoid marriage with Chandan. • ChandanSinghis the brother of Hukam Singh. He raped Deeti along with his mother as an accomplice, on the day of her marriage to Hukam. He is the father of Kabutri, Deeti’sdaughter. • Bhyrosingh is Hukam and Chandan’s uncle, he is depicted as a powerful and merciless man; he has been probably involved in Deeti’s rape during her wedding night and is involved with the search of both of them for their elopement. Unfortunately, Kalua and Deeti meet Bhyron Singh on the Ibis
GROUPS OF PEOPLE • LASCARS: In the novel a large number of Lascars are employed during the first voyage of the Ibis from Baltimore to Calcutta; their leader is Serang Ali. The term ‘lascar’ (believed to derive from the Persian lashkar, meaning an army, a camp or a band of followers) dates back to the early 1500s when it was used by Portuguese explorers to describe the sailors they encountered from modern India, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, China, etc. By the seventeenth century, though, lascars were increasingly employed on British merchant ships as the Empire rapidly expanded and new trading routes materialized. “He had thought that lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux: he discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. They came in groups of ten or fifteen, each with a leader who spoke on their behalf. To break up these groups was impossible; they had to be taken together or not at all, and although they came cheap, they had their own ideas of how much work they would do and how many men would share each job.”
GIRMITYAS In 1833, slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire. Moreover, profits from the fantastically lucrative opium trade came under threat due to changing Chinese policies. In this newly uncertain economic reality, both factors combined to make the engagement and transportation of indentured laborers suddenly profitable. Accordingly, British officials engaged in the mass recruitment of Indian laborers; Those recruited signed an indenture “agreement”—vernacularized in North Indian languages as “girmit”—and were thereafter known as “girmitiyas”). The girmitiyas were transported to British colonies as far-flung as Mauritius and Fiji to East Africa and the Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica) In Gosh’s novel the fracture of traditional identities created new solidarities forged out of a sense of subaltern companionship and togetherness…which would over time lay the foundations of a new, more egalitarian, more pragmatic, and less protocol-driven culture; his new inclusive unity amongst the girmitiyas is strikingly articulated by Ghosh as follows: “from now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings— jaházbhais and jaházbahens— to each other. There’ll be no differences between us!”
REPRESENTETION OF WOMEN Ghosh has tried to depict sufferings women from all sections of Indian society during the nineteenth century. He has dealt with social problems like sati, rape, seclusion, misery and isolation during the widowhood. • Throughout the novel, the theme of sexual abuse and rape occur very frequently and it is also illustrated that black women slaves are perceived as objects of sexual gratification, in fact we learn that another character’s -Zachary’s mother- is raped by her master and Deetiherself was not the only rape victim in Sea of Poppies. In the name of educating Paulette, Mr Burnham does not hesitate to enforce his fantasies on her such as whip-beating. Later on, during the sea journey, we see the subedar, Bhyro Singh abusing Deeti explicitly. Also, a female character named Munia cannot say “no” to her boyfriend out of the fear of public exposure and eventually had a son out of wedlock, as it is expressed in the following words: “She had enjoyed the secrecy and the romance and even the fondling, until the night when he forced himself on her: after that for fear of public exposure, she had continued to do his bidding”.
In the novel it emerges the belief that women at the time of their period are considered as dirty and may bring bad luck to their community and thus are sent out of their home to a secluded place: “It so happened that it was Munia’s time of the month, so she was sleeping away from others, out in the fields…” • Another interesting point given in the novel is that there is a relationship between the costumes of women and honour. In the Indian case, it seems that veil represents honour of a woman, and extensionally her family’s honour as well. In Sea of Poppies, there are many passages which emphasize this kind of relationship between veil or purdah and honour: “The covers had dropped from her ever-veiled face, and [Malati] had torn open the bindings of her braids so that her hair lay on her shoulders like a dark shroud of grief… it was as if the uncovering of her face stripped the veil from his own manhood, leaving [Neel, her husband] naked and exposed to the gloating pity of the world, to a shame that could never be overcome”.
Through the character of Heeru, Ghosh has tried to depict plight of women left by their husband due to some disease or inability to give male heir to the family. She is left by her husband in a fair due to her disease of forgetfulness. • Through the character of Neel’s wife Malti, it is shown how his wife is a passive sufferer and her condition is not better than Deeti’s. Her life is controlled by patriarchal laws. She is made to play role of mother and wife, without any expectations while her husband enjoys with his mistress Elokeshi. She is just a silent spectator in the house performing duties and never questioning her husband. • The characters of Mrs Burnham and her daughter represent the counterpart of the so called Memsahib; they are representative of the mindset of Britishers that they are superior than Indians and anything which is a part of Indian culture is looked upon as inferior be it people, dress or language.
Richard Shweder explains that most of the widows want to practice sati in order not be excluded by their friends or family and to gain fame and honour in their community after their death, thinking that isolation in their community is something more horrible than to die in the fire. During the British Raj in India Sati was banned, but it was a long and complex process: the first formal British ban was imposed in 1798, in the city of Calcutta only but the practice continued in surrounding regions until 1861 when the general ban on Sati was issued by a proclamation from Queen Victoria. SATI
CONCLUSION: In the Indian context emerged from the novel women are doubly and some are triply marginalized but they abandon restriction of complex society and go ahead identifying themselves as indentures on a strange land. They desire to leave their complicated past experience and seek betterment in future. They build up an egalitarian community which is classless and castelessembodying the novel’s soul.
