Ship Ahoy!
This is it! This is the book that Amitav Ghosh has talked about and read from during his recent visit to Dhaka (Sea of Poppies, Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008). Anyone who has been to Ghosh's talk must remember his immediate response to the warm reception given to him by Independent University, Bangladesh: "I wish my parents were here to see how Dhaka had honoured me!" This remark mediated through a shadowy line combines personal 'desire' with the social aspects of language--an idea which I think is characteristic of almost all of Ghosh's writing. Sea of Poppies, the first in Ibis trilogy, is no different. It is an engrossing story involving members of the schooner Ibis. The characters are from all over the world: from Bihar to Baltimore, from China to Paris, from London to Rangoon. It is fate (or lack of it) that has turned these characters into ship-siblings, i.e. jahaj bhais and jahaj bahens. Their mode of communication is a maritime language that was common among the colonial ships sailing the Indian Ocean. Ghosh, by his own admission, had spent hours in the Greenwich Royal Maritime Museum in London to make sense of lascar language. He relates this pidgin language with the "Tower of Babel" in order to subvert communicative purpose of language that can be a cause of serious (com)-motion. Hence one running theme of the novel is the desire for freedom that this Mauritius-bound ship has to offer for the individuals who, to a great extent, are running away from their own identities. The characters are stowaways who take Ibis to be a bird that will take them away from caste, colour, race, sexual humiliation, judicial jugglery and poverty, and give them a new identity once they reach the shore across the ocean. The ship is thus described as "A great wooden mai-bap, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come." The desire for freedom is so intense that it outweighs the taboos of crossing the black water. One character even thinks that they are on a pilgrimage: "On a boat of pilgrims, no one can lose caste and everyone is the same; it's like taking a boat to the temple of Jagannath, in Puri. From now on, and forever afterwards, we will be ship-siblings--jahaj bhais and jahaj bahens--to each other. There'll be no difference between us". It all seems like an Opium-induced Utopian dream. The irony is Ibis used to be a slave ship, and has now become a floating home for indentured labourers. The irony is that the religious overtone of the pilgrimage is tinged with the idea that the Ibis appears to be an intruder from the unholy black water that constantly threatens the holy Ganges. Thus a topsy-turvy ("oolter-poolter" in lascar lingua), world view is presented in which the ship epitomises a new form of slavery--albeit an abstract and notional one. Nevertheless, Ghosh does not present his characters as subjects of colonial gaze or as objects for discovery and subjugation. He simply presents his characters as a wonderful document of human spirit at its most attractive and serious. Hence, in a trance, Deeti envisages the ship "heading in her way" even though she has never seen a sea-going vessel. She sketches the image of her vision on a mango leaf with sindoor and places it in her shrine that transforms the journey-to-be into a spiritual one. "It was the river itself that had granted Deeti the vision: that the image of the Ibis had been transported upstream, like an electric current, the moment the vessel made contact with the sacred waters". The fact that Deeti was impregnated by her brother-in-law to hide the impotency of her husband and to salvage family honour highlights the presence of unholiness in land. The vision can thus be construed as a divine dictum, a supernatural event that sets the tone of the novel. Thus, the line between micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos is constantly challenged. We are introduced to a mixed-blood American who became the first mate of the Ibis by sheer accident; the only reason he could navigate the ship to the shore was due to the lascar leader Serang Ali who relied more on astronomical knowledge than the technological sextants. Deeti loses her opium addicted husband, and flees the funeral pyre with the help of a gigantic yet simple-minded wrestler-turned-cart-driver, the untouchable Kalua. Then there is the bankrupt Raja who witnesses the façade of justness of English laws as his property is forfeited and he's sent to Mauritius on exile. The orphaned French girl Paulette Lambert, wet-nursed by an Indian woman, dresses up as a local woman to join the motley crew. Earlier, she was forced to comply with the pervert desire of a baboo with a fetish for domination. Set in the nineteenth century, on the eve of the Opium War, Sea of Poppies offers a gallery of characters that can be found in any other period-piece. Ghosh even maintains the aura of historical novels that brings him close to Walter Scott. Ghosh's eye for detail (aided no doubt by his training as an anthropologist) makes the novel read as one within the realistic tradition, much like E. M. Forster. Yet in Ghosh, the native characters resist being flatly stereotypical. The further the nineteenth century recedes into history the more it is reproduced in a variety of forms. The overwhelming presence of lascar language may make it difficult for readers, a difficulty perhaps added to by the indiscriminate khichuri of dialects, pidgin languages and Indianicisation of English reminds one of Rushdie. However, Ghosh is not writing a metafiction where fiction and facts enjoy a tug of war. Ghos seems more focused on giving the lascars their due in maritime history than turning them into fantastic characters with political agenda of righting wrongs in history. The primary objective of Ghosh's documentation, it appears, is aimed at demystifying the lascars. The first mate of Ibis, Zachary Reid, for example, "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". Zachary becomes alive to these people and their ability through Serang Ali. Later when Paulette asks, "But tell me Mr. Reid, how is it that you communicate with your lascars? Do they speak English?" Zachary offers a matter-of-fact answer. "They know the commands," said Zachary. "And sometimes, when it's needed, Serang Ali translates". It is through these scantily-dressed natives we come to know more about the aspirations and frustrations of the people on the lower decks than the usual white heroes in uniforms from the upper decks who pervade colonial travelogues and naval discourse. The white supremacy is acknowledged, but not without a grain of salt. Through the bankrupt king, Neel Ratan Haldar, we come to realise that the English had become the new Brahmins. The Judge's pronouncement on the caste system sounds empty when he claims, "But we see no merit whatsoever in the contention that men of high caste should suffer a less severe punishment than any other person, such a principle has never been recognized nor ever will be recognized in English law, the very foundation of which lies in the belief that all are equal who appear before it". The myth of equality thus falls flat as Raja Neel Ratan joins the troop of lower caste travellers to work in the sugar plantation in Mauritius. The story ends with a huge storm, and the course of Ibis becomes unclear. Ghosh has suspended the story like shehzade, the madam storyteller in the Arabian Nights in order to leave the reader crave for the second spell of his verbal magic.
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