Amitav Ghosh’s book Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, shortlisted for the British Academy Prize 2024 weaves together the horticultural, social, and political economy of the colonial opium trade. A work of historical non-fiction that appears to be the preface to his fictional explorations in the Ibis Trilogy – The Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), three novels based on the Sino-Indian Opium trade of the mid-17th Century.
The first book in the Ibis Trilogy, The Sea of Poppies begins with a foreboding omen, when Deeti, the protagonist, hallucinates the dark vision of a schooner slave ship disappearing at the cusp of River Ganges and the “Kala-Pani”. The portentous vision appears to her at the threshold of the known world, and the space-of-exception, as the blackwaters or kala pani were the quasi-legal zone of British penal colonies located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
As the plot thickens, a ship called The Ibis, unlike anyone has ever seen before, indeed arrives at the dockss of Calcutta, navigated by the Afro-American second-mate passing as white. In the novel, the premonitory vision of The Ibis, a repurposed slave ship carrying in its wake the horrors of transatlantic chattel slavery, with its boards and planks still reeking of the sweat, blood, excrement, and vomit of a hold full of human cargo is all but set up for a fateful collision with the European colonial histories of indentured labour and the illegal trafficking of opium to China.
Ghosh’s recent historiography of the opium poppy is a rife setting for a phármakon narrative, deriving from the classical Greek word that contains the oppositional meanings of being both the poison as well as cure, and also the scapegoat (pharmakos). As the advent of medical science remains unimaginable without opioid-based anaesthetics used for surgeries and the palliative care of terminally ill patients, as poison, opium remains one of the most dangerous addictions known to mankind.
In Smoke and Ashes, the research is divided in two parts – the first half focuses on the administration and auctioning of Bengal Opium in Bihar and Calcutta by the British East India Company. It looks at the rise of Malwa opium that was exported from the ports of Bombay and led to the wealth and prominence of Parsi merchants like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, founder of the JJ School of Art in Mumbai.
Initially, the research traces the economic motive of the East India Company for setting up an opaque bureaucracy for the management of opium, leading to coerced cultivation of poppy, bonded labour, and the enslavement of farmers, alongside the collateral of mass addiction among peasants, as well as the rise of smuggling networks and black markets that attempt to foil the British monopoly on opium trade.
In the second part, the focus shifts to the New World and “Boston Brahmins” or the Canton Graduates from Massachusetts residing in the secure enclaves of Guangzhou, China and their involvement in the opium trade, thereby linking the hidden public histories of some of the wealthiest North American families to the fortunes made via the Sino-Indian opium trade.
In chapters on the “Opium Department”, Ghosh links his own family’s displacement from East Bengal to Chhapra in Bihar (due to flooding and not the partition as one would imagine). Reminiscing his ancestral and geopolitical ties to the histories of migrant indentured labourers and opium farming in the region. He draws attention to vernacular literature particularly the popularity of the Bhojpuri novel, Phoolsunghi written by Kapil Pandey, which set in the opium industries of Bihar in the mid-nineteenth Century.
Ghosh also alludes to the English writer, George Orwell who was born in the Motihari district of Bihar, as the son of a Sub-Deputy opium officer. Astutely commenting on how Orwellian political dystopias and the repressive totalitarian regime in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four may well have real analogues in colonial practices that were set in motion by the British East India Company in India. Charting over a century of colonial exploitation through forced cultivation of poppy flowers instead of sustainable food crops, the racial ban at opium auctioning houses at Dalhousie, Calcutta (unlike Bombay auctions) allowed the East India Company to gain monopoly over the export of opium to China. Conclusively, Ghosh argues that the degeneracy of the opium department and its vast revenues, the plight of farmers and workers in opium factories to date remains the primary cause for the economic backwardness of Eastern India – particularly, the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.
In Sea of Poppies, Deeti and her young daughter Kabutri are summoned to the Sudder Opium Carcanna at Ghazipur because her opium-addict husband, Hukum Singh has collapsed inside the factory. As she approaches the gates, the entire ecosystem around the factory is coated in a “miasma of lethargy”. Even the monkeys are drugged, they lap at the waters from the factory sewage and climb back onto the trees to stare in a vacant haze at the movement of water across the Ganges River, it is as if time itself has come to be suspended in an anaesthetised stupor of haze.
Within the fictional diegesis, the gates of the factory come to represent the porosity of boundaries between the ongoing extractive economy of the factory and the co-existence of the life worlds of non-human entities and other sentient beings. The processes of extracting the dangerously addictive psychoactive substance cannot be contained, it seeps into the environment and contaminates the ecology; as we observe that the odious stench and milled dust of poppy waste sends anyone within the vicinity of the factory into paroxysms of sneezing, sniffles. One is deeply humbled by the powerful non-human agency exerted by the opium poppy plant, its production cannot be contained within the factory, and its lines of exchange refuse to follow the colonial trade monopolies intended for it, and its surplus is the intense complexity of its entanglement with human societies exceeding the barriers of a generational life-spans.
In Smoke and Ashes, we can observe Amitav Ghosh finessing the existing argument on the non-human agency of plants, which is an extension of his previous work of non-fiction, The Nutmegs Curse: Parables of Planetary Crisis (2021). As a post-humanist critique of the Anthropocene, The Nutmeg’s Curse is a journey into the heart of colonial darkness, mapping the genocide of the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company.
Here, Ghosh argues for a supranatural agency exerted by non-human actors, like the nutmeg and its impact on the Dutch East India Company, which in many ways set a historical precedent for coercing native subjects into unfair trade relations, even justifying genocide as a common good for free-trade and the European monopoly over spices and tea, which soon extends to opium poppy grown in Bengal and Bihar. As Western ideologies are configured in an extractive relation to nature, it is unable to acknowledge the vitality and power of non-human actors, in other words, by colonising the poppy fields of Bihar, it soon becomes evident that “the colonizers have themselves been colonised – by a non-human entity (the opium poppy) whose intelligence, patience and longevity far exceed that of humans.”
The intergenerational poverty and the economic disparity remain the consequence of the histories of opium, it also allows a deeper reflection into the time scale of the accumulation of wealth and privilege. The notion of “slow-time” where the dredge of racial capitalism is sifted reappears continually across lines of generations, percolating into the present. In other words, the cultures we inherit are not composed of neutered artefacts or depoliticized anecdotes that belong to the distant past.
For centuries, opium epidemics have disproportionately affected workers, as it offered a lethal combination of pleasure and pain relief that numbed masses of proletariats, who were so detached from the reality of physical labour in the factories and mines that they often silently worked themselves to death. In the historiography of opium, Ghosh contends that, unlike other grassroots psychoactive substances, the opium poppy has for centuries exerted a peculiar hold over human societies, owing to the distinctive properties of amnesia and forgetfulness associated with it.
Time and again the looped temporalities of opium addictions have induced a form of historical amnesia, in which the dangers associated with the plant are easily forgotten, until it once again descends on human societies with no previous memory of the miasma and despair, most recently this has been the commentary of Laura Poitras film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) following the activist Nan Goldin legal battle against Purdue Pharmacy owned by the Sackler Family. The film documents the aggressive pharmaceutical marketing of the prescription painkiller, Oxycontin in view of the Sackler family’s generational wealth and response to the recent opioid crisis in America.
Opium, as one of the most dangerous psychoactive substances on a planetary scale, has a propensity to induce historical amnesia, for some it is a blissful haze of innocent forgetfulness and intergenerational privileges acquired through histories of racial and colonial violence, and for others a treacherous miasma locking them into traumatic cycles of structural violence and poverty. This powerful indictment on the temporalities of opium, the agency exerted by non-human actors and the vegetative soul of the opium poppy might only possibly reach us through the sinuous undercurrents of Amitav Ghosh’s novels, The Ibis Trilogy.
For example, the visceral horror of walking through a dark tunnel, the mixing room of the opium factory causes Deeti to almost faint, described in the novel as – “bare-bodied men sunk waist deep in tanks of opium, tramping round and round to soften the sludge. Their eyes were vacant, glazed and yet somehow, they managed to keep moving, as slow as ants in honey, tramping, treading … These men had more the look of ghouls than any living thing she had ever seen: their eyes glowed red in the dark and they appeared completely naked, their loincloths being so steeped in the drug as to be indistinguishable from their skin.” The narcotic eeriness permeating the dark chambers of bare-bodied workers sinking in vats of sticky opium sludge in an opium factory could easily feature in an Orwellian dystopia.
Such memorable descriptions of the interiority of the opium factories in Bihar are now further supplemented by the research materials that Ghosh encountered in the archives while writing and researching the Ibis Trilogy. As many as six detailed lithographs of opium factories located in Patna from 1885 made by the British army officer, Walter Stanhope Sherwill were traced back to the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven. Some of the illustrations depicting the Stacking and Mixing room at the Ghazipur and Patna Opium Factory have been reproduced in Smoke and Ashes, including the dark tunnel that Deeti walks through. In his drawings, Sherwill offers a highly sanitised and well-lit version of the mixing room, with no sign of opium sludge, the vats are pristine, there are barely any workers, and a few British overseers are leisurely pacing around the halls. Ghosh informs us that these illustrations were commissioned to be displayed at the World Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London, hence these archival images are mostly the fabrications of a Western colonial “gaze” which is intent on prioritising a narrative about the mechanisation of factory work and industrial progress being brought to the colonies.
In the Sea of Poppies, when the portentous slave ship appears at the Hooghly River in Calcutta led by the Afro-American Zachary Reid and his lascar crew, the owner of the Ibis, British opium trader Benjamin Burnham instructs that the ship will initially transport indentured labourer to Mauritius Islands before carrying consignments of opium to China. The slave ship, with air ducts bored into its hull, and still carrying the indelible scratch marks made by a hold full of human cargo struggling to breathe in their middle passage from Africa becomes an unexpected point of convergence for two strands of Euro-American imperial and colonial history. The collisions of transatlantic slavery, indentured labour, farmers dispossession, racial capitalism and the narcotic addictions of the Indo-Chinese opium industries produce a strange temporal slippage that loosens our grasp over historical time. In one sense, time becomes unhinged revealing itself as anachronistically “out of joint” and in the novel, this is exquisitely depicted through events unfolding in relation to the spectral ghost ship
The impact of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy fiction series, alongside a renewed academic interest in the historical research on opium industries presented in Smoke and Ashes also importantly highlights the ground-breaking links both these works have sought to make between “racial capitalism” and the “narcopolitics” of the Sino-Indian opium trade. Racial capitalism, advanced by Cedric Robinson (also author of Black Marxism: Making of the Black Radical Tradition) asserts that neoliberal capitalism is shaped by the American histories of transatlantic slavery, racial segregation and the plantation economy. Meanwhile, narcopolitics refers to the wide acceptance of the Sino-Indian opium trade as the “world’s first drug cartel” and the propagation of racist colonial discourses that contributed to the pathologisation of addiction, as infirmities belonging solely to natives and non-white subjects.
Ghosh attends to this by making visible the moral double standards prevalent in social discourses at the time, especially regarding trading and profiting from addictive drugs like opium, whose export was banned by the Chinese authorities. The existence of a dubious morality among the Protestant merchant class of Europe and America allowed them to continue trafficking and profiting from opium addiction, circumvented through the belief that as white traders, one is vested with the divine right to exploit the colonies, especially under the guise of “free-market” which supersedes every other commandment, thereby birthing the racist and narcopolitical logic of early capitalism.
Furthermore, Ghosh turns to the works of historian Hans Derks to point out that between the 17th and 19th centuries, the British and Dutch colonial models for opium trade in India and China have in turn ensured that every modern Asiatic war, including the ones in Vietnam and Afghanistan have a strong “narco-character”. The displacement of the innate propensity for addiction onto native subjects, allowed the white-European trading class to abdicate any moral responsibility for profiting from drug-peddling in the distant colonies while continuing to maintain an untarnished middle-class respectability. As Ghosh explains the drug cartels are often associated with the Escobars of the world, but for Purdue Pharmacy, the painkiller Oxycontin is approved by both regulatory bodies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the federal government. Much like the merchants who previously built their fortunes selling opium in China and Southeast Asia, the Sackler family scion can be found saying – “You don’t chase a market; you create it.”
There is a brilliant rehearsal of the tenets of free-market capitalism in the Sea of Poppies, when the Bengali zamindar Raja Neel Rattan Halder interrogates Benjamin Burnham about his revenues from trafficking opium in China. On-board the Raja’s budgerow, Neel Rattan, the native son who has returned after an extensive British education enquires about the moral hypocrisy of the colonial administration, that sanctions poppy cultivation in Bengal and has established a monopoly over opium trade in Eastern India to sell them to addicts in China, despite the official drug ban by the Chinese authorities. The evangelical Ben Burnham is outraged at the accusation, his explanation highlights the colonial perspective – “The war is not for opium but for a principle: for freedom. Free trade is a right conferred to Man by God and its principles apply as much to opium as any other article of trade.” Raja Neel Rattan then asks him, “Does it not trouble you, Mr Burnham, to invoke God in the service of opium?” To which Burnham retorts, “Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ… For merchants like myself are but servants of Free Trade, which is as immutable as God’s commandments.”
The Ibis Trilogy has a plethora of memorable characters, it also features the inimitable lascar, Serang Ali from Rohingya. Lascars were the first indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent recruited on European ships as early as the 16th century, with nothing in common between them except the Indian Oceans; As Ghosh writes “among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese.”
The last time I left Calcutta, I had carried in my bag a single book of translated French poems from the Seagull Bookstore, written by Khal Torabully, called Cargo Hold of Stars. A collection about the voyages of men and women from India and China who were bought as indentured labourers to Mauritius, nameless coolies who simply vanished onboard ships like the Ibis.
Perhaps, as an intuition, I had simply carried this book along because the poetics of coolitude and the sonorous translation of French Mauritian Creole assuaged some of my anxieties about returning to England. And it goes:
Sanjita Majumder is a writer and lecturer specialising in media and postcolonial studies. She completed her PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College.