A young mother called Deeti finds herself having visions of a ship with large sales around the time her opium addicted husband begins to die.
Pauletta, the ward of a restrictive Christian businessman, tries to return to the freer style of life she enjoyed with her father.
Neel, a Raja deeply in debt, struggles to keep up appearances and dodge the clutches of manipulative English creditors.
Zachary, a freed African American slave, finds that assumptions that he is white allow him to climb the up the ranks of his ship.
All these characters and more are destined to eventually meet on board a refitted slaver ship called the Ibis.
I suspect that I like ‘Sea of Poppies’ so much because its action centres around the nineteenth century opium trade, a historical issue I’ve been interested in for a while. It’s a book that puts forward the same kind of arguments I would about the negative aspects of the opium trade and the cynical British involvement behind the production of opium, so I’ll admit I was already primed to like this novel.
At the beginning of the novel Deeti plants this years poppy crop alone as her husband, who works at the opium factory, has been taken ill. Through Deeti’s narrative Amitav Ghosh begins to explain how the poppy crop has been forced on the Indian farmers, to the exclusion of all other crops:
‘…no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies – fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be broken by hand, with a dantoli; fences and buns to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked and scraped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies – but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegatables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory’s appetite for opium seemed never to be sated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planets; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on farmers, making them sign asami contracts. It was impossible to say no to them; if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window.’
In ‘Sea of Poppies’ the opium trade is shown as an industry which causes the degeneration of India as the crop is planted to exclusion, causing Indian farmers to struggle to feed themselves. British arguments for the continued trade are illustrated, so that the reader sees the (harmful) contextual logic that the British used to justify the opium trade and to ignore the realities of the addiction they were creating in India and China. The British Mr Burnham, who is usually the one leading conversations about the rightness of the opium trade, or slavery says things like ‘The war when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on man by God and its principles apply as much to opium as to any other article of trade.’
What follows is an instructional set piece conversation between Mr Burnham, Zachary Reed and Neel about the ways in which opium supposedly benefits the Indian people. Zachary and Neel query Mr Burnham’s views and each time their points, for example ‘is it not true there is a great deal of addiction and intoxication in China? Surely such afflictions are not pleasing to our creator’ are answered by Burnham. What I like about these exchanges is that the two characters who don’t yet have fixed views on the trade don’t immediately recognise the wrongness of Burnham’s views and come out in violent opposition to Burnham’s ideas. Neel is convinced by some of his arguments and Zachary is naïve at this point in the book, easily stirred if Burnham links his conclusions with patriotism. In fact the first person to really object to Burnham’s ideas is Captain Chillingworth, the character who makes his money shipping Indian indentured workers in a decommissioned slave ship. Ghosh creates characters with realistic attitudes that fit their time period, as well as their individual circumstances. To an extent he avoids a one-dimensional alignment between modern, liberal values and sympathetic, heroic characters, choosing to make his heroes more nuanced through their privilege and misunderstanding and to make characters that modern readers might not automatically sympathise with possess liberal opinions for their time.
The villains in ‘Sea of Poppies’ are more clear cut. There’s little indication that characters like Mr Burnham, or Deeti’s rapist male relatives should be given sympathy. In fact Mr Burnham’s bad character is suddenly, crudely emphasised when Paulette tells Zachary he has asked her to spank him (she is his dependent ward and he asks her this during late night Bible instruction). This revelation comes suddenly and there aren’t any clues in the earlier text that suggest Mr Burnham is a pervert set on abusing his ward, which means that Paulette’s revelation feels like an attempt at concretely demonising Mr Burnham, setting him up as a man who is definitely bad. This is unnecessary, as the reader has already spent a good portion of time being exposed to Burnham’s unpleasant character and it seems obvious that he is the villain of this novel.
What stops the novel’s clear, decided expression of one historical perspective (the damn right perspective) from becoming overly didactic is how complex Ghosh makes the male characters who sit somewhere in between hero and villain, like Neel and Baboo Nob Kissin, Mr Burnham’s agent. Each one flawed in some way, even though they are also easy for the reader to sympathise with because of their circumstances. Neel, horribly mistreated, but at the beginning of the book he is proud and obsessed with caste. Zachary who the reader will be willing to keep climbing the ranks is unable to view Paulette as an equal, even when idealising her puts her in danger and doesn’t really understand that his shipboard career is based on the oppression of others. Baboo Nob Kissin only wants to build a shrine to his departed aunt, but he was involved in robbing Neel of his status and property. Most of the heroic male characters slowly reveal how their own privilege in some way allows them to elevate themselves over others, even as they continue to act like brave characters, or are oppressed by others.
In contrast the most ideally heroic characters of the book are women. There are vile female characters around like Mrs Burnham, but there aren’t really any women that fall into that middle category of flawed heroines. The women are either reprehensible (Mrs Burnham , Deeti’s dead mother in law) or ideal, if not uncomplicated (Deeti, Paulette).
I think Ghosh displays a really clever, sensitive touch for writing characters in this novel. I wouldn’t say this is an entirely realistic book, or that it always follows the traditions of realistic storytelling, so I’ll hold off on saying he writes totally realistic, human beings (maybe that’s why I feel a bit more forgiving about his ideal, straight down the line heroines) but he definitely creates characters that readers can care about. The plot of this book alone is full of detail and is entertaining, but I’m convinced it’s the characters that make this novel enjoyable, not just the constantly developing plot that brings them together. Child bride flees village with lower caste lover, sounds like a typical plot, the individuality of Deeti and Kalua are what make it interesting once you get past the initial thrill of watching their peril filled escape. When the author combines that sort of thrill with something deeper that comes out through the characters, I still care about the characters when the drama slows down and the characters take a breather - that’s what makes me feel a book has been successful at getting inside my head. Characters don’t always have to be physically active to interest me, but they should always be convincingly emotionally active, even if what they’re expressing is a quieter emotional sentiment.
‘Sea of Poppies’ is a good fit for my personal historical politics and it thrills me that people might learn more about the hard circumstances that the opium trade pushed on people in China by reading some popular literary fiction. It was also interesting to see the opium trade examined with a different emphasis than the one I learned the most about. Ghosh’s book is primarily set in India, the country that grew the bulk of the opium crop, before China was bullied into growing large quantities, while I learnt about opium wars and addiction with a focus on how it affected Chinese people. There’s also lots of in depth, but easy to follow, information to be gained about the physical methods of growing, manufacturing and taking opium. I like learning from historical, because I am a history geek :)
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