Sea of Poppies traverses one of the least treaded paths of Indian colonial history as it deftly exposes the shrewd business acumen of the erstwhile colonial masters, the British who scrapped India of its riches and the Chinese of their discretion by poisoning them with opium, both literally and otherwise. While Chinese were being poisoned under the guise of triangular trade of opium in the mid nineteenth century, the poor Indian peasant actually suffered the brunt of this poisoning. The English ‘sahibs’ forced everyone to grow poppy in place of useful crops like wheat, dal and vegetables. Ghosh captures the sheer helplessness of Indian labourers and peasants as the factory’s growing appetite for revenue rendered them exploited and defenseless. Muharir’s bitter comment to Deeti exposes the bone grinding poverty and colonial exploitation that often impelled the peasants to sell themselves and their children as ‘girmitiyas’ in return for a few cowries. “Do what others are doing…sell your sons. Send them to Mareech.”
As the Chinese stood up in their defence and banned the import of opium, the Company took its revenge by declaring war on China under the rhetoric of freedom. “…for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of Chinese people.” Thus we see the kernel of the so called American policy of ‘free trade rights’ being sown as early as the mid nineteenth century with respect to its most vulnerable colonies, namely India and China and continues to this day under the hideous guise of neo colonisation.
Alongside this panorama of characters lies Ghosh’s scholarly attempt to open the realms of his novel to incorporate a free play of varied languages ranging from Bhojpuri, Hindi, Bengali, French and English. He even adds to them a flavour of his self created vocabulary, which further contributes to the charm of reading Sea of Poppies. This inter lingual and inter cultural alertness on Ghosh’s part also sensitises us to compare the vexed diasporic experiences of colonial India with that of an equally perturbed colonial history of Africa and the numbing diasporic experiences of Africans as poignantly encapsulated in Walcott’s poems. Indeed, the jahaz bhais of the Ibis too must have faced a similar dilemma while crossing the “chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala Pani” as expressed in Walcott’s ‘Names’ (1976):
“Behind us all, the sky folded
as history folds over a fishline
and the foam foreclosed
but this stick
to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference.”
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