Next M an and opium have a relationship that goes back to the infancy of mankind. Human civilization is inconceivable without it,’ Amitav Ghosh said during an interview with an American radio station in 2008, shortly after the release of Sea Of Poppies (Penguin/ Viking, 2008). The acclaimed novelist, who was shortlisted to win the Booker Prize in 2008, painted the first volume of his celebrated Ibis trilogy on an expansive and exquisitely detailed canvas, plotting his epic tale against the backdrop of two great Opium Wars, which the British Empire fought in the 1830s to subdue an impregnable and indomitable China. Under the premise of free trade, the British East India Company and other Western mercantile institutions with similar vested interests employed opium to enter the Dragon, and to eventually tame it. Indeed, Ghosh reminds us that the plotters of these wars believed that opium was ‘God’s instrument for opening the Chinese oyster.’ Ghosh’s picturesque prose transports the reader from the poppy fields of impoverished Bihar to the great opium factory at Ghazipur, Bengal (which stands to this day), and then amid a great ocean of characters aboard the Ibis, where a curious breed of Indian Ocean ship-people, the… Read full this story
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