The eve of the Opium War
October 14, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
NO writer in modern India has held a novelistic lamp to the subcontinent's densely thicketed past as vividly and acutely as Amitav Ghosh. Since publication of "The Circle of Reason" in the mid-1980s, Ghosh's work has been animated by its inventive collages and connections. "River of Smoke," the second volume of his ambitious Ibis trilogy, is the work of a writer with a historical awareness and an appetite for polyphony that are equal to the immense demands of the material he seeks to illuminate.
Like its predecessor, "Sea of Poppies," this new novel fashions narrative pleasures from narcotic ones, exploring the fizzing currents of language, politics, trade and culture that swept through the vast opium network operated by the British East India Company in the 19th century.
"Sea of Poppies" was set almost entirely in the cities, harbors and plains of India, the source of opium poppies. "River of Smoke" advances the action to the same opium's destination, the Chinese trading outpost of Canton (today's Guangzhou, Guangdong Province).
Although convincing in its reconstruction of early 19th-century India and revelatory in its linguistic ventriloquism, "Sea of Poppies" often labored under its own weight. Improbable plot turns too often tied its narrative threads together; its pastiches too frequently lapsed into stretches of creaking comedy. Superficially less dramatic, "River of Smoke" is much more evenly written.
Ghosh is fascinated by the history of Canton and, within it, of Fanqui-town, a tiny foreign enclave on the edge of a formidable but mysterious civilization that is beginning to resent the corruption of its people by opium. The outpost is populated by traders from around the world (but dominated by agents of the East India Company) and surrounded by a flotilla of boats that ferry smuggled goods and serve as eating and pleasure houses. Although so small it's like a ship at sea, Fanqui-town is, in one memorable description, "the last and greatest of all the world's caravansaries."
At the center of Ghosh's story stands a man who owes his life to Canton: Bahram Modi, a Parsee merchant from Mumbai. Entirely absent from the first book in the trilogy, Bahram is almost everywhere in the second, and serves as a channel for much of its energy.
One of the few independent Indian businessmen in a trade controlled by the East India Company, he is both insider and outsider. A self-made man who has staked his fortunes on one massive opium shipment, Bahram is paradoxically rich and poor, caught between British merchants who swear by "the elemental force of Free Trade" and a Chinese establishment eager to root out commerce in opium. If there is one thing that reveals all the elements of Bahram's life, it is his language, "silted with the sediment of many tongues - Gujarati, Hindustani, English, pidgin, Cantonese."
Probably the most memorable character in all of Ghosh's fiction, Bahram is captured in every possible mood, from opium-induced hallucination to boardroom bluster, romantic rapture to Zoroastrian-inflected philosophical rumination.
Ghosh clearly sets up the events leading to the breakout of the Opium War of 1839 as a mirror to contemporary realities. His British merchants, although fully realized characters, are like today's free-trade fundamentalists, adroitly dodging any moral criticism of their position.
The force of Ghosh's ideas and the beauty of his tableaus of Canton are two of the book's achievements; the semantic ripples of the variety of dialects he folds into the narration are a third. "River of Smoke" is both a stirring portrayal of the past and, novelistically, a prescient beacon for the future.
Like its predecessor, "Sea of Poppies," this new novel fashions narrative pleasures from narcotic ones, exploring the fizzing currents of language, politics, trade and culture that swept through the vast opium network operated by the British East India Company in the 19th century.
"Sea of Poppies" was set almost entirely in the cities, harbors and plains of India, the source of opium poppies. "River of Smoke" advances the action to the same opium's destination, the Chinese trading outpost of Canton (today's Guangzhou, Guangdong Province).
Although convincing in its reconstruction of early 19th-century India and revelatory in its linguistic ventriloquism, "Sea of Poppies" often labored under its own weight. Improbable plot turns too often tied its narrative threads together; its pastiches too frequently lapsed into stretches of creaking comedy. Superficially less dramatic, "River of Smoke" is much more evenly written.
Ghosh is fascinated by the history of Canton and, within it, of Fanqui-town, a tiny foreign enclave on the edge of a formidable but mysterious civilization that is beginning to resent the corruption of its people by opium. The outpost is populated by traders from around the world (but dominated by agents of the East India Company) and surrounded by a flotilla of boats that ferry smuggled goods and serve as eating and pleasure houses. Although so small it's like a ship at sea, Fanqui-town is, in one memorable description, "the last and greatest of all the world's caravansaries."
At the center of Ghosh's story stands a man who owes his life to Canton: Bahram Modi, a Parsee merchant from Mumbai. Entirely absent from the first book in the trilogy, Bahram is almost everywhere in the second, and serves as a channel for much of its energy.
One of the few independent Indian businessmen in a trade controlled by the East India Company, he is both insider and outsider. A self-made man who has staked his fortunes on one massive opium shipment, Bahram is paradoxically rich and poor, caught between British merchants who swear by "the elemental force of Free Trade" and a Chinese establishment eager to root out commerce in opium. If there is one thing that reveals all the elements of Bahram's life, it is his language, "silted with the sediment of many tongues - Gujarati, Hindustani, English, pidgin, Cantonese."
Probably the most memorable character in all of Ghosh's fiction, Bahram is captured in every possible mood, from opium-induced hallucination to boardroom bluster, romantic rapture to Zoroastrian-inflected philosophical rumination.
Ghosh clearly sets up the events leading to the breakout of the Opium War of 1839 as a mirror to contemporary realities. His British merchants, although fully realized characters, are like today's free-trade fundamentalists, adroitly dodging any moral criticism of their position.
The force of Ghosh's ideas and the beauty of his tableaus of Canton are two of the book's achievements; the semantic ripples of the variety of dialects he folds into the narration are a third. "River of Smoke" is both a stirring portrayal of the past and, novelistically, a prescient beacon for the future.
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