© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Last week, at India International Centre on Saturday evening, amid stormy skies and a flooded city, Jnanpith Award-winning author Amitav Ghosh declared the conclusion of his 20-year academic affair with the opium poppy and its bloody seeds scattered across the pages of world history: “It’s a very depressing story about human fragility and frailty. We like to say we are masters of our own fate, but with this story, you see that this humble, simple-looking flower has outsmarted us at every turn,” said Ghosh, who was in conversation with The Print Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta for the launch of his latest book, Smoke and Ashes (Rs 699, HarperCollins), a non-fiction work about the history of opium and its unrecognised impact on the world order.
Ghosh’s intellectual curiosity about the plant sparked the research period of his immensely popular Ibis trilogy, a story about labourers near the Indian Ocean just before the first Opium War in the 19th century between Britain and China – caused by illegal sales from Indian soil to China despite a ban. The Qing dynasty had found that their institutions were crumbling due to the influx of opium and it was necessary to control it. The British, for whom it was “the most valuable commodity being produced by weight” at the time, according to Ghosh, demanded free trade instead. War was declared.
“The Europeans started calling the Chinese irredeemably corrupt and imbeciles [when their institutions started failing due to opium] … It happened with all of us. Opium has this ability to undermine the structures of the state. It’s happening in Mexico, America, and even India… once these addictive substances create these incredible markets, it’s almost impossible to bring them under control,” said Ghosh.
Smoke and Ashes delves deep into the story of the opium poppy and how the British grew massive amounts of it on Indian soil. In the 16th century, there was already a small industry in Patna and the Malwa region for medicinal uses. After the Battle of Buxar in the 18th century, Bihar came under the control of the British – and so began exports to China in exchange for tea. “The market grew at a phenomenal rate,” said Ghosh, “Production within Bihar expanded over a very small period… By 1799 the British declared a complete monopoly over production and established the opium department.”
It was this opium department that featured in the Ibis trilogy as well, its central storyline anchored by labourers who cultivated the plant for British use. “The department had incredible powers like criminalising farmers and imprisoning anyone and policing people… They had incredible quotas for farmers every year, who produced opium below cost,” said Ghosh.
Referring to how the sepoys of Purvanchal (eastern Uttar Pradesh) revolted in 1857 as they hailed from a region of exploited farmers and how “large parts of London” are built on “opium money” produced in factories like the one in Ghazipur, Ghosh said, “Opium played such a foundational role in India’s history and society. There’s a lot of historical work on this, yet do we read about it in school? No. There’s a disavowal of it. It’s important for us to recognise it.”
A day earlier, Ghosh was in conversation with poet Sukrita Paul at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, over a similar disavowal. The sentiment of softly-voiced outrage over suppressed knowledge and oppressed cultures echoed, though this time it was mustered not over a plant, but an entire ecosystem – one even closer to Ghosh’s literary universe: the Sundarbans.
“When I went there in 2000, it opened my eyes to climate change. We were sceptical back then. But you could see what was unfolding. The biodiversity loss was huge,” he said, adding that the crab, which aerates the soil for the survival of the mangrove forest, has seen a huge decline over the past two decades.
Ghosh also invoked the legend of Bon Bibi, the forest spirit of the Sundarbans Forest, which he retold in his 2021 graphic novel Jungle Nama (Rs 699, Fourth Estate), illustrated by Salman Toor. He mentioned how the spirit was worshipped by both Muslims and Hindus (including Dalits), and “comes from the soil” rather than a religion.
Upon recent visits Ghosh claims to have seen depleted birdlife, plastic and light pollution, methanol leakage into the river, and destructive cyclones, adding that the story of Manasa Devi, the Hindu goddess of snakes, captures the dynamic of climate change with “absolute precision”.
“She’s understood as the goddess of snakes but she’s the goddess of many things, of the weather, of the storms, of the floods… She gives voice to all natural phenomena. She recognises that someone has to give voice to the non-human. And she doesn’t order creatures – she negotiates with snakes in the story,” he said.
“Dhona, the merchant, represents the profit principle,” he added. “Manasa Devi tries to restrain and drive him out but eventually lets him return when he accepts her sovereignty. It’s the struggle between the profit motive and non-human needs.”
