Sea of Poppies
Sea of Poppies
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Amitav Ghosh on Sea of Poppies
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Coolies and opium: the same storyThe book began in a demographic puzzle. Ghosh was tracing the origins of 19th-century Indian indentured laborers when he noticed that the earliest migrants to British colonies in the 1830s all came from two or three landlocked districts, five or six hundred miles from any coast. They were not seafaring people, and nothing in the standard histories explained what had uprooted them.
When I was looking at the sort of history of these migrants, it became clear that there was some sort of connection... some sort of disturbance within the agricultural cycle, which came about through the introduction of this monoculture of opium. [paraphrased from audio]
Once he had connected the migrant laborers to the poppy fields, he confronted the scale of what had been deliberately forgotten. The East India Company’s opium revenue, in many years, exceeded the entire revenue of the United States, and the mortality the trade accelerated in China ran into the tens of millions. That this history had been left out of curricula and largely untouched by researchers struck him as a scandal worth a novel.
The history of the opium trade is nowhere taught. It’s hardly even researched. It’s an astonishing thing... the opium trade in the 19th century brought the British India Company in many years more revenue than the entire revenue of the United States of America... it’s become as it were one of those repressed memories of modernity. [paraphrased from audio]
The suppression of this history was not random, he argued. Ghosh found that Amar Farooqui, the one contemporary Indian historian who had written seriously on the opium trade, had spent years trying to recruit research students to the subject without success. Both Britain and India had reasons to look away, and the moment in which he was writing made that collective amnesia feel urgent rather than merely academic.
I was writing the novel at a time when this kind of capitalist ideology was absolutely in its ascendant, where it was thought that the market was God. Within this context, it just baffled me that people could not see that for Free Traders, the first major testing ground was opium. All of that has been erased from memory.
Beyond the history, there was a writer’s restlessness. Several novels in, Ghosh felt he had reached the limits of his usual form and wanted a commitment that would outlast a single book.
I had written quite a few novels and it was becoming predictable. I wanted a larger scale, I wanted to spend a longer time with my characters…in my head, they are as real as you or me, every time I have to end a novel and say goodbye to them it’s a wrenching thing.
How he wrote it
Lascar dictionaries and a language that swept him upThe research drew on sources that would have been inaccessible to an earlier generation. Ghosh found obscure 1820s traveler memoirs and period dictionaries through Google Books, and he consulted actual 19th-century ship crew lists, including manifests on the Sydney Harbor Master’s website, which revealed vessels crewed by men from East Africa, India, Malaysia, China, and the Philippines alongside a handful of English officers. Those lists posed an immediate question: how did these men talk to each other?
When I was researching Sea of Poppies I looked at a lot of old crew lists, from 19th century ships. These crews were often incredibly diverse, with sailors from East Africa, the Gulf, Somalia, Persia, India, China. It made me wonder how these crewmen, who were all known as ‘lascars’, communicated with each other.
The answer arrived by accident in a library catalogue, and it changed the texture of the novel. The Laskari language, a nautical jargon that had kept the Indian Ocean’s mixed crews in conversation, had never appeared in any secondary source he had encountered. Finding it was both an intellectual discovery and something more personal.
one day, while looking through a library catalogue, I came upon a 19th century dictionary of the ‘Laskari’ language. I’d never seen any references to this dictionary anywhere, so it was a really exciting discovery. And the language proved to be a wonderful nautical jargon that mixed bits of Hindi, Urdu, English, Portuguese, Bengali, Arabic, Malay and many other languages. It was fascinating for me personally because it incorporated elements of many of the languages I grew up with.
Rendering that multilingual world on the page eventually required him to stop calculating risk. The novel’s hybrid English, which weaves Bhojpuri, Hindustani, nautical Laskari, and period colonial slang into a single voice, was the kind of formal gamble that a more cautious writer might have pulled back from. Ghosh describes the moment he stopped pulling back.
There were moments in this book when the words were like a sort of great updraft which just swept me up... at a certain point I just stopped caring about it. [paraphrased from audio]
That surrender to the language had structural consequences. What he thought would be a single novel expanded because the characters he had assembled on the Ibis, the opium-hauling brig at the heart of the story, refused to be concluded in one volume.
The decision to write a trilogy, the Ibis Trilogy, was not made at the outset. It emerged about a year into the writing, driven not by a planned architecture but by the pull the characters exerted on him.
I really didn’t know that it was going to be a trilogy until I was about a year into it. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Bhojpuri at the kitchen tableThe novel is set largely in the poppy districts between Banaras and Patna in northern Bihar. Ghosh did not arrive at that geography through archival chance. His father’s family had settled in Chapra in that same region in 1856, the year the poppy monoculture was already reshaping rural life there. The language the indentured workers speak in the novel was the language of his own childhood home.
I actually grew up with Bhojpuri because... my father’s family is settled in Chapra in 1856. And at home, they always spoke Bhojpuri. My father, my aunts, they spoke Bhojpuri to each other. [paraphrased from audio]
This means the fictional world Ghosh built around the Ibis’s indentured passengers was, in part, a world he had heard spoken at home. The research and the family memory were drawing on the same source.
What he wants us to sit with
A repressed memory, a present warThe novel asks Indian readers in particular to reckon with what the country has chosen not to remember about its own formation. Ghosh points to the way both nations implicated in the trade, Britain and India, have structured their historical silence around it, one through institutional control of scholarship, the other through a cultivated self-image that the opium era cannot fit.
Contemporary India has developed a vision of itself as straitlaced, spiritual etc. and we’ve chosen to forget that much of modern India was actually built on this drug.
The Opium Wars of the 1840s were sold to the British public as a short, righteous campaign to open closed markets, with merchants assuring Parliament that Chinese defenses were negligible and that troops would be welcomed in Canton. Ghosh wants readers to feel the familiarity of that pitch. He drew the parallel explicitly when talking about what the 19th-century story was really about.
I think, when people look back... they’ll see that these last two centuries have been really bookended, by 1838 on the one hand and 2003, the invasion of Iraq, on the other. There’s a sort of... darkling parallelism between the ways that wars were conceived and thought of. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s language is not stylistic ornamentation. The hybrid tongue that characters speak aboard the Ibis, drawing on Laskari, Bhojpuri, colonial pidgin English, and other strands, is meant to show that the interconnected, polyglot world readers associate with the present is not new. The Indian Ocean was already that world two centuries ago.
Globalization is actually really very old. We think of this multiplicity and this globalization as being new things. [paraphrased from audio]