River of Smoke: A Review

I just finished ‘River of Smoke’ by Amitav Ghosh. The plot is superb, the writing is vivid and the expanse of his vision is vast. It is a sequel to ‘Sea of Poppies’, his previous book which was just as good. The thing about Ghosh in both of these books is the exuberant use of language. The language of the lascars, who were a kind of sailors from various parts of the Indian subcontinent is an odd patios of broken English, some words of various Indian languages and some surely made-up words. The language of colonial Englishmen in India( words like bobachee-connah, cuzzana, puckrow) the Chinese pidgin( Simple English with Cantonese Grammar, origin of Long Time, No see) and snatches of Cantonese in River of Smoke, they are all a delight to read. The books read like a Dickens novel, a vast catalogue of characters, most of them not very subtle but intensely interesting all the same. At times comical, at times desperately sad, these two books which are part of what will be the Ibis trilogy(Ibis being the name of a ship which brings together many of the characters) run through a variety of themes. Amitav Ghosh is definitely interested in the forces of colonialism and what they did to change the world and most of his books are connected in some way with that subject.

From the migration of girmityas( or Indian indentured labourers) to places like Mauritius and the actions of the British in India in the early part of the 19th century everything was about the opium trade. The British grew opium in India and exported it to China where it was illegal, but smuggled through with lax regulations and bribes paid to mandarins, it became a part of Chinese life with millions of people addicted. On the other hand, the poppy growing in India ruined more than a few farmers, many of which had no choice but to put their a thumbprint on a ‘girmit’( mispronounciation of agreement) and become indentured labourers in various countries where their descendants still live today. The world as described in ‘Sea of Poppies’ is sort of familiar sometimes, from rural Bihar to colonial Calcutta, though the deck of the Ibis feels delightfully foreign. The upper caste almost-Sati who runs away with the untouchable man, the young daughter of a French botanist who speaks fluent Bengali and prefers a sari to a dress, the ruined scholarly Zamindar who is sentenced to labour as an indenture, the mulatto from Maryland who looked white enough to be a sahib and second mate of the ship, the mysterious half Chinese half Parsi prisoner. The book is a cacophony of such characters who are led to these paths because of the irresistible forces changing the world they live in.

‘River of Smoke’ to me though is even more brilliant because it is just the force of his writing that hits you. As Amitav himself pointed out in an interview, Indians for some reason don’t know very much about China, or the people inside it, their vast different regions, their history. So when we reach Canton in the time just before the first Opium war, there is no frame of reference that I have that I had with the first book, since a lot of it is set in India. Some it is on the ocean, some of it is set in Mauritius, but the description of the city of Canton(modern day Guangzhou) with the Fanqui or foreign quarter is absolutely enervating. China, its people and the kind of place it was then is painstakingly drawn out in my imagination due to this man’s enchanting writing. The Parsi merchant , along with the other English, American merchants around him are all smugglers of opium who have millions of dollars worth opium waiting to be sold to China but can’t because the Chinese have realized the havoc that it created and persevere on the right to control its sale in their own country. But this as Ghosh points out, is the time of Adam Smith, and Free Trade as an inalienable right from God are concepts which the merchants and the British use as their excuse to justify their actions. This is historical fiction at its very best, the research is immaculate, the books are entertaining, and he literally creates pictures in your head. There is a secret to this, which he has stated elsewhere, the trick to good descriptive writing is not just what you write, it’s also how much you leave out. He describes just enough for one to successfully imagine. And also the man loves words, and playing with them. And by the end, you will too.