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Book Reviewed by:A motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts embark on a voyage across the Indian Ocean in the midst of the Opium Wars between Britain and China.
At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.
In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.
The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.
As the language departs from the concrete vocabulary of vessels and their parts, meaning breaks down, but the speakers forge ahead into delightful misunderstandings with unwittingly bawdy undertones. There is a glossary of sorts at the back, but after a few exchanges, you get the gist – which is just about what the characters themselves get as they attempt to bridge linguistic impasses. Struggling to decode the strange patois, then slipping into its lilts and rhythms, illuminates how malleable language is, how much we mold and shape it to our own contexts and purposes, and yet so often view it as a rigid structure not to be tampered with. The pidgin tongue isn't always easy reading, but it's certainly fun. As Amitav Ghosh remarks in an interview with New York Magazine, "The idea that language is a warm bath into which you slip in a comfortable way, to me it's a very deceptive idea."..continued
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(Reviewed by Lucia Silva).
The Ghazipur Opium Factory
For centuries, India was the largest exporter of opium,
accounting for 17-20% of Indian revenues. The export of opium to China began in
the 1780's at the urging of the first governor general of British India, Warren
Hastings, in an attempt to balance trade with China. At the time, China exported
enormous amounts of goods including tea, but imported little from Europe. At first,
there wasn't much demand for the drug, but over the next decade demand increased
exponentially. Indian farmers were effectively forced to replace their crops
with opium poppies, and then sell the resulting harvest back to the British East India Company for a pittance.
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