Sea of Poppies

"Shortlist"

"This book tells a story that we don’t often hear, which is about the opium trade and what it did to India, notably to the part of India I come from, Bihar. Why was India even important to the British or the East India Company ? It was because of the opium more than anything else. It profoundly changed India, reaching deep into the economy of rural India. Till opium became their biggest trading item, the British didn’t really touch rural India. I learnt this thanks to Amitav Ghosh. The trilogy is about a group of people who have become indentured laborers on an opium ship. The three books follow loosely the lives of about five or six of the characters on that ship. Again, I go back to the Mahabharat , because you have this wonderful thing of the backstory, and the consequences, and how things develop. The trilogy has that same kind of epic sweep. It’s difficult to say what is the best thing about these three books. First, it’s the attention to historic detail. Second, the characters, and third, the attention to language and how it has morphed and died through time – Chinese-English, Laskari, colonial English. “I love to read not to learn about other cultures, but to feel what it means to be human” There are times in the book when your blood boils at the horrors of colonialism. And there are other times when you just think, ‘The human spirit is unbelievable, that people could survive such cruelty and exploitation and still come out on top with their humanity intact.’ It’s also a very exciting read. Again, I love it because it shows you the world, the interconnections between cultures and peoples. You realize that colonialism was an encounter between not just two cultures but several. Which is something we often forget. The trilogy made me understand and feel very sympathetic to China, it made me feel shame too for the part we played in its subjugation at the time. Reading a book is a journey. When I think of reading I always think of the word gam, which in Sanskrit means to go. Part of being human is to move, I think. Humans have always moved around, we don’t like to stay in one place too long. In the trilogy, Amitav Ghosh really brings that theme alive as well — how people move and adapt and accept very difficult circumstances and remake their lives. It’s also wonderful how Amitav Ghosh weaves history into the novel without overwhelming the characters and turning them into cardboard figures. Yes, absolutely, he has a sense of perspective. There are moments which are really quite terrible, but there’s every emotion under the sun in those books. I love it because you don’t just see India. That’s also something which is very special. You see it through an Indian lens, but you see the world. My favorite in the whole collection was River of Smoke , the second one, which is based mainly in China. Apparently, that was a language that was created on those boats and in Shanghai and Hongkong. Because of the incredible mix of people from different places: Malays, Indians, etc. they created this language. Amitav Ghosh found a dictionary of this language — I believe in the New York Public Library. He spends a lot of time doing his research and it’s worth looking at the bibliography at the back of each book. That’s the other thing that’s amazing about Amitav Ghosh’s books, they’re very readable. At the same time, you’ve learned a whole lot of things by the end. These books spark your curiosity, and then you can go and look things up using his wonderful bibliography, if you want. It’s really enjoyable. It’s an amazing work of the imagination to have been able to do that, to put it all together, because it’s hard to research something and then write about it. There’s a lot that you have to throw out when you want to write it as a novel. There is a lot of information that you cannot use and a lot of information you need which isn’t there, you have to imagine it."