CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM WRITER

Amitav Ghosh is back with Smoke and Ashes, part memoir, part travelogue and part sociocultural history of the opium trade

- Rimi B. Chatterjee

Colonialism is tremendously adaptable. I say 'is' rather than 'was' because colonialism, in its avatar of capitalism, is still very much with us. The only major differences between the past and present are that (a) the beneficiaries no longer need to be exported to the colonies, since our current economic and political institutions do the job of colonising for them, and (b) poor people in coloniser countries are beginning to suspect that they also number among the colonised.

Amitav Ghosh's Smoke and Ashes recognises and interrogates that continuity. It is as if Ghosh took the entire vast span of the Ibis trilogy and squeezed out the plot and characterisation but kept the epic scope and the novelistic flair. This leaves one principal actor on the stage, towering above any human agency: opium itself. Ghosh utilises the conceit of imagining opium as having an agenda and a strategy of its own: a desire to propagate itself using the willing hands and minds of its human thralls. While this metaphor has great dramatic force, I suspect I am a little too cynical about humans to fully appreciate it. I agree that the poppy has been quite successful in getting humans to grow and spread it, but then so have a vast number of other species we have 'domesticated'. With one caveat: the poppy can change minds, and that is always disturbing.

So, one June afternoon I got on a Zoom call with the author to discuss the new book. Ghosh told me that the book was indeed a 'distillation' of the scholarly spadework he had had to do for the Ibis trilogy. He hadn't intended to write it while he was working on the novels, but the raw materials remained in the back of his mind, haunting him. Long after the novels were out in the world, he returned to the history behind them.