smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

the great derangement (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh does something  breathtaking in this work of non-fiction. He turns one of the colonialists’ most sacred tools, the modern realist novel, back on itself, to question the seemingly inexorable drift of Western society towards the annihilation of the planet. In so doing both vindicating the importance of the novel (he himself is, after all, a novelist) and also suggesting that its modern realist incarnation has become a symbol or symptomatic of the decadence that is leading the world towards catastrophe. Incorporated into his argument is a slyly savage assault on that prince of the modern inconsequential, if moral, writers, John Updike. Whilst the western novel has chosen to blackball the unlikely, the catastrophic, the in-credible, the natural world is sedately going about the business of making these tropes the norm. Rather than paying heed to the existential battles which humanity is confronted with, the modern novel hides under its shell of privilege, making cute novels about (bourgeois) moral dilemmas. So, Ghosh postulates, in a hundred years time, when the sea levels have risen and the deserts are marching on, people will look back and say: where were the Cassandras? Those who might at least have raised a flag of warning, seeking to include the great peril of our time on the cultural agenda. They are sidelined on grounds of taste, (here, tangentially, Ghosh’s book reminds me of Natalie Olah’s), their narratives not being deemed relevant or even saleable. 

As a result, The great derangement, as Ghosh puts it in biblical terms, is allowed to proceed unchecked. The derangement being that we blithely ignore the suicidal contradictions at the heart of “progress”. Contradictions whose full extent will be unleashed when those countries in Asia seeking, understandably, to catch up with this progressive agenda, contribute even more to humanity’s lemming like tendencies. 

As one more inclined towards the novel than the science, I would have to say how remarkable it is to to see the shibboleths of good taste and the well constructed novel being so rightfully savaged. Ghosh’s argument is that we are trapped in the bubble of our our own perception, which refuses to allow us to see that the trappings of our comfort contain the seeds of our destruction. Because that message is a turn-off, it’s a downer, it doesn’t sell. Instead we construct genteel narratives of personal crisis, ignoring the existential crisis that threatens to engulf each and every one of our descendants. 

river of smoke [amitav ghosh]

River of Smoke is a curious book. At once vast, full of fascinating detail, engaging; but at the same time the storytelling is flawed and the book’s structure means it sags somewhat as it homes in on the finishing line.

In my (perhaps) former job, a script was defined by character, narrative, (dialogue) and ‘world’. The last being the most relevant here and frequently the hardest for a scriptwriter to master. A novelist has more scope to conjure an unknown world, and Ghosh takes full advantage. He appears to know mid c19^th Canton like the back of his hand. His prose leads us through the alleyways, across the Maidan, weaving in and out of the 13 factories. It’s a world as brilliantly realised as Dickens’ London and the depth and breath of the author’s scholarship is never in doubt.

However, his fascination with the intricacies of Canton’s geo-political structure is at the expense of his plot. Ghosh treats his characters with the irreverence of a historian, rather than the reverence of a novelist. Paulette and Penrose, two of the principle characters in the book’s opening section are rudely removed from the plot, left to dawdle about in Hong Kong, offstage. Similarly, Bahram’s son, perhaps the most fascinating character in the book, a true product of Canton’s miscegenation, is introduced and then expunged. There are other figures who flicker into life only to fade out before they are allowed to catch fire. Instead, the author’s focus turns to the historical detail of the lead-up to the opium wars and the actions of the British and US merchants as they strive to resist the Chinese emperor’s will. Whilst Modi’s fate remains of interest, the novel increasingly feels as though it’s marking time before it can knit up its plot, with the day-by-day account of the last days of Canton’s foreign enclave overstated.

Having said which, River of Smoke is still an absorbing read. Ghosh displays an authoritative, over-arching take on the way the modern world has been shaped. Furthermore, he does the European the grand favour of removing their continent from the epicentre, shifting history’s focus further Eastwards, revealing the centuries-old mercantile structures that Europe’s military might took advantage of. Furthermore, River of Smoke contains a vigorous commentary on the nature of the drugs trade. It’s a strong critique of European double standards, one with echoes of today’s world, proving there’s little new under the rising sun.

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[Some of the characters named above, I realise after a cursory glance at Wikipedia, feature in the first part of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies. Which might mean that I am being unjust in my criticism. Nevertheless, it still feels to me as though the book lacks balance as a result of the way the author manipulates his characters.]

the hungry tide [amitav ghosh]

This is one of those books that arrived at a time of need. When you don't really know what you're doing yourself and you can't understand why things are happening as they are and you can't think about reading anything but then you do and the voice of the author anchors you. This is the world. Not the things that happen. But the things that are written. Which exist like a permanent rainbow overhead, a pot of gold which is constantly within reach.

In the end, oddly, Ghosh's book left me feeling disappointed. But in the beginning, it was a revelation. To say this reveals that reading this writer is to embark on a journey. Fittingly, the book's two principle characters, Piya, the US cetologist and Kanai, an Indian translator, meet on a train as they are about to begin a journey to the Sundarbans, a series of mangrove swamp islands in the Bay of Benghal, not all that far from Calcutta. Piya is hoping to study river dolphins; Kanai is returning to visit his aunt, whose late husband's notebook has been discovered and bequeathed to Kanai, for reasons he doesn't entirely understand.

Immediately the reader is thrown into rich novelistic territory. What will Kanai discover in the journal? Will Piya find the dolphins and what will happen if she does? How are these two seemingly disconnected persons due to become connected? Ghosh's book is so well formed, it's foundations laid with the cunning and art of a mason, that it's an immediate delight to feel oneself, as a reader, caught up in his tide, rolling down the river with his effortless narrative. In addition to all this, the book feels as though it's hard-wired into the land he's talking about: the people's myths; the presence of nature, above all in the shape of the mercurial, murderous tigers; the influence of the British; and finally, the force of the weather, which shapes the land as well as the stories of those who inhabit this land. Including all the characters we will meet. At one point, the narrative even finds a way to inform the reader of how the birth of the continent, so far away and yet so present, the island that was India colliding with Asia, forming the Himalayas and its rivers, helped to shape this land, and its people.

At times this is bravura writing, the novelist providing the perspective for his characters' stories (and our own) which day-to-day life has no time for. Ghosh achieves this without imposing his voice upon this audience: the information he conveys resides within the dreams, folklore and learning of the people he writes about. You come out of the book feeling as though you too have visited the Sundarbans and walked in the shadow of the tiger. The moment Fokir, the local fisherman, explains to Piya, distraught at the killing of a tiger, why the tiger has allowed itself to be killed, is a remarkable one, the inherited knowledge of the land trumping everything our liberal Western sensibilities have taught us (with our inherited knowledge) to feel.

Perhaps strangely, it felt to me as though the book's denouement was its least convincing aspect. As though the mechanics of the story are in danger of taking hold. There are moments in this book when you can see the gears moving. Perhaps because he had done such a job of luring me into his trap, it's closing felt like an anti-climax. Nevertheless, the job had been done. I had been taken out of my world, a world without sense, and escorted through another one. The act of separation helping to lend perspective to my own. Reading being the opposite of escapism; instead a space for contemplation, the novelist's acute presentation of the parameters of his described world allowing one to spy the parameters of one's own.