The fulcrum of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is the Ibis, the ship of hope and woe upon which his 19th century drama is staged. It balances the misery of peasants shackled to the East India Company's poppy fields in Bihar with the anxious emancipation promised by the black water -- Kala Pani.
Aboard this vessel with a dark past -- not long ago it was a blackbirder, ferrying slaves -- is a motley crew of seafarers and castaways, natives and Europeans, peasants and kings.
There is Deeti, a young widow rescued from her husband's funeral pyre by a low-caste wrestler. There is Zachary Reid, a mulatto American freedman who is Malum Zikri to his shipmates.
There is Paulette, a Bengali-speaking French orphan whose heart is bursting with liberty and love. And her blood-brother Jodu, a daring young boatman whose dead mother was Paulette's wet nurse. There is the landless Raja of Raskhali whose title, mangled by gone-native English tongues, has become the Rascally Roger. There are Englishmen of birth, Indians who have forfeited caste, and lascars -- ship-people of uncertain address who speak a patois comprehensible to none but the most travelled sailor.
On this great voyage, all their ancestral moorings -- every hue of skin and every consonant of tongue -- come undone and they become jahaj-bhais -- ship-brothers. Dreaming up this polyglot cast and placing it against the historical backdrop of the Opium Wars was a gigantic but immensely enjoyable effort for Ghosh. As for imagining the Ibis, he pieced together models of 19th century ships while conducting his research but admits that he "stretched (the) ship a bit!"
With Sea of Poppies, how have you changed or evolved as a writer?
With this book I was bringing together so much of myself -- my life, my work, my engagements, my love of languages. It was like a vast vessel into which I was emptying it all and giving it shape. It takes time to have that life experience that can enrich your work. And just to learn the craft takes a long time. In the course of writing this book, I felt that my experience and my craft had come together. But those who have read my earlier books will say to you that the absence of experience and craft can also make a wonderful book.
Hemingway, Conrad, Melville... all these writers experienced the sea and evoked it in their books. Was it hard for you to imagine a nautical novel without experiencing seafaring?
I actually learned how to sail. (Chuckles) Well, I spent some time trying! There are sailboats on the Caribbean where you can do that, and the one I was on was captained by a retired English sea-captain who had a parrot on his shoulder!
You count Herman Melville's Moby Dick among your influences. But just out of curiosity, have any of the other Melville novels -- The Encantadas (Enchanted Isles), for instance -- been part of your research?
Yes. I didn't really know about the Encantadas until after I had done my research. And when I discovered the book, I found it to be a really wonderful set of essays about the Galapagos. Similarly, many of his other books have influenced me -- particularly Redburn, a fictionalised memoir of his first voyage from New York to Liverpool. Melville was 14 when he made that voyage. It contains a description of a meeting with a lascar -- one of the few such accounts we have in literature. Also, Melville's Typee and his South Sea island writing was quite serious ethnography.
Poppies has such a huge sea of characters. How did you develop them? Did you have conversations with them?
All the time! They're completely in my head. A couple of years ago I had this really odd experience. I was working in a library, writing something. Suddenly, I looked up and I saw people were staring at me. I wondered why. But after a while I realised I was talking as I was writing -- I was speaking the words out loud!
Video, click above: 'After you sign these books I will sell them on eBay!': Amitav Ghosh's book tour took him to Mumbai for two days where he met, intensively over 48 hours, with a series of journalists, editors and fans. He autographs copies of all his books for columnist Jerry Pinto
Also read: Jhumpa Lahiri achieves a rare feat
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