If you know nothing of the Opium Wars that brought the Chinese to heel under the British Crown, perhaps Sea of Poppies can initiate you into that history. But more precious than all the literature you can lay your hands on is Ghosh's description of an opium factory in Ghazipur (now in Uttar Pradesh), based on a factory superintendent's record which he encountered during his research. As the background to a tense scene where an anxious woman wanders through the cavernous shed looking for her husband, Ghosh describes the surreal vision of boys tossing down balls of processed opium from precariously high shelves.
But there's more to it than the surface reveals. Ghosh identifies opium as a 'foundational commerce' of the 19th century. He alludes to the book
Opium City, by the Delhi-based historian Amar Farooqui, which holds that Bombay, without a proper hinterland, had to be entirely financed from Bengal and became so prohibitively expensive for the British East India Company to maintain that only the opium trade, fed by the poppies grown mostly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, saved it from being shut down. The British, Ghosh insists, were exporting opium out of India until the 1920s. In an interview with the BBC, he said, "It is not a coincidence that 20 years after the opium trade stopped, the Raj more or less packed up its bags and left. India was not a paying proposition any longer."
It was opium then, it is heroin now. How has the 19th century opium trade influenced today's global economy?
I don't think today's drug trade is even a tenth of what opium was in the 19th century. Opium was really a foundational commerce of that period. We hear people going on about the industrial revolution. Certainly, those technical innovations were quite important but so much of it was underwritten by the opium trade, which -- if you think about it -- is a third-world product produced by illiterate peasants who are paid a pittance for their labour, and it is taken to another Asian country and sold there for enormous profit.
If it weren't for opium, Bombay (Mumbai) would have been shut down. The world's biggest port today -- Hong Kong -- was entirely a product of opium. It was founded as a result of the Opium Wars and for the first seventy or eighty years of its life it was primarily an opium distribution port.
(Laughs) In fact, some of the world's biggest banks were founded by merchants who made their money in opium. In India, there's virtually no 19th century money that isn't opium money!
So, all the morality attacks we're having today on account of the drug trade are unfounded?
No, drugs are a serious concern. And to me as a parent, of course, it's a very serious concern. But what you see (laughs wryly) in this whole Victorian Empire thing is also an incredible hypocrisy -- on the one hand, incredible Puritanism, and on the other, absolute cynicism.
A very well-known British policymaker had said, 'Opium is the tool with which we will prise open the Chinese oyster'. It was completely out in the open -- it was not something they were embarrassed about.
Video, click above: 'Our quality of parliamentary debate is extraordinary high': Amitav Ghosh in conversation with The Pioneer editor and Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra
Also read: The Chinese resisted the importation of opium
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