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HISTORY
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray, $34.99
Amitav Ghosh (or perhaps his publishers) has given Smoke and Ashes two subtitles. In India, it came out in 2023 as “A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories”. Most later editions leave out “A Writer’s Journey”, making a plant or a drug the protagonist, not a human being.
Ghosh’s celebrated Ibis trilogy of novels, published between 2008 and 2015, revolves around a sailing ship of that name that sailed through Asian waters at the time of the early 19th-century Opium War. Smoke and Ashes is about the historical background through which his characters moved.
Amitav Ghosh realised the most important relationship between China and India was that they shared a joint experience of British imperialism when opium dominated the background.Credit:
Ghosh’s language is famously rich. When he immerses his readers in his characters, it is not just in what they do and think and say. Their vocabulary is overwhelming too: Hindi mixes with Mauritian Kreol at the beginning of River of Smoke: “To complain that your legs were fatigé or your head gidigidi was no use: all you’d get in return was a ferocious: Bas to fana. Get on your feet.” His readers sink into the words.
To write like this Ghosh had to know about early 19th-century India and Mauritius and, above all, China, but in 2004, when he began his research for the trilogy, he suffered a wide and profound ignorance.
As a child, and a young man, Ghosh, like most Indians, was barely conscious of China. Chinese words reverberated through Indian everyday language. The names of various commodities – tea, the drink, and china, the porcelain, are obvious and the words for sugar and peanuts recalled Chinese origins. Chinese products were everywhere, but Ghosh had no realisation of China itself. The old Chinese community in India vanished in 1962, after a brief border war. The Chinese army defeated Indian troops on the battleground, and the Chinese population in India was reduced to the category of enemy.
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Through his research, though, Ghosh realised that the most important relationship between China and India was not antagonistic. They shared a joint experience of British imperialism when opium dominated the background of both countries. Smoke and Ashes is the account of this personal journey.
Yet the changing subtitle shifted attention from the human. There are only two characters in Smoke and Ashes: Amitav Ghosh and the non-human, non-sentient and inscrutable opium poppy. Approvingly, he quotes an American diplomatic historian named William McAllister who talks of “opium as an actor in its own right … A sort of independent biological agent … [that] appears to have bested all its human contenders.”