Book Extract: Wild Fictions

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writings on subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel and discoveries. The spaces that we inhabit, and the manner in which we occupy them, is a constant thread throughout this striking and expansive collection.

From the significance of the commodification of the clove to the diversity of the mangrove forests in Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, Wild Fictions is a powerful refutation of imperial violence, a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history, and a reminder of the importance of sensitivity and empathy. With the combination of moral passion, intellectual curiosity and literary elegance that defines his writing, Amitav Ghosh makes us understand the world in new, and urgent, ways. Together, the pieces in Wild Fictions chart a course that allows us to heal our relationships and restore the delicate balance with the volatile landscapes to which we all belong.

'We owe a great debt to Ghosh's brilliant mind, avenging pen and huge soul' --- Naomi Klein.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, Jungle Nama and The Living Mountain.
Amitav Ghosh's work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive it. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize for his writings on the planetary crisis and climate change.

Extracted with permission from Wild Fictions, Amitav Ghosh, HarperCollins India.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

Of Fanás and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail

In the age of the sailing ship, indigenous sailors from the Indian Ocean area-Arabs, Chinese, East Africans, Filipinos, Malays and South Asians-made up the 'lascars'. This truly diverse group gave the world, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Laskari language, the language of command on ships, drawn from English, Malay, Hindustani, Chinese, Malayalam and the entire Babel of languages spoken on board. The lives of the lascars should be of more interest today than ever before because they were the first Asians and Africans to participate freely and in substantial numbers in a globalized 'workspace'.

Bangladeshis, like Armenians and Gujaratis, often tell stories about the unexpected places where their countrymen are to be found. One location I have never heard mentioned, however, is a website maintained for the benefit of the Australian 'family history community': it was there that I came upon the ship's manifest of the William Stewart, a 5tz-ton vessel that arrived in Sydney on 8 November 1854, having made the journey from England to Australia with a crew of forty-four.1 The ship was captained by one Mr Charles J. Riches and had only a single mate, a Mr Webb of London. Of the others on the list, only a handful (possibly seven or eight) were white sailors; the rest were lascars of various grades.

Who then were these lascars? The brief notations on the list reveal more than might be expected: although most of them were Muslims, there were some Christians and Hindus among them too. The oldest was a man of forty-eight, from Sylhet in what is now Bangladesh, and the youngest was a sixteen-year-old from Madras-but for the most part, these men were in their twenties and thirties, by no means young according to the standards of an age when English and American seamen commonly began their careers in their teens. The seniormost lascar was one Serang Mohammad, a thirty-two-year-old sailor from Bombay; next in seniority were the two tindals, one of whom was from Chittagong and the other from Bamnell, a place that has the distinction of being unknown to Google. For the rest, twelve of the lascars were from what might be called undivided Bengal-places such as Sylhet, Barisal, Noakhali, Calcutta and Howrah; six were from various ports along the east coast of India, including Madras; one of the seacunnies, Roderick by name, was probably a burgher from Colombo; two others were from Goa; two were Malay; two were probably Arab-African; and another two were, in the vocabulary of the time, 'Manila-men', meaning Filipino.

The crew of the William Stewart was by no means exceptional in its heterogeneity. The Tynemouth, a steamship of 1,228 tons that sailed from Hong Kong to Australia in 1858, had a crew of seventy, of whom thirty-six were white sailors, all English except for four Germans. The others were lascars of various grades, of whom seven were from Bengal. As for the rest, they were from places too various to list severally: Daman, Cochin, Gorakhpur, Munger, Bencoolen (off Sumatra), Massawah (in East Africa) and so on. On lists like these, the term 'lascar' has so wide an application that we might well wonder where the word came from and what it means. The term appears to be an Anglo-Indian adaptation of the Persian/Urdu 'lashkar'/'lashkari', meaning 'soldier' or 'army'.2 In passing between languages, the word appears to have taken on the connotation of 'mercenary' or 'hired hand' and was applied in this sense to a certain kind of sailor. The transition seems to have occurred first in Portuguese, in which the words 'laschar'/'lasquarim' have been in circulation since about 1z00 CE: as with many other nautical terms, it was probably through a Lusitanian route that it entered English.3 The nautical usage of the term is, however, distinctively European: in the Indian subcontinent, for example, the word is still generally used to mean 'army' or 'militia'.4 The extended meaning of 'sailor' would appear to have been introduced to the subcontinent by Europeans; when thus used today, it has a touch of both the exotic and the archaic. In sum, the word 'lascar', as used on the manifest of the William Stewart, belongs to two kinds of jargon, the nautical and the colonial, and its meaning is specific to those contexts. What then is this meaning? When placed beside a crew list like that of the William Stewart, the Oxford English Dictionary's terse definition ('East Indian sailor') would seem to be no less misleading than that of those well-known nineteenth-century lexicographers Albert Barrère and Charles Leland ('Malay sailor'). In actual use, the term was applied to all indigenous sailors of the Indian Ocean region-'native' would have been the operative category of the time-which is to say that it referred indifferently to Arabs, South Asians, Malays, East Africans, Filipinos and Chinese. That a single word should cast so large a net is puzzling only from a landward and contemporary perspective; for European sailors of an earlier era, the word 'lascar' would have been paired with, and opposed to, another similar term, 'kanaka', which referred to the native seamen of the Pacific.5 With an ocean as a referent, it is scarcely surprising that both these terms cast their net very wide; scarcely surprising either that both suffered the same fate, drowning under the derogatory racial freightage that came to be loaded upon them.

That lascars were a richly cosmopolitan group is beyond question. Yet no matter whether they were from-South Asia, East Africa, the Arabian coast or the Malay Archipelago-these sailors were lumped together once they stepped on board. Words often create their own reality: it is easy to imagine that living in the cramped bowels of sailing ships, coping with conditions of extreme danger and difficulty, men from every edge of the Indian Ocean came to share in an experience that, although similar to that of sailors everywhere, was different in that it was salted with a particular kind of brine.

Diversity in Ship Crew

It is common nowadays to hear 'diversity' being spoken of as though it were some thrilling new invention. But it is unlikely that there were ever any more diverse collections of people-albeit only men-than the crews of merchant ships in the age of sail.z No one was more keenly aware of this, or represented it to better effect, than Herman Melville, especially in the startling fortieth chapter of Moby Dick, where the Pequod's crew begin to sing in a great outpouring of tongues and it becomes apparent that this small Nantucket whaling ship is a floating Babel, with sailors from Holland, France, Malta, Long Island, the Azores, Tahiti, Sicily, the Isle of Man and China. There is, of course, a token lascar, whose contribution to the merriment consists of: 'By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high- tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow Seeva!'7 Nor is this the only Asian on the Pequod: Captain Ahab's mysterious ompany of private harpooners consists, Melville tells us, of Parsees. The unlikeliness of this should cast no doubt either upon Melville's curiosity or his powers of observation-for he was one of the very few nineteenth-century writers who actually took the time to look at the world of the lascars with some attention. In his autobiographical novel, Redburn, based on his earliest experiences as a seaman, he writes of a vessel called the Irrawaddy that was docked in Liverpool when his own ship arrived there. The Irrawaddy was a 'country boat', which was the term commonly applied to ships built in Asia in the Western style. In Liverpool, the Irrawaddy and her lascar crew were something of a curiosity.

Every Sunday, crowds of well-dressed people came down to the dock to see this singular ship … It was amusing … to watch the old women with umbrellas, who stood on the quay staring at the Lascars, even when they desired to be private. These inquisitive old ladies seemed to regard the sailors as a species of wild animal, whom they might gaze at with as much impunity, as at the leopards in the Zoological Gardens.

Melville too was fascinated, and one Sunday, he went aboard the Irrawaddy to take a dekko. He found a group of lascars eating on the fo'c'sle deck:

Among them were Malays, Mahrattas, Burmese, Siamese, and Cinghalese. They were seated around 'kids' full of rice, from which, according to their invariable custom, they helped themselves with one hand, the other being reserved for quite another purpose. They were chattering like magpies in Hindostanee, but I found that several of them could also speak very good English. They were a small-limbed wiry, tawny set; and I was informed, made excellent seamen.

The chain of command on the Irrawaddy was no different from that of any other 'country boat' that made the crossing to England: such vessels might be built in India, they might be owned by Indian merchants, they might be manned entirely by lascars, but their officers were almost always white 'Free Mariners'.10 The captain of the Irrawaddy, accordingly, was an Englishman, as were the three mates, master and bo'sun.

These officers lived astern in the cabin where every Sunday they read the church of England's prayers, while the heathen at the other end of the ship were left to their false gods and idols. And thus, with Christianity on the quarter-deck, and paganism on the fo'c'sle, the Irrawaddy ploughed the sea.

One night, Melville got into a conversation with a lascar who gave his name as 'Dallabdoolmans'. Melville found that he spoke English well and was quite communicative, 'like most smokers'. He wrote:

It is a Godsend to fall in with a fellow like this. He knows things you never dreamed of; his experiences are like a man from the moon-wholly strange, a new revelation. If you want to learn romance … take a stroll along the docks of a great commercial port. Ten to one, you will encounter Crusoe himself among the crowds of mariners from all parts of the globe.12

Melville wrote Redburn from memory when his first voyage was long in the past, but his visit to the Irrawaddy clearly made a powerful impression, for more than a decade later, he was able to recall Hindustani/Bengali words, such as 'sagoon', 'teak'. He probably got the lascar's name wrong, but the fact that he went to the trouble of recalling it is still of enormous significance-for in the annals of nineteenth-century nautical writing, the lascar, when he appears at ll, is almost always a figure unnamed. Melville's account is almost unique in this regard, and his memory was perhaps not entirely to blame for the mangling of Dallabdoolmans' name. It is easy to imagine that a nosy young writer who inquired after the name of an Asian or African transient in today's Europe would be given a similarly misleading answer. Lascars like Dallabdoolmans were probably wary of making themselves conspicuous, and this may be one reason why the names recorded on nineteenth-century ships' manifests seem too sketchy to be real markers of personhood. For it is a fact that when a lascar stands out from the generality of his brethren in the historical record, it is almost always because he is the subject of some kind of legal or disciplinary action. Thus, for example, we have the case of Abdul Rhyme in 1z4t, a lascar who was convicted while at sea for having sex with a fellow member of his crew, a sixteen-year-old Londoner by the name of John Durrant. Several witnesses testified that the relationship was consensual, but in the eyes of the ship's captain, this served only to deepen the gravity of the offence, since it implied that the English boy had willingly entered into a liaison with a 'Hindoosthan peon'. The accused were both sentenced to forty lashes, and it was specified that their wounds were to be rubbed with salt.13 Or there is the 1814 case in which a lascar was whipped to within an inch of his life in East London: the incident caught the attention of a magistrate and became something of a scandal. The lascar in question had been whipped by none other than his own serang, who, on being arraigned, offered the defence that he was merely applying the custom of his trade, with the consent of his employers, the East India Company.

Forerunners of Today's Migrants

Like many paperless migrants in the West today, lascars were probably suspicious of public scrutiny, so it behoves us to note that theirs is not the least of the many curtains of silence that we seek to pierce when we inquire into their lives. The truth is that their lives are of more interest today than ever before-for the very good reason that they were possibly the first Asians and Africans to participate freely, and in substantial numbers, in a globalized workspace. They were among the first to travel extensively; the first to participate in industrial processes of work; the first to create settlements in Europe; the first to adapt to clock-bound rhythms of work-time (the shipboard regime of four-hour work-shifts, or watches, was one of the most exacting disciplinary regimes ever invented); and the first to be familiar with emergent technologies (nautical engineering itself being one of the pioneering technologies of the industrial age). Not least, the lascars were among the first Asians to acquire a familiarity with colloquial (as opposed to book-learnt) European languages. They were thus in every sense the forerunners of today's migratory computer technicians, nurses, high-tech workers and so on. Indeed, they encountered many of the same problems that contemporary Asian and African workers face, with their Western counterparts doing everything possible to limit their access to the most profitable labour markets. The British Navigation Laws of 1814 and 1823, for example, imposed rigid restrictions on the employment of lascars and played no small part in crippling the Indian shipping industry, which had shown itself to be fully capable of competing with its British counterpart.

Today, thanks to the work of pioneering scholars like Isaac Land, Rozina Visram and Michael Fisher, a great deal more is known about lascars than was the case even ten years ago.1z We know, for instance, that lascars were a substantial presence in London even in the seventeenth century, and possibly even earlier; we know that they could, by law, be paid a fraction of a white sailor's wage and that to hire them was an easy way to expand profit margins. We know that in many Asian ports, well-organized chain gangs recruited sailors through such methods as kidnapping and debt bondage. We know that contractors would sometimes sell their kinsmen's children into virtual servitude, and that often, on reaching their destination, unscrupulous shipmasters would abandon these young men and boys on the streets of London and Glasgow.

Yet it remains true that much of what is known about lascars pertains to the shore; about their life at sea, we know very little. How, for example, in the Babel of tongues that was a lascar-manned sailing ship, did people communicate? Or, to put it differently, how could they afford not to?

Amitav Ghosh Wild Fiction: Essays Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins India Publishers, Gurugram, 2025. Hb. Pp. 474 Rs. 799