Book review | In ‘Smoke and Ashes’, Amitav Ghosh connects the dots between opium, China and the world today

Opium production in Calcutta, India, in 1900. Workers in dhotis and turbans are mixing and balling opium. (Photo: Bourne & Shepherd courtesy www.plantcultures.org/Wellcome Library, London via Wikimedia Commons)

Much of Amitav Ghosh’s new book, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories, is similar to the trilogy that the book’s hefty and expansive contents fuelled. Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, 2008; River of Smoke, 2011; Flood of Fire, 2012) is unlike anything an Indian author has written in the last several decades — in his rigorous world-building, in the dilated architecture of the epic in which opium trade in the 17th and 18th centuries thwart or unite characters both colonising and colonised, the socio-historical novel attains a singular fire. A new genre is born.

‘Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories’, by Amitav Ghosh, HaperCollins, 397 pages, Rs 699.

Similarly, Smoke and Ashes, drawn on research that Ghosh accumulated over several years to write the trilogy, is economic history, memoir and socio-political commentary with a journalistic eye — again a triumphant genre-bender. As always, in the past four decades that he has been an author, with 10 novels and nine books of non-fiction, Ghosh’s erudition and world view, informed and updated by real events and dug-up knowledge, has no trace of solipsism. The cautionary parts — lessons for today’s tech-united world, based on mistakes that governments and societies have made in the past — are so well-argued, so heavily amped by research and knowledge-gathering that the writer’s ego seems to subsume in a desire to be authentic, true and thorough. It’s a rare and lofty achievement.

Smoke and Ashes begins with the hegemonic tussle between Britain and China as early as the 17th century. It was when British marine merchants transported tea from China to Britain and its colonies, including India (among the many popular perceptions that Ghosh shatters is the fact that our not-so-friendly neighbour gave us the gift of ‘chai’).  China’s lack of interest in foreign goods didn’t go down well with the colonisers. Ghosh refers to scholarly views that suggest Chinese self-sufficiency was a source of anxiety to the British “because they discerned in it the possibility of a rival ‘master race’.” But the British found their most devoted allies in the Indian subcontinent, among Parsis and Marwaris, instrumental in sparking the idea of opium trading and creating what describes as “a certain kind of colonial modernity.” By the late 1830s, the period in which the Ibis Trilogy is set, swelling streams of opium were flowing from India to China, and the colonial modernity was responsible for this growth, the beneficiaries of which, were, of course, the British rulers, at the cost of brutalities to the plantation workers and farmer which Ghosh describes with arduous details and historical facts. “The story of a Mughal opium monopoly is but another instance of the British Expire’s remarkable talents is self-expulcatory myth-making. This is indeed one of the most astonishing aspects of the West’s involvement with opium in Asia. Not only did Western colonisers succeed in using opium to extract incalculable wealth from Asians, but they were successful also in obscuring their own role in the trade y claiming that it had existed from time immemorial because non-White people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity,” he writes.

Through chapters that too much digressing, related stories and facts often weigh down (a difficulty that readers of the trilogy also frequently encountered), Ghosh concludes convincingly that opium trade was an essential element of the emerging capitalist system but that far from being a “free market”, this system had two touchstones: colonialism and race. Some of Ghosh’s connections between opium trade and the idea of progress that is in currency now can seem over-stretched — but only until he delves into the current patterns in geopolitics and discriminations based on race, caste and other social markers: “The stamp of the past sometimes sinks so deep into the fabric of everyday life that its traces are difficult, if not impossible, to erase.”

Part of the narrative is a memoir of Ghosh’s own lineage and how that has connections in opium trade. Like the millions of people that opium trading affected, uprooted and dehumanised, his father told him stories of growing up in Chhapra, Bihar, and seeing opium ruin as well as make lives. It was the opium industry that took his ancestors to Chhapra and kept them there. In that sense, while Ghosh is looking inward as much as he is looking outward to historical connections that have shaped him and all Indians — or, for that matter, all Chinese.

The narrative is world-roving. From Mumbai’s Parsis we go to the horticulturists and weavers, potters and painters of China, especially of the great city of Guangzhou. The intricacies of the Parsi Gara saris are traced back to weavers of Guangzhou, and so are the origins of an artistic ferment in Bombay when Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, brought back many paintings to India from China. The idea for an art school in Bombay came to Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy after his Guangzhou visits, and the JJ School of Art came about. Ghosh goes on to devote pages to the nature of grassroots psychoactive substances and how opium was different in this class of psychoactive because it became a mainstay among pharmaceuticals too: “Grassroots psychoactive (cannabis, qat, coca, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, kava, pituri, etc.) are one of the few defences that could be effectively deployed against the continuing spread of opioids and cocainoids. The reality is that all other efforts at curbing the spread of opioids have failed: the opium poppy has always found a way of circumventing them.”

A Chinese sewing machine from early 19th century. Ghosh believes objects like these were models for the table-top Singer sewing machines that many Indian households had or have. (Image courtesy 'Smoke and Ashes')

Ghosh reiterates through the book that binary narratives about countries and culture — eg. China is evil — that is entrenched in popular perception is misleading and takes away the historical context of trade relations among nations. “The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy — Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — were initially sustained by opium. In other words, it wasn’t Free Trade or the autonomous laws of the market that laid the foundations of globalised economy: it was a monopolistic trade in a drug produced under colonial auspices by poor Asian farmers, a substance that creates addiction, the very negation of freedom.” In other words, if we sent all the opium to China and caused collective ruin to generations of Chinese, we don’t serve the high moral ground.

Ghosh’s narrative keeps circling back to the present, when in the US as well in many countries around the world including India, the opioid crisis has reached epic proportions and the American government is bullish about its “War on Drugs”.

How Ghosh establishes the interconnectedness of economic agency with geopolitics, a plant with human flourishing and wreckage and produces a narrative as luxuriant as it is painstaking in detail and density is his mastery as a prose writer and thinker. His love of language hasn’t dimmed a bit. But that signature quality aside, what Smoke and Ashes stands out for is its insistence on collective memory and the idea of taking responsibility for history. China is today an assertive and aggressive power, with many deplorable practices and policies is beyond dispute, but Ghosh argues that just because it is difficult to conceive of China as being wronged by history should not influence our assessment of the past. Ask yourself, he says, what made China what it is today? And by extension, what made the world what it is today?

There is pulsating energy and intellectual conviction in Smoke and Ashes. The cautionary strand is absolutely bang-on, and eminently Instagrammable: “At a time when elite hucksters and all-powerful billionaires are trying to peddle the idea of solar geoengineering there is nothing more important than to remember that every one of the interconnected crises that humanity now confronts is the unintended consequence of interventions conceived of by men who believed that their superior education and privilege entitled them to over-ride all customary, common-sense constraints.

Now, if ever, is the time for humility, in relation to other species and to the Earth itself.”