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Review |
Smoke on the Water
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| The sleeping giant has awoken but does it really come to life? |
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MISS PRISM: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume
novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
CECILY: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully
clever you are! I hope it did not end happily?…
MISS PRISM: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.
That is what fiction means.
The Importance of Being Earnest
| T |
HE FIRST BOOK OF AMITAV GHOSH'S TRILOGY, Sea of Poppies, left his characters so thrillingly poised on—or just off—the Ibis, a ship bound for Mauritius, that I couldn’t wait for the next book. They were all immensely engaging characters, too. Deeti, the tough, strangely fey villager; Kalua, her powerful but innocent husband; Neel Halder, the sensual,
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ruined Raja; Paulette Lambert, the delightful gamine; Zachary Reid, the misfit sailor—these and a host of personages around them (I can’t call them minor characters because each is fleshed out so well) carried me through the book on eagle’s wings. They also, as I wrote in these pages in May, gave me hope in the Indian historical novel.
Unfortunately for me, none of these people figures prominently in River of Smoke. The central space is taken up by Bahram Modi, a Parsi merchant trading in Canton (now called Guangzhou), who has a tenuous connection to the first book. This novel is all set in Canton, except for an introductory passage telling what happened to those aboard the Mauritius-bound Ibis. Bahram is not, for me, a sufficiently weighty or engaging personality to carry this book on his shoulders. His business acumen is boasted of, but many of his dealings in Canton seem obvious and naïve. And Ghosh does not, I think, make enough of the moral battle within him to convince me he is interesting. For Bahram is an opium trader, and this book is set in 1838-39, when China was first struggling to throw off the coils of the drug.
In some ways, the central character is not Bahram, but opium, which briefly blazed the stage in Sea of Poppies. And if you want an objective correlative, something with the flesh and sinew that Bahram lacks, the central character is Canton.
The city of Canton—or, rather, the ‘Fan-qui-Town’ or foreigners’ part of it—is described in exhaustive detail. It is energetic, enervating and occasionally vicious. In this it is like the opium trade which gave it its wealth. Ghosh’s use of background is, as usual, meticulous. Listen to Bahram convince his father-in-law of the need to diversify:
But look at the world around us, look at how it is changing. Today the biggest profits don’t come from selling useful things: quite the opposite. The profits come from selling things that are not of any real use. Look at this new kind of white sugar that people are bringing from China – this thing they call ‘cheeni’. Is it any sweeter than honey or palm-jaggery? No, but people pay twice as much for it or even more. Look at all the money that people are making from selling rum and gin. Are these any better than our own toddy and wine and sharaab? No, but people want them. Opium is just like that. It is completely useless unless you’re sick, but still people want it. And it is such a thing that once people start using it they can’t stop; the market just gets larger and larger.
Much of this book can be read as a scathing denouncement of the Baal of Free Trade and of capitalism. I do think that has grown to be one of Ghosh’s chief concerns. The deliberations of the Committee of the Canton Chamber of Commerce, dominated by the British, are carefully researched and presented, often in the original speech. The taipans’ casual treacheries and considered hypocrisy amount to practically a philosophy of exploitation. The poor Parsi, Bahram, admitted to the Committee, shares the taipans’ views but pines for what is not:
“Democracy is a wonderful thing, Mr Burnham,” he said wistfully. “It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages – and China too, of course.”
“Let us raise a glass to that!”
This is excellent satire, made precisely for this year of grace 2011, and I’m wholly for Ghosh’s view of the matter. But this is a novel, not a polemic. The very achievement for which I’d fêted Sea of Poppies—the skilful fashioning of a truly subaltern Indian historical novel—is suborned by River of Smoke’s emphasis on the games people in power play. Deeti, Kalua and Zachary are missing from the cast; Paulette has a walk-on role; and Neel is unrecognisable. What use was their suffering in the first volume, if we are condemned to forget it for five years, until the third is out?
Also, as in Sea of Poppies, the vast amount of period slang, jargon and pidgin is sometimes hard to digest. It might be fun, for a north Indian, to puzzle out a sentence such as
“…the whole clan would be on the march; accompanied by paltans of bonoys, belsers, bowjis, salas, sakubays and other in-laws…” which occurs as early as the first page, or to figure that ‘dumbcowings’ is Hobson-Jobson Hinglish for ‘dhamkao-ings’, but what can I make of “it was but a geek of his face that Fitcher caught” (‘keek’ is Scots for ‘look’; a ‘geek’ was originally a performer in a circus who bit the heads off live rats and snakes) or “Fitcher was suddenly aware of a strange bedoling in certain parts of his body” when the narrative rolls on in modern English?
| W |
HAT MADE Sea of Poppies exhilarating was the way Ghosh allowed its inhabitants to do their own thing. They took full advantage of this freedom, and swept the story along at a breathless pace. None of them was in full control of their own destiny, but within the little space permitted (by other inhabitants of the book) they ran this way and that like
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cornered animals, finding always just that little loophole, that breathing space. Their creator had his plot outlined, but he did not jerk his characters around on strings.
In River of Smoke, Ghosh has his straitjacket ready. Perhaps it’s as well for Sea of Poppies’ protagonists that none of them will fit into it. Hence Bahram, as the sacrificial goat, his shoulders stooping beneath a yoke they are not strong enough to carry with pride. For Ghosh has not just a ruthlessly well-made story for him to bear, but all the weight of an ideology.
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