The first novel I had read of Amitav Ghosh was Shadow Lines, one of the first novels about imagined geographies and histories. It was followed by Calcutta Chromosomes in 2005 or so, and pandemics are a thing of the past more or less. Frankly, I failed to understand the genius of the novel as much of the futuristic world created in the novel was already beginning to take shape in during the time. But these two novels set Ghosh amongst the novelists whose books I could pick up as they came, without reviews as I knew I would be left with a great story. Amitav Ghosh has insisted that he is merely a story-teller. But Sea of Poppies is not an imagined world, neither a futuristic one, it is rooted deeply in the colonial past of India, and Ghosh recreates this world through the eyes of a woman whose horizons had never expanded beyond her village river. The ships of East India company brought in massive waves that swept an entire country and spared no one. This novel is about one such no one whose life changes due to the big changes in the status quo.
It is Sea Of Poppies, the first of the Ibis trilogy is here. The choice of subject is special because colonisation as a subject has been often handled but one of the very important chapters, the Opium War was always sidelined. Strange considering the impact it had politically, economically on the three countries involved, Britain, India and China. Ghosh has always insisted that at heart he is just a story teller, and this one bears a testimonial to the fact just like his other books. But perhaps what Ghosh does not acknowledge is that he is more than a storyteller, that he is a historian, a journalist, who knows how to blend it all for a great concoction. When it comes to the shipping jargon, he matches his homework skills to the likes of Hemingway.
The book is a maze in many ways; be it the language, the kaleidoscopic backgrounds of the many protagonists, and of course the structure. It has the pace of a popular fiction undownputtable but that in a way adds to the delight of reading and most importantly suits the grande setting and scale of the book .
However the usage of Bhojpuri might repel a non-Hindi reader. There has also been exorbitant use of the ship jargon in Hindi. For most readers, all the maritime life will need a little research to get and then again to translate it into another language might seem like an effort. Agreed that both the reader and the writer have to be equally creative partners to make a book complete but it should not lean towards being a textbook exercise.
That said, I completely skipped the effort of researching and shallow read the shipping terms and let imagination do its work and much like Deeti's vision, the ship took a shape on its own.
