Flood of Fire
Amitav Ghosh
Hamish Hamilton. First published 2015
This is the final book of the wonderful 'Ibis' trilogy by Ghosh, the first two being 'Sea of Poppies' and 'River of Smoke'. The opus is fictionalized history of the events leading up to and surrounding the opium wars, which, at least in hindsight, tore the mask off one of the terrible and hypocritical faces of colonialism, and its true motivation, unrestrained capitalism. Briefly, the history is as follows. In the late 18th and early 19th century, Englishmen, or more precisely, the English East India Company, had already established political dominion and commercial control over much of the Indian heartland. India was producing a lot of stuff - tea, spices, cotton - much in demand in Britain. Their export from the subcontinent entailed a large amount of transfer of currency from Europe into India - not remotely commensurate with the value of the stuff going the other way, but substantial nevertheless. The capitalist bosses then hit upon the idea of exporting opium from India to China, and using the profits to pay for all the good stuff going to Britain. This way British money would stay in Britain, and the immense profits of the opium trade would allow the British to still get all the goods they wanted. So they forced the peasants of the Gangetic plains to grow poppies and make opium, which they then bought cheap and shipped to China where they monopolized its distribution and sale. In the process the Indian farmers were immiserated, the Chinese populace became drug-addicted, and the English businessmen accumulated untold riches. In India the Company had a free hand. Not so much in China, where the Emperor and his mandarins exercised political control over the land. In the mid 19th century, they banned the import of the drug, seized and burnt existing stocks, and expelled the Europeans from the trading posts around Canton that had been until then allowed. The British Empire struck back. The East India Company of course had immense political power in Britain, and many of its shareholders held important positions in the government. It is not too far a stretch to say that Company was indistinguishable from the British nation state at this time. So in the name of Free Trade, and to protect 'legitimate' British commercial interests, the British Navy and Army swing into action, destroyed all the Chinese forces in and around Canton, and forced the Chinese Emperor to allow the sale of opium, and in addition cede the island of Hong Kong on a long 'lease' that came to an end only in 1999. [The similarities between these actions and present day international trade and commercial practices not only of America and Europe, but capitalist interests everywhere, are obvious].
In the first book of the trilogy, 'Sea of Poppies', Ghosh set the stage mainly in India, in what is now Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, in Calcutta, and aboard the Ibis, a ship transporting indentured labour displaced from the fields on the banks to the Ganges to the sugarcane plantations on the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. An immense cast of characters was introduced. They included a peasant woman Diti and her lower caste lover Kalua, seeking safety and a modicum of prosperity as indentured labour; Neel, a former Zamindar cheated out of his property and forced to seek employment as a Parsi businessman's clerk; Behram, the Parsi businessman from Bombay, seeking to make a fortune from the few fragments of the opium trade allowed to entrepreneurs outside the Company; Zachary, a Octaroon sailor from Baltimore, passing as a white man to escape American and English racism; Ah Fat, the illegitimate half-Chinese son of Behram; Burnham, a Company man epitomizing a lot of what is wrong about capitalism; and Paulette, a French naturalist's daughter, seeking her father who is hunting rare orchids in China. The second book, 'River of Smoke' was set chiefly in China. It introduced a few more characters, more importantly the historical mandarin Lin, who was chief administrative representative of the Chinese Emperor, and who was responsible for the initial banning of the opium trade. The negotiations and the seizure and destruction of the stocks are vividly described, mainly from the point of view of Neel, who is now working in Canton. The book ends with the Chinese blockade of the opium trade.
'Flood of Fire' does not exactly begin when the previous book stopped. Instead, a bit confusingly, it backtracks to follow the fortunes of a new character, Kesri Singh, who joins the Company troops and is sent to Assam to maintain the peace in the tea estates. Eventually, along with his commandant Mee, he is shipped to China, there to fight the Chinese and re-establish the holy British right to 'Free Trade'. Meanwhile, Shireen in Mumbai breaks from the cloying clutches of traditional Parsi society to sail to Canton in order to visit the grave of her husband Behram, dead in mysterious circumstances. She is assisted by Zadig, an Armenian and her husband's friend and colleague, eventually to become her new husband. These, a couple of other new characters, and most of those introduced in the previous couple of books, all meet in Canton during the climactic period of the Opium War, in which the Company dealt a crushing blow to the Chinese Empire. The final battles are described in great, sometimes heartbreaking, detail. And though most of the narration is from the British point of view, we are constantly lead to sympathize with the Chinese.
Amitav Ghosh weaves a great many strands of narrative to create this large and beautifully detailed triptych. One of his constant concerns is language. He explores the birth of different dialects of English. His own voice, the narrator's voice, is in proper modern day English, the kind you find in any Indian writing in English. It is fairly straightforward and bland, lacking even the kind of flourishes you find in the writing of, say, Pankaj Mishra. But his characters all speak to each other mostly in English, and each has a different dialect. These are captured extremely well. Two particular accents are used more than others. When the Englishmen who have long lived in India spoke their native tongue even to each other, they apparently used such a lot of words from Indian languages - Urdu and Hindi, mainly. Ghosh heightens the effect by retaining the archaic spelling of the words: burra/burree, tumasher, larkin... The other language that Ghosh takes delight is delineating is the pidgin English used by lascars, the able-bodied sailors recruited to European ship crews from every South and East Asian country. Apart from this, Ghosh conveys very well the other dialects of English as spoken by other groups of people - Parsi, Chinese, American and French.
Though there are many stories, and many characters, we remain invested in all of them. They are all interesting, even exciting, and proceed at a good pace, and conclude satisfactorily, if not all of them happily. There is humour in many of the interactions. One particular funny thread deals with the sexual encounters between the young and handsome Zachary Reid, and the beautiful, still young Mrs. Burnham, who has a boor for a husband. Mr. Burnham, and his partner Doughty, are about the only two characters in the book who are treated unsympathetically. The real villains of the triology are of course the British Empire and the greedy capitalists, but Burnham and Doughty, with their cupidity and pomposity, personify this villainy.
I am unable to decide if this is history masquerading as fiction, of simply fiction with a historical setting. The former, I think. History can be a matter of interpretation. Though there is no heavy-handed moralizing, the 'Ibis' trilogy is an angry view of the events from the colonized countryman's perspective.
Hamish Hamilton. First published 2015
This is the final book of the wonderful 'Ibis' trilogy by Ghosh, the first two being 'Sea of Poppies' and 'River of Smoke'. The opus is fictionalized history of the events leading up to and surrounding the opium wars, which, at least in hindsight, tore the mask off one of the terrible and hypocritical faces of colonialism, and its true motivation, unrestrained capitalism. Briefly, the history is as follows. In the late 18th and early 19th century, Englishmen, or more precisely, the English East India Company, had already established political dominion and commercial control over much of the Indian heartland. India was producing a lot of stuff - tea, spices, cotton - much in demand in Britain. Their export from the subcontinent entailed a large amount of transfer of currency from Europe into India - not remotely commensurate with the value of the stuff going the other way, but substantial nevertheless. The capitalist bosses then hit upon the idea of exporting opium from India to China, and using the profits to pay for all the good stuff going to Britain. This way British money would stay in Britain, and the immense profits of the opium trade would allow the British to still get all the goods they wanted. So they forced the peasants of the Gangetic plains to grow poppies and make opium, which they then bought cheap and shipped to China where they monopolized its distribution and sale. In the process the Indian farmers were immiserated, the Chinese populace became drug-addicted, and the English businessmen accumulated untold riches. In India the Company had a free hand. Not so much in China, where the Emperor and his mandarins exercised political control over the land. In the mid 19th century, they banned the import of the drug, seized and burnt existing stocks, and expelled the Europeans from the trading posts around Canton that had been until then allowed. The British Empire struck back. The East India Company of course had immense political power in Britain, and many of its shareholders held important positions in the government. It is not too far a stretch to say that Company was indistinguishable from the British nation state at this time. So in the name of Free Trade, and to protect 'legitimate' British commercial interests, the British Navy and Army swing into action, destroyed all the Chinese forces in and around Canton, and forced the Chinese Emperor to allow the sale of opium, and in addition cede the island of Hong Kong on a long 'lease' that came to an end only in 1999. [The similarities between these actions and present day international trade and commercial practices not only of America and Europe, but capitalist interests everywhere, are obvious].
In the first book of the trilogy, 'Sea of Poppies', Ghosh set the stage mainly in India, in what is now Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, in Calcutta, and aboard the Ibis, a ship transporting indentured labour displaced from the fields on the banks to the Ganges to the sugarcane plantations on the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. An immense cast of characters was introduced. They included a peasant woman Diti and her lower caste lover Kalua, seeking safety and a modicum of prosperity as indentured labour; Neel, a former Zamindar cheated out of his property and forced to seek employment as a Parsi businessman's clerk; Behram, the Parsi businessman from Bombay, seeking to make a fortune from the few fragments of the opium trade allowed to entrepreneurs outside the Company; Zachary, a Octaroon sailor from Baltimore, passing as a white man to escape American and English racism; Ah Fat, the illegitimate half-Chinese son of Behram; Burnham, a Company man epitomizing a lot of what is wrong about capitalism; and Paulette, a French naturalist's daughter, seeking her father who is hunting rare orchids in China. The second book, 'River of Smoke' was set chiefly in China. It introduced a few more characters, more importantly the historical mandarin Lin, who was chief administrative representative of the Chinese Emperor, and who was responsible for the initial banning of the opium trade. The negotiations and the seizure and destruction of the stocks are vividly described, mainly from the point of view of Neel, who is now working in Canton. The book ends with the Chinese blockade of the opium trade.
'Flood of Fire' does not exactly begin when the previous book stopped. Instead, a bit confusingly, it backtracks to follow the fortunes of a new character, Kesri Singh, who joins the Company troops and is sent to Assam to maintain the peace in the tea estates. Eventually, along with his commandant Mee, he is shipped to China, there to fight the Chinese and re-establish the holy British right to 'Free Trade'. Meanwhile, Shireen in Mumbai breaks from the cloying clutches of traditional Parsi society to sail to Canton in order to visit the grave of her husband Behram, dead in mysterious circumstances. She is assisted by Zadig, an Armenian and her husband's friend and colleague, eventually to become her new husband. These, a couple of other new characters, and most of those introduced in the previous couple of books, all meet in Canton during the climactic period of the Opium War, in which the Company dealt a crushing blow to the Chinese Empire. The final battles are described in great, sometimes heartbreaking, detail. And though most of the narration is from the British point of view, we are constantly lead to sympathize with the Chinese.
Amitav Ghosh weaves a great many strands of narrative to create this large and beautifully detailed triptych. One of his constant concerns is language. He explores the birth of different dialects of English. His own voice, the narrator's voice, is in proper modern day English, the kind you find in any Indian writing in English. It is fairly straightforward and bland, lacking even the kind of flourishes you find in the writing of, say, Pankaj Mishra. But his characters all speak to each other mostly in English, and each has a different dialect. These are captured extremely well. Two particular accents are used more than others. When the Englishmen who have long lived in India spoke their native tongue even to each other, they apparently used such a lot of words from Indian languages - Urdu and Hindi, mainly. Ghosh heightens the effect by retaining the archaic spelling of the words: burra/burree, tumasher, larkin... The other language that Ghosh takes delight is delineating is the pidgin English used by lascars, the able-bodied sailors recruited to European ship crews from every South and East Asian country. Apart from this, Ghosh conveys very well the other dialects of English as spoken by other groups of people - Parsi, Chinese, American and French.
Though there are many stories, and many characters, we remain invested in all of them. They are all interesting, even exciting, and proceed at a good pace, and conclude satisfactorily, if not all of them happily. There is humour in many of the interactions. One particular funny thread deals with the sexual encounters between the young and handsome Zachary Reid, and the beautiful, still young Mrs. Burnham, who has a boor for a husband. Mr. Burnham, and his partner Doughty, are about the only two characters in the book who are treated unsympathetically. The real villains of the triology are of course the British Empire and the greedy capitalists, but Burnham and Doughty, with their cupidity and pomposity, personify this villainy.
I am unable to decide if this is history masquerading as fiction, of simply fiction with a historical setting. The former, I think. History can be a matter of interpretation. Though there is no heavy-handed moralizing, the 'Ibis' trilogy is an angry view of the events from the colonized countryman's perspective.
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