Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal

Impact Factor 6.8992 (ICI) http://www.rjelal.com; Email:editorrjelal@gmail.com ISSN:2395-2636 (P); 2321-3108(O)

Vol.6.Issue 3. 2018 (July-Sept)

224 G. KALAIYARASAN, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI

DIASPORIC VISTA IN AMITAV GHOSH’S SEA OF POPPIES

G. KALAIYARASAN1, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI2

1M.Phil Scholar, Department of English, Prist University, Thanjavur, 2Asst. Professor, Department of English, Prist University, Thanjavur.

ABSTRACT

Amitav Ghosh is one of the leading writers of Indian English literature. The novel highlights multiple concerns that the author used to project, directly or indirectly in his work of fiction. The author focuses on almost every character belonging to different levels of society. Diasporic vista in amitav ghosh’s sea of poppies Here in this point of view, Ghosh sincerely reveals the plight of the farmers like Deeti who fell in the clutches of the English businessmen and began poppy plantation. The novel highlights multiple concerns that the author used to project, directly or indirectly in his work of fiction. In the endeavour to stand with two cultures; the old one is lost and the new one is obtained, diasporic writing is distinguished by a “dislocation from” and “relocation to” a foreign region. It is always in flux and therefore evolving by nature. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is a novel in relation to diasporic sensibility and reconstruction of identity. It has a number of characters, who groan under the British rule. Keywords: Diaspora, Oppression, Imperialism, Colonialism, Subaltern, Hybridity,

Girmitiyas, Black water, Indenture, Ibis.

.

INTRODUCTION

English literature is one of the most visible

majors at any college or university, with huge a

portion of students enrolling. Indian English

Literature is an honest enterprise to demonstrate

the ever rare gems of Indian Writing in English. From

being a singular and exceptional, rather gradual

native flare - up of geniuses, Indian Writing has

turned out to be a new form of Indian culture and

voice in which India converses regularly.

Indian Writers - poets, novelists, essayists,

and dramatists have been making momentous and

considerable contributions to world literature since

pre - Independence era, the past few years have

witnessed a gigantic prospering and thriving of

Indian English Writing in the global market.

The Indian English fiction has had a

meteoritic growth during the dawn of the

millennium year and the writing in all genres of

literature has gained momentum, particularly the

Indian novel, the doyens of the Indian writing like

R.K.Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and their ilk promoted

the conventional mode of writing. The crusaders of

the contemporary and modern era include Salman

Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and many

more. They elucidate and substantiate strength of

the emerging modern voice of India, which has the

vibrancy and energy of a gushing artesian along with

an unmatched resolve to experiment and explore

new avenues of writing novels. A host of

contemporary post - colonial writers like Rushdie,

Arundati Roy, Meena Alexander, Anita Nair and

Jhumpa Lahiri have initiated the process of

decolonizing the 'Colonial English' and using it as a

medium to express Indian thoughts and sensibilities

with a distinctive Indian style.

Later novelists like Kamala Markandaya

(Nectar in a Sieve, Some Inner Fury, A Silence of

Desire,Two Virgins), Manohar Malgaonkar (Distant

Drum, Combat of Shadows, The Princes,A Bend in

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal

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Vol.6.Issue 3. 2018 (July-Sept)

225 G. KALAIYARASAN, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI

the Ganges and The Devil's Wind), Anita Desai (Clear

Light of Day, The Accompanist, Fire on the

Mountain, Games atTwil ight), and Nayantara Sehgal

captured the spirit of an independent India,

struggling to break away from the British and

traditional Indian cultures and establish a distinct

identity.

Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956) is an

Indian writer best known for his work in English

fiction. Ghosh is the author of The Circle of

Reason (his 1986 debut novel), The Shadow

Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome(1995), The

Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004),

and Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume of The

Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the Opium

War, which encapsulates the colonial history of the

East. Ghosh's River of Smoke (2011), is the second

volume of The Ibis trilogy. The third, Flood of Fire,

completing the trilogy, has been published 28 May

2015 to positive reviews. Most of his work deals

with historical settings, especially in the Indian

Ocean periphery.

The Circle of Reason won the Prix Médicis

étranger, one of France's top literary awards. The

Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and

the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta

Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for

1997. Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the

2008 Man Booker Prize. It was the co-winner of

the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2009, as

well as co-winner of the 2010 Dan David Prize. River

of Smoke was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary

Prize 2011. The government of India awarded him

the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2007. He also

received - together with Margaret Atwood - the

Israeli Dan David Prize.

Ghosh famously withdrew his novel The

Glass Palace from consideration for

the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, where it was

awarded the best novel in the Eurasian section,

citing his objections to the term "commonwealth"

and the unfairness of the English-language

requirement specified in the rules. Ghosh received

the lifetime achievement award at Tata Literature

Live, the Mumbai LitFest on November 20, 2016.

Indian Writings has innumerable value in

English Literature. While speaking Indian Writings

we can’t move without diaspora reading. It has been

emerged in recent days. Indian writers are also

participated in writings about immigrants’

longingness, journey for identity, recollecting past

and indentured labours.

Diasporas occur as much across time as

across space, for they are like their motivations,

continual but changing processes of the scattering of

peoples. They do not automatically exclude

assimilation or resettlement.

In the Indo-Christian tradition the fall of the

Satan from heaven and humankind’s expulsion from

the Garden of Eden, metaphorically the separation

from God constitute diasporic situations.

Etymologically diaspora with its connotative political

weight is drawn from Greek, meaning to disperse

and signifies a voluntary or forcible movement of

the people from the homeland into new regions.

According to Rushdie, the migrants arrive

from the native land and the migrants run from

pillar to post crossing the boundaries of time,

memory and history, carrying with them the vision

and dreams of returning to their homeland as and

when the migrants like and find fit to return.

According to V.S. Naipaul, the Indians are

well aware that their journey to Trinidad had been

final, but these tensions remain a recurring theme in

diasporic Literature.

DIASPORIC VISTA IN AMITAV GHOSH’S SEA OF

POPPIES

Amitav Ghosh is a prominent one among

these new diasporic writers. However, as far as the

Sea of Poppies is concerned, Ghosh takes a new

stance in that he writes not about his own

experiences in a diasporic individual. Rather, as a

trained anthropologist and historian, he delves into

the history of the first wave of Indian diaspora

which have been relatively neglected in the corpus

of diasporic writings by authors of Indian origin.

Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh‟s first

volume of the Ibis trilogy, which traces several

characters from different levels of society united

chiefly through their personal lives aboard a ship

and through their connections to the opium and

slave trades. This remarkable novel unfurls in north

India and the Bay of Bengal in 1938 on the eve of

British attack on the Chinese ports known as the

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal

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Vol.6.Issue 3. 2018 (July-Sept)

226 G. KALAIYARASAN, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI

First Opium War. A group of people from different

caste and class were moving together by leaving

behind their past to find their way of living on the

Ibis to go to Mauritius. Ibis is an ex-slave-trading

ship bound for Madagascar with its cargo of Opium,

indentured labours and criminals.

Sea of poppies narrates a period namely

earlier nineteenth- century colonial history in Asia

where he has delineated the individual self

guagmired in the kaleidoscope spatio-temporal

reality of the society. The characters in Ghosh’s

novel have chosen to travel across the Indian Ocean

to an unfamiliar island where they must reconstruct

new identities.

Keeping the difficulties aside, Ghosh

attempts to create a fictional history of the

indentured diaspora of nineteenth century India by

relying on historical sources from a number of

scholars, lexicographers, linguists and historians

which he gratefully acknowledges. Ghosh is

preoccupied with the question why the Indians

became indentures in the first place. He delineates

the socioeconomic conditions of the British Raj in

which the farmers of the Gangetic plains had been

forced to cultivate opium leading to the rapid

destruction of the agrarian economy thereby

depriving the farmers of their sustenance as Ghosh

records:

The town was thronged with hundreds of other impoverished transients, many of whom were willing to sweat themselves half to death for a few handfuls of rice. Many of these people had been driven from their villages by the flood of flowers that had washed over the countryside: lands that had once provided sustenance were now swamped by the rising tide of poppies; food was so hard to come by that people were glad to lick the leaves in which offerings were made at temples. . . . (SOP 202) Set against the backdrop of opium war and

migration of Indians as indentured labour to sugar

plantation islands, Sea of Poppies explores socio-

cultural and civilizational impact on Indian diaspora

as a consequence of British exploitation. It suggests

the „labour diaspora‟ with its mercantile history.

Here, the diasporic consciousness evolves among

workers and they are addressed as „girmitiyas‟

noticeably. Diasporic writing are related with two

kinds of migration, the one that is forceful as in case

of indentured labour occurred during late 18th and

19th centuries, or willingly to seek better prospects

in life and career. Prof. Makarand Paranjape, in his

essay, “Displaced Relations: Diasporas, Empires,

Homelands” (2001) argues, that “to first category

belong all those migrations on account of slavery or

indentured labour, while the second would

encompass the voluntary migrations of businessmen

and professionals who went abroad in search of

fortune” (8). Migration becomes a new identity to

the characters in the novel as Deeti is termed as

„Kabutari-ki ma‟, on the ship.

A survival tale of desperation and

adventure, Sea of Poppies is also very much about

language. In fact, the author seems to have

deliberately set about to create a primer for his

readers in Maithili / Bhojpuri and the arcane

domestic English of the Indian subcontinent which

was to become the common parlance of the British

ruling class. The linguistic calisthenics of the

dialogues, rather than the dense story line, may

prove to be the main stumbling block for many

readers. While the foreign tongue of the native

characters is dutifully clarified in Standard English,

Ghosh liberally puts words from Lascar lingo and

Hobson-Jobson without the benefit of translation in

the mouths of characters who actually converse in

English. Those fluent in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, will

be able to decipher the antiquated mongrel English

of those speakers. Others may lose patience after a

few tries. With the colourful characters, another

bedazzling aspect of Sea of Poppies is the clash and

mingling of languages.

Bhojpuri, Bengali, Laskari, Hindustani,

Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and a fantastic

spectrum of English including the malapropisms of

Baboo Nob Kissin, Burnham’s accountant, create a

vivid sense of living voices as well as the linguistic

resourcefulness of people in diaspora.

The victim of this rigidity of caste and

religious structures is the misplaced love of Jodu,

the Muslim lascar, and Munia, a Hindu indentured

labourer on board the Ibis. When their frequent

flirting comes to light, Jodu is savagely beaten up for

taking liberties with a Hindu girl – a precursor to

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227 G. KALAIYARASAN, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI

today’s rampant honour killing courtesy Khap

Panchayats and Kangaroo Courts. Although Munia

was a willing party to their lighthearted relationship,

she escapes lynding because a majority community.

Joining forces with the outraged Hindu foreman in

the savage beating is the British first mate, Crowle,

who really had nothing to spur his anger except

personal dislike. Ghosh’s powerful indictment of

colonial and native repressions and questionable

ideals is explicit throughout the novel sea of

poppies. This is evident in the speeches he attributes

to Mr. Burnham, Mr. Doughty and Justice Kendall in

particular, when they hold forth on the divine right

of the British to begin waging the Opium Wars

against China between 1839-1860. To each of the

above imperialists, Ghosh attributes the ‘official’

pretext for mounting an attack: Mr. Burnham, the

wealthy merchant who profits enormously by the

sale of opium, declares:

“No one dislikes war more than I do – indeed I abhor it. But it cannot be denied that there are times when war is not merely just and necessary, but also humane. In China, that time has come: nothing else will do” (SOP 260). In another conversation with Neel Rattan,

he privately admits that the only reason they are

going to war with China is that the British cannot do

without importing Chinese tea and silks, but the

Chinese are not interested in British products, so

forcing opium on them is a way to redress the

imbalance of trades between the two countries.

Cloaked in what is now familiar war jargon, Burnham

describes this offence as:

“The war, when it comes, will not be opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and its principles apply as much to opium as to any other article of trade” (SOP 115). Rising to a crescendo of spuriousness, he

proclaims:

Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is

Jesus Christ” (SOP 116).

This specious rhetoric is exposed for what it

really is by Tony Davies, in his book Humanism, who

sees through the symbiotic connection between this

brand of melancholic humanism and sadistic

imperialism.

Sea of poppies colossally deals with the

term diaspora and diasporic identity. The most

important thing that prevails in this novel is that the

displacement and the journeys of the characters are

undeniable. The subalterns of the society move due

to their personal reasons or bad situation. In the

beginning of the novel we find Deeti a simple, pious

lady caring mother and an efficient house wife.

Married to Hukam Singh, a crippled worker in

Ghazipur opium factory, the unfortunate Deeti

figures out that on her wedding night she was

drugged with opium by her marriage in place of her

infertile husband this brother in law is the real

father of Deeti’s daughter Kabutri when he husband

dies Deeti sends Kabutri to stay with relations. Deeti

looks almost certain to meet her doom when she is

forced to consider sati ritual (immolation on her

husband’s funeral pyre) as the only option in the

face of threats of more rapes by the brother-in-law,

but then Kalua, the untouchable caste ox man from

the neighbouring village comes to her rescue the

couple flee and unite. This is not acceptable to the

high caste villagers. In order to escape Deeti’s in-

laws, she and Kalua become indentured servants on

a schooner named Ibis.

Neel Rattan Halder, a wealthy rajah whose

dynasty has been ruling the ‘zamindary’ of Rakshali

for centuries; is confronted by MR. Burnham with

the need to sell off his incurred when trading opium

with china at the height of the opium trade has

come to a standstill, as a result of the resistance

shown by the Chinese authorities he is left with no

money to clear his loan when MR. Burnham

proposes to settle the load for Halder’s ‘zamindary’

is his family’s ancestral property and selling it would

mean dependents living in his house and

‘zamindary’. He is tried for forgery but it is a sham

trial orchestrated by Burnham and his cronies. The

court punishes him by sentencing him to work as an

indentured labourer for seven years in Mauritius. It

is then that he meets ‘Ah Fatt’, a half-Chinese; half-

Parsi opium addict from canton, his sole companion

in prison since the two will eventually be

transported together on the ibis. Paulette Azad

Baboon ob Kissin move because of their choice

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal

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Vol.6.Issue 3. 2018 (July-Sept)

228 G. KALAIYARASAN, Dr. R. VISHALAKSHI

Lascars and others moves for economic reasons and

Neel, the king moves due to colonial injustice. Their

events & situations of life act as a catalyst for their

movement be it any global notional or personal

reasons. Ghosh in his novel Sea of Poppies deals

with the first wave of Indian diaspora, referred as

old diaspora. Though this aspect of diaspora has

been somewhat ignored in the corpus of diasporic

writings yet Ghosh has made an effort to depict a

true picture of it. As an anthropologist and historian,

he takes help of historical records, lexicographers,

linguists, historian and document to present the

picture of the indentured diaspora of nineteenth

century India. The culture of diaspora is global in the

sense it generates its own culture beyond the ethnic

boundaries. In diaspora moving across the

boundaries is symbolically crossing the boundaries.

At one place Neel is told that “when you step on

that ship, to go across the Black water, you and your

fellow transportees will become a brotherhood of

your own; you will be your own village, your own

family, your own caste”(314). On the ship the

passengers from various sections had a story of

exploitation torment and deprivation at the back.

The place their origin has never been the place of

their self-satisfaction but the diaspora place that is

ship becomes their place of living together and self-

development. The social interaction during these

sea voyages begins a process of rebuilding ethnic

and cultural identities. The class or gender

subalternity in diaspora does not confirm a lack of

identity rather they reconstruct a new identity and a

new life full of self-respect and dignity. In the novel

Ghosh has shown the rebellious approach of those

people who boarded the Ibis and leave behind their

identities in terms of caste, religion etc.

Conclusion

Amitav Ghosh has remarkably focused on

the seriousness of impacts and effects of history on

people who lived amidst various historical events.

Migration and displacement are very significant role

in the works of Amitav Ghosh. With migration and

displacement as a subject Ghosh has very

consciously unraveled the historical situations and

conditions responsible for the movement of people

from their place of origin to a foreign land.

Sea of Poppies is indeed a remarkable

historical narrative which minutely captures the

journey and experiences of the North Indian

indentured labourers within the early Indian

diaspora. The novel is notable for its intimate

portrayal of the early diasporic community who

were forced to lose their caste and face several

hardships under the British colonialism.

However in the journey of their migration

Ghosh shows how the migrants dissolved the caste

system and became jahazbhais and jahaz-behens in

order to come in terms with their new reality and

also how they successfully maintained their own

individual, cultural and national identities even in

the worst circumstances. This novel is indeed a new

revision of the old diaspora of India and a

representation of their fears, hopes and aspirations

in the form of a historical tale.

Works Cited:

Agarawal, Devyani. Diasporic Consciousness in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies: Writing Nation and History, 28 August, 2011.

Badgujar, Avinash. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study. Kanpur: Chandralok Prakashan, 2014.

Bose, Brinda. Introduction. Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Brinda Bose. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2005.13-44.Print.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. 2nded. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers. 2008.

Dominic, K.V. Concepts and Contexts of Diasporic Literature of India. New Delhi: Gnosis, 2011.

Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009.

Rai, Rajesh and Peter Reeves. 2008. Introduction. The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational networks and Changing Identities. edited by Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves,1–12. London: Routledge.

Khair, Tabish. Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.

Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorising the Diasporic Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2007.

Mishra, Vijay. “Voices from the Diaspora.” The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora. Eds. Brij V. Lal, Peter Reeves and Rajesh Rai. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006. 120-139.

Rushdie, Salman. 2010. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Vintage.