‘Opium financed British rule in India
Leading Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s critically acclaimed new novel Sea
of Poppies is set during a time when opium trade out of India was
flourishing during British rule.
The novel spans three continents and close to two centuries and is
the first in a planned historical trilogy set in the 19th century.
Ghosh, a trained anthropologist and historian with a doctorate from
Oxford University, spoke to the BBC’s Soutik Biswas on the colonial
opium trade.
Sea of Poppies is a historical novel. Is it the fact that the
British were the world’s biggest opium suppliers two centuries ago that
led you into this story?
I should correct you. It was not two centuries ago. Under the
British Raj, an enormous amount of opium was being exported out of
India until the 1920s.
And no, the opium story was not really the trigger for the novel.
What basically interested me when I started this book were the lives of
the Indian indentured workers, especially those who left India from the
Bihar region.
But once I started researching into it, it was kind of inescapable
- all the roads led back to opium. The indentured emigration [out of
India] really started in the 1830s and that was [around the time of]
the peak of the opium traffic. That decade culminated in the opium wars
against China.
Also all the indentured workers at that time came from all the
opium growing regions in the Benares and Ghazipur areas. So there was
such an overlap there was no escaping opium.
When and how did you end up researching and learning more about the British opium trade out of India?
I was looking into it as I began writing the book about five years ago. Like most Indians, I had very little idea about opium.
I had no idea that India was the largest opium exporter for
centuries. I had no idea that opium was essentially the commodity which
financed the British Raj in India.
