Sea of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh
Sea of Poppies is book one of Indian author Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ibis is the name of an old slaving ship which is a key part of the story (though by no means all the action is set there). The other books in the trilogy are River of Smoke (recommended by economic historian Emma Rothschild) and Flood of Fire.
Recommendations from our site
“This book tells a story that we don’t often hear, which is about the opium trade and what it did to India, notably to the part of India I come from, Bihar. Why was India even important to the British or the East India Company? It was because of the opium more than anything else. It profoundly changed India, reaching deep into the economy of rural India. Till opium became their biggest trading item, the British didn’t really touch rural India. I learnt this thanks to Amitav Ghosh. The trilogy is about a group of people who have become indentured laborers on an opium ship. The three books follow loosely the lives of about five or six of the characters on that ship…It’s difficult to say what is the best thing about these three books. First, it’s the attention to historic detail. Second, the characters, and third, the attention to language and how it has morphed and died through time – Chinese-English, Laskari, colonial English. There are times in the book when your blood boils at the horrors of colonialism. And there are other times when you just think, ‘The human spirit is unbelievable, that people could survive such cruelty and exploitation and still come out on top with their humanity intact.'” Read more...
Radhika Jha, Novelist
