‘Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories’ by Amitav Ghosh

Expand

Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh

Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh is best known for his fictional depiction of the 19th century opium trade, the Ibis trilogy. His latest work of nonfiction, Smoke and Ashes, picks up the topic by examining the worldwide impact of opium trafficking, but encompasses several other themes. Ghosh reflects on his family history and finds that they, too, were complicit in the opium industry developed by India’s British colonizers. Opium was so profitable that the proceeds helped finance Britain’s empire in the 19th century.

But while he calls Britain a narco state for running an extensive smuggling operation in China, he sketches the narcotic’s long precolonial history and finds that many Indians during the Raj trafficked in the drug for their own interests. Huge fortunes were made by merchants of many religions—Hindus, Muslim, Armenians, Jews and Jains—abetted by India’s maharajahs. Ghosh dismisses the stereotype of those local princes as decadent hedonists. Many of them ploughed drug money into public projects benefitting the health and education of their subjects. The region of India directly controlled by Britain’s opium agency, Bihar, remains the nation’s poorest, scarred by a century of brutal agricultural extraction, forced labor in the opium factories and a surveillance system the East Germans could have envied.

Ghosh paints his condemnation of British imperialism om a wider canvas of global exploitation, conducted under the banner of free trade, that encompassed the transatlantic slave system, the silver extracted from Spain’s New World colonies and the cotton grown on American plantations. “The stamp of the past sometimes sinks so deep into the fabric of everyday life that its traces are difficult, if not impossible, to erase,” he writes.

Get Smoke and Ashes at Amazon here.

Paid link