Even though historians have just scratched the surface of opium, future research may expose more undisclosed information about it. “However, I will not write about it anymore,” Amitav Ghosh says in his recent interview with the Desh magazine.

The publication of Ghosh’s latest non-fiction Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories (4th Estate, 2023) marks the end of a two-decade-long research of opium.

It is the last addition to the scholarship of his best-selling Ibis trilogy, namely, Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015), where Ghosh dug deep into the workings of the British Empire’s opium trading system and its effects.

Similar to other non-fiction writings of Ghosh—The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse(2021)—the book is a semi-autobiographical take on how he sets forth into the world of Papver Somniferun, the opium poppy.

Ghosh mentions in the interview with Desh magazine that not much work has been done on opium, but during colonial times, opium was more important than sugarcane for British India’s economy.

Opium’s history has been Eurocentric up until the publication of the first instalment of the Ibis trilogy. This is why historian Antoinette Burton called it a ‘world history from below’. Also, Ghosh has been a part of the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG). Even in most of his interviews, he mentions that he is interested in the people who are silent in the archives.

This book is a part of this larger project and helps the readers understand the history of opium from the other side of the coin.

For the readers who are not familiar with the Ibis trilogy, Smoke and Ashes can be enjoyed as a standalone work. Nevertheless, Ghosh oscillates back and forth to the trilogy helping the readers to connect a few dots, that were not dealt with in detail before, but this does not mean that a new reader will trail behind. The book is a page-turner for both kinds of readers.

The book begins with a void on maps, China, which for Ghosh was a “uniformed blackness” that can be marked: “Here be dragons.” It was during his research in Mauritius that he came to realise the “flow of seaborne traffic” in the Indian Ocean was not only between India and the West but also with a particular place in China, Canton.

This took him to Guangzhao in 2004, where he spent a few weeks. He comes to realise the entanglement between South Asia and China only on his return to India. The linguistic connections have started to lay bare around him, which had never crossed his mind before.

Before the nefarious poppy took control over the economic system, there lay a plant that was draining the British Empire’s economy: tea. The Empire was highly dependent on imported tea from China; on the other hand, China was uninterested in trading it for wares the Empire had to offer. Nevertheless, there existed a readymade market for opium, which attracted the attention of the East India Company.

China banned the importation of opium in 1729 way before the company took up its production. Thus, the company manoeuvered other means to circumvent and smuggle it into the celestial land, and in the end waged war in the name of free trade, which we now know as the Opium Wars, an important turning point for East Asia.

Opium had been cultivated and traded among the locals before the British colonial regime but not at scale. Taking over opium production, the East Indian Company turned it into an industrial system, built factories and went into mass production and distribution.

One of the interesting approaches Ghosh takes is depicting the mise en scène of these factories and their surroundings from both the colonisers and colonised perspectives through narratives of writers as well as painters of that time. It is fascinating to see a few well-known names pop up here and there which will amuse the readers, and therefore, even though tempted, I refrain myself from mentioning any of them here leaving it to the readers to explore.

As a neo-materialist in his own right, Ghosh’s treatment of Opium as an agent is not surprising. Opium is put at the centre of his research, which leads him to a different part of Asia just as Nutmeg did in his previous non-fiction.

Rather than reducing it as a consumable commodity, Ghosh’s approach shows the readers that material objects may be brought together or separated. This brings to the fore the contemporary global capitalist system that we are currently a part of.

Smoke and Ashes is crucial for the present moment because—besides its stand-alone interest in opium—it is a compliment to the recent developments on the growing interest in South Asian and East Asian relations as India and China turn into global powers.

Therefore, the book can be read along with the recent works of Tensen Sen, Adira Mangalagiri, Gal Gvili and Sugata Bose, etc. The book exhibits a different version of a cosmopolitan Global South in the backdrop of the British Empire’s opium business.

Overall, it is not just a journey by the writer, like the title suggests, but also a journey by the readers as well: a journey that takes readers back in time to decolonise opium’s history.

________________________________________

The writer is a graduate student, Critical Global Studies, Sogang University, Republic of Korea