Have Ideas, Will Travel

In River of Smoke, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh banishes one of his characters, a French orphan, to a ship anchored near Hong Kong, then just a “wild, gale-swept” island off the coast of Macau. Paulette spends nearly the entire novel waiting there for news of a rare flower, the Golden Camellia, from a friend in Canton’s foreign quarter — “threshold of the last and greatest of all the world’s caravanserais.”

In the 19th century, these South China Sea ports bustled with people on their way to someplace else, and Ghosh meets me in the 21st century equivalent — a New Delhi airport-hotel bar called Savannah. He has a few hours en route from Goa to New York City, the two places he calls home, so we drink Indian sauvignon blanc, eat American potato chips and chat about common acquaintances on three continents.

(Read about Ghosh’s 2000 novel The Glass Palace.)

Though trained as an anthropologist at Oxford, Ghosh now scrutinizes humankind as a writer. With thick, white hair crowning an unlined face, he seems at once distinguished and boyish and, at nearly 55, hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for discovery. River of Smoke follows 2008’s Sea of Poppies as the second volume in the Ibis Trilogy, which covers the Opium Wars. In researching it, Ghosh stumbled across the forgotten history of India’s involvement in the sale of opium to China. “That’s an aspect of the Indian past that we simply do not know about,” he says. “It was kind of a revelation for me.”

The Ibis Trilogy began as a story about migration, a subject Ghosh has chronicled since 1986 in six novels and one exquisite memoir-history. His characters used to come across as improbable bit players of history — Englishmen in Bangladesh, Indians in Egypt, Burmese in India. But they are, in fact, the future — harbingers of a global diaspora that is larger and more important than ever.

River of Smoke spills over with startling first encounters and worlds within worlds (like the abandoned botanical garden on Mauritius “where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace”). For this material, Ghosh draws on his own experience of travel and dispersal. Some of his relatives trace their roots to colonial Burma; his father was a diplomat. Ghosh was born in Calcutta but spent parts of his childhood in Colombo and Dhaka.

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He left India for Oxford in 1978, never really expecting to return, and is amazed to see how fluid notions of place and identity have become. “Today, people can go to America but they don’t have to be totally American,” he says. “They can continue to be Arab, Chinese or Indians because they can come back anytime … That consciousness of the nation-state being the defining aspect of your experience, I think that is profoundly dissolving.”

His work bears that out. Ghosh is often clubbed with Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth as one of the best Indian writers of English, but he transcends the label. He is less interested in India or Indians than he is in uprooted people who share the experience of remaking themselves in a new place. His characters move between worlds, propelled by commerce, revolution and curiosity. In the Ibis Trilogy, they are jahaj-bhai, “ship brothers,” united by their common journey.

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“For the first 15 or 20 years of my writing, it was met with incomprehension almost,” he says. “The world at large was asking, ‘What is this?'” Now we know: Ghosh has been writing about globalization since before the word existed. Perhaps that’s why he is finally finding a wider audience in the U.S. For years, his books sold steadily in Europe and Asia but modestly in his second home. That changed with Sea of Poppies, a devastating portrait of the personal and political costs of the trade in opium, a commodity even more addictive than cheap oil. The book was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 — the year that Americans, too, suddenly found themselves vulnerable to the flows of global capital — and Ghosh is amused to find his lifelong ideas suddenly trendy. “It’s only because the world caught up with us.”

Despite being steeped in history, much of his work has the prescience of science fiction. The Shadow Lines, about a family torn apart by the division of Bangladesh, was published in 1988, prefiguring a much later wave of books about the traumas of Partition. In 2005, a year before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Ghosh explored Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, a fragile mangrove forest on the brink of environmental collapse, in The Hungry Tide. Says Indian book critic Nilanjana Roy: “Amitav tends to anticipate what we’re going to be interested in.”

(Read about Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide.)

There are also faint stirrings of Cairo’s Tahrir Square — young men at a loose end in villages with few prospects — in Ghosh’s 1992 nonfiction work on Egypt, In an Antique Land. Considered by many critics his most important book for its intimate style and use of history to illuminate contemporary conflicts, it traces two parallel narratives: that of Ghosh as a graduate student doing fieldwork in the Egyptian countryside and that of Bomma, a 12th century Indian slave whose story Ghosh mosaics together from shards of archived letters and journals. In piecing together an opinion on the Arab Spring, Ghosh warns that Americans are misreading Egyptians’ call for freedom. “A lot of those marchers are demanding exactly the opposite of what Americans think,” he says. “They are demanding a stronger welfare state, they are demanding higher wages through unions, they are demanding more benefits.”

Listen to Ghosh’s critiques of unchecked capitalism, imperial hubris or reckless military action, and it would be tempting to see him as playing to type — a leftist Bengali intellectual, pronouncing strident condemnations of the West in impeccable boarding-school English. But he is no ideologue. He acknowledges that a globalized world can be as thrilling as it is destructive.

This essential contradiction is beautifully expressed in Bahram, a character in River of Smoke. The Parsi trader is disgusted with what he has become — an opium smuggler serving the god of free trade — but knows that his life has also been freed by trade. “It was here, in Canton that he had always felt most alive … It was Canton that had given him wealth, friends, social standing, a son; it was this city that had given him such knowledge as he would ever have of love and carnal pleasure. If not for Canton he would have lived his life like a man without a shadow.”

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As Bahram comes into his own, his best friend, Zadig the Armenian clock merchant, implores him, unsuccessfully, “to speak for all of us who are neither British nor American nor Chinese.” In Ghosh, they find a voice.

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