Read an exclusive excerpt from Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes

I eventually came to accept that China’s historical presence in my world was easy to overlook because it was for the most part non-verbal: it was not usually attached to the kinds of discursive concepts, like ‘development’ and ‘progress’, that have played such a large part in the writing of modern history.

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Or, put differently, while the West’s influence on my world was exerted through a near-obsessive elaboration of words and concepts, China’s influence was more subtle, almost invisible, wielded through the diffusion of practices, and through objects, like those that were arrayed on my desks in Calcutta and Brooklyn. Because objects are mute, and do not of themselves supply an explanation for their presence, it requires a conceptual shift to become aware of what it is that they do, in fact, communicate. This shift is especially taxing for those of us who, through training and education, have become accustomed to thinking about the world in ways that depend, almost exclusively, on language. And since language, of the human kind, is by definition an attribute of the species Homo sapiens, this means that all things non-human are, in principle, mute, in the sense that they cannot speak.

Of course, the objects that sparked my epiphany were not ‘speaking’ in any sense. Yet, they were communicating something to me silently, something that pointed to historical and cultural connections that were quite different from those suggested by abstract concepts like ‘Westernization’, ‘modernity’, ‘colonialism’ and so on. But in this too there was a problem, for the things that were assembled in front of me were not all definable as objects: the teacup, the tray and the sugar bowl certainly were objects, but what of the tea itself? The pale brown liquid in my teacup was something far more complicated than an object: tea exists also as dried leaves, as a living plant and as a species that covers a significant part of the Earth’s surface. ‘Tea’, then, is a vast complex of plant matter that is found in multiple forms; without that network of forms, the objects in front of me that day—the cup, the tray, the sugar bowl—would have no coherence. To think of those things on the analogy of words, then, would imply that there was a grammar or syntax that tied them together: and what could that grammar be other than ‘tea’ itself, a thing that is not a single object but a living entity, continuously evolving and finding new modes of articulation? This, in turn, would mean that the thing I had always so easily and unproblematically identified as ‘tea’ had a certain kind of vitality, a life that manifested itself in innumerable ways, seen and unseen.

To think of botanical matter in this way is to acknowledge that when humans interact with certain plants the relationship is not unidirectional; people too are changed by that association. This gives us an inkling of why some cultures regard certain plants as spirits or deities, whose interactions with human beings are mysterious, sometimes benign and sometimes vengeful. In the words of the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer:

In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brother of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place.

To look at China’s relationship with India through this lens is disorienting, but also, in some ways, enlightening. For this relationship is one in which botanical materials have played an inordinately large part, with certain plants entering into it so forcefully as to create patterns that have invisibly shaped culture and history, not just within Asia but also in Britain and America. So powerful, indeed, is the imprint of botanical matter on China’s relationship with the world that it demands exactly the kind of species-level humility that Kimmerer calls for, where it is acknowledged that there are beings and entities on this planet that have the power to amplify human intentions and intervene in relations between people.

This is not, by any means, to diminish the importance of the historical agency of humans. Far from it. It is to emphasize, rather, that humans have used many kinds of non-human entities in their relations with each other. Paradoxically, it is only by thinking of history without according primacy to humans, and by acknowledging the historical agency of botanical matter, that we can recognize the true nature of human intentions with regard to plants like tea. Conversely, it is the denial of the agency of certain non-human forces that often serves to occlude the intentions of humans who have used plants and other non-human entities to wage war upon their rivals and enemies.

(Excerpted with permission from Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories, by Amitav Ghosh; HarperCollins India, July 2023)