Smoke signals: A Wknd interview with author Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh became the first writer in English to win the Jnanpith Award, one of India’s most prestigious literary prizes, in 2018. It’s a sign of just how effectively he has decolonised the language.

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Borders mean little to the 67-year-old who was born in Calcutta; raised across India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria; and now lives in New York with his wife, writer Deborah Baker.

Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), was set in India, northern Africa and the Middle East. His second, The Shadow Lines (1988), won the Sahitya Akademi Award and has featured on college syllabi.

He has written historical novels (The Glass Palace) and medical thrillers (The Calcutta Chromosome); fiction and non-fiction set in vanishing islands ravaged first by colonialism and now by the climate crisis (The Hungry Tide in 2004, and The Nutmeg’s Curse in 2021).

Between those two, he released his Ibis Trilogy, works of historical fiction that trace the lead-up to the First Opium War of 1839-1842. It was a war waged by England when China, concerned by the impact that opium was having on its population, tried to ban the drug in the country.

In Smoke and Ashes, released on July 15, Ghosh returns to the opium poppy, in a work of non-fiction that is part memoir and part travelogue, to explore how this one plant has contributed to what he refers to as “the current unmaking of our world”. “The story of the opium poppy is, above all, a story about human frailty and fragility,” he says. Excerpts from an interview.

* What is it about this plant that has kept you hooked for over 15 years?

In the course of writing the Ibis trilogy (released between 2008 and 2012), I realised that Papaver somniferum has played a hugely important part in human history – especially the history of colonial Asia – yet this story goes largely unnoticed even though all the relevant facts are easily accessible.

For instance, the part that the late-19th-century anti-opium movement played in the genesis of Indian nationalism is rarely mentioned in history books. And this history is very far from being over. In fact, the opium poppy’s role in global politics is growing in importance today.

It has an important presence in almost every major conflict currently underway in the world, no matter whether in Mexico, Myanmar or Manipur. Once you begin to pay attention, it becomes clear that this history is so vast that it would take many volumes to cover it all.

* Your last book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, is a work of non-fiction that focuses on the Banda Islands in Indonesia and the environmental impact of colonisation there. Opium’s history is also deeply rooted in colonialism. Do you see one as a larger disaster within the other – the exploitation of natural resources, the indifference to the impacts of commerce and other human activity?

The two narratives are so closely connected that they are almost the same story. Both The Nutmeg’s Curse and Smoke and Ashes deal with the role that certain botanical entities have played in enabling and empowering colonial exploitation and extractivism. Both stories throw light on the genesis of an economic system that is utterly indifferent to its catastrophic long-term impacts on society and the environment.

* In Smoke and Ashes, you write about your family’s association with opium, and how this personal history links you to the larger history of peasants being exploited. Can you tell us how you have navigated this? Are there any lessons here for the reader — so many of us, most of us, are complicit in past and unfolding injustices.

I should note that my speculations about my family’s possible connections with opium are entirely hypothetical. Indeed, that such a connection might plausibly exist came as a complete surprise to me. But it is, I think, beyond dispute that many Indian families had some sort of link with the opium industry. And this is true particularly of families that were involved in commerce and trade.

But this goes far beyond India. As I have shown in the book, many of the best-known families in the US were also connected to the opium trade, and this is also true of South-Eastern and Eastern Asia. The reality is that the current system of globalised capitalism was to a large degree founded on the opium trade.

Despite the abundance of research material, the world has yet to properly reckon with the part that opium has played in history, especially in the history of modernity.

* We don’t associate the pharmaceutical industry as strongly, with the excesses and ravages of opium. Why do you think that is? Is this changing, or changing fast enough?

The current opioid epidemic in America has certainly led to a major reckoning with the part that Big Pharma played in creating the crisis. But this relationship has a long history – in the 19th century too, doctors and chemists played a very important role in creating opioid epidemics. One good instance is the invention and marketing of heroin. In the late 19th century, this incredibly powerful drug was marketed as a harmless over-the-counter medication. I think India, as a major producer of pharmaceuticals, needs to pay very careful attention to this history.

* Is this something that is inherent to our view of our world – an inability to see the big picture all at once?

The story of the opium poppy is, above all, a story about human frailty and fragility. It shows us how we have consistently been out-thought and out-manoeuvred by a botanical entity. As with climate change, the broader moral is that we humans need to recognise the limits of our intelligence and our abilities, and act with due humility in relation to other species.

* Is this a change you think we can make?

To be honest, the story of the opium poppy leaves even less room for optimism than the story of climate change. But in a general sense it must be said, for our sanity as much as anything else, that there is always time.

* What’s next for you?

The one thing I am sure of is that I am done with writing non-fiction. I would like to go back to writing novels, but who knows what the future holds?