Opium, History and Narration in River of Smoke

Histories… take the form of narratives, and the ways in which the events described are portrayed, linked and made sense of are themselves susceptible to critical interrogation… historical events do not mean things in themselves but, rather, their meanings are generated by the ways in which they are described and linked together to form a historical narrative, and the resonances produced by that narrative depend on the recognition by its audience of the familiar story-telling devices it employs (Malpas 98).

 

River of Smoke is woven on the warps of history with woofs of individual lives. It is the tale of a city – the city that is called Canton – in the years that led to the first opium war that shocked China and caused its awakening. It became one of the main causal factors behind China’s getting exposed to the western ideas and practices and to its modernization. The imperial mission of civilizing the natives in the colonies, teaching them the gospel – of Jesus and of the free trade, and of making the world a better place (for themselves) was the central factor that shaped the world from sixteenth century onwards. It is seen at work in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke.

The imperial colonizing power had created its allies in their colonies but they had also created powerful and persistent antagonists. In River of Smoke Seth Bahram can be seen as an ally and Commissioner Lin as an antagonist of the imperial powers. Bahram, a very convincingly Janus like character can tell Napoleon very honestly and philosophically: “Opium is like the wind or the tides: it is outside my power to affect its course. A man is neither good nor evil because he sails his ship upon the wind. It is his conduct towards those around him – his friends, his family, his servants – by which he must be judged. This is the creed I live by”(River of Smoke, 105). Thus he tries to cover a clear trail of greed with a thick layer of specious rationalization. He is a colonial subject whose profit was allied with that of his masters, so he allied himself with them. It is the same trait that the postcolonial theory sees as the main reason behind the success of the imperial powers in colonizing and exploiting a large part of the world for a long time.

The Indian merchant was not duped into trading opium, nor was he coerced in any way. He chose his path with the sole motive of profit with the independence to take action. He wasn’t naïve or innocent. He was fully aware of what he was doing. The tenets of his religion, which he had explained to Napoleon, very clearly showed how the forces of light (Ahura Mazda or the Creator) and the forces of darkness (Ahirman or the Devil) are in an eternal struggle. Like any other Zoroastrian whose aim was to “embrace the good and to banish evil”, his path was clearly chalked out (102). Yet all he did was to embrace evil and to carry it to millions of Chinese every year, year after year, in the form of opium.

His power and part he played in the drama of evil on the stage of china was negligible when compared to that of the East India Company, the white merchants and the Government of Britain. They deserved most of the blame. Their role inChina’s enfeeblement is very clearly brought forth in Commissioner Lin’s public dispatch to QueenVictoria. The facts mentioned and claims made in it are both historically verifiable and morally just. He blamed the foreign merchants of seducing the people ofChinainto using opium for their profit and then flooding the country with illegally brought opium. It was the Dutch who had introduced non-medicinal use of opium toChina. In the beginning, the menace was primarily for the leisured upper classes and the masses ofChinawere comparatively free of any danger. When the Englishmen adopted opium as a commercial enterprise, they converted it into the hand of death and destruction. The foreign trade deficitEnglandwas facing because it needed the Chinese products, especially tea, butChinadid not need anything from them. Thus was created an immense foreign trade imbalance. It prompted them to “invent” opium’s addiction for the common man ofChina.

Opium, the powerful economic force, was a very potent drug. It controlled human brains and lead to addiction. Those who controlled the production and supply of opium also controlled its slaves. As Bahram very shrewdly explained to his sasarji: “Opium is just like that. It is completely useless unless you’re sick, but still people want it. And it is such a thing that once people start using it they can’t stop; the market just gets larger and larger”(River of Smoke 90). Opium became the medium of strengthening and expanding the Empire, as it was behind the generation of huge revenues that went into the Empire building.

In the beginning of their interactions with China, the west was totally at a loss because the Chinese wanted none of their products, whereas, they needed a lot from there. Thus originated a kind of trade that was in favour of the Chinese. It was totally according to the diktats of Free Trade, yet it was unprofitable. So it had to change. Opium became the medium of change when it was insidiously inserted into the Chinese market, legally, and later, against the law of the land. The “trafficking in opium tilted the balance of global trade to benefit the west”(Brook 3). The edicts of the Chinese emperor against opium were proven to be powerless because of the “deadly combination of expanding Chinese demand and skyrocketing British supply. … Lin Zexu was appointed imperial maritime commissioner in 1838 to stop the opium trade” (Brook 6). His tough measures culminated into the opium war
(1839-42), that ended with a shameful defeat for the Chinese.

It was this defeat, some historians claim, that opened China to the western influence and resulted into its modernization. Just like some claim that Indiabenefited largely through
its colonization by the British because they gave it the foundation of modern
nationalism and all the basic institutions required to run a state effectively. As
if India was a wilderness, sans any system, before 1757 and it would never have
modernized itself had it not been shamefully and deleteriously exploited by its
colonizers. The other side of the same coin of exploitation was the havoc wreaked on the Indian farmers. This devastation of the economy of two prosperous Asian nations was whitewashed by the white people and even some native historians is shocking. The course of Chinese history was changed in the brief span of less than three generations and they did it so effectively, efficiently and insidiously that the world started to believe that China had always been a heavy consumer of opium since time immemorial. The long lasting image of the Chinese opium dens and addicts spread throughout the world and stuck with those of Chinese origin well up to mid-twentieth century. This wholesale whitewashing of history and silencing of all parallel versions prompted Ghosh to begin his Ibis trilogy of which River of Smoke is the second part.

Ghosh had stated in an interview with BBC that he had started the Ibis trilogy with its first part, Sea of Poppies, as the story of indentured immigrants from Bihar. The indentured immigration had started in the 1830’s, at the end of the decade came the opium war withChina and the firm establishment of the opium based trade of the Raj. It was no coincidence, pointed out Ghosh in the same interview, that they had to leave merely twenty years after the opium trade stopped. Thus ended the cycle that had started with Warren Hastings’ coming up with the idea of balancing the trade deficit of the East India Company withChina. The other side of the same coin of exploitation was the havoc wreaked on the Indian farmers. That this devastation of the economy of two prosperous Asian nations was whitewashed by the White and even some native historians was shocking to him. His being a postcolonial thinker-writer made his position strong when he decided to create a series of novels on the imperial exploitation of a large part of his mother continent, i.e.Asia. The narrator and the characters with whom his sympathy lies at any point of time, have a voice that is strong and exposes incisively the exploitative nature and the double facedness of the concept of free trade and those who used it for their sole benefit – the biggest imperial power of all the times – England.

Free trade was the excuse that the English merchants gave to explain away their unforgivable
conduct. In fact, there was nothing “free” about their trade practices for others. Theirs was
the side that had all the freedom. They had the license to exploit under the banner of free
trade. It was not only the conservatives who favoured this legalized and systemic exploitation of the millions. Even the liberals were on its side. The British Parliament and queen were in league with the merchants whose actions brought the much needed revenues and many other things from all over the world. Mr. Charles King, the only honest man amongst all the merchants who had never tried to exploit the Chinese or trade in opium, and whose uprightness and goodwill were recognized by a personage as great as the Commissioner Lin himself, was universally disliked amongst white merchants. His refusal to deal in opium had resulted into his being thrown out of the clique of the merchants whose profit came from it.

The institutionalized and vicious cycle of the exploitation of the non-white peoples was because of the Empire over which the sun never set. The Chinese wanted no English products. Therefore, they were seduced to use opium. To adequately supply the demand thus created, they forced another of their colonies –India– to produce more and more of it by bringing a vast area of land under its cultivation belt. The Indian farmer was forced to stop growing other crops and to cultivate opium only. The sea of poppies inundated large areas ofIndiaand broke the age-old crop cycles and also damaged irreparably and irreversibly the sustainable way of land use and life. Patnaand Malwa opium were the varieties that were exported.Englandhad monopoly over opium trade in most parts ofIndia. Even if a native entrepreneur like Seth Bahram had not entered the trade, it would have gone on unhampered and unaltered.

It was because of the champions of free trade that opium became the foundation of the whole economic system of the Empire. It financed the Empire and the surplus that was generated went into the expansion of the Empire. The whole opium centric economy was, as Bahram told his father-in-law, very strange in nature. Opium was totally useless for an average healthy man. It became Important and useful only for its addicts. It was this fact that finally got the Englishmen success in opening deep inroads intoChina. The English merchants used all means, from rhetoric to brute force, in order to convince those who opposed their line of thinking. They perpetuated their ideology in various garbs. Religion, politics, economics, ethics all ingredients went into the making of the pot-pourri used to convince all races all over the world. Burnham, Jardine, Dent etc. are few of the most prominent voices that philosophy of a white exploiter. They are the forces of darkness to which Bahram sells his soul. He is betrayed at the end and regrets it later. Zadig Bey summed it all up very neatly when he warned his friend that the Chamber would fain yield him up to the Chinese just to save Dent, as there was no gunboat behind him.

Bahramji’s probable treatment in the hands of the English merchants would not at all be shocking, as it would be keeping with their treatment of his country and his fellow countrymen. The apostles of free trade increased the volume of trade with Indiain the seventeenth century, but when at the end of that century “great quantities of cheap and graceful Indian calicos, muslin and chintzes were imported in England, and they found such favour that the woolen and silk manufacturers were seriously alarmed… [they forced passing of Acts of] the Parliament … prohibiting… the use of any printed or dyed goods of which cotton formed any part” (Lecky qtd. in Raychoudhary 63). Later they flooded the Indian market with cheap factory made cloth and damaged the system of production completely. The East India Company converted India from the workshop of the world to the producer of raw materials for English factories and the consumer of their products, and “about £ 100 million was drained in Britain from India between 1757 and 1815” (Raychoudhary 68). When India’s manufacturing industries tried to survive even after this exploitation, laissez faire, or free competition among the unequals played the role of dealing the fatal and final coup de grace. “Political domination was the basic factor in bringing Industrial Revolution inBritain” (Raychoudhary 83). They same modus operandi was used onChina.

“In 1830, the auditor-general of the East India Company declared that every year at least £
4,000,000 had to be carried back fromIndia toEngland” (Fairbank 173). The Cambridge History further explains that this money was used to buy opium that was exported toChina, to be sold inCanton and the sale yielded another £ 3,300,000. Thus, west had finally found a way to address the huge deficit it was facing in its trade withChina. By 1830’s it had finally found something that it could supply toChina in return of many valuable things. Yet, no foreigners were allowed inside the walls of the city ofCanton itself. They were not allowed to sell their goods anywhere else either. Opium, that was the mainstay of their trade equation, was soon to be removed from it through an imperial edict that banned its trade all overChina. This edict was the final deciding factor that made the western merchants’ need to get unrestricted access to the Chinese market clear and pressing. What they wanted was possible only when all the Chinese restrictions on trade and movement of the westerners were lifted.

Whig liberalist policies found their compatible partner in the form of the Manchester lobby. Together, they adopted and modified fromChinaitself the government’s policy of non- intervention in trade policies and practices of the Chinese merchants. Ironically, guilds and a controlled market were the European way of trade and the exposure to new culture and system had brought in the novel idea of laissez faire toEurope. Laissez faire, a French word that literally means “to leave (somebody) to do (something)” took the form of the slogan of Free Trade and it was used against the colonies to exploit them. It was the same ploy used against the Chinese too but there they found resistance to their looting. Commissioner Lin stood against their plan, and he seemed to be succeeding.

In response to the Captain’s steps, the Commissioner blockaded the factories and ordered all
the Chinese people working there out of the enclave. The enclave was effectively sealed from all the sides. Even its riverfront was blockaded. The Chinese servants who were removed in the morning returned as a corps of militia and were posted in the Maidan. Their whole manner had changed with the change in their role. They had left their old clothes and manners behind and had donned new uniform and pride that was previously never thought of. Captain Elliott’s letter to the Commissioner that demanded travel permits for all, elicited a reply that underscored the true nature of opium trade. The letter stated that the white barbarian had

brought opium – that pervading poison – to this land, thus profiting themselves to the injury of others. As High Commissioner I issued an edict promising not to delve into the past but only requiring that the opium already here should be entirely delivered up and that further shipments should be effectually stopped from coming. Three days were prescribed within which to give a reply but none was received. As High Commissioner I had ascertained that the opium brought by Dent was comparatively in large quantity and summoned him to be examined. He too procrastinated for three days and the order was not obeyed. In consequence a temporary embargo was placed on the trade and the issuing of permits to go to Macauwas stayed. In reading the letter of the English Superintendent I see no recognition of these circumstances, but only a demand for permits. I would ask: While my commands remain unanswered and my summonses unattended, how can permits be granted? Elliott has come into the territory of the Celestial Courtas the English Superintendent. But his country, while itself interdicting the use of opium, has yet permitted the seduction and enticement of the Chinese people.  (River of Smoke 304)

The Comissioner demanded the surrender of the whole lot of opium and of all the foreigners signing a bond of obedience to his orders. They could then carry on with their trade, if it was legitimate. He knew that they could not seize the cargoes on the British ships as their naval forces were far superior. So, he took hostage all that were in the enclave. By his ploy he made them surrender all the opium. The merchants called it robbery and complained of bing forced to betray their investors. They were totally at loss in understanding how “subjects of the world’s moist powerful nation” were made to do so against their wish (River of Smoke 306). Mr. Slade offered them another perspective: that it’d give Lord Palmerstone a casus belli and it would then be possible to declare war. He presented his case with force and clarity and with precedents.

There was a heated debate in the British Parliament. Thomas Babbington Macaulay, the eloquent Whig parliamentarian, roared that the Englishmen belonged to a country unaccustomed to defeat, to submission or to shame; to a country which
had exacted such reparation for the wrongs to her children as had made the ears of all who
heard it to tingle … to a country which had not degenerated since the great Protector vowed
that he would make the name of Englishman as much respected as ever had been the name of Roman citizen. (qtd. in Fairbank 195). To this eloquent appeal to public emotions the Tory Gladstone responded with an appeal to reason and to the sense of justice and honour of the Englishmen. He declared the proposed war unjust and disgraceful. He openly condemned the act of his countrymen and also spoke against Captain Elliott’s protecting a dealer in contraband goods. He called the war unjust and was in support of the anti-war resolution. He had mentioned the British flag hoisted inCanton to support and protect drug trafficking. Lord Palmerstone convinced the Parliament that the issue at hand was not opium trade, but all future trade betweenChina andEngland. He reminded them that they had been insulted and war was the only reply. Both Elliott and Lin were removed disgracefully from their positions. Elliott’s replacement, Sir Henry Pottinger, had explicit instructions from Palmerstone to get hege sums of compensation, “opening of 4 new ports, retention of Hong Kong and the cession of more islands where goods could be landed free of duty” (Fairbank 201).

It wasn’t about the specific instance of the East India Company or opium trade. It was all about imperialism as an exploitative system. Lenin was to call it the most corrupt form of exploitation later. In his famous essay “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, Lenin pronounced: “The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid process of concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism”. Capitalism had its own tendencies and forces that grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into their most shameless and exploitative form – imperialism. Laissez faire demanded for a barrier free market for the home country on one hand. On the other hand, it gave rise to monopoly and its variations. “England became a capitalist country before any other, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, having adopted free trade, claimed to be the ‘workshop of the world’”(Lenin).

India was the workshop of the world in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was slowly converted into a producer of raw materials through a planned process that was to be replicated in all the colonies and even inChina. The mechanism of converting a workshop into a producer of raw materials and consumer of finished English products was perfected inIndia. The gradual and definite destruction of all native production and manufacturing industries, the molding of the nature of native economy and crop production cycles and the closing and opening game of domestic markets was something in which the English merchants and Parliament were adept at. They had ruined Indian industries and the capital looted from there and through the continued revenue generated from there, they sponsored industrial revolution and the expansion of the Empire. Their next cycle of capitalist expansion was to be funded by using the hitherto gained capital in cycles like that based on opium inChina. They wanted tea and gave opium in exchange. They had a surplus which was endangered. They reacted to that with barbaric and decisive force. The Chinese had always looked upon the British merchants as barbarians and time proved them right. The British and French gunships bombardedCantonand left only the factories unharmed. As Neel would tell Deeti, the angry mob set fire to the factories and they were never rebuilt. Later on, there was:

a typical ‘White Town’ of the kind the British made everywhere they went – it was cut off from the rest of the city, and very few Chinese were allowed inside, only servants. The streets were clean and leafy, and the buildings were as staid and dull as the people inside them. But behind that façade of bland respectability the foreigners were importing more opium than ever from India– after winning the war the British had quickly put an end to Chinese efforts to prohibit the drug. (River of Smoke 329)

Things had changed as the foreigners had forced the Chinese to open up so that they could bring more opium than they did before. Neel hated the enclave of Shamian and looked at it with disgust as “the new enclave was like a monument built by the forces of evil to celebrate their triumphal march through history”(River of Smoke 324).

Works Cited

Brook, Timothy and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. “Opium’s History in China”. Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839-1952. ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi.Univ. ofCalifornia Press:Los Angeles, 2000. Print.

Fairbank, John K. ed. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part 1. CambridgeUniversity Press:Cambridge, 1978. Print.

Ghosh, Amitav. “Opium financed British rule inIndia”. BBC News. 23 June 2008. Web. 27 November 2011.

–. River of Smoke. 2011. n.d. Web. PDF. 27 November 2011.

Lenin, Vladimir Illyich. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Fordham.edu. n.d. Web. 24 December 2011.

Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern.New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Raychoudhary, S.C.Social, Cultural and economic History of India. Surjeet:Delhi, 1998. Print.

The Legacy of Macaulay’s Minute

“India won freedom on 15 August 1947.”

A statement that’s a fact can never be challenged. Or it can be; depending upon the fact and the way it is used, along with the hidden assumptions that are made in order to reach the inference. There are two very important words in the statement that is at the beginning of this paper:Indiaand freedom.Indiaas a geopolitical entity definitely came into existence on the date mentioned in the sentence. It was freed of any foreign control on the date mentioned above, butIndiaas its people in totality was not granted independence. Yet, looked at in the hindsight, the assumptions may be challenged. Every Indian citizen, of any class, creed or caste, was guaranteed liberty, equality and justice in its constitution that came into force in 1950. The English colonials went away, but the colonization remained, in essence, intact. The white sahib left, but the brown sahib took his place smoothly and the transition was complete. A postcolonial perspective of the things reveals that the discriminatory power structure was left intact and was strengthened in the years to come by those with vested interests. Class, religion and caste became the bases for a very rigid stratification of the Indian society. Social mobility was the only means, apart from a nearly impossible or hopelessly and vaguely distant revolution, to change one’s status. The English had gone, but they had left behind their legacy: the whole political system ofIndia, along with its institutions that ran the whole nation, beginning from district to national level. They had also left a class of rulers in their place that consisted of a very strong and irreplaceable bureaucracy. It was the “culture determining group…the so called elites ofIndia…busy…observing the latest developments in the West” (Paranjape). It was impossible to do away with, and, at times, appeared to be even more powerful than the legislature or the judiciary. The one language that acted as the force binding all the persons in the upper echelons of this bureaucracy was English: both pre- and post-independence. It is not just inIndiathat it happened. It happened equally in all the erstwhile colonies, e.g. those in Asia andAfrica. Thiong’o, in Nigerian context, shows “how English serves to uphold the domination of a small elite and of the foreign interests that they are allied with”(Kachru et al 307). InIndiatoo, those who ruled generally interacted in English. Moreover, English remained the official language of interdepartmental communication. Although,

the constitution ofIndia[had] specified 26 January 1965 as the date on which English would no longer be used as an official language of the new state. Since then, in spite of attempts to phase out English, practical difficulties in implementing the original constitutional mandate have convinced the successive governments to leave the status quo undisturbed. (Kachru et al161-62)

It was the knowledge of this language, just like that of Persian or Arabic in the age of the Mughals, was and is, the surest way to better employment opportunities. English was and is a definitely and distinctively powerful language used by those in power. It is the surest, best and fastest way to achieve the mush coveted social mobility inIndia. Ironically, “English is the paradigm modern language of political and economic power; …the factor responsible for disenfranchisement of a vast majority of populations in the third world” (Kachru et al 305). There are, in fact, two nations in our country today: one that is designated as Hindustan, and the otherIndia.Hindustanspeaks vernaculars and dreams of climbing the power and social ladder. The English speaking, rich and powerful section of our country are designated asIndiaby thinkers today. The present paper is an attempt to trace the development ofIndiaand Hindustan from the pre-independenceIndia. Its focus will be on Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute of the Educational Policy (the Minute), 2 February 1835, that is widely blamed or acclaimed as the foundation of the future education policies of India, hence of future India. Taking up such an old link in the chain of colonial policy and using the past as a parallel to the present is justified by the fact that the past continues to live with minor changes even today. Even today there exist inIndiathe powerful elite who rules and the powerless masses that is ruled and exploited. Even from today’s freeIndia, there is a huge drain of wealth, like its pre-independence colonial days, to both a parallel black economy and to various foreign bank accounts. The juggernaut set in motion in the nineteenth century crushes the bones of millions of Indians even today, although they are citizens of a free democracy with freedom to choose between a whole set of options between a life in perpetually powerless poverty and a slow but definite descent into death. It is also important because English Language Teaching (ELT) policies inIndiadescended from those of the Raj era, just as many of the implicit assumptions regarding education and value of native civilization and languages. “It is education that plays the dominant role in suppressing local languages and forcing alien languages and cultural values onto people” (Kachru et al 306). InIndia, as Macaulay had planned, the system and medium of education planted in the past did their work perfectly.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute of the Educational Policy (the Minute), 2 February 1835, that Lord William Bentick had later assented to, was the cornerstone of the long term development of the education system of the Indian subcontinent as it “had the support of the powerful government lobby and was a classic example of using language as a vehicle for destabilizing a subjugate culture with the aim of creating a subculture” (Sharp qtd. in Kachru 37). Macaulay had written it, as a Member of the Council of India, in reaction to the policy of education being followed inIndiaat his time. The 1813 Act of the British Parliament had set apart one lac rupees “for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives ofIndia, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories” (Macaulay). Macaulay was totally against the way the above mentioned amount was used. He was heavily critical and disapproving of the Arabic and Sanscrit literature. His idea of “a learned native” was of a native “familiar with the poetry ofMilton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics ofNewton”, i.e. Indian only in external features, but for all intellectual and practical purposes steeped in western, nay English philosophy, science and literature. A scholar of the Sanskrit sacred books, Hindu rituals and philosophy was not to be called learned. Moreover, Macaulay based his strong plea for change in the educational policy on the explicit mention of the promotion of the knowledge of science among the colonized natives. The orientalists were campaigning for the maintenance of the status quo. Macaulay, on the other hand, was very sure of the uselessness of teaching “certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded”. He claimed with certainty that the vernaculars would become useless with the passage of time, being replaced by the dominant language: English. Time proved him wrong. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil are spoken by a very large proportion of the world’s population today. The number of people who call these languages their mother tongue is increasing day by day. Macaulay’s claim of the unscientific native sciences was not reached at through a scientifically valid research and analysis of only facts. It was based on baseless and immature opinions of an opinionated white man. Paranjape, in his “Decolonizing English Studies: Attaining Swaraj?” points towards the:

…examples of our indigenous science and technology… the advanced metallurgical traditions ofIndia. Nowadays we talk about the need to cut down on the high energy expended to make steel. InIndia, we had a tradition of small furnaces in which we made pretty high quality steel in villages. This skill was known and recorded in the 18th century and still continues today. Another example is inoculation. InBengalthere were people who toured the countryside inoculating adults and children against small pox. In the early 18th century, the British were learning from them. The latter made records, some of which are still available. Yet another example is plastic surgery. In Pune, for instance, barbers were expert plastic surgeons. There are detailed British records of how a person whose nose was cut off had a new nose grafted on to his face. Now, nose surgery is very sophisticated. Even today not everybody can do it. So also the case of artificial limbs, especially the world-famous Jaipur foot. These were made, and continue to be made, extremely effectively inIndia. These knowledge systems-and many more-were available inIndiain the 18th century and some of them survive to this day.

Macaulay’s confident assumption of the eventual exploding the native sciences was made with an arrogance that knew no bounds. It was with this very characteristic faith in his white racial supremacy that he declared: “We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country”. The unsaid yet widely believed opinion of his time was that the Orientals were beasts of natural impulses, given to the pleasures of flesh, and nothing else. His generalizations are so totalizing and confident that they leave one speechless with intellectual rage. He had the courage to pronounce: “All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of Indiacontain neither literary nor scientific information”. He was not alone in explicitly or implicitly mentioning so. There were many, among the colonized too, who were of a similar opinion. They had, as Paranjape points out, an “insufficiency thesis” regarding their own culture and its products. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a famous social reformer and enlightened Hindu who started Brahmo Samaj movement in Bengal, did not “have much use of traditional or Sanskrit learning”. He demanded for his countrymen the knowledge of the western sciences and the modern empirical method. It is this very “unqualified enthusiasm for techno-modernity” that Gandhi later opposed in his Hind Swaraj. “His Hind Swaraj …contains the anti-thesis of Rammohun’s insufficiency thesis. Gandhi advances what might be termed the complete self-sufficiency thesis. He says Indian civilization is superior to modern civilization”(Paranjape). He had questioned the very idea of a “western” civilization, defending his point by reporting the instance of: “A great English writer[‘s] work called Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. [W]herein he …called it a disease” (29). He went on to conclude: “According to the teaching of Mahommed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age” (30).

Macaulay was not making his assertions on his own authority, or in opposition to the claims of the point of view he opposed. In fact, one of his most infamous assertions is made on behalf of both Orientalists and Occidentaslists, as he had “never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature ofIndiaandArabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education”. It was their faith of their superiority, fed by their collective chauvinism, which made the colonizers blind to reason. Macaulay mentions very clearly that even among the orientalists, the Sanskrit and Arabic poetry, the best and choicest fruit of these classical languages, was seen as inferior to the European one. The Minute had not a single idea that was “invented”. Macaulay was just presenting the then prevalent line of thought that had matured through the long struggle between the two major and contending views the colonizers held of the colonized of the East: the Orientalist versus Occidentalist controversy. It was the overall discourse, i.e. “large body of texts with a similar intent and set of protocols”, of contrapuntal positions (Paranjape). It had generated all the ideas and the heat, one part of which is strongly present in the Minute. Neither extreme of views was race exclusive, as they had both white and brown proponents, depending on the part of grand narrative they were interpellated with. Yet, they did constitute parts of a structure and could only function while belonging to it. The Minute only present a set of ideas, not essentially and exclusively related to either the content or the medium of education. It is very important to focus on the Minute in detail because it is from this point of origin that whole subsequent system is alleged to have come, especially by those who criticize it.

 

Macaulay made sweeping generalizations disregarding both common sense and specific examples that might have proven it otherwise. He claimed that the English had “to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue”, while either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that in Bombay presidency vernacular was successfully used as the medium of instruction in schools. His linguistic chauvinism knows no bounds when he asserts confidently that English stood “pre-eminent even among the languages of the West”. His claim was neither unique nor uncharacteristic of his times. In addition to the obvious superior intrinsic value of English language, he was also presenting more concrete reasons:

 

InIndia, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other inAustralia, –communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire.

 

Thus he was presenting a very strong case for the adoption of English as the medium of education and also for an insidious infiltration of young minds when they were the most impressionable. He knew that “language is a system of culture, not merely a system of communication. [and a]… culture is deeply embedded in a language” (Paranjape). Thus he was aiming at something much more significant than just the medium of instruction. His explicitly expressed objective, just like that of his race, was regarding “a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society, of prejudices overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and sciences”. His race was there to civilize the ignorant barbarians of the East and he knew that the white man’s sacred burden ought to be shouldered with a dutiful faith. His arrogance, a very characteristic imperial arrogance, oozes out of the whole body of the text. He takes the implicit assumptions of his time as self-contained and self-sustaining axioms of the perfect Euclidean Empire. His certainty is amazing, as is his unshakeable faith in the superiority of his race. He opines that, “when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant”, the learners must be guided by their masters (pun intended), and not the other way round. His generalizations had no rational ground or support. He declared the literature, history, metaphysics and theology ofIndiaas “absurd”. With a very strongly chauvinistic assumption regarding his race and its culture, Macaulay asserted that the British must try to create a class of Indians who would act as interpreters between their countrymen and their white masters. He envisioned very shrewdly the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. To a large extent he succeeded in his plan. The postcolonial theory very clearly states that it is impossible for an alien nation to colonize and exploit another nation until they get ample support from certain sections of the colonized people themselves. The collusion of the colonized with the Empire was one of the main reasons not only behind its successful entry intoIndia, but also behind the sustenance of the colonial rule. Macaulay’s success was so complete that even today a whole set of countercurrents run in the Indian system, as was mentioned in the beginning of this paper. The colonizers had created an elite and language was an important element in the successful execution of their plans as “the colonizers were also in part linguistic codifiers, who were able to act as gatekeepers for those who wished to share in the economic and other benefits of becoming English users” (Kachru et al 307-08).

Macaulay’s confident assertions may be proven fallacious, illogical, and even ridiculous today, but, ironically, his prediction turned out to be true. English is the most coveted and the most popular medium of education in urban India. The hegemony of English language and literature is directly linked with the forces of globalization and polarization of powers – both military and monetary. As far as Indiais concerned, English happens to be the passport for securing gainful employment in the private sector. Thus, it acts as it did nearly two centuries ago, as is mentioned in that much detested and debated about document. Even poor people send their children to English medium schools in hope that learning English would definitely enhance their employability and will finally help in moving up from the social stratum they belong to. The same motivation was working exactly in the same manner in Macaulay’s time too. The language of power was creating market and learners at a very fast pace; just as it had done in past after the Muslim invasion and expansion in India. Macaulay had very incisively opined about the market demand for his language and its eventual spread in India: “Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant or profitable”. He had ample support favouring English against the classical languages of learning. Analysing Macaulay’s premises, assumptions and claims leads one to a coherent and distinct attitude he had towards life and humanity. He appears to have a firm faith in the superiority of the West over the East – aesthetically and intellectually, arising implicitly out of its geopolitical superiority. He may have been proven wrong about the geopolitical and temporal strength and extent of the Empire, but he was accurate about the predictions he made regarding the strength and future of the linguistic entity called the Empire of English language. Two hundred years after the Minute was written Randolph Quirk expressed a similar confidence in the future and power of his language: “a language – the language – on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep” (qtd. in McArthur xiv). It is this very empire of English language of whichSouth Asia is a part. A look at Kachru’s three circles very clearly indicates that Macaulay’s legacy stayed. Most of the erstwhile British colonies in South Asia (India,Pakistan,Bangladesh andSri Lanka) are found in theOuter Circle of English speakers (qtd. in McArthur 100). English stayed there, even after the Empire was done away with. It has now taken roots that have gone too deep to be uprooted in near future. Macaulay’s aim of creating an intermediary class was fulfilled. He did not know it fully that his prophesy would come true one day, especially when he was mentioning the future of English language in the world.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj. Navajivan: Ahmedabad, 1938. Print.

Kachru, Braj B. Asian Englishes Beyond The Canon. Hong KongUniversity Press:Hong Kong, 2005. Print.

Kachru, Yamuna and Cecil L. Nelson. World Englishes in Asian Contexts.Hong KongUniversity Press:Hong Kong, 2006. Print.

McArthur, Tom. The English Languages. CUP:Cambridge, 1998. Print.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Decolonizing English Studies: Attaining Swaraj?” swaraj.org. n.d. Web. 27 December 2011. 

India’s Hidden Apartheid and the Poetry of a Dalit Woman Activist

“Judgment day is long since due.”(Kandasamy, “Hymns of a hag”)

India Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s “Untouchables”, a
report that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) published in 2007 very clearly presents the state of Indian Dalits. The report states that the Indian Dalit is exploited, poor, under-educated and unable to live safely and comfortably, i.e. even their most fundamental needs of safety and shelter are not met in this country. They are continuously exploited both by individuals in the society and by the system and the governmental machinery that was erected to protect them. Not only are various forms of insult and deprivation but also everyday physical violence very common in their lives. They are humiliated, discriminated against in various ways, severely beaten and even brutally lynched by the powerful upper caste groups. All because of their “Caste—crueler than disease, emotionless, dry” (Kandasamy, “Prayers”). All because they were born to lower castes, or they dared to hope or dream for t he upliftment of their lot. The constitution guarantees equal opportunities and an honourable life to all Indian citizens; not for the Dalits. Practically for them, as the majority of the cases of atrocity prove time and again, no rights exist. The reason behind this exploited and subaltern-human existence of a considerable proportion of India’s population is rigid social stratification that is caste based. Various governmental institutions are composed of individuals whose identities are cast in the mould of caste. It is impossible for a human agent to transcend the barriers set by their very own identity that is socially programmed. If the ghettoization of the Jews was inhuman then the same must be true in the instance of an unofficial yet definite segregation of Dalits in India when it comes to residence, employment and basic public amenities. This paper is an attempt to look at the age-old barrier of caste in India, on a point of time that’s a decade after the world has entered a new millennium. It’s also an attempt to look at the condition of the Indian Dalit through the eyes of a woman. To do so, it has taken the poetry of a Dalit woman activist as its point of departure. Although the previous line essentializes Meena Kandasamy, it does so with her own consent. She describes herself in her wordpress blog as “a 26-year-old Tamil woman obsessed with Dr. Ambedkar’s dream of caste annihilation” and in her profile it’s given: “Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism”. In her “Another Paradise Lost”, once more, she is, “showing solidarity/ with activists and dissenters”. She is a committed writer and proudly asserts so. She writes, and tries to bring forth change through literature. The paper does not focus on her as a person, and on her personal emotions or views. It attempts to distil from her poems lines expressing the Dalit concerns, anger, angst and hope for change in a corrupt and rotten social system. As Paul had very aptly put: “In a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of the language is complicated, interesting and definitive” (Paul 60).

Kandasamy’s blog on wordpress is an adequate presentation of her poems. The present paper quotes her poems from her blog. Her poems are powerful, heartfelt and angry. The source of their power is millennia long exploitation of Dalits in India. They are driven by the dominant current of reactions against an exploitative system. They assert an individual or caste pride same as the various movements of the coloured peoples of the United States, South Africa or many other parts of the world do. These peoples whose voices had been suppressed for a long time, and who had been marginalized completely, had a Blakean choice before them. They could either create their own system or follow that of the others. Instead of choosing to live as branded “infra” humans in a malevolent and maleficent system, these “challengers of hierarchy” chose differently (“Another Paradise Lost”). They opted for liberty (limited initially but finally full) and equality, if not fraternity with amity, to begin with. Only God has the hypothetical power of creating matter ex nihilo. He is the only exception to the law: “Nothing will come out of nothing.” All human products of imagination are definitely the outcome of the creative processes of human mind, but that site of creation (the subject as an entity) is itself the point where various intersecting lines of effect meet. It is a very interesting thing when two peoples separated by several hundred miles of oceans, without any definite and prominent socio-cultural exchange, produce literature that has themes that may be called mirror images, albeit with unique features of their own. This paper uses Gangadher Pantwane’s comprehensive definition of the term “Dalit”:

To me, Dalit is not a caste
He is a man exploited by
the social and economic
traditions of this country.
He does not believe in God,
Rebirth, soul, Holy books teaching
separatism, fate and heaven
because they have made him
a slave. He does believe in
humanism. Dalit is a symbol
of change and revolution. (2-3)
Officially, India gained independence in 1947, so did the Dalits, in theory. The ground reality is different. Untouchability was decreed unconstitutional in India on paper but the people of that caste were never freed of the stigma in practice. They continued being the unpurchased slaves of the upper castes because of the monolithic social structure of India. The courses of the history of subjugation and exploitation ran on smoothly as ever. Voices were raised and action taken against the atrocity. The responding voices are a legion, but their core concerns are pronounced and clear, as is evident from an analysis of the poetry of the Indian Dalits. As the essay “India: ‘Hidden Apartheid’ of Discrimination Against Dalits” records, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women reported in 2007 “the plight of Dalit women and the multiple forms of discrimination they face. Abuses documented in the report include sexual abuse by the police and upper-caste men, forced prostitution, and discrimination in employment and the payment of wages”. There is a limit up to which such a treatment can be tolerated. This limit had been crossed a long time ago by the exploiters as “Agony is not always a forgotten memory” (Kandasamy, “Prayers”). The hitherto dormant volcano of the hearts of the Dalits erupts and the lava of their anger, discontent, frustration and angst flows out with force. The age old system of oppression and discrimination finds staunch opposition. Those who had been silenced by the forces beyond their control wrote back. Their poems assert their identity and the pride they take in it. They also emphasize their right to be treated as equals to their fellow mortals who claim themselves to be the more equals among the equals. The dispossessed, those whose dignity was snatched away, reclaim it and don’t hesitate to snatch it back from the usurpers even violently, if the occasion demands it. Upper caste men and their gods are equally hated and condemned in Dalit poems of catharsis. In fact, “the Caste Gods deserve/ the treatment they get” (“Reverence:: Nuisance”). It becomes clearer in Kandasamy’s “Maariamma”:
We understand
why upper caste Gods
and their ‘good-girl’ much-married, father-fucked,
virgin, vegetarian oh-so-pure Goddesses
borne in their golden chariots
don’t come to our streets.
We know the reasons for their non-entry into slums.
Actually, our poverty would soil their hears
and our labor corrupt their souls.
Moreover, “God, Lifeless as ever—watched grimly with closed eyes.
In resigned submission”, when His upper-caste favourite sons were creating, perpetuating and strengthening the exploitative caste system through millennia. Thus, “Life teaches: there are different Gods at different temples” (Kandasamy, “Prayers”). Even gods have caste in India. The upper class pantheon wouldn’t accept a Dalit goddess Maariamma, until she is sanitized, alienated from Dalits and is made a part of the upper caste gang of gods. The same holds for the Dalit human beings.
Dalit Women, the subaltern among the subalterns, the invisible, yet irritatingly present entities of this discourse, have been subjected to the worse kind of oppression. Yet their voice is heard amid the tumultuous uproar of multitudinous voices. In fact, it has never been silenced completely. They have their own history. A history in which are narrated various small victories of common yet uncommon Dalit women of the past. The women today feel proud of their “fore-mothers” and tell Paracetamol legends of the ones who:
Married a man who murdered thirteen men and one
Lonely summer afternoon her rice-white teeth tore
Through layers of khaki, and golden white skin to spill
The bloodied guts of a British soldier who tried to colonize her. . .
…some
Young woman near my father’s home, with a drunken husband
Who never changed; she bore his beatings everyday until on one
Stormy night, in fury, she killed him by stomping his seedbags. . . (Kandasamy, “Their daughters”)
The Dalit women have never been so effectively silenced as their middle class counterparts from Hindu upper castes. The oral and performative aspects of their expressions cannot be discounted as they have had a strong tradition of lavanis and tamashas where they have presented their thoughts candidly, although they are new to the expression in the form of printed words. The twenty-first century Dalit woman proudly asserts her identity and rights. She has the power to destroy the exploitative system and the exploiter too. She has the cause, willingness and means and she vents her rage:
Thin, stark-naked and with fire for eyes.
Killing men whom I despise.
Bewailing the woeful life I led.
…
Thronging ghettos, to unbend bent backs.
Handing them knives, ’least an axe.
…
Haunting oppressors to shave their heads.
Cutting all their holy threads.
Experiencing joy as they bleed.
Dance, rejoice my black black deed. (Kandasamy, “Hymns of a hag”)
The anger and hatred of the part of the poem quoted may appear as extreme to some. Yet, it is a very practical recourse for the powerless, as history is theirs who have the power and means to write it. The marginalized subaltern never gets the centre stage. Where all action is shown in progress they remain “invisible” as always. As Fanon or Malcolm X proclaimed, these voices assert that violence must be employed if needed, against the exploiters whose best interest is in maintaining the status quo through perpetuation of their hegemony. It is the process of maintaining the hegemony that has taken a lot of ideological support and practical methods that have congealed into policies. The Indian Dalit had to face a challenge to his caste identity and responded in various manners. The extent of hopelessness was compounded by the fact that they were the doubly dispossessed and marginalized in both their class and caste. The Indian Dalit woman was facing discrimination and exploitation at their worst level. Although untouchable, as the upper castes decreed, they were molested, raped and in general, were treated like some sort of freely available sexual cattle slave. Their exploitation, physical and systemic, continues to this day, despite the huge array of laws and acts that guarantee their safety and well being. Kandasamy presents the plight of the Dalit woman in her “Narration”:
I’ll weep to you about
My landlord, and with
My mature gestures—
You will understand:
The torn sari, disheveled hair
Stifled cries and meek submission.
I was not an untouchable then.
I’ll curse the skies,
And shout: scream to you
Words that incite wrath and
You will definitely know:
The priest, his lecherous eyes,
Glances that disrobed, defiled.
I was not polluting at four feet.
The themes of hatred and resistance against the exploiters are very common in Kandasamy’s poems. In this they are like other Dalit writer’s poems that, rising from the soil, raise disturbing issues. They prove that the grand narrative of the Enlightenment – the great ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” as the rational end of all social systems and the attainable or desirable state of existence – is only there to beguile the masses. In reality, for an Indian Dalit, there is neither liberty nor equality, and fraternity is nowhere to be seen. Reason has been proven powerless in redressing the wrongs perpetrated by an iniquitous system of institutionalized exploitation. Therefore, the subaltern must catapult themselves to the stage of power play using any means whatsoever. Their language is charged with the power to burn the social customs and the desiccated traditions that have given the Dalits a life worse than that of animals.

Long years of exploitation, subjection and subjugation would have broken any normal human being, but the Dalits are made of some sterner stuff. Their resilience and power to resist and rise like the phoenixes, have made it possible for them to rewrite history. The twenty-first century Dalit does not leave his life in the hands of the Hindu upper class, all explaining, fatalistic twin theories of dharma and karma, as Kandasamy’s “Justice is…” clearly presents. As Marx’s once famously equating religion with sedative of the masses, dharma, its indian equivalent that comprised a lot more in it, performed the sedative, explanatory and exploitative functions variously. Dharma along with the theory of karma became the most potent tool of explaining the marginalization of Dalits to both upper and lower castes for centuries. Thus it aided interpellation, very poisonously, insidiously and sweetly too. But “the truth about Dharma” as the poem presents, is that “the man Dharma … is a bastard”. The natural and predictable outcome of such a realization is that “all [their]… hopes die and [they]…stop all… expectations”. There is no hope of any kind of help from either god or the upper class, because: “Those above are (mostly):/ indifferent bastards” (Fire). The Dalits live “In an arid land of arid human minds” (Kandasamy, “Prayers”).

Of course, hatred and anger are not the only things present in Kandasamy’s poems. The voice resisting exploitation is fully aware of its own strength and dignity. She takes pride in her Dalit identity. It is the Dalit identity and self-image that are affirmed in her poems again and again. Then there is a hope that the hitherto marginalized and silenced powerless masses will be able to build a new world for themselves. In “We will rebuild worlds” Kandasamy writes of a world that will be built “from shattered glass/ and remnants of holocausts”. It is a world of the collective Dalit dream that she envisions in her poem, but before it becomes possible, there’ll be several reckonings. The upper caste exploiters will be asked “to produce the list / from hallowed memories / of our people disgraced/ as outcastes / degraded / as untouchable at / sixty-four feet / denied a life/ and livelihood”. Had it stopped at just insult and giving the sub-human status to fellow human beings in a democracy that guarantees equality to all its citizens, it would have been just atrocity. The statistics in India prove beyond just that. It is not at all an exaggeration when the poet writes that they are “done to death … charred to death forty-four of our men and women and children / because they asked for handfuls of rice/… and other ghastly carnages”. Life becomes unbearable and death the only possible and practical respite for people who are forced to millennia of life-in-death. Yet, all is not lost. There is hope and the grit to hold that hope alive. It is the hope for a future revolution that sustains the Dalits in the darkest of their hours. They will learn resistance and violence, just as they had learnt muteness and subjection. They will dare to dream, and in their dreams will come all that will make them rise. The revolution, says the poet, will definitely begin with the Dalits learning to “stand up straight / put up a pretty fight/ redeem and reclaim/ the essence of [their]… earth”. She presages a new world: not created by the upper caste gods and men, but by Dalits themselves, “set to defy the dares the /diktats the years the terms / the threats”. There will be a time when they will realize their state of powerlessness, along with the power that lies within. They will rise that day to change the rotten state of the world that’s their yet not theirs. The subaltern will rise and create space for himself, and also the voice, newly found, with which to attempt to tell his stories to all who wish or not to hear them. It will all begin, like all the other past revolutions, suddenly. The hindsight will reveal the mechanism and nature of the factors involved, but at the time of its actually happening, it’ll be abrupt and unstoppable. With the cycle of revolution gaining momentum, the hitherto oppressor-oppressed roles will be reversed. It must be marked that this revolution is not a non-violent, Gandhian type, but a violent one of the kind Fanon had presaged. It’s certain that the revolution will come, and the Dalit say that “It will begin when never / resting we will scream / until / our uvulas tear away and our breathless words breathe life to the bleeding dead …our words will rush/ in this silenced earth / like the rage of a river in first flood”.
Eklavya’s story is repeated very often and he becomes the modern symbol of the wronged Dalit: exploited by the upper castes and through the insidious working of the centrifugal forces of the rigid caste based Indian society that systematically marginalizes them. Kandasamy’s “Eklaivan” has a note of consolation, probably from his guru, that offers him alternatives: “You can do a lot of things/ With your left hand”. The poem is similar to the official storyline, until the final break that gives it a surprisingly militant note: “You don’t need your right thumb, / To pull a trigger or hurl a bomb”. Such a state of being naturally produces hatred and anger. This anger is not at all specific to the poet. It is found elsewhere with the same intensity:

Let us go to the village
O Jamni
I want to buy a gun
gun? why Jivali?
are you mad?
Why do you need a gun?
Ali Jamni, you do not know
Poor Shambuk
was meditating and practicing vedas
And then?
Rama killed him mercilessly.
Now
I want to shoot Rama
and also
I want to kill Drona
who demanded
Eklavya’s thumb as
Gurudakshina. (Pandya 6)

The themes of hatred and resistance against the exploiters are very common in Dalit poems. Trivedi points towards it: “the hopes and aspirations of the exploited masses, the problem of untouchability, the exploitation of Dalit women by higher caste men, are the themes of Dalit literature. The aim of Dalit writers is to expose the evil of caste system and injustice done to them by higher castes” (Trivedi 4). The voices of the subaltern, freshly raised, rising from the soil, raise disturbing issues. They prove that the grand narrative of the Enlightenment – the great ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” as the rational end of all social systems and the attainable or desirable state of existence – is only there to beguile the masses. In reality, for an Indian Dalit, there is neither liberty nor equality, and fraternity is nowhere to be seen. Reason has been proven powerless in redressing the wrongs perpetrated by an iniquitous system of institutionalized exploitation. Therefore, the subaltern must catapult themselves to the stage of power play using any means whatsoever. Their language is charged with the power to burn the social customs and the desiccated traditions that have given them a life worse than that of animals and auguries of violence can be discerned too. The modern Dalit is intellectually emancipated as the result of a century’s long struggle. There were tricks played with verbal chicanery in the past that now fail to fool. The very word play and logic of the brahmanas are now being used against them, as in Kandasamy’s “Advaita: The ultimate question”: “Non Dualism/Atman Self/ Brahman God/ Are Equal/And Same. / So I /Untouchable Outcast/ Am God. / Will You/ Ever Agree? / No Matter/ What You/ Preach Answer/ Me… Can/ My Untouchable/ Atman And/ Your Brahmin/ Atman Ever/ Be One?
Dalits have been silenced for such a long time that their endless wait has taken a life of its own. The Indian fatalism had ensured that they blamed their fate for their state of being, and then, unable to borne any more, the silence “it breaks into wails” (Aggression Kandasamy). History doesn’t always repeat itself. In Indian context, a perpetual state of helplessness, silence, marginality, i.e. subalternity, would finally lead to revolutions.
Sometimes,
the outward signals
of inward struggles takes colossal forms
And the revolution happens because our dreams explode.
Most of the time:
Aggression is the best kind of trouble-shooting.
Like the snake of “Another Paradise Lost”, the Dalit poet, activist too bothers for history. The snake revealed very incisively: “‘Look here comrade, my credentials/ are different. In heaven, I was/ an activist. An/ avid dissenter”. It is actually a very artful re-telling of the popular upper class myth of the forefather of the Pandavas, the great emperor Nahusa. He reached heaven after his death and was respected there too, until he “wanted to know why/ caste was there”. He was enjoying the fruits of his worthy deeds among the gods and sages until he dared to challenge the very existence and stability of the system from within. The unequal and iniquitous division of labour worried him as he was “a rebel/ pleading for liberty-equality-fraternity’. He was banished from the paradise in another and altogether different case of paradise lost in which “Tradition triumphed over reason’ and, ironically “and the good were cast away”.
The half-mocking, half-serious tone comes handy in poems like “Becoming a Brahmin” in which the “Algorithm advocated by Father of the Nation at Tirupur. / Documented by Periyar on 20.09.1947” is looked at:
Begin.
Step 1: Take a beautiful Shudra girl.
Step 2: Make her marry a Brahmin.
Step 3: Let her give birth to his female child.
Step 4: Let this child marry a Brahmin.
Step 5: Repeat steps 3-4 six times.
Step 6: Display the end product. It is a Brahmin.
End.
Algorithm for converting a Pariah into a Brahmin
Awaiting another Father of the Nation
to produce this algorithm.
(Inconvenience caused due to inadvertent delay
is sincerely regretted.)
The Dalit will not wait endlessly. New age has brought new possibilities to rewrite history and the subaltern is creating space and is also speaking and is being heard. The very challenge that seemed fruitless and pointless in not so distant past now appears practical. Mobility through social strata has been made possible, and it has made possible for the hitherto dispossessed and marginalized to “make money… [and] grow dam rich” (Kandasamy, “For sale”). The most coveted equality to worship in the temples that did not allow entry to Dalits, the same right for which wholesale movements were planned, executed and failed, was won through change in the equation. The equation was changed by the entry of one simple variable on the side of Dalits: money. Thus was created the creamy layer, the privileged among the underprivileged. It was this very layer, created within half-a-century within the independence of India that had the means to buy its place of equality before gods:
He also buy a standing place
at da front and da special prayer
in his name all at twenty more.
Priest with ash and holy smoke
come to him, give extra blesses for
a cool crisp fifty my bud gives.
He stand there and stare,
stare hard at the Gawd;
his first time in temple. (“For sale”)
There are differences in the themes and concerns of the poetry of the Dalits of various times and climes, yet there is a stream of commonality that runs through them. Specificities notwithstanding, the insults, wounds and scars these peoples share give their voices the same intensity of pain and poignancy. Internalization of the prejudices of the dominant group and their assertion and perpetuation by the very people against whom the prejudices were held, is a common mechanism for survival. It creates a set of alienated people who neither belong to their people nor are accepted as equal by the others. Social and caste mobilization are excruciatingly slow and very unsure processes whose rate or outcome can never be controlled or predicted with certainty. Moreover, black skin with white mask (or Dalit skin with upper caste mask) is not a psychologically healthy combination. Neither is it right, ethico-politically and socially. The Dalits – dispossessed and silenced – belong to one body. Their resistance to the phallogocentric social structure and their attempts at critiquing or deconstructing are very logical ends to the centuries old process of planned dehumanization. Their heroic resistance has brought about several changes in the structure and functioning of the exploitative system. How deep these changes have percolated and how fundamental in nature they are, has yet to be seen and tested. In the meanwhile, the longest march for a seemingly unreachable goal must not stop.

Works Cited

Kandasamy, Meena. “Eklaivan”. meenakandasamy.wordpress.com. 1 June 2008. Web. 29 December 2011.
—. “Profile”. meenu.wordpress.com. n.d. Web. 29 December 2011.
Pandya, Mahesh. “Uttar Gujarati ni Jivali”. Hayati. Tr. Darshana Trivedi. Gujarat Dalit Sahitya Academy: Ahmedabad, 1999.
Pantwane, Gangadhar. “Dalit: New Cultural Context of an old, Marathi Word”. Contribution to Asian Studies, XI.1977-78.
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Market, History, Race and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Art, in all its forms, has always been a product of human mind processes, and the mind
processes aren’t totally independent of the effects of the stimuli coming from the world out
there. Human actions are affected by their milieu − social, political, economic and cultural −
and affect the milieu in their turn. Thus, literature has a reciprocal relationship with the
people and systems of its own time and before and after it. The degree and extent of the
circles of influence in which the production, dissemination and reception of literature fall
have been changing in types and radii with the changing times. Gone are the days when printed knowledge used to travel at snail’s pace and cover geographical distances in a world with frontiers and checks and restraints. Today, the dissemination of knowledge occurs at the speed of light through the World Wide Web in a world sans frontiers and nearly sans any kind of check or restraint on its movement or speed of dissemination. In a span of less than a hundred years, the world and kind of literature it produces have undergone a sea change. The central factor behind such a huge change is globalization. The present paper is an attempt to look at the forces acting on the generation of a specific form of literature : fiction, that too, created by somebody who shares the collective trauma of colonial exploitation. Postcolonialism enters the scene as a specific means for widening one’s intellectual horizon. The intellectual horizon of an average individual in the postcolonial anti-bias and anti-prejudice age has limits imposed only by the individual’s own thirst for knowledge. Postcolonialism can not be given an all inclusive definition because the process has been perceived in various ways by different people. Yet, an attempt can be made to understand it better:

Postcolonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that contests that disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past. It asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their cultures, cultures that are now intervening inandtransforming the societies of the west. Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things.(Young 4)

Moreover, its positive and negative effects too have been weighed against each other to make pronouncements ranging from rapturous optimism to uninhibited ranting. Taking the goldenmean may prove to be the most fruitful. When one looks at the phenomenon of postcolonialism, one finds that there is a lot that
remains hidden and whatever is visible is only the tip of the iceberg. Equality is one of its
desired objectives but the Gulf Wars and the post Afghanistan scenario have shorn the world of any kind of faith in humanity. The new Empire has replaced thje old one and rules the world more subtly. “The cases of Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq, make it clear that any country that has the nerve to resist its former imperial masters does so at its peril. All governments of these countries that have positioned themselves politically against western control have suffered military interventions by the west against them” (Young 3).

The post-postmodern world of the twenty-first century is characterized by the absence of any
kind of faith. It doesn’t believe naively in the “invisible hand” of market. Neither does it trust the “innate goodness” of those in power to think for the welfare of others. Theories try to find out the dynamics that evolves out of the interactions between various nations and bodies that are definitely unequal in power and pursue diametrically opposite goals and conflicting interests at times. In many ways, neocolonaialism is a continuation of the scourges of colonialism and imperialism. It is seen as a means of exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful, e.g. the apathy shown by corporate giants towards the extent of exploitation and living standards in the sub Saharan Africa is not very different in comparison to that shown by the imperialist and colonial powers till the mid-twentieth century. It has also been seen as a menace that threatens cultures, languages, and ways of life of the peoples away from the centre of the power discourse.
Income, information and education gaps between the rich and the poor are widening not narrowing; economic crises, trade imbalances and structural adjustments have precipitated a moral crisis in many countries, tearing the basic social and cultural fabric of many families and communities apart… (Chinnammai)

They are being marginalized and finally their culture, languages and ways of life are eliminated effectively through substitution by their counterparts in the dominant force. The corporate giants that function at trans-national levels have become immensely powerful in the present age and they have exploited human and natural resources equally dangerously and irresponsibly, without any concern for sustainability. Gutenberg brought the first revolution in the world of written words by inventing the printing press. He made it possible for the words to be reproduced with accuracy and with a speed resembling that of lightening, as compared to the speed at which hand-written books were produced before the invention of the printing press. The printed books could be produced very fast and in much larger numbers. This change in the means of production played a very significant part in bringing about the Renaissance of learning. With the increase in the speed
of the modes of transport, the rate of dissemination of printed words increased and it brought
about a very significant change in production, dissemination and reception of works seen as
literature. The man who wrote in the medieval ages had in his mind people of his city, region
or nation as readers. The Renaissance and post Renaissance writer wrote for that part of the
known civilized world that spoke the same set of languages. The modern writer wrote keeping that part of the world in mind with which he had socio-political, cultural or linguistic affinities. The writer in the age of globalization writes keeping the global village in mind. Thus he produces a world literature. Al-Azm points out that Goethe was the first person who gave the idea of a world literature or Weltliteratur, “transcending national limits, cultural boundaries and provincial traditions”, and globalization has produced something akin to Weltliteratur, at least partially, if not wholly or substantially. It is written for a market
that comprises real and virtual players and networks and whose forces determine the shape the writing will take. Decisions are determined by the market that has to be catered to and by the kind of reception a work will get. As Paul Jay asserts, globalization ensures that the
“contemporary production and consumption [of literature] no longer take place within discrete national borders but unfold in a complex system of transnational economic and cultural exchanges characterized by the global flow of cultural products and commodities”.

To begin at the beginning of the life cycle of the creative production, a writer conceives the
idea of writing a piece of literary work with certain considerations in mind. Today’s
professional writers are market driven – they have to be, as their survival depends on the
circulation, reception and reach of what they write. They do not write in isolation from the
society without thinking anything about the fate of their writing as did their counterparts
not more than a hundred years ago. For them, market is the taskmaster and even their God. What happens to their writing career after their books hit the stands depends on who talks about them and what kinds of awards they get. As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature.

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she
must be an international rather than a national phenomenon … the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of (Park).

As an author is in the process of creating a work, most of the times even before he starts
working on it, he has to look into the matters like the prospective publishers and promotional
campaign that the publishers will run before the launch of the book. The book has to be talked about in the right circles by the people who matter and must get the media’s spotlight, and if possible, a Booker or a Nobel. The audience an author targets is neither homogeneous nor fully known or predictable. It is an international audience whose tastes the author has to cater to, and such a heterogeneous set of people is not pleased easily. In addition to buying the book from various bookstores, the buyers also have access to the sites viz. Amazon.com, fromwhere they can very easily order and purchase the book. Rushdie put forth in his article entitled “In Defense of the Novel Yet Again,” published in
the special issue of The New Yorker that the kind of novel that globalization has given birth
to is “postcolonial … decentered, transnational, interlingual, [and] cross-cultural” (qtd. in
Al-Azm, 47). Existing in a veritable pot-pourri of socio-cultural influences and especially
exposed to them as their work demands it, a writer is always absorbing new ideas bombarded
from all types of media. Being dependent on the successful and artistic synthesis of ideas
assimilated in the course of life, their work is thus firmly shaped by the kind of exposure
theyhad. There are many writers, e.g. Soyinka and Achebe from the continent of Africa, who react against the forced homogenization of literature that globalization has brought about. These writers go back to their roots and revive the traditional forms of the literature of their
respective countries or tribes. This countercurrent in literature is a part of the larger
postcolonial discourse. English being the language of the colonialist forces from whom their
countries had won freedom painfully, these writers passed through three stages: unquestioned acceptance and imitation, partial questioning and alteration and rejection and creation of new forms of literature that they had inherited from their colonial masters. They are not the sole representatives of their countrymen or culture. They only represent a set that has chosen one way. The other set with different choices has writers that are “de-rooted and have to cure this handicap through ‘a cultural imagery,’ trying to overcome their fear of not belonging anywhere and nowhere. The writer adopts a caricatured identity…as ‘World’s Citizen,’” (Boneza). Amitav Ghosh’s mind shows an interesting melding together of the opposites. So des his fiction. In it one can witness a world’s citizen looking at the world with exclusively postcolonial eyes. Here the term postcolonial has nothing to do with the specific geographical location or the point of origin of a specific thought. It is related more to the nature and orientation of a thought or an idea. It is a paradigm shift, comparable to the post quantum theory shift in the paradigm of the hitherto Newtonian Physics. From a west centric approach to world history, the spread of democracy resulted into a more diffused and decentralized approach to history. Thus dominant discourses were challenged effectively and even replaced by strategically developed mini or local narratives in the countries that had been exploited in the past. The literature taking birth in these various nations is very diverse in nature, yet it has something that becomes visible occasionally, and runs as a subterranean stream at other times. That thingis its response to its colonial past. It is this past that joins the peoples and experiences of these countries, and their literature too. Ghosh inherited his colonial past. Although he repudiated it in his own way by withdrawing The Glass Palace from the final list of Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001, declaring:
As a grouping of nations collected from the remains of the British Empire, the Commonwealth serves as an umbrella forum in global politics. As a literary or cultural groupinghowever,it seems to me that ‘the Commonwealth’ can only be a misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of these countries (it is surely inconceivable, for example, that athletes would have to be fluent in English in order to qualify for the Commonwealth Games). (qtd. in Roy Chowdhury)
He does benefit from the legacy of India’s colonial past. Ghosh’s assertion on the pride of language and nation arises out of his intellectual constitution that was built in a postcolonial India: a part of the Commonwealth. It gives him a dual advantage of a local-postcolonial and, at the same time, a global perspective. He is a commonwealth writer whose fiction curiously, strongly and predictably enough, abounds in postcolonial themes “of cultural translation, of braided temporality, of marginality itself” (Boehmer and Chaudhuri 3). His Ibis trilogy promises to be his most thoroughgoing take on postcolonialism; a backward glance at the infamous opium trade cycle that finally lead to the Anglo-china Opium War and China’s subjugation to the omnipotent “free trade”. Sea of Poppies, the first part of the trilogy starts a cycle of stories that is continued in the next book: River of Smoke. History seeps into the stories of the characters in so many ways that they become histories of  colonial exploitation.

Histories… take the form of narratives, and the ways in which the events described are portrayed, linked and made sense of are themselves susceptible to critical interrogation… historical events do not mean things in themselves but, rather, their meanings are generated by the ways in which they are described and linked together to form a historical narrative, and the resonances produced by that narrative depend on the recognition by its audience of the familiar story-telling devices it employs. …a specifically historical inquiry is born less of  the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society, or culture’s conception of its present tasks and further prospects (Malpas 98).

When a particular position becomes precarious and untenable reason is utilized to buttress it.
Repeated falsification of truth and invention of facts becomes essential when an unnatural
imposition has to be shown as the natural order of the things. History is white washed,
revised, reread and re-presented in various ways to support otherwise unsupportable claims and to hold hitherto untenable positions. An element of narration had always been present in
history because of one simple reason: even a simple collation of facts has to be made on the
basis of some conscious decisions and has to pass through the human medium that invariably
alters the content. In Sea of Poppies racialization and rationalization of history are shown
at work through dialogues and narrative accounts. Raja Neel Rattan’s accidental stumbling upon a theme that would keep Mr. Burnham’s mind fully and enthusiastically occupied – Free Trade” – also serves to expose things unsaid. He gives a white man a chance to show his superiority – personal and racial – over a brown zamindar. He is happy to announce “When the doors of freedom were close to the African, the Lord opened them to tribe that was yet more needful of it – the Asiatick” (Ghosh 118). The black/brown/yellow races were the subject races to be marginalized and silenced effectively and to be effectively written out of the power discourse. After the slave trade was made illegal merchants like Mr. Burnham quickly shifted to other lucrative areas. Only one similarity remained between their old and new trades – profit generated out of shameless and inhuman exploitation of the colonies. The Africans were sold as slaves for profit and then the Indians were transported as indentured immigrants to generate capital to be used for supplying opium and finally subjugate the Chinese. Physical, physiological, mental, socio-political and economic subjugation of the native populations was the sole aim of the strongest class in the whole Empire: the merchant class. They had made it appear very natural that the Chinese consumed opium, so much so, that Neel was astonished to hear that the kind of history he knew was totally untrue. Here, the narrator’s subtle intervention must be acknowledged. In his own attempt at revisiting history, he tries to expose the wrongs of the past in his novel. Reason is shown working devilish schemes very transparently in Sea of Poppies.

The pseudoscientific racial theory of the colonizers had been carefully propounded and
propagated in order to make the subjection and subjugation appear natural and according to the “binary typology of advanced and backward (subject) races” (Said 206). The legitimation of exploitation was facilitated “by anthropological theories which
increasingly portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior, childlike,
or feminine, incapable of looking after themselves… and requiring the paternal
rule of the west for their own interests (today they are deemed to require
‘development’)” (Young 2). The white man had to shoulder his sacred burden. It was a sacrifice that he had to make. He had to colonize, control, exploit, tyrannize and even kill the
black/brown/yellow peoples of the world, in order to civilize them. The white man’s arrogance is reflected unconsciously in the smallest of things. During Neel’s trial, the judge declared that India had been “opened to the benefits of civilization… [the Englishmen were] chosen to burden with the welfare of such races as were still in the infancy of civilization”(Ghosh 349). By the time Neel’s trial ended, it was very clear to him “that in this system of justice it was the English themselves – Mr Burnham and his ilk – who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world’s new Brahmins”(Ghosh 353). Money was the main motive behind the exploitation of the Indian farmer. The same was true in the case of the Chinaman too. He was drowned in the river of smoke, while the white suppliers of opium glibly produced altruistic justifications all the time: “Indeed, humanity demands it. We need only think of the poor Indian peasant – what will become of him if his opium can’t be sold in in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore” (Ghosh 385). The very idealistic Mr. Burnham, the devotee of Free Trade, surprisingly happens to be a very forceful supporter of the English merchant’s right to supply opium to china, even if the Chinese are against it. He sees the Chinese emperor’s edict against opium as halting the “march of human freedom” and, ironically, explains it to a racially mixed Zachary that freedom meant “mastery of the white man” (Ghosh 117). He very happily and confidently expresses his joy at America’s being the last bastion of liberty: because slavery is legal there! The postcolonial revisiting and revision of history started since the time when the colonized subject, silenced and marginalized, started asserting his own identity instead of one that was purely constructed by his colonial masters, during the process of decolonization or at the end of the socio-political decolonization when, intellectually, their nation was still in the clutches of the intellectual and cultural hegemony of their erstwhile rulers. The postcolonial writers of fiction wove their narratives intricately, patterned with the themes that appealed to or were infused into them. Their work took roots in the land that had been liberated recently from the pernicious foreign control. They reacted against exploitation of the powerless- theirs and, in general, anybody’s.

The industrial revolution in many European countries was facilitated, expedited, made possible with the capital accumulated due to the exploitation of the so called backward races. The advanced races imposed their will and culture on those who had no say in the process. Then they presented their mission of all pervading and shameless exploitation as one of cultural and religious salvation of the barbarians and pagans. They had the power. The power to speak, write, reason and prove: all were theirs. So, they created the narrative of a history from their perspective and objectivised the objectification of the natives. As the postmodern
historiography points out, “historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society, or culture’s conception of its present tasks and further prospects”
(Malpas 98). The history of the Empire was meant for the consumption at two levels: by the white man and by the black/brown/yellow one too. Therefore, it had to be convincing. It
turned out to be so convincing that the anti and postcolonial discourses had to use all their powers to dispel the myths created by the colonial histories. The process of de-mythization has not been completed till now, and the postcolonial discourse continues to perform its task even today. Such being the case, Sea of Poppies can be seen as an attempt to narrate a specific history from a particular perspective. The narrative is of interlinked lives of
various brown and white characters, and the narrative perspective is the critical one. The “anti colonial freedom movements had fought for political self-determination, the ‘post-colonialists’ inspired by Said fought for the intellectual and spiritual self-determination of
the people who had been subjected to colonial rule” (Rothemund 31) unmistakably postcolonial. Ghosh revisits the past with a very critical eye. His fiction curiously, strongly and predictably enough, abounds in postcolonial themes “of cultural translation, of braided
temporality, of marginality itself” (Boehmer and Chaudhuri 3). He has his own version of it –
that arises out of the consensus among the postcolonial intelligentsia – and he makes the
narration of his fiction his tool to propound his thesis. Of course, like all previous
histories, his story that is intermeshed with history, can be critically interrogated. Yet,
the fact remains that the “desire” to determine what the colonial rule meant to those
colonized cannot be denied to the hitherto voiceless and marginalized subject, written out of
the discourse structurally. It is this very desire that is behind the creation of Ibis
trilogy.

Systemic and systematic exploitation of the inferior “races”, as the white man looked down
upon the “Asiatick” and the “African”, originated in the racialist doctrine that Todorov very
pithily summarizes in his statement of its five basic propositions. The first proposition is
the simplest. It obviously consists in affirming that there are such things as races. The next
one posits that there is continuity between physical type and character; but races are not
simply groups of individuals who look alike (if this had been the case, the stakes would have
been trivial). The racialist postulates, in the second place, that physical and moral
characteristics are interdependent; in other words, the segmentation of the world along racial
lines has as its corollary an equally definitive segmentation along cultural lines. To be
sure, a single race may possess more than one culture; but as soon as there is racial
variation there is cultural change. The solidarity between race and culture is evoked to
explain why the races tend to go to war with one another. In the third postulate same
determinist principle comes into play in another sense: the behavior of the individual
depends, to a very large extent, on the racio-cultural (or “ethnic”) group to which he or she
belongs. This leads to a unique hierarchy of values as the racialist is not content to assert
that races differ; he also believes that some are superior to others, which implies that he
possesses a unitary hierarchy of values, an evaluative framework with respect to which he can make universal judgments. The final point is the conclusion arrived at:

There is a need to embark upon a political course that brings the world into harmony with the
description provided. Having established the “facts,” the racialist draws from them a moral
judgment and a political ideal. Thus, the subordination of inferior races or even their
elimination can be justified by accumulated knowledge on the subject of race. Here is where
racialism rejoins racism: the theory is put into practice (Todorov 66).
Ghosh is clearly critiquing the racialist doctrine through his work. Coming from a person
whose people were colonized and exploited for centuries, it does not seem totally
disproportionate or unnatural. This fact notwithstanding, the critique itself can be critiqued
for a certain degree of either honest oversimplification or purposeful collusion that results
into overlooking certain important facts. The driving force behind the Empire was lussion and for the accumulation of wealth. The lust for wealth was not at all limited to the upper ranks of the racial hierarchy. It was present in the colonizer and in the colonized as well,
although the extent to which it could be satisfied depended on the power of the person or of
the people in question. The colonial rulers were powerful, hence they exploited the colonized, but they could never have succeeded in doing so without an active, voluntary and complete collaboration of the colonized e.g. Baboo Nob Kissin, Raja Neel Rattan’s father and he himself. These collaborators were used by the colonialists but also made use of their rulers to serve their own interests. The advocates of the excentric view hold that the periphery did not accept passively what the centre imposed on it but shaped the imperial impact to a large
extent. Ronald Robinson, the pioneer of ‘excentrism’, even claims that this theory can explain the rise and fall of colonialism through the reversal of a single model… Colonialism thrives on recruiting collaborators and when it can no longer do so, decolonization becomes
inevitable. (Rothermund 23)
Malpas makes it clear in his, Jean-Francois Lyotard that history is the narration of the story
of a nation or people. It intends to explain the existence of a human entity in terms of its
being shaped in continuation with the past, and the cycle leading to future. The tale is
“presented according to the rules of the narrative genre and, like literary narrative, can
take a number of different forms” (Malpas 74). Ghosh shiftS the point of focus of his history-
as-story very uncomfortably for the prototypically constituted western eyes, to the filth the
West had created and its mechanism of generating it. Opium and coolies were exported from
India. As is pointed out in Sea of Poppies: “In the good old days people used to say there
were only two things to be exported from Calcutta: thugs and drugs or opium and coolies as
some would have it” (113). It generated profit that sustained the Empire. In fact,
“trafficking in opium tilted the balance of global trade to benefit the west”( Brook 3). The
extent of exploitation in the country that produced the human and material produce was
limitless. Opium ruined lives. It ruined the lives of the poor Indian farmers whose very
lifestyle. Sea of Poppies very clearly and poignantly brings forth one of the main and
recurring motifs of the commonwealth fiction: the mechanism of exploitation, in its full
detail. It shows how the farmer was exploited and how the agricultural timetable of a nation
and the sustainable lifestyle of its people were altered with devastating effects on the
economy. Deeti remembers the good old days when the fields “would be heavy with wheat in the winter… now, with the sahibs forcing everyone to grow poppy, no one had thatch to spare… poppy had been luxury then, grown in small clusters between the fields that bore the main winter crop” (Ghosh 42). The vicious cycle of debt that the farmers of the opium belt entered, made any idea of escape impossible. The grain crops and vegetables were not grown. There was only a sea of poppies in all the fields. To feed their families they took more debt and thus they became more confirmed in their state. Opium broke the very fabric of the society, as was the case when Deeti and Kalua came across the impoverished transients in Chhapra, “driven from their villages by the flood of flowers that had washed over the countryside” (Ghosh 298). Hunger pressed them so much that they were ready to forget all bindings of caste, religion and concern for life and it safety. They only had one thing in their minds: survival. That’swhy they signed agreements to work on the farms in some unknown lands, evenhazarding to cross “black waters”. If money was the main motive behind the exploitation of the Indian farmer, the same was true in the case of the Chinaman too. He was drowned in the river of smoke, while the white suppliers of opium glibly produced altruistic justifications all the time: “Indeed, humanity demands it. We need only think of the poor Indian peasant – what will become of him if his opium can’t be sold in in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore” (Ghosh 385). The very idealistic Mr. Burnham, the devotee of Free Trade, surprisingly happens to be a very forceful supporter of the English merchant’s right to supply opium to china, even if the Chinese are against it. He sees the Chinese emperor’s edict against opium as halting the “march of human freedom” and, ironically, explains it to a racially mixed Zachary that freedom meant “mastery of the white man” (Ghosh 117). He very happily and confidently expresses his joy at America’s being the last bastion of liberty: because slavery is legal there!
Sea of Poppies is a tale of the effects of racialization and rationalization of history on the subject races: colonized, tormented and exploited.

“Postcolonialism is in effect a metamorphosed version of postmodernism in relation to the
anti-colonialist and decolonizing practice in Oriental and Third World countries” (Ning 233).
Sea of Poppies is Ghosh’s response to the collective past of Asia, and he takes a postcolonial
stance. He presents human condition, at the levels of individuals and of the nations as
players in the international arena. The novel’s unobtrusive but definite agenda is to
challenges the grand narrative of capitalism: capital accumulation through free trade, leading
to overall well being through the trickle down effect, and the whole nation’s developing due
to the way in which the invisible hand directs the market. The novel challenges these grand
narratives of the colonial era effectively and offers an alternative point of view very
strongly and convincingly. In this, it is successful. It is successful in catching the
interest of an average reader, and, surprisingly, of an average critic or reviewer too. Thus
Ghosh succeeds in catering to the demands of the world market, his origins, his craft and also to the river of history in which float both past and present.

Works Cited

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—. Jean-Francois Lyotard. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

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Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Print.