“Our longing for the imagined health of the past must be a sign of the sickness of the present” (Bate 2). Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke looks back at a time in the past that is important as it is the site of contest for two ways of life, two different ways of looking at culture and nature and two very different set of peoples. The past it looks at is not totally free of rot. Yet, it has its moments of glimpses to a health that is not imagined but real. There are two pasts of China when one looks at the narrative: the reader’s past and the narrator’s past. The reader’s past includes the narrator’s past and present and the time between the opium wars and today. The narrator’s present is full of the physic-moral sickness induced by opium but his past is glorious, with a balance of yin and yang and oneness with nature. That’s not all, because there is an array of possibilities to be explored. When seen through the twin lenses of ecocriticism and postcolonialism the novel presents a wide and interesting vista. These two ways of looking at the world have been yoked together, not unnaturally or violently, but because they have a common denominator of questioning the exploitative nature of humanity, and demanding equality: for humans and for all the elements of nature respectively. Ghosh’s novel is informed by his critical gaze at the anthropocentric, Eurocentric and materialistic human beings in general, and the West in particular. The suffix –centric that is used in the previous sentence is quite dangerous. It is true, particularly in the case of this paper, that this suffix is generally attributed derogatorily in an ex post facto manner to an object that has been conclusively proven to be ridiculously, clearly and absolutely wrong. Copernicus et. al. proved the Aristotelian geocentric view of the universe wrong. The German High Criticism proved the absolute theocentric certainty of the Bible wrong. Ecocentrism challenges the humanist and Biblical anthropocentrism to prove it wrong, while ironically leaving the curse of –centrism free to work on it. The troika of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, and after them, the Enlightenment thinkers established it firmly (and anthropocentrically) that the human mind is the medium though which the world is created using reason and sense experience as guides. The modern scientific method of observation leading to hypothesis, experiments and formation of theories that are universally valid, even eternally so, was invented in the seventeenth century. That method seeped into the realms of knowledge now called sciences, including social sciences, critical theory etc. Very characteristically, one of the latest progenies of the method- ecocentrism – happens to be one of the most perceptive and harshest critics of the myth of the objective scientific method and of the grand narrative of the Enlightenment scientific progress. River of Smoke (henceforth RS) yields rich dividends to a logical ecocentric analysis but it must be kept in mind that it does the same from a postcolonial perspective too. In fact, it is a fictional work in the postcolonial post pastoral mould that keeps defying definition all the time. Curiously the writer/narrator attempts only to critique the exploitative free trade system of the Raj on a historico-economical basis. Yet, there are a plethora of critical possibilities that open up in the text and contain strands intertwined with the post pastoral convention and the (in)human exploitation of the earth and of the less powerful. In contrast to the characters that have power and exploit nature, there is a circle of people centred on nature. It contains Commissioner Lin, Pauline and her father, Penrose and Robin. Those closer to the centre – like Pauline and her father – worship nature, but the points on the periphery look at it as a substance for human consumption and utilization with aesthetic and economical advantages. People outside the circle have no time to think about a thing as unimportant as nature. People in the novel, except Commissioner Lin, generally view nature anthropocentrically. Commissioner Lin, one of the very few persons portrayed as totally devoid of the taint of evil, speaks axiomatically about the “Way of Heaven” asserting that people choose life over death and good over evil asserting their free will. The Commissioner, who may also stand for the Chinese wisdom that sees yin and yang or the opposing forces composing the universe, also strengthens the post pastoralness of his part of the novel in his recognition of the “creative–destructive universe equally in balance in a continuous momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay, ecstasy and dissolution” (Gifford 153). It is the way of heaven from which those who are out of the circle have strayed. They are the blind and mindless destroyers of nature. There is a complete continuum of positions taken inside the circle of nature: from its cognizant and sustainable users that are all anthropocentric to its worshippers qua nature, deep ecological to the core. The stream of anthropocentric knowledge that has been highlighted in the novel is horticulture, one of most refined branches of agriculture. All –cultures in agriculture, the science of sustaining human life on this earth through plant products are strongly anthropocentric. For instance, they neatly classify plants into weeds and non-weeds and instill in humanity the hatred of weeds, converting them into deadly and committed weed killers, although weeds are but plants, whose products have no mass demand in markets. Mr. Penrose was a devoted horticulturalist who had made fortune through his innovative and bold utilization of the natural resources of the world. He looked upon nature “as an assortment of puzzles, many of which, if properly resolved, could provide rich sources of profit” (RS 47). His practical approach towards nature can be judged rightly through his response to the wilderness that the Botanical Gardens of Port Louis had turned into. It was irksome to his eyes that the symmetrical beauty of an English garden was no more, in its place was nature’s plenty in all its varieties of vegetation from various continents. “In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel” (RS 23). It was this man-made storehouse of botanical riches that had forced Penrose to include Port Louis in Redruth’s itinerary. Even while “mourning” for its fallen state Penrose was forming schemes of benefiting from whatever he could lay his hands on, as it had no owner. It was the same mentality with which the white races had always colonized and snatched lands from others. He was intensely and intelligently immersed in his work of making profit from plants, and this made him invent whatever made his work easier. The process of making technological advances so that nature can be exploited more easily was repeated in his case too. It was his purely egocentric gaze on nature that had enabled Penrose to extract a fortune from it. What troubled him the most was that the changing times had increased the number of competitors in the market of exotic flora; hence the extent of exploitation of nature too must have increased. Imperialism and colonization were the bringers of death and destruction of native flora, fauna, cultures and human beings. As Lenin had rightly pointed out in his “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, capitalism in its crassest and most dangerously exploitative form was called imperialism. So, it sucked the marrow out of nature’s bone after having fed on its flesh heartily. It had an insatiable appetite for profit and was essentially anthropo-, and generally, Eurocentric. For the Penroses of the world, the natural world around them aroused just a sense of curiosity, never awe. They are genuinely interested, but they don’t see any mystery in the phenomena of nature. In other words, they don’t fit in the scheme of the temple of nature as its priests. That role is left for the people like Pierre Lambert. To know better about the way he looked at nature and its majesty, one has to have an entirely differently cast mind. For him “the love of Nature had been a kind of religion, a form of spiritual striving: he had believed that in trying to comprehend the inner vitality of each species, human beings could transcend the mundane world and its artificial divisions” (RS 47). He was a botanist for whom horticulture was a form of spiritual communion with nature, nay, with the spirit of the earth. Paulette, trained by her father had inherited a worshipful love of nature. Lambert was her biological and intellectual father at the same time and she was made in his image, although not as purely ecocentrally and selflessly as he. She did find Penrose, her quasi-father with his resolve to extract a living from what nature had in it, a better fit in the order of nature than her father. Robin, with his artist’s sensibility and trained eyes that saw aspects of nature’s beauty missed by others, still remained atavistically ensconced in the Renaissance humanistic anthropocentrism. Penrose’s sons disappointed him because they had no interest in botany and plants were just like any other item of merchandise for them. Yet, he was different only in according nature comparatively more importance than them while remaining firmly anthropocentric. He was, after all, a western man and an imperialist too. In the beginning, “the cultures of most primal societies throughout the world were permeated with Nature-oriented religions that expressed the ecocentric perspective. These cosmologies, involving a sacred sense of the Earth and all its inhabitants, helped order their lives and determine their values” (Sessions 158). With the passage of time, amongst the religions and philosophies of the world, various eastern or pagan religions stayed close to nature while the western philosophy and religion became anthropocentric from the pagan ecocentrism and animism. It was Aristotle who had firmly established a geocentric universe with man at the top of the Great Chain of Beings: as Nature made plants for the use of the animals and both for man’s use. Penrose is a man, and for him nature is a source of things that he uses for his benefit. His ship is made in his image, with nothing fanciful and his eyes were always on profit that was huge. The plants he had chosen for the Chinese connoisseurs were handpicked from the Americas. antirrhinums, lobelias and georginas… the ‘Mexcian Orange’ and a beautiful new fuchsia… Gaultheria shallon, a plant both ornamental and medicinal, and a magnificent new conifer… Shrubs were not neglected either: the flowering currant, in particular, was a species for which Fitcher had very high hopes. (RS 47) He had planned to exchange the plants never seen in China for those never seen in the west, making neat profit in the process. All his inventiveness and his spirit were devoted to his own self and not to any other entity. He is just one of the many imperial explorers, horticulturalists and botanists who saw nature especially that of the colonies, as something to be acquired and exploited for profit. As is made clear in the novel, Holland and France were also making similar ventures in the field of horticulture. Sir Joseph Banks, the Curator of the King’s Garden at Kew, had collected plants for display from the remotest parts of the world. Only China, “– a country singularly blessed in its botanical riches, being endowed not only with some of the most beautiful and medicinally useful plants in existence, but also with many that were of immense commercial value” was not equally represented as it was not so heavily exploitable (RS 61). The reason behind it was that the Celestials were clearly aware of the value of nature and they did not allow the western barbarians to invade and destroy their nature. Even when some success brought them in possession of the much yearned for plant specimens, it was very difficult to transport them across the seas as the seamen who were in charge of the plants on board looked at the plants as some kind of “threat”, as their competitor who had eyes on the water that was essential for their existence. The imperial explorers/exploiters of nature had devised ingenious ways of doing their work. Explorers in the eighteenth century couldn’t take any live specimens with them, so they took dried specimens (seeds) with them. They even devised a “painted garden”, i.e. painted pictures of the specimens, some kind of a catalogue, to plan future exploitative excursions on. They finally did succeed in bringing the Chinese flora to enrich the European landscape. “Hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, flowering plums, tree peonies, the first repeat-flowering roses, crested irises, innumerable new gardenias, primroses, lilies, hostas, wisterias, asters and azaleas” were all Chinese imports (RS 73). To top it all came Cunningham’s find – the horticultural Holy Grail, the Golden Camellia – that was reputed to be the eternal font of youth. It is the search for this flowering plant that makes the most important sub-plot of the novel, with two of the five central characters involved. The novel focuses an ecocritical glance on the nineteenth century human exploitation of nature. In addition to showing how those who ruled, the imperial powers and the dominant human races, exploited fellow humans and nature, the novel also shows that nature is the voiceless and powerless entity that is exploited even by the most powerless humans. When Paulette looks at the island of Kowloon, what she saw is proleptic of modern man’s mindless destruction of the life sustaining nature: The vegetation was sparse and lacking in interest: such trees as there may once have been had been hacked down by the people who lived in the impoverished little villages that were scattered around the island’s rim. They had done a thorough job of it too, for almost nothing remained now but a few stunted trunks and wind-twisted branches (RS 120). She finds the sparsely populated Hong Kong more attractive. From where Redruth was anchored, the human habitations couldn’t be seen. Rice fields were everywhere and the mainlanders were not interested in such an island. Nature offered clean drinking water in abundance in the form of streams and the ships were drawn there because of the same. Even Paulette is not a nature worshipper in a totally egoless manner. The thrill one got in wandering in the forests of china and “be to botanize in these vast and beautiful wilds” attracted her a lot. It is ironical that the nurseries run by the professional gardeners on the island of Honam were the place from where all the plants introduced to Europe came, and not from the forests. The civilized barbarians were not allowed to come in contact with nature in China. They are denied this opportunity because the Chinese know their real intentions. One of the greatest power someone may have over something is the power to name them. it was this power that man had over nature and the power was exercised to its fullest when Linnaeus gave it the scientific format of classification and binominal nomenclature. It was the same power that made Penrose exclaim that she had found something new, and Paulette “discovers and names” Diploprora penrosii. Robin’s letter contrasts the crowded Canton with Honam, which is compared to a huge, green and wooded park. The tone clearly conveys his preference. He is there on his quest for the Holy Grail of Cunningham and Penrose. He is full of praise for the way in which the pots were “skilfully grouped to create an impression of a landscape… these natural features… endlessly mutable… reconfigured with the passing of the seasons, or perhaps even to suit the daily moods of its custodians” (RS 182). His praise is an epitome of self-contradiction. It is given to a heavily artificial panorama of nature that is changed according to the aesthetic choices, wishes and fancies of humans. The point is, that they intensify the effects of seasons and generate a concentrated kind of “artificial/pseudo” season in themselves. It is his celebration of the unreal that a Baudrillard would find very interesting. His mindset finds a correlative in the European’s taming of the wilderness, yet maintaining the pretense of nature in designing gardens, landscapes and improved “views”. Ironically, it is the same person talking about the possibility of the transfer of the Redruth consignment to an island: “plants were not meant to grow on ships, were they, Puggly dear? and it does seem cruel to deprive them of their natural element when it lies so close at hand” (RS 260). In the very next instant his anthropocentrism reasserts itself and he suggests that a nursery should be set on the same spot as it’d yield rich future dividends. The enigmatic painter has a visionary’s capacity to throw surprisingly accurate analyses reached through his intuitive sight. His connecting opium and flowers and equating the relation to the abstract ideas of evil and beauty is one such case. The city of Canton had gifted the western world with the choicest of the flowers and also changed the way it viewed gardens and nature. What it had got in return was the permanent curse of slavery to opium. He prophesys that one day, when everything else is forgotten, Canton will be remembered for its flowers that are “immortal and will bloom for ever” (RS 320). Ah Fey’s story is the point where the novel’s postcolonial concern meets the ecocritical one. The man who tells his story as a boy is known to Robin as Mr. Chan. The Eurocentric, anthropocentric men of the Western money making machines can only give contempt, mistreatment and hatred to a fifteen year old Chinese gardener. Although his had been the driving intelligence, success was attributed to a white man, Mr. Kerr. In contrast to Robin’s praise for the gardens of China, Ah Fey hates the best one of Britain. After the kind of treatment he received, to his eyes, Kew is “not a garden but an untended wilderness” (RS 265). Here, it is true, anthropocentrism is clearly discernible. Yet, in an ecocentric character like Ah Fey, for whom plants are more important than his own self, it is not a blemish. In fact, it acts as a medium to make the west’s “taming” and exploitation of nature and of the colonized peoples clearer. Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Picador: London, 2007. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. 2011. n.d. Web. DOC. 27 November 2011. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Routledge: London, 1999. Print. Lenin, V.I. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. May 1997. Web. 22 March 2012. Sessions, George. “Ecocentrism and the Anthropocentric Detour”. Deep Ecology for, the Twenty-first Century. Ed. George Sessions. Shambhala: London, 1995. Print.
Tag Archives: river of smoke
The Forces of Light and Darkness in River of Smoke
“Without opium, Chinese history… would have been far different” (Brook 1).
Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke is a tale of people whose lives were linked to the history of opium trade. It has people of various nationalities that meet in Canton, where most of the novel is set. The action is set just before the first opium war, in a time when the edicts of the Chinese Emperor against opium were proving to be powerless because of the “deadly combination of expanding Chinese demand and skyrocketing British supply…[when] 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 India benefited 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 colonized and exploited. At the end of the novel there’s Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria. It was published in Canton register and is presented in the novel very faithfully. It is a parallel presentation of the narrator’s point of view and sympathies. This statement is borne out by various instances and ways that are used in the novel to expose their true colour that is black.
Commissioner Lin was a scholar officer who appeared to have risen from the legends of ancient China– the incorruptible poet-philosopher and administrator of the Chinese civil services came to life in him. His actions consistently gave positive messages to the people of Chinawho had lost all hopes in mandarins. In opposition to the morally black merchants, his colour is white. Between the two extremes of morally white and black lie various other characters of the novel. The only white character in the novel that could be called honest is Charles King. He stood against his own race and had only his conviction in the call of his conscience on his side. Just like Commissioner Lin, he had made enemies amongst his own people, because opium was the font of wealth for many Chinese and foreigners alike and “in a world where corruption and greed are the rule, they are both incorruptible – and it is not surprising that this should be hateful in the eyes of their peers” (River of Smoke 317).
There was a foreshadowing of the future in Mr. King’s thoughts at the end. Several battleships had been mobilized. He knew that the ensuing war would change the scale of balance entirely. He had written a letter to Elliott in which he had petitioned for justice, in vain:
Justice forbids that the steps taken by the Chinese, to arrest a system of wrongs practised on them, under the mask of friendship, be made pretence for still deeper injuries. Interest condemns the sacrifice of the lawful and useful trade with China, on the altar of illicit traffic. Still more loudly does it warn against the assumption of arms in an unjust quarrel, against – not the Chinese government only – but the Chinese people. Strong as Great Britainis she cannot war with success, or even safety, upon the consciences – the moral sense – of these three or four hundred million people. (River of Smoke 320)
In the same letter he asserted that the white man’s trade in opium had dishonoured the name of Christian God among those they saw as the heathen races. It was given several disturbingly negative epithets in Chinese language and the Chinese people hated it and those who traded in it. Opium and its introducers to China were rightly and equally hated by the common Chinese men. It had not only ruined just China, but also another Asian country: India. There were huge land areas of “Malwa, Bihar, and Benares” where opium was mainly cultivated. The whole pernicious system was put into action by the powerful Empire over which the sun never set. The white man had come to civilize the brown and yellow races and had turned them into animals instead.
Mr. King saw the true nature of opium trade through the screen of ideology. He saw how the East India Company was behind opium trade that had full support of the British Parliament. The British opium merchants had full support of their society, whereas, every Chinese who used opium felt guilty and ashamed and hated it and disapproved of it. In addition to the white merchants and the Chinese people, there are Indians who play important role in the novel. The leader of all the Canton Indian merchants is Seth Bahramji.
Seth Bahram is a character who wants to side with the forces of light through being morally correct, i.e. white. He tries to do the same yet his actions yield results that make his intentions immaterial and push him into an endless chasm of blackness. He participates very actively in supplying opium to the Chinese people but then he was only a small part in the overall machinery. At more individual level of mismatch of intentions and actions, his cumshaw to Allow, as he had promised to do too Chi-Mei, actually pushed the boy into opium smuggling and finally led him to his death. His own son was nearly ruined because of his failure as a father. Yet he inspired loyalty in his employees in a way that is possible only when a man is good. Neel’s loyalty was won in the same way too. Bahramji is a very complex character who acts as the living battleground for the forces of darkness and light. It is within him that Ahur-Majda and Ahirman fight. There is no final victory until the very end of his life. He was destiny’s victim. He would have been an innovator; a hero, had he been born in some other country or time. He was a product of the forces of history and their tool too. He did not choose opium because he wanted to inflict damage on the Chinese people. His choice was dictated by the gospel of his age, the rule set by his masters, the religion of his making – free trade. Shireenbai had urged Bahram not to go toChinain his voyage that proved to be his last. She had insisted that she had confirmed reports of an impending war. Bahram had allayed her fears by telling her that he had met the Rear-Admiral Maitland himself and was assured that war was not a possibility.
Maitland had succeeded in cowing the Chinese officers with his two warships and had returned satisfied of his success to India. The things were to change with the turn of the year 1838. On December 31, 1838, the emperor formally named Lin his Commissioner to Canton. The commissioner reached Cantonsixty days after he had left the capital and “moved into the YiienhuaAcademy, and turned directly to local scholar-officials for help” (Fairbank 186). He did not meet the mandarins or address the people, as was customary. The first thing he did was taking stock of the situation in hand. He knew that his method was far from perfect. Those he favoured took advantage of their position too. Yet he used them for practical reason, as the official machinery could not be trusted. Lin came to believe, through his deliberations with his officers, that Lancelot Dent was the main culprit behind the opium trade and the biggest enemy of China. The list of names of the enemies of Chinathat Compton had shown Neel in River of Smoke is indicative of the Commissioner’s deliberations.
By the orders issued on 22 March, Dent was to be taken in custody. Two Chinese merchants were taken hostage. If Dent didn’t come for an interrogation, he was told, they had to be decapitated. The novel portrays very poignantly how they were betrayed by their white friends. They had worked in tandem for a very long period of time. Yet, when time came, the Englishmen didn’t think twice before delivering them to their sure death. They sensed a ploy in the arrest of the Chinese merchants until the end and when they did finally believe it to be true, they showed most open and shameless greed. They tried to wring out the price of the 1056 chests of opium that they had agreed upon to yield in order to save the merchants. Comptonhad also told Neel that the leader of the Canton Acchas was to be arrested with Dent because as all opium came from Hindustan. It was to send warning signals to those who traded in opium and those who supplied it to them. Neel proved it very rightly that the British controlled the opium trade completely; that cultivating it was their monopoly in Bengal. As they did not control the entire Bombay Presidency, they couldn’t monopolize its cultivation there. The money that Indian traders like Bahramji made accounted for only a miniscule proportion of the total profit. Most of the profit generated out of this smoke of death went to Europe and America. Even if all the Hindustanis stopped trading in opium, it’d still be grown and traded in. it’d become a British monopoly and would be supplied in the same manner to China. Moreover, the Englishmen would give up the Indian just to save Dent. He proved it by citing their behavior in case of their sacrificing, at least in their intent, their two Chinese friends Howqua and Mowqua. Neel very perceptively saw and proved how Seth Bahramji was not like Dent or Burnham, because he was a victim of his circumstances. Otherwise, “he would have been a pioneer, a genius even. It is his misfortune that he comes from a land where it is impossible even for the very best men to be true to themselves” (River of Smoke 288).
Captain Elliott had promised the opium merchants that Lord Palmerston’s government would pay the cost of opium that they surrendered. “20,283 chests valued at $ 9 million” was surrendered (Fairbank 188). The Canton blockade was lifted. It was to haunt the collective memory of Englishmen as another Black hole of Calcutta. It was to be used in a similar manner. The Commissioner was happy and confident about his success in subduing the white barbarians, as he had envisaged before starting his journey to Canton. He had demanded that all the foreigners sign a bond. As Cambridge History puts it, the “bonds would bring the barbarians under acknowledged Chinese jurisdiction” (168). They did not sign and Elliott demanded sanctuary fromMacau. He shifted there with all the merchants who were allowed to move out. The action inRiver ofSmoke ends at nearly this juncture of time. Neel reports later that he had returned more than a decade later to find the factories razed to the ground. The foreign merchants who returned after the Chinese were forced to give them all they had demanded built their new establishment quite far from it.
Burnham and his ilk offered legalisms to save Dent. They said that the commissioner had no
jurisdiction over them as they were the Queen’s subjects. The mandarin Weijuen exposed the
fallacy of their argument by mentioning that England did not exempt the foreigners from
observing the law of the land. Neither would China. This caused Mr. Dent to ask for the
intervention of Captain Elliott. Ironically, Dent and his Free Trade lobby insisted on total
non-involvement of the government in all their matters. When it came to his own life, he
welcomed government intervention very much. Mr. Charles King rightly remarked: “But Mr Dent! It is you and Mr Slade who have always wanted to keep Captain Elliott at a distance from Canton. Am I wrong to think that it was you who said that the involvement of a government representative would be a perversion of the laws of Free Trade?” (293).
The British representative Elliott came to rescue Dent from Macau. This exposed the real nature of the free traders. As Robin’s letter made it very clear that they were devoid of any sense of justice and the only thing they honestly sided with was their profit. Captain Elliott saved Dent and gave shelter to a criminal under the British flag. It was that action of his that
Gladstone later criticized severely in the Parliament. Elliott demanded travel permits For all
the foreigners. If denied, he intended to consider it as an act of war. Robin likened it to “a
dacoit leader marching into a courtroom and demanding the immediate and unconditional release of his gang” (River of Smoke 297).
The Committee had met to discuss their course of action. Commissioner Lin’s action was declared to be unique as it was the biggest instance of robbery that too on the basis of mere morality. To all the palaver produced there Mr. King only had to say:
You have neglected to mention a crucial difference between these precedents and the case at hand – which is that the property in question here consists of smuggled goods. The prohibitions of Chinese law against opium are of nearly forty years standing and their existence, and steadily increasing severity, is well known to all. Need I remind you, by way of comparison, that British law states that any person found harbouring prohibited goods shall forfeit treble their value? Need I add further that British law also states that any person who is found guilty of the offence of smuggling shall suffer death as a felon?’ (River of Smoke 306-07)
To Mr. King’s strong argument, Mr. Slade responded with one full of fallacies. He called names and invoked stereotypes and talked about the despotism and misrule of the Chinese Emperor. They rejoiced that years of failed negotiations would be made up with a “few gunboats and a small expeditionary force” (River of Smoke 307). The real importance of the British trade withChina was emphasized in the discussion as volume of their revenue fromChina was £5,000,000 and it was linked to that ofIndia too.
Bahramji was the only person present in the meeting who objected to the proposal all else agreed upon. Eventually he had to yield and was heart-broken, not because he had lost money, but because he had given his soul to the powers of darkness in return of nothing. His pain and anguish remind one of Dr. Faustus’ selling his soul to the Devil and finding out finally that it was for nothing. There was a cost for purgation and Bahramji had to pay it too, but the sympathy of the reader lies with the sinner at the end. As Neel had toldCompton, Bahramji had a largeness and generosity that his English counterparts hadn’t. The English merchants did not lose anything in the last count. It was Bahramji with his large heart who turned out to be the biggest loser of all. The victim of his time and place of birth, the genius, the innovator – Bahramji – worried about his name and how it would be viewed in future. He asked Zadig Bey:
When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives? …And what was it all for, Zadig Bey? Was it just for this: so that these fellows could speak English, and wear hats and trowsers, and play cricket? …Perhaps that is what Ahriman’s kingdom is, isn’t it, Zadig Bey? An unending tamasha in a desert of forgetting and emptiness. (River of Smoke 313-14)
The forgetting and emptiness that Sethji was afraid of could not engulf him. He was remembered: in the tears of Neel and those who mourned him. Their loyalty was proof enough that he was not wrong on the personal front. Thus ends the novel one of whose central concerns is the concepts of right and wrong. It attempts to explore the various characters up to their core. Their moral nature is shown to be of the utmost importance in the novel. Although the most immoral and exploitative set of characters, the British merchants, emerge victorious in the end, the narrator’s sympathy is with the Chinese people. Commissioner Lin has been portrayed as the voice of reason and justice. Bahramji’s character has a complex richness and attraction to it, despite being morally wrong. It is an exact and balanced portrayal of the forces of history affecting human decisions and lives in a free play of determinism and free will.
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.
Fairbank, John K. ed. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part 1. CambridgeUniversity Press:Cambridge, 1978.
Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. Web. 27 November 2011. PDF.
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.
rajnishmishravns 