- Agence France-Presse
- Amitav Ghosh
In “River of Smoke,” Amitav Ghosh puts his background in journalism and social anthropology to good use, evoking 19th-century Chinese opulence in scenes such as one banquet where a dish called “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” is served: “It had taken two days to prepare and included some 30 condiments — crisp shoots of bamboo and slippery sea-cucumbers; chewy tendons of pork and juicy sea scallops; taro root and abalone; fish-lips and mushrooms…reputed to have lured many a monk into breaking his vows.”
“River of Smoke,” Mr. Ghosh’s latest book, is the second in his “Ibis Trilogy,” the story of wayfarers cast aboard the ship Ibis during the years preceding the outbreak of the first Opium War.
The first book in the series, “Sea of Poppies,” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. “River of Smoke” has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the winner of which will be announced next week in Hong Kong, not far from where much of the book’s action takes place — although in a fragrant harbor much transformed by the intervening 180 years.
Born in Calcutta, Mr. Ghosh, now 55 years old, spent his youth in Bengal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and New Delhi, before going on to study in England and later teach comparative literature in the U.S. at Queens College, Columbia and Harvard. He is married to the biographer and essayist Deborah Baker, with whom he has two grown children. Today, the couple split time between homes in Brooklyn and Goa.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. Ghosh about the splendor of old Canton, 88-course meals, and opium’s central role in the history of free-market capitalism.
The Wall Street Journal: The most striking aspect of the “Ibis Trilogy” so far is the richness of languages, cultures and customs from the pre-Opium War period. How did you bring it to life?
Mr. Ghosh: In some sense, Guangzhou itself is a protagonist in the second book. So it was very important for me to be able to, as it were, recreate it. But the specific place I was recreating was the small foreign enclave in Canton, and that doesn’t exist anymore — it was burnt down in 1856. So even though I spent a lot of time in Guangzhou, it was completely an extrapolation, and I had to depend mainly on all kinds of source material. Fortunately, the source material on Canton in the 19th century is very abundant.
On top of my travel to China, I spent some time in the Greenwich Maritime Museum in London, where I found many memoirs, journals and collections of letters that described the place. There’s a wonderful visual archive of Canton too, because the artists of the day made an incredible number of paintings and drawings of the foreign enclave.
How did you go about rediscovering the sensory details: the food, smells and sounds? There’s so much of that in the book.
This highlights a big difference between the way novelists and historians approach history. As a novelist, my interest when I’m researching and writing about a place is what was it like to be there. Walking down the street in Canton, what would you wear, what would you smell, what would you see? These are questions that historians don’t often ask or answer. It’s just not what interests them. But for me as a novelist, it’s very exciting to seek these things out. But you do sort of have to piece it together. For example, many of the menus from the banquets are actually described in the memoirs of people who went to them. And by reading the back issues of the Canton Register, the newspaper of the time, you can actually find out what the weather was like on any given day.
At one point you describe an 88-course meal hosted by one of the great Cantonese Mandarins. Did you find records of meals like that?
All the details of that scene are taken directly from a memoir. I added a couple of things here and there, of course, but it’s very authentic. Many travelers to Canton in the 19th century described these banquets at great length. They were sort of astonished and amazed by them. But you have to remember, although there were 88 of them, most of the dishes were quite small.
“River of Smoke’s” themes ring true to many readers today: the virtues of the free market versus the greater social good, China’s trade relationships, and cultural exchange between its Asian neighbors and the West. Was the book conceived with contemporary world affairs in mind?
I can see perfectly well why you would think that. But in fact, these same discussions and arguments were going on right then and there in the Canton of the period. A lot of the words that are spoken in the book come directly from the sources. They’re in the letters and written about in the newspapers of the time. You have to remember that a lot of the people who were in Canton in the 1820s and 1830s were Scotsmen and were Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus’s first students. Malthus himself worked in the East India office. So they were very much exposed to these ideas and they were the first generation of people to discuss them.
What’s astonishing is how little the discussion has changed. In another sense, it’s amazing how people talk so much about the principle of free trade today without anyone ever brining up the fact that the central commodity at issue in the original free trade dispute was a drug, opium.
Turning to that, what’s your take on the Opium Wars? The most common reading has it that China was victimized by the forces of imperialism and forced into becoming a nation of addicts. But some contemporary historians, such as Frank Dikotter at the University of Hong Kong, have argued that in many ways opium was a benign and ritualized substance in China. They also suggest that there’s been a pattern of inconsistency in the Western humanities, whereby historians who are often critical of contemporary prohibitionist policies — i.e., the American “War on Drugs” — simultaneously lament that China was victimized by the forced legalization of opium.
I have come across that argument quite a lot. And it’s true that what happened in China was a remarkable aestheticization of opium. It’s also true that it was perfectly possible to have a relatively benign opium culture. Many people who smoked opium were not addicts. So I certainly don’t think one can be moralistic about opium.
But let me put it like this: Within the contemporary records, when you read accounts of the battles of the Opium Wars, it’s very clear that the Chinese army was greatly weakened by opium. The generals were taking it, the soldiers were taking it. And even more than that, the thing that really worried them was that opium had created this incredible culture of corruption. You might say that if they had legalized opium, there would not have been that corruption. But on the other hand, what they were also very concerned about was a trade regulation issue, the outflow of silver from China for opium.
The other thing that we should consider in any discussion of this is the practice of the modern West. Why does it ban drugs? Because they are broadly perceived as a threat. We all know that marijuana is very possibly benign, really. Yet Western countries, especially the U.S., see such a threat from drugs that, in fact, you could say the opposition to drugs is the major social problem of the modern West. So you know, if it’s possible in today’s world for Britain and the U.S. to perceive this major threat from drugs, we have to consider that in the case of China, they were confronting a mass narcotic addiction for the very first time in history. They’re the first society to ever confront it.
And it also has to be said that they are the first society to ever defeat a culture of narcotics, which finally happened in the 1920s by popular initiatives. Literally within a year or two, once they managed to get the Geneva Conventions passed on drug trade, they managed to root it out very quickly. The reality is that it’s almost impossible to think of Britain or the U.S. achieving something similar today.
It’s perfectly clear that if you arrived in China in the mid-19th century, you wouldn’t see destitute opium addicts everywhere. But it’s also clear that in some very basic sense, the opium trade had undermined the body politic. That’s clear from the evolution of European statements about China, because if you look at what Europeans said about China in the 18th century, they’re full of admiration for it, especially for Chinese forms of government. At that time, they always talked about China as being the perfection of governance. By the late 18th, early 19th century, the discourse completely changes, and they always talk about how rotten and corrupt it is — without ever stopping to pose the question of why it’s so rotten or questioning their own part in the systemic corruption.
The other interesting thing about the Chinese case is they had a very rational approach. When the opium problem first showed up, the emperors commissioned studies and they had the mandarins write exhaustive memoranda on it. It was a model of measured, rational debate. It was much more rational than the debate around drugs in contemporary America. They talked about possibilities of legalization. They discussed the issue from various angles at great length. So it’s not like they just blundered into this policy out of a blind moralism. Not at all. But at some level they began to realize that opium posed a profound threat to family and political structures in China — and, essentially, they were right.
Chinese authors have won the Man Asian Literary Prize three out of four years since it started in 2007. Is India due for a win?
I can’t say that I’ve looked into the matter [laughs]. A win would be good for Indian literature, but I’m a great admirer of Chinese literature as well. You can’t decide these things by a quota system.
Since you split time between the U.S. and India, in broad strokes, what would you say distinguishes their literary cultures?
I don’t know if I would draw such a broad line of distinction. Indians read a lot of American literature, and I’ve always had a deep interest in American writing. That said, our writing is often very much built upon narrative. There are so many amazing untold stories in India. There’s so much happening in India. It’s a society in a circumstance of such incredible change. I sometimes look around me, and I think, even if I lived to be 150 years old, I wouldn’t be able to tell half the stories I’d like to tell about this place.
In the United States, even though there’s a lot of technological change and so on, it’s not a society in upheaval in the same way as India, and I think that’s reflected in the writing. It’s a very exciting moment in Indian writing.
You’re now at work on the third and final installment in the “Ibis” series. Anything you can share with us about where the story goes next?
Oh, no. Like some of my characters, I’m a bit superstitious. I think it’s very bad luck to talk about a book before it’s finished.
When you have a novel underway, as you do now, what is a regular day of work like for you?
I usually spend the first half of the day writing and the latter half reading. The two go hand in hand, really. But there are no rules. Some days I’ll write all day long. It’s a very unpredictable process, you know? All my life I’ve tried to make it a sort of routine thing, but still no two days are the same.
Graham Greene used to write 500 words a day and then promptly stop — no more and no less. If I tried to do that, the work would just collapse. I think the anxiety would kill me.
My wife is an author as well, and you know, we’re constantly reading and writing. We do other things too, but books are the central axis of our lives.