Opium wars exposé

Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.799; Pages: 616

Richly evocative of trade and empire, cross cultural societies and political intrigues, emotional encounters and sexual escapades, Amitav Ghosh’s voluminous last instalment of the Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire, is a gripping read. Complexities of China’s First Opium War (1839-42) provide a rich historical backdrop, competently built up from earlier volumes of the trilogy.

In Sea of Poppies, the opium factories of Bihar, production of opium and the business potential of the product was explored through the story of the newly widowed Deeti who escapes to Mauritius aboard the Ibis, a slaving schooner reused for ferrying opium. The second book of the trilogy, River of Smoke, hinted at the tension building up between the imperial Chinese government and opium traders in the coastal city of Canton.

The narrative in this last book culminates in the military face-off between the British East India Company and the Qing emperors, skirmishes that become a full-fledged political war that reshaped the contours of the map of South China, the peninsula of Macau, the Pearl River estuary up to Canton/Guangzhou and what was later to become the global port city of Hong Kong.

Flood of Fire is not a mere historical treatise about China’s resistance to foreigners and rapacious British inroads into an ancient dynastic empire. It expands into epic proportions involving characters from remarkably diverse social and cultural circuits, across countries and continents, living lives determined by events, people, and circumstances over which they have no control. The detailed and therefore sometimes excruciatingly slow exposition of non-linear storylines are woven together meaningfully in the rushed last quarter of the novel.

Against this backdrop of British merchant adventurers dumping opium into China in the cynically righteous cause of freedom of trade, the individual histories of several characters — Kesri Singh and Neel Rattan Halder; Shireen Mody, the sequestered widow of Behram Bhai and his friend Zadig Bey, Zachary Reid and the wealthy Catherine Burnham, wife of ship-owner and opium trader — are unfolded.

It seems like sheer coincidence that Kesri Singh of Nayanpur should enlist in the Pacheesi, the Indian sepoy battalion of the company stationed at Barrackpore, and then be promoted to a Havildar who enlists for service in Maha Chin and sets sail on the Hind to fight in the first Opium War. His sibling bond with sister Deeti is reasserted in the most surprising of ways through his meeting with Zachary Reid and Paulette, fellow passengers with Deeti on the Ibis.

The career of Kesri throws light on the life of the native sepoy in the service of the East India Company. Towards the end, it dawns upon Kesri that he is a participant in an unrighteous war raining devastation on the Chinese people.

The story of the conservative Parsi widow Shireen who travels from Bombay to Canton, on the Hind, to claim the compensation demanded by British traders from the Chinese Emperor for chests of opium seized from her late husband, runs on a parallel track. It’s an amazing narrative of personal transformation. Shireen’s self-fashioning goes beyond wearing European clothes and abandoning the veil, to accepting her husband’s illegitimate son Freddy, and finally marrying Behram’s friend Zadig Bey.

Other personal histories narrated in this book include that of Zachary Reid, second mate of the Ibis, with dubious links to the murders committed aboard that ship, who is introduced here as an impoverished mistri in the employment of Mrs. Burnham. He journeys as a cargo supervisor on the Hind to safeguard and sell Burnham’s opium and ends up as captain of the Ibis and Burnham’s business partner. Zachary’s history uncovers the underbelly of colonial social and cultural life, evoking its atmospherics in the boredom of the memsahibs, adultery, snobbishness and a misplaced sense of dignity.

This complex interweaving of political power plays, commercial rivalries and social shenanigans endows a unique narrative texture to Ghosh’s writing. The novel probes questions of identity and loyalty in the context of acceptance and marginalisation. Zachary for one is a Baltimore seaman, the son of a slave and her white master, who is able to make a fortune as he passes as a white man in a colonial society.

Neel Rattan Halder, an impoverished Calcutta landlord, on the other hand, who works as a munshi and translator in Canton, keeps a diary that offers the Chinese perspective of European greed and free trade hypocrisy, and the debilitating impact of opium addiction on the unsuspecting Chinese.

Several of the private sub-plots are neatly­ ­tied up, but the defining course of military action, the ‘flood of fire’ continues, underlining Ghosh’s critique of the unrelenting greed of colonial powers, which has been substantially covered up by western historians and hugely ignored by Asians.

Jayati Gupta

Forthright narrative

1984: The anti-sikh violence and after by Sanjay Suri; HARPER COLLINS; Price: Rs.499; Pages; 272

One of the major turning points in India’s history as an independent nation was the horrific anti-Sikh pogrom that broke out in Delhi in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. In 48 hours, the violence escalated and some 3,000 Sikhs were savagely murdered in the national capital. The trauma haunts the Sikh psyche over three decades later, because few of the murderers and their instigators were brought to justice.

Sanjay Suri was a young crime reporter with the Delhi edition of Indian Express at the time. He was assigned to cover some trouble spots, without much idea of what exactly was unfolding, since this was an era when radio and TV were state-controlled, and the mobile phone was in the distant future. The main contact point for a crime reporter was the police station and they had become mysteriously incommunicado. Nevertheless, Suri put his all into the assignment and offers some crucial revelations in this book. At a gurdwara he had a run in with Congress politician, Kamal Nath, accompanied by Gautam Kaul, a senior police officer. Both of them were complicit in varying degrees with the rioters, says the author, who testified before two inquiry commissions subsequently set up to probe the riots.

According to Suri, the first commission headed by Justice Ranganath Misra, was a complete disgrace. “Misra had got his facts wrong and few thought he had got his conclusions right,” he writes. “He declared in his report that the riots were not organised by the Congress party.” Which is exactly the conclusion the Congress had wanted from him. And he was suitably rewarded, being subsequently appointed chief justice of India, and later chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, and finally given a seat in the Rajya Sabha!

But Suri reserves his severest criticism for the inquiry entrusted to Ved Marwah, a senior and highly respected Delhi police officer, by the Congress government in the aftermath of the pogrom.  Marwah had been brought back to the Delhi Police as additional commissioner heading the Crime Investigation Department (CID), following the violence. Unlike Justice Misra, he decided to investigate the murder and mayhem comprehensively, and called for every police record and evidence available.

But just when Marwah was poised to complete his inquiry, which inter alia examined the failures of the Delhi police, his superior, who had initiated the inquiry, did a volte face and ordered him to stop. To ensure Marwah’s silence for as long as possible, he was given promotions and made a governor, so that as a government official, he couldn’t go public or speak to the press. It was only after Marwah retired that Suri got a chance to interview him to confirm that the Delhi police, as well as the Central government, were petrified that his report would indict senior police officers and expose the culpability of the Congress government.

“Which could be the organisation which would want to unleash violence against the Sikhs?” asks Suri. “Which organisation would have the resources to do it? And which organisation could make sure that they do it and get away with it? Who could prevail on the government itself and the police themselves to look the other way? The answer, Marwah had said, was obvious.”

“Most of the police force did not actually kill,” says the author, “theirs was the guilt of inaction, but that inaction was criminal.”
There is some sobering introspection towards the end of Suri’s narrative, and it deals with the print media. According to him, just “three or four” mainstream journalists from the Indian Express and the Statesman covered the anti-Sikh riots. The others maintained a strange silence, though censorship wasn’t imposed by the government. Why? It is a question that the Indian media should ask itself, because had there been greater exposure of the violence, it’s likely there would have been fewer lives lost.

Rahul Singh