Opium wars expos©

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…