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Suppressed history: Smoke and Ashes

EducationWorld March 2024 | Books Magazine

Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh harper collins Rs.699 Pages 318 The unwritten history of how the British forcibly grew opium over vast swathes of the Gangetic plain and dumped it on a weak imperial China Environment and climate warrior and author of the Ibis trilogy of novels centred around the history of the Indian diaspora in Mauritius, South-east Asia and China, Amitav Ghosh is one of the most celebrated writers in the English language. Although the Ibis trilogy which comprised Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) were globally acclaimed, this reviewer believes that Ghosh’s deeply researched non-fiction works including Gun Island (2019) and Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) recounting the rise of European and British power in the subcontinent and their discovery and exploitation of herbs and spices — opium, nutmeg and tea — to fund the rise and spread of their empires, make infinitely better reading, more so because they are suppressed, unwritten histories. In Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh focused on the ruthless efficiency with which the Dutch upended the lives and livelihoods of innocent islanders to establish a nutmegs monopoly. Native islanders were uprooted and exiled to neighbouring islands of Indonesia, to live lives of poverty and misery as Dutch adventurers established large nutmeg plantations. In Smoke and Ashes, Ghosh describes in gruesome detail, how thousands of acres of fertile multi-crop farmlands of Bihar were forcibly converted into opium poppy fields by the British East India Company (EIC) and opium was exported to China to pay for tea imported into Britain after the silver and bullion demanded by imperial China began to run out. It’s not as though there was pre-existing demand for opium in imperial China. Steadily incremental quantities of this highly addictive drug were exported from Calcutta to Hong Kong for forcible distribution within mainland China. When the Chinese government objected to this deadly, habit-forming and debilitating narcotic being imposed — under the marketing principle that supply often generates demand — upon the Chinese populace, British gunboats sailed up the River Yangtze to bombard the imperial capital Beijing for infringing the rules of “free trade”. The value of this wide-ranging history is that it covers previously untrodden ground. As the author writes in the very first chapter of Smoke and Ashes, although Bengal shares a border with China, information and knowledge about our neighbouring country never featured in his school and college curriculums. Yet the plain truth is that our two countries have had a long and troubled history connected with opium grown in the poppy fields of Bihar and forcibly dumped upon the Chinese people for over a century. As Ghosh recounts, EIC took over the fledgling opium industry of Bihar in 1772 and in 1799, established a dedicated Opium Department to stabilise production and maintain “an output of around 4,800 chests (3.5 million kg) per year, almost all of which was exported to the Dutch East Indies and China”. The ruthless efficiency with which the Department selected farmers over a

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