Word: ghosh
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...love words, I love languages," says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies - recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize - crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese - and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk...
...Ibis appears on our horizon off the coast of India in 1838 - a period often romanticized in fiction through narratives of imperial bravado. But this won't do for Ghosh, a veteran postcolonialist. He instead depicts India as it most likely was under the thumb of Britain's East India Company. Its once bounteous countryside is now run by Company edict, with farmers ordered to grow poppies to feed colossal opium factories, in whose noxious environs even monkeys slump in "a miasma of lethargy." Their fields given over to drug cultivation, thousands of starving, impoverished villagers leave for new pastures...
...Among the migrants is Deeti, a resolute and resourceful peasant woman who flouts conventions of caste and presciently foretells the coming of the tall-masted ship that will reshape her destiny. Sitting in his Kolkata home, Ghosh describes her to TIME as the book's "mainsail, its guiding energy." But while Deeti drives a story of considerable scope, she's not alone. Ghosh has a talent - revealed not only in this novel but previous ones - for bringing to life through his characters worlds that have been long forgotten. We meet, among others, a freed American slave, an impeccably-mannered Bengali...
...many contemporary writers can muster Ghosh's panoramic verve - even fewer can wield it with his deftness and poise. His research into 19th century nautical manifests led him to the lascars, a fascinating pan-Asian community of sailors employed aboard nearly all European craft in the Eastern hemisphere. Some of the book's most affecting passages involve their moonlit gatherings aboard the Ibis' deck, singing songs, swapping tales and forging a globalized identity long before such things were ever in vogue...
...Ghosh also knows that there's no easy harmony when peoples and cultures mix. While writing Sea of Poppies, he scoured old dictionaries and almanacs and filled the novel with dizzying dialogues incorporating bastardized Hindustani and lascar words that he claims entered common English parlance in the 19th century. Each character talks with his or her own particular style and peculiar vocabulary. ("Just eat the bish, you gudda," one sailor scolds another. "He was only foozlowing.") The book offers no glossary and Ghosh offers no apology for the difficulties some readers may have. "The first aspect of India's reality...