Across the waters, tales of seduction
Farida Shaikh is intrigued by a new perspective on history
Contemporary writer Amitav Ghosh is reputed to be one of the most scholarly practitioners of the distinctive genre known as Indian writing in English --- one of the finest writers of prose, profoundly knowledgeable and a traveller in the physical and metaphysical sense. Ghosh's new book, Sea of Poppies, is being described as the first in what will be a trilogy. It is based on a world as it was in the nineteenth century - just before the Opium Wars. The Opium Wars are also known as the Anglo-Chinese Wars, which covered the periods 1839-42 and 1856-60, caused by a trade dispute between the Chinese Qing Dynasty and Britain. China was defeated in both the wars, signed the Treaty of Nanking and the Treaty of Tianjin and was forced to tolerate the opium trade. Smuggling of opium from India into China and the government's efforts to enforce drug laws erupted into conflict. The British East India Company had a monopoly on the production of opium in India and its subsequent export after Britain conquered Bengal in the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The old opium syndicate at Patna was abolished in1773. Import of opium into China was forbidden, and domestically a small amount was produced. The British fortune seekers in India turned the banks of the Ganges into a sea of poppies and tried to force refined opium on the reluctant Chinese. The East India Company bought tea in Canton on credit, carrying no opium, but would sell opium at the auctions in Calcutta. Eventually the opium would reach the Chinese coast aboard British ships and be smuggled into China by Chinese merchants. In 1797 the company ended the role of local Bengal purchasing agents and instituted the direct sale of opium by farmers to the company. British exports of opium to China skyrocketed from an estimated 15 tons in 1730 to 75 tons in 1773, shipped in over two thousand "chests", each containing 140 pounds (64 kg) of opium. By the 1820s China was importing 900 tons of opium from Bengal annually. The background to this book was encapsulated in a talk by the writer (Of Fanaas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and a Lost Language of the Age of Sail) in February 2008 at the Department of English, Independent University Bangladesh. Sea of Poppies is all about Lascars. The dictionary meaning of the word is sailor from India or South East Asia, sailor from the Indian Ocean ranging from Malay to African to Arab. Very many were from the region of Bengal, at present Bangladesh. This word created an informal reality. The life the sailors led in a small ship, the intense concentration, their ways of communication, their food, et al, are all covered in the book. There is profound silence on the life of the Lascars. This area has been ignored in 19th century history and the part they played during this period. This subject is of particular interest to the writer. The term lascar has a wide application. One possibility is to be found in Arabic, where al-Askari means soldier or a hired hand. The meaning is similar in Persian and Urdu. This is not very persuasive. It most probably derives from the Portuguese word Lascaran. The dictionary meaning of the term gives reference to a geographical area and notes Indian sailor, Malay sailor or African sailor. There is a racial tone to the term. This word created its own reality. There they are --- the Filipino, the Goan, the Bengalee --- and the kind of life they were living together, as the ship was a small one. They were living in intense concentration with each other. The lascars were dehumanised. They had to pay for their own return journey, so it is incredible what they had to do, and once the writer Herman Melville got into conversation with a lascar who spoke quite good English. Melville wrote from memory of his first voyage, but this encounter had a powerful impression on him. The lascar's name was garbled and that is because Melville wanted to remember the names; in western nautical writing, the names are preceded by the word. Lascars have always been suspicious of public scrutiny, but the fact is that they were the first Asians and Africans to participate freely in a globalised work place, the first to participate in the industrial process, the first to be introduced to nautical engineering, the developing subject of the 19th century. There is no doubt the lascars were in every way pioneers. Their experience is nowhere celebrated or recognised. Today, owing to the work of liberal scholars like Ravina Misra and Michael Fisher, a great deal is known about the lascars than was known ten years ago. We know that they were present in substantial numbers even in the 17th century, and earlier. We also know that they were not paid even a portion of the white man's wages and the profit margin that was maintained in hiring them. They were hired through organised chains of white sailors through kidnapping and networking. The lascars had to look for a living in London and Glasgow. More information is available about their lives on shore and very little about their life at sea. Western nautical writing mentions nothing about the lascars. The lascari language matters. The nautical vocabulary of the Indian Ocean had Portuguese roots. The word balti is derived from the Portuguese word ba-lay, and it was understood as ship's bucket, not like the balti we have today. This word has had an interesting journey. It is not the subcontinental word which we suppose it to be. What was it that was serving the purpose of balti? In the east lascars who lived in boarding houses were incredibly poor, so they would throw all their stuff into the balti. Bilati bangon was their word for tomato, and they would boil all this and it became balti chicken, but it was daliha ba-lay Portuguese. In the Oxford English Dictionary, balti is a style of Punjabi cooking. Similarly, there is the word karma, which is such a common word, basically in the sub-continent. Ghar refers to a house. Kamra comes from a Portuguese word kamara, which refers to a ship's cabin. Also, the Latin word kamera means box. Words work as hinges. Banyan, another Portuguese word, came to be referred to as banyanjee with respect to subcontinental language. Then it came to be applied to a grand dressing gown. The next incarnation of the word was sailor's vest, a western sailor's vest, a sailor's suit and then it became what we have today, the shrunken baniyan. Then there is the word for sail, pal. In western nautical language there are many names for the various kinds of sails. The word for fore sail comes from the word sacket sail and the kutchi word sac rate sail .There are many such words. One is kursi. For the lascar the word applies to cross tee, where the sailor could take his rest. Then there is purana jeeps which through several transformations turn to shaitan jee! Sarang is derived from Malay. The word sukkhani comes from the Arabic word and was understood as stewardship. There is arkati which comes from the Nawab of Arcot near Madras. The word malum comes from Arabic; and there are words like bara malum, chota malum, pehla malum, dusra malum. The word farab means agay and abh is pechay. Sea of Poppies paints a poignant picture of the human devastation of this trade. The fertile farms of the Ganges plain are blooming only with poppies - beautiful, deadly, denying the peasants the crops to sustain them and making them indebted to moneylenders and landowners, themselves indebted to the buccaneers of the East India Company.
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