Book Review: Flood of fire

BOOK Review: Flood of fire

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 616

Rs: 799

The thought uppermost in my head as I neared the end of Flood of Fire, the much-anticipated last instalment of the Ibis trilogy, was how neatly Amitav Ghosh had brought together the many strands of the complex, sprawling narrative which he had started to unfold seven years ago with Sea of Poppies. How, despite its considerable length - this is the fattest of the three – it remains a page-turner, full of brisk-paced dramatic action. How the story, which opened in the poppy fields and opium factory of Ghazipur, moved to the slave ship Ibis and thereon to Calcutta, Bombay and Fanqui town in Canton, finds its logical resolution on a rain-misted afternoon in a slushy paddy field in China. And how, through all its many sub-plots and digressions, its vast cast of characters, disparate settings and seemingly rambling progression, Ghosh constructs an epic critique of colonialism and the unfettered greed that underpins it.

The first Opium War is the theatre of action in Flood of Fire. It follows logically from book two, River of Smoke, which ended with Canton's governor, Lin Zexu, seizing and destroying 20,000 chests of opium that the British merchants had brought to "trade" in China. This was, as history tells us, the provocation that led the British Empire to mount a naval expedition to China and the first Opium War.

If readers travelled to China on Behram Mody's lavishly appointed Anahita in River of Smoke, here they cross the 'kala pani' on Hind, a civilian transport ship that carries four companies of the British Indian army - two each of native 'volunteer' sepoys and gora soldiers - raised with funding from the opium merchants, many of them Parsis, for the China campaign. Leading one of the companies is Havildar Kesri Singh, Deeti's elder brother, whom we meet for the first time in this book. Kesri, it may be remembered, had played a brief role in book one, fixing Deeti's marriage to Hukam Singh, the brother of the subedar of his battalion, Bhyro Singh. Kesri had not met Deeti since and so was ignorant of the troubles in her marriage. But Deeti's elopement with Kalua, and Bhyro Singh's death at the latter's hands, had forced him to leave the battalion and volunteer for the Maha-Chin operation.

Travelling on the Hind is also Zachary Reid, who's come up significantly in life since we last saw him as Ibis's beleaguered second mate charged with abetting the murders on that ship. Zachary is "supercargo" on Hind, employed by the ship's owner, Mr Burnham, to trade opium on his behalf; by the end of Flood of Fire, he is captain of Ibis and Mr Burnham's business partner. But Zachary isn't the sympathetic character of Sea of Poppies. In Flood of Fire, he is an opportunist cad who will do anything, including exploit the emotions of the woman, Mrs Burnham, with whom he has an affair and who sets him off on the road to material riches, to further his own interests.

Also travelling on Hind is Shireen Mody, Behram's widow, on her way to China to stake claim to her share of the fat compensation that the British traders want the Chinese emperor to pay for the seized opium. This is a very different Shireen from the superstitious, nagging housewife of earlier books, a woman we almost don't blame Behram for cheating on. The Shireen here is a confident woman who not just learns to live with the knowledge of her husband's betrayal, but even accepts his illegitimate son Freddy and dares, a significant step, to fall in love with and marry Behram's friend Zadig Bey.

In China, the novel moves into the battlefield following in the steps of Kesri Singh and Raju, Neel's son who travels out on Hind in search of his father, and ends up as one of the 'banjee-boys' leading the soldiers to war. Ghosh is at his most evocative here, recreating the sights and smells of close combat warfare in all its sensory immediacy - the reverberation of the earth as cannons explode, the cacophony of thudding feet, pounding drums and whistling bullets, the excreta expelled from the guts of dying men, the desperate courage of the Chinese who die standing at their posts as the superior British guns easily pick them out. China, as we well know, lost the battle, and the Opium Wars - but perhaps it takes feats of imagination such Ghosh's to apprehend, as Neel does, "how a small number of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn".

Ghoshspeak: Q&A with Amitav Ghosh

That the Ibis trilogy just "worked itself out" is a kind of miracle, says Amitav Ghosh as he discusses his latest book, Flood of Fire, and gives an insight into the research and the craft behind his books

Ten years, three books, numerous characters and sub-plots - how did you manage to bring it all together?
I didn't work it out - it worked itself out. Right from the start the book was about intersecting lives, and somehow the lives intersected in such a way that at the end there is a kind of meeting of all the various threads. It seems to be a kind of miracle.

Did you have a plan in your head when you began about how the three books would pan out?
Some writers are able to plan their books. I am not that kind of writer. I am a blundering writer, I blunder about in the dark. Writing a book is a process of discovery for me. I actually bought a big board I thought I would plot it - but nothing like that happened.

There's obviously many years of hard research that has gone into the writing of the Ibis trilogy. But the way it is integrated seems almost intuitive. Would you agree?
Research is hardly intuitive, it is a lot of hard work. These are the two poles of how I work. Often, one part of the work requires me to go through hundreds of documents, but there are also these moments of what I call moments of recognition, or illumination, when suddenly something opens up. Neel, for instance. I was looking through judicial documents of early 19th century Calcutta and I came across the interesting case of a zamindar called Pran Krishna Halder - spelt "Prawn Kissin Halder" - a very rich man, very close to Calcutta's English elite, who is suddenly indicted for forgery...(and) was banished to Prince of Wales Island, now Penang. It was one of those moments when whole new aspects open up. That was the point at which Neel was born.

The Chinese, as your book shows, felt a deep disdain for the Indian soldiers who fought in the Opium War. Does that disdain explain the disjunction that informs modern-day India-China relations?
The Chinese thought the Indians would not fight for the British, they were persuaded that the Indian sepoys were slaves. It became one of China's miscalculations in the Opium wars. You have to remember that this is just the first Opium War. There was a second Opium War which was even more destructive. Then there was the Boxer rebellion, and Indian soldiers were again used to suppress that. So it is not just one incident, but a long history. They are accustomed to thinking that Indians are people who do other people's dirty work for them.

What next?
I am working on a book of essays that comes out at the end of the year.