Amitav Ghosh’s book Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories , shortlisted for the British Academy Prize 2024 weaves together the horticultural, social, and political economy of the colonial opium trade. A work of historical non-fiction that appears to be the preface to his fictional explorations in the Ibis Trilogy – The Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), three novels based on the Sino-Indian Opium trade of the mid-17th Century. The first book in the Ibis Trilogy, The Sea of Poppies begins with a foreboding omen, when Deeti, the protagonist, hallucinates the dark vision of a schooner slave ship disappearing at the cusp of River Ganges and the “Kala-Pani”.
The portentous vision appears to her at the threshold of the known world, and the space-of-exception, as the blackwaters or kala pani were the quasi-legal zone of British penal colonies located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. As the plot thickens, a ship called The Ibis, unlike anyone has ever seen before, indeed arrives at the dockss of Calcutta, navigated by the Afro-American second-mate passing as white. In the novel, the premonitory vision of The Ibis, a repurposed slave ship carrying in its wake the horrors of transatlantic chattel slavery, with its boards and planks still reeking of the sweat, blood, excrement, and vomit of a hold full of human cargo is all but set up for a fateful collision with the European colonial histories of indentured labour and the illegal tra.
