Sept/Oct/Nov 2008
HEAVY TRAFFIC
Amitav Ghosh’s novel illuminates the British Empire’s polyglot opium trade
Maya Jaggi
The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise. While the slave trade in the Atlantic triangle between England, Africa, and the Americas has long been a rich source of epic fiction, Sea of Poppies casts light on a less well-charted
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