Amitav Ghosh, a critically acclaimed post-colonial writer deeply committed to unearthing lesser-known plots of the British Empire has added a new dimension to the disturbing colonial phases of the Indian sub-continent in this work of historical fiction, the Ibis trilogy. The trilogy is derived from and centered around the ship Ibis, which also provides a setting where most of the main characters meet. Ghosh came out with the first volume, Sea of Poppies, in 2008, probably without knowing that he would spend the next seven years completing the sequels, River of Smoke (2011) and Floods of Fire (2015).

A brief synopsis

The first half of the 19th century provides the historical backdrop for the novel to showcase the darkest realities of the British Empire. Together, the three volumes work to separate the vanity of the British Empire from the incorrigible realities around it and decipher the ‘Great Experiment’ that, in actuality, was a ploy to transport highly vulnerable labourers and convicts from India to work in inhuman conditions in the sugarcane plantations of Mauritius or use them in the opium trade between India and China.

Calcutta, with its conducive geography and presence of anglophile Bengali intelligentsia, was the first place where the British Empire found firm ground. In the Ibis trilogy, the Ibis departs safely from Calcutta but runs into a storm and faces a mutiny by on-board labourers. The story also involves two other ships—Anahita and Redruth—that are on a botanical expedition and get caught in the same storm. Some of the passengers of the Ibis reach their destination in Mauritius, and the rest find themselves in Hong Kong and Canton, caught in the middle of the events that led to the First Opium War.

The third novel

Flood of Fire, the concluding sequel of the Ibis trilogy, captures the hostile positions of China and British India in 1839, when, following the crackdown on opium smuggling in Beijing, the colonial government of India  declared war on China. Among the requisitioned vessels for the attack are the Hind that travels eastwards from Bengal to China in the midst of the First Opium War. The uncertainty faced by the travellers brings them together to pursue a single agenda of mutiny and defiance.

Worth a read

The Ibis trilogy reshapes the way history is seen, perceived and fictionalised in the Indian context, where subjects and narratives live with a greater risk of being blurred under the overlapping tendencies of historical facts forged by chroniclers.

This richly researched trilogy also shakes the false claims of the British Empire, that it was involved in a missionary work in the colonised lands—before the unimaginable international developments compelled it to fight the two world wars in the twentieth century—only to wreck its erstwhile glory and might. The opium trade, through the support of bonded labourers, was certainly not a missionary work for the Empire. And no sane  mind would term the action benignly inspired or disguised as a ‘white men’s burden’. There is enough evidence to show that the British Empire was running criminal activities and it frequently made a mockery of the Western ideals like modernism and enlightenment.

The colonial government in India found it easy to rule the land because it was extensively divided along the lines of feudal interests and was peppered with medieval socio-economic infrastructure.

But this is not to say that India, back then, was in the receiving end of  British achievements. British India gave much more to its colonial masters than they expected to get out of it, and not just in economic terms. The British also found civilisational attributes in their subject country, even though the latter was passing through its own worst time. Even without categorising the discourse with the controvertible ‘east-west syndrome,’it is not hard to notice that based on past documents, the Western world should not claim of living with modernism much earlier than the rest of the world. They took time to believe and practise their own propaganda of ‘modernism’, which they later confused with ‘industrialisation’.

Amitav Ghosh is among the most talented Indian writers writing in English not just because of his hold over the ‘language of the colonisers’ but also because of the efforts he puts in to put forward a complex, historical theme. With the Ibis trilogy, readers can ponder India’s intriguing past in well-researched fictional narratives. Readers from South Asia should take some time to read the sweeping volumes of the Ibis trilogy; for this is about their collective vulnerability, not so far back in history.

Thakur is a New Delhi-based journalist and writer. (@atul_mdb)