'Migration is the reality of my times'

NEW DELHI: The characters and setting may be different, but his latest 'Sea of Poppies' like his other works also focuses on migration, which is the reality of "the Asian times", says India's bestselling contemporary author Amitav Ghosh.

'Sea of Poppies', which was launched on Monday and hit bookstores across India in the first week of the month, is the first of a trilogy set just before the Opium wars. It is about an old slaving ship, the Ibis, which sails across the Indian Ocean with its motley crew of sailors, stowaways, coolies and convicts.

At the heart of it is a diverse cast of a bankrupt king, a widowed villager, an evangelical English opium trader and mulatto American, who are thrown together in a time of colonial upheaval. As their old family ties are washed away, an unlikely dynasty is born spanning continents, races and generations.                

"The characters of my new book may be different, the setting different and the time period different, but it is not unlike my other books because it also focuses on migration. I have been writing about migration and exodus long before globalisation. It is the reality of my times - the Asian times," said Ghosh, the writer of internationally acclaimed books like the 'The Glass Palace', 'The Hungry Tide', 'The Circle of Reason' and 'The Shadow Lines'.

Ghosh, 52, who wrote his first novel, 'The Circle of Reason' in 1986, has 10 books to his credit.

Seated in his eleventh floor suite of the Hotel Taj Mansingh overlooking a rain-washed Delhi skyline, Ghosh, who was in the capital to promote his new book, cut an incisive figure.

"I am trying to see these global movements of people in a historical perspective. 'Sea of Poppies' is a historical novel about migration, both past and present. Don't call it rootlessness or alienation from the mother culture; those are negative words.

"I don't think migration signifies one thing. There are so many reasons why migration takes place- it could be economic, social or even related to education. Every middle class Indian has a cousin abroad. For instance, almost everyone on Goa has either worked abroad or have relatives outside the country. That's the kind of reality people are living with now," Ghosh said. 

Much of 'Sea of Poppies' is set in Mauritius, an island that the author toured and explored extensively in course of his research. "My research took me to Mauritius, China and England. I discovered several fascinating nuggets of history in Mauritius."

He also sailed a bit. "I went sailing on a sail boat to know what it was like to be on the ocean. The slave ship, Ibis, in my book is a slice of history. A lot of these American slave ships were used in the Indian Ocean to transport opium and ferry people."

His period of research was the 18th century.

"I went to all sorts of interesting archives. In Mauritius, I went to a place called the Mahatma Gandhi Institute Library where I chanced upon a book, which had a story about a young Bengali man with the surname Ghosh, who had migrated to Mauritius in the late 19th century.

"He fought with his brother and ran away to Mauritius. For years, his brothers wrote to the commissioner of migrants in Mauritius to help find their sibling," he said.

Ghosh, who spends his time between the US and India, is also passionate about diaspora heritage. According to him, the most interesting thing about Mauritius is the intense consciousness about history - the arrival of the early settlers from Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to work in the plantations and trade in spice.

"I came across a memorial Aapravasi Ghat, a UNESCO world heritage monument, which was an immigration depot in the 18th and the 19th century," he said.

Nearly half-a-million indentured Indian labourers arrived at the Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius between 1834 to 1920.

But he rued the lack of historical enterprise in India, pointing to a similar site in Kolkata. "There is a similar immigration depot near Kalighat Temple along the Adi (old) Ganga stream, where indentured labourers from across the country came stayed for weeks before being shipped off to Mauritius, Guyana and Fiji.

"If the Bengal government preserves it as a heritage site, the depot can draw thousands of visitors from the island countries every year. There is a large chunk of the migrant population in the island nations who still call themselves 'Kolkataiyas', though they have been assimilated into the bigger Bhojpuri culture of the migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh," he said.              

Mauritius with its large Bhojpuri diaspora struck a chord in Ghosh, who speaks Bhojpuri and listens to traditional music of Bhopjpur, courtesy his father and aunts who settled in Bihar's Chapra district after migrating from Bangladesh.

The Kolkata born author, who was educated in Doon School, St Stephen's College and the University of Oxford, is an avid reader who loves the "IIT novels emenating from the Indian Institute of Technology campus". "I loved reading Chetan Bhagat's first book 'Five Point Someone' and Amitava Bagchi's  'Above Average'," he said.