Samata Biswas
(Samata teaches English at Bethune College and can be reached at bsamata@gmail.com)
“...the Ibis was not a ship like any other; in
her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the
mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was truth”(422-423)[i].
Set in the 19th century, immediately
before the first Opium War, Sea of
Poppies chronicles the journey of Ibis, from the coast of Calcutta to
Mauritius. Central to the novel is Ibis, once a vessel that carried slaves, now
fitted for human cargo, and later, for opium. It brings together merchants,
indentured labourers and their guards, convicts undergoing a sentence of kala-pani, lascars who ply their trade,
one white woman trying to build an independent life in another country, a black
man passing as white- the link between the different sections on board etc. The
narrative is at pains to underscore the idea that on board the ship, everyone,
especially the marginalised are part of a unified community of forced migrants
irrespective of the reasons behind their migration and their previous
situations in life. This article teases out the tensions inherent in the
creation of a homogenous migrant identity.
Baboo Nob Kissin, the wily gomusta travelling aboard the Ibis,
slowly realising his woman self, first through acts of cross dressing and then,
a changed physiognomy- views the ship as a powerful force, giving birth to new
identities for himself as well as for the convicts, Lascars and the immigrants.
In extension, the ship serves as a powerful metaphor for the passage, the
experience of forced migration, within the novel- and the craft of
fiction itself, both, in several broad sweeps, obliterating difference and
engendering new, multiple identities.
This difference in their identities
(predominantly linguistic/ religious) and its subsumption under the
brother/sisterhood of the ship, on being evoked also negates itself. At the
moment of Ibis’s sailing from Calcutta, each of the three sections containing
detailed description of its movement, people’s feelings, the mechanics of sails
and waves ends with a prayer; with the crucial difference that the three
different prayers are uttered in three different languages and express three
different religious faiths. The narrative also describes how irrespective of
caste and creed all the members of the marginalised population on board join
into these prayers. This and the alignment of different sections of this
population against the oppressors (again of diverse identities) are crucial in
framing the migrants as a unified whole, whose fortunes are inexorably linked
to that of the ship:
Colonised
|
Coloniser
|
Lascars
|
Officers
|
Convicts
|
Guards
|
Indentured
|
Maistries
|
The above list represents the oppositions that
are set up in the novel, but as the list also indicates, different rows of the
list are not mutually exclusive. Marginalisation and exploitation, as always,
operate intersectionally.
Oppression is widespread in the novel, the
systematic exploitation of the farmers by the opium traders and their arm, the
colonial government- the intricate web of money lenders, requirement of opium
in absence of food crops and the alienation of the producers from their produce
are all represented in great detail in the novel. But the ease with which
poverty as systemic is represented, is not replicated in the representation of
the role that landed Indian upper caste aristocrats played in its production.
On one hand, the division between the migrants are elided upon- on the other,
the Indian gentry (here represented in the person of Neel) is absolved of its
responsibility in the production of marginalisation by making its sole
representative extraordinary sensitive, learned and learning. Within the novel,
a certain section of the natives are directly responsible for the miseries of
the migrants: some who were instrumental in getting them to
sign up and others who are the guards who treat them unkindly. But this
conflict of interests does not find an easy expression, in fact it gets
congealed within the person of one or two exceptionally villainous characters,
leaving the others free of blame. There is a function that portraying a few
characters with all villainies perform: in the narrative’s moral universe, most
characters continue to be free of blame, and forge solidarities with each other
easily.
The novel repeatedly celebrates multiple
identities: be it that of a Black carpenter who, mistaken as white, becomes the
second mate of a ship; that of a simultaneously religious and money minded
native official, who embraces his guru’s manifestation in his body, both materially
and spiritually; an upper caste landlord who goes through various degradations
before learning to care for his fellow convict, etc. An upper caste widow
emerges as a leader of her new community with a new caste identity. The ship
then, as mentioned in the beginning, as a metaphor for both the physical
journey as well as a shared experience of oppression, lack, physical and mental
hardship, engenders a new community. Deeti calls it their ship brother/
sisterhood. The inclusivity of marginalised identities forms another
insistent feature of the novel. In Canton (where the next part of the trilogy
is set and the destination of the opium trade that informs the novel and its
economy) not all foreigners are excluded from the forbidden city, as Neel’s
fellow convict Ah Fatt informs him. Without fail, the foreigners who are kept
out are the Americans, the Europeans and the Parsis, owners and employees of
Opium trading houses- in short, the Fanquis- aliens. The outsiders who
nevertheless are present within the gates of the city are Javanese, Malayalis,
Malays and Black hat Arabs (377). Representatives from nations and
nationalities all besieged by Western imperialism and capital find space and perhaps common cause with the Chinese fighting opium. The Lascars are
another similar case in point. “...they came from spaces that were far apart,
and had nothing in common, except the Indian ocean; among them were the Chinese
and east Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese”
(13). In their shared occupation and dedication to the Serang, and not least in
the pidgin they speak in, the Lascars are, in the novel the quintessential
representatives of this new migrant community, and narratively, its helper.
At the end of the novel the reader sees Jodu (an
orphaned Bengali Muslim boatman), Neel (erstwhile landowner- avid practitioner
of the caste system and caregiver of his fellow convict), Ah Fatt (the illegitimate
son of a Parsi businessman in Canton, a convict, and an opium addict to
boot), Kalua (a chamar ox cart driver
of prodigious strength, who rescued Deeti from her Sati-pyre) and Serang Ali (the leader of the Lascars, of
indeterminate origin and background) escape from the Ibis. The group that looks on in (at maybe!)farewell is equally
motley- Paulette, Baboo Nob Kissin, Deeti and Zachary (with their origins and
occupations as widely different as the one before). But in spite of their
differences both these groups can come together due to
some shared experience of dispossession, difficulty, their migration from the
familiar and the familial and their marginality.
In spite of the differences in their identities,
some common factors help in creating a group out of them. Dispossession, threat
to person, lack of well being, or simply gullibility is cited as the reason
behind the migrants signing up for the trip to Mauritius. But, without
exception, immigrant women in the novel are on the ship owing to matters
sexual- some thwarted, some forced upon and some in anticipation. Hence even
within their shared marginalisation, the agency of the women on the ship is
determined by their sexualities. After Deeti’s husband’s death, she would have
been forced to sleep with her brother in law to ensure her survival, the other
unaccompanied women on boat, including Paulette were either easy preys to their
benefactors or threats to the existing social fabric. The fictional resolution to
contested sexualities offered by the novel, i.e. migration,
nevertheless occurs within the limits of this contestation, and never
transgresses it. Crucial twists to the plot are brought to a head by
questions of desire and operations of power that seek to discipline women’s
bodies. The narrative also disciplines bodies, the cross-dressing gomusta is an object of ridicule, the
first mate transfers his unrequited desire for Zachary into extreme aggression
and has to die, the extreme physical and emotional proximity that the two
convicts share is wondered upon, by the narrative: but not treated
homosocially. Heterosexual love on the other hand takes the plot forward. Deeti
is saved by Kalua twice, once from being burnt alive and the second, from most
violent rape. Paulette manages to divert Zachary’s attention by feigning
intimacy so that the escapees succeed. However, in spite of being crucial to
the movement of the plot, in fact, of being the one who conjures the entire
novel into being with her line images of the important characters and the ship:
Deeti has no place in the final action. The crossdresser, the French woman who
wants to roam freely like men and the pregnant woman look on as the rest of the
central characters embark upon a new adventure.
Sexuality bubbles over Sea of Poppies, in abuses, references, songs and celebrations,
through its deviations from the norm as well as its acceptance of the
heteronorm even provides impetus to the plot, and carries the action
forward. But as Serang Ali instructs Zachary, “What for wanchi flower-girl? He
not big pukka sahib now?” (22)-the resolution, at least in this part of the
trilogy has to be brought about through a disavowal of women’s sexuality, it
has to be built by the actions of marginalised men, even as the women or
wanting to be women, look on.
In “Refugees, Forced Resettlers and ‘Other Forced
Migrants”[ii] David
Turton argues for “focusing on forced migrants as ‘purposive actors’ or
‘ordinary people’,” (10) while cautioning about thinking of them as “identical
members of homogeneous categories” (11). In Sea
of Poppies, the move is towards this homogenisation, as well as in a novel
full of movement, towards action. But the above discussion regarding the
forceful creation of homogenous identities in Sea of Poppies has hopefully illustrated the dangerous exclusions
that every act of inclusion nevertheless carries within it.
[i] All quotations, unless indicated otherwise, are from Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh, New Delhi:
Penguin Books. 2008. Print.
[ii] Turton, David. “Refugees, forced resettlers and ‘other forced
migrants’: towards a unitary study of forced migration”. Workign Paper no. 94.
UNHCR. Switzerland, 2003. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment