All Aboard

“I love words, I love languages,” says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. “It’s only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them.” His latest book, Sea of Poppies — recently short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize — crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese — and yet, through “the alchemy of the open water,” as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk. Language animates the Ibis, as well it should: loaded with migrants, opium and the dreams of unwitting pioneers, it is intended to be the vessel for a whole trilogy of novels. Sea of Poppies is the impressive first installment.

The Ibis appears on our horizon off the coast of India in 1838 — a period often romanticized in fiction through narratives of imperial bravado. But this won’t do for Ghosh, a veteran postcolonialist. He instead depicts India as it most likely was under the thumb of Britain’s East India Company. Its once bounteous countryside is now run by Company edict, with farmers ordered to grow poppies to feed colossal opium factories, in whose noxious environs even monkeys slump in “a miasma of lethargy.” Their fields given over to drug cultivation, thousands of starving, impoverished villagers leave for new pastures as indentured labor in Mauritius, a place so remote that it is thought to be a “demon-plagued land.”

Among the migrants is Deeti, a resolute and resourceful peasant woman who flouts conventions of caste and presciently foretells the coming of the tall-masted ship that will reshape her destiny. Sitting in his Kolkata home, Ghosh describes her to TIME as the book’s “mainsail, its guiding energy.” But while Deeti drives a story of considerable scope, she’s not alone. Ghosh has a talent — revealed not only in this novel but previous ones — for bringing to life through his characters worlds that have been long forgotten. We meet, among others, a freed American slave, an impeccably-mannered Bengali nobleman turned convict and a cross-dressing businessman who scans the stools of strangers for spiritual omens.

Not many contemporary writers can muster Ghosh’s panoramic verve — even fewer can wield it with his deftness and poise. His research into 19th century nautical manifests led him to the lascars, a fascinating pan-Asian community of sailors employed aboard nearly all European craft in the Eastern hemisphere. Some of the book’s most affecting passages involve their moonlit gatherings aboard the Ibis‘ deck, singing songs, swapping tales and forging a globalized identity long before such things were ever in vogue.

But Ghosh also knows that there’s no easy harmony when peoples and cultures mix. While writing Sea of Poppies, he scoured old dictionaries and almanacs and filled the novel with dizzying dialogues incorporating bastardized Hindustani and lascar words that he claims entered common English parlance in the 19th century. Each character talks with his or her own particular style and peculiar vocabulary. (“Just eat the bish, you gudda,” one sailor scolds another. “He was only foozlowing.”) The book offers no glossary and Ghosh offers no apology for the difficulties some readers may have. “The first aspect of India’s reality is that it’s intensely multilingual,” he says. “You have to find rhetorical ways to show that, to show that the experience of language is not transparent.”

That’s all well and good, but there are moments when you really do want to look beyond what it means to “puckrow” a “beebee” or tolerate a “badmash chuckeroo.” Thus the remarkable aspect of Ghosh’s writing — his acute sensitivity to place and historical setting — can also present something of a drawback. The occasionally overzealous nature of his politics is also disappointing in a writer of such intelligence and originality. Here, imperialists are corrupt and bad, and Ghosh’s descriptions of some verge on hackneyed: the Ibis‘ English owner, for instance, expounds upon the divine right of free trade one moment, and then lasciviously forces a young girl to spank him — in church — the next. We get it.

Yet these are minor squalls in what is otherwise a rather pleasant journey. Sea of Poppies ends somewhere off the coast of Malaya, with the motley crew we met in India now poised to go off in myriad directions. Ghosh is coy about his next act, but speaks keenly of the month he spent researching in Guangzhou — the Canton of old. Could the Opium Wars soon entangle the Ibis? Or will it be a mutiny of disgruntled migrants? Or what about the machinations of a mysterious ex-pirate from Burma’s Muslim Rohingya minority, whose betel-stained gums and drooping mustache make him look “like some bloodthirsty Tartar of the steppes”? Wherever Ghosh’s Asian epic may turn, readers can rest assured there are few better navigators to guide it.