Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is an admixture of adventure and ordeal. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France’s top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar.
SEA OF POPPIES ,is actually the” Ibis Triology” that talks of an era in early 19th century, at the outset of the three-year Opium War between the British and the Chinese, this epic novel follows several characters from different levels of society, who become united through their personal lives aboard the ship and, more generally, through their connections to the opium and slave trades.
Deeti Singh, married as a young teenager to a man whose dependence on opium makes him an inadequate husband and provider, is forced to work on the family’s opium field outside Ghazipur by herself, though she fears her sadistic brother-in-law. When she has no options left that make sense to her, she escapes, eventually joining the migrants aboard the Ibis.
With certainty there is great reason for the notion that U.K. is so enchanted by Indian writing or even Indian subjects. E.M.Forster’s “A Passage To India” is a white man’s perception of the Indian democracy.There are three charters as it is in the three symbolical parts of it.Personally, I found the work very insipid, as there was no passion in it, it even falls short of being a a dialectic, as J.L.Nehru’s “Discovery of India”. Indians have preserved the legacy trunk of the British, that they pitieously left behind, in their hurried greed to drain this colonial grab off its rich produce. Now, they might look onto this country with yearning and nostalgia. The colonizer often loses threads of his natinal identity in his victory. Nevertheless, there is great worth in the whole interchange, draped in an energetic world of new emotions and interpretations. Ghosh has an exceptional narrative that lets you lose your logical understanding of cosmic events in an overwhelming ominipotent personality of the story teller’s conception. Timescales overlap and form a labyrinth of mystical realism. So much so that, there is often an inclination for open endings, where readers have to read between words.
May is another character of Ghosh in The Shadow Lines, whose persona is a scintillating propound of cross cultural connections. Ghosh’d character’s are fraught with conflicts and they have dynamic facets of life as they course on it. The drama unfolds therein. In An Antique Land is another notable work,in the non-fiction category.
Amitav Ghosh has taught at the Delhi University, and other International institutions.
He is married to Deborah Baker, a writer.
