At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camellia in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke

Abstract

This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisition, assimilation and dissemination of colonial knowledge in River of Smoke (2012). The paper highlights the cultural exchange of botanical and horticultural knowledge between Europe and China in the nineteenth century narrativized by Ghosh. The novel illustrates the significance of non-Eurocentric modes of conserving knowledge that would otherwise suffer from the violence of utilitarian models of European epistemology. The paper explicates how Ghosh represents the Chinese as successful in ensuring that the Golden Camellia – a rare flowering variety in China – is preserved from falling prey to the profiteering logic of botanical expeditions and epistemic hegemony by European naturalists. Using Pramod Nayar’s imperial cosmopolitanism and Robert Proctor’s agnotology as critical frames, the paper maps Ghosh’s fictional representation of Chinese horticulturists using botanical illustration to disable Europeans from accessing the Golden Camellia. By circulating the nonexistence of the plant variety as the truth, the Chinese horticulturalists in the novel prevent the Golden Camellia from being usurped and profiteered by European botanists and plant traders. The paper also establishes how Ghosh’s work functions as a significant addition to works foregrounding the South-South connection in the South Asian literary imagination.