(Re)inventing a People on the Sea: Instances of Creolization in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

While the East India Company made huge profits from the opium trade between its Indian dominion and China in the 1830s, many people in the colony, Indians and Europeans alike, felt their future was hopeless. Ruined by the compulsory cultivation of opium to the detriment of traditional agriculture that guaranteed self-reliance, or condemned by social prejudice, men and women were left with no other option than to seek a future elsewhere. Forced to share a confined place during a lengthy boat trip to an unknown destination in the Indian Ocean, people of opposed social and cultural backgrounds had to adjust to the unwritten laws of a community formed by chance. The characters of Amitav Ghosh's historical novel, Sea of Poppies, belong to the early waves of indentured workers that traveled throughout the Indian Ocean in the hope of a less arduous future. Notwithstanding their individual fate, Ghosh’s narrative shows that the ship constitutes a transitory “society” where each one has to re-negotiate his or her relationship to diversity.