The way of words: Vernacular cosmopolitanism in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

In Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies I examine the ways of imagining and practising resistance by way of the concept of “vernacular cosmopolitanism”. I use the concept in two senses: first, as a cultural and political term that Homi Bhabha describes as a “cosmopolitan community envisaged in a marginality”, a form of materialist, actually existing, and rooted cosmopolitanism; second, in its vernacular, linguistic sense that reflects the way of words and the politics of language in the novel. In applying the term “vernacular”, I wish to bring to the fore — in the spirit of Sheldon Pollock’s groundbreaking work on “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” — the linguistic aspect of the concept of cosmopolitanism, which I feel has been inadequately discussed. In Sea of Poppies, language importantly serves both as an index of the cross-cultural fusion that was operating in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and their littoral zone and hinterland in the second quarter of the nineteenth-century, and also as a trope for the emergence of new identities in the Ibis trilogy.