Ritu Jha–
Amitav Ghosh, the globally recognized Indian writer who won the Jnanpith Award — the country’s highest literary honor — in 2018, spoke about his latest book ‘Smoke and Ashes’ at the closing keynote of the recently concluded South Asian Literature and Arts (SALA) Festival held at Menlo College in Atherton, California.
According to the publisher HarperCollins, “Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival. Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, several of America’s most powerful families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. In India the long-term consequences were even more profound.”
The reason that Ghosh gravitated to a subject as complex as this was because, he said, his ancestors settled in Chapra near Patna (the capital of Bihar) in the mid-19th century.
“At a certain point, I started asking myself, despite this being the richest, most productive, most culturally important part of India why is it that suddenly in the 19th century, millions of people were abandoning this place? That’s when I discovered the narrative of opium and opium cultivation, which is not discussed in our history books, and most of us don’t know it.”

He said the Chinese remember this history and how it affected them very clearly. “It’s still a very central part of their view of their own history.”
In India, Ghosh said, it is completely absent, even though it shaped the nation’s socioeconomic geography. “At the heart of this bureaucratic system was the Opium Department, which was capable of brutalizing large numbers of people and forcing them to cultivate poppies, to sell them at a loss and essentially entrapping and enslaving them into a system of opium production.”
Ghosh believes it is an “astonishing story.”
He said at the SALA Festival, “A huge migration occurred around opium. For example, the Marwari influx into Calcutta (now Kolkata) was accelerated by the opium trade because the main opium auctions of the East India Company were in that city. The difference between the way that opium is produced in the east is that there is a government monopoly. Local people have no access to it at all. It arrives in Calcutta, is auctioned off to a few chosen merchants, and then it goes off to China. In Bombay, it’s completely different because what happens in Bombay is that it’s basically the princely states protect opium production because they rely on the local merchant network. The merchant network included every commercial community of western India. Every community Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, everybody was involved in the trade.”
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Born in Kolkata, Ghosh, who likes to work on complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia, and his books have looked at colonization, trade, and climate change.
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He said to the engrossed audience, “Opium has always existed since the beginning of humanity… what changed later is that round about the 12th and 13th centuries, opium began to enter courtly culture, especially via the Mongol conquests.”
He said, “The Mongols used opium, and so did their successor empires such as the Ottomans, the Sassanids, and the Mughals, for various rituals. You can see (Emperor) Jahangir’s opium cup if you Google it on your phone. But even then, it was very restricted because opium production labor intensive.”
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Ghosh begins his narrative at a time when India was one of the centers of opium production. “Opium was grown as a kind of secondary product of rice, beets, and vegetables. Once the Dutch started conquering, they bought lots of opium because they used it to create monopolies in various substances in Southeast Asia where these experiments with opium first began.”
However, “When the British took control of Patna, they immediately imposed a monopoly on opium.”
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He then added, “Over the next 40 years, they grew opium production manifold. And the problem for them was that at that point, the British government revenues were heavily dependent on taxes and the Chinese would only accept payment for tea in silver bullion. For a while, the Europeans could trade with China with silver bullion because they conquered South America. Through enslaved labor, they were able to extract enormous quantities of silver, which they then took to China and bought the tea. But in the mid-18th century, there was a shortage of silver. To continue trading with China they came up with an idea that they’ll take opium there and sell them the opium.”

Then they sent off just one ship first, which didn’t even manage to sell all its opium. “That was around 1770 but then over the next few years, they just grew the trade, especially in Bengal, around Patna, and they created this thing called the Opium Department, which basically controlled all the agriculture in this entire region that we call Purvanchal, which is Bihar,” Ghosh explained.
By the 1830s, the Chinese were facing a tsunami of opium coming at them. That’s why in 1839, they made an effort to shut down the opium trade. “The British attacked them saying that they could not stop buying opium. That marked the beginning of the era of narco colonialism.”
Ghosh said, “It never occurred to me that China could have had an influence on the culture that surrounded me. It happened through this one epiphanic moment when I was sitting in my study in Calcutta. Suddenly I look around me and I see the tea, which is called cha in Bengali is a Cantonese word. I look at the sugar and what’s the word for sugar? Chini. It just means Chinese. I looked around and I could see China everywhere. There’s a historical lineage behind each and every one of those. And it’s a connection to China that we don’t realize and that we completely have erased from our minds. When you delve into history and read the Chinese voices from the past, specifically the opium wars, you realize what is lost by not understanding this period of history through Chinese eyes.”
“In the late 19th century, a huge international movement grew, an anti-opium movement. At that point in time, the European empires were the main sponsors of the opium trade and they were the most powerful entities on Earth. But this international movement, which included religious groups, and women’s groups was very important, and all kinds of other organizations, equivalent of NGOs at that time. They essentially managed to create so much reputational damage for the Empire that they ultimately had to come to the table and accept limitations on opium production.”
He added, “But the British, as late as 1935, built the biggest opium production opium factory in the world. It’s on the border of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The other big opium factory is in Ghazipur. This opium factory has existed since 1780 and has created more. It’s still one of the world’s biggest producers of legal opium.”
Ghosh’s book points out how the Chinese state had been desperately trying, taking measure after measure to control the illegal smuggling of opium into China. The smuggling was carried out to create dependencies and addictions in the society and to balance out the terms of the balance of trade to European advantage.” He said those measures were repeatedly thwarted and undermined by European powers with the help of Indians in many respects. Eventually, war erupted and these measures were defeated by sheer brute force, forcing open the borders so that more opium can pour into China.”
He said, “We see this exactly 100 years later right now as we speak, the entire geopolitical order of the world is changing. We can see that all around us today and it’s very, very scary. But this is the greatest geopolitical change in the last 500 years. For the first time, Western hegemony is seriously under challenge. And who knows where it will lead? Will it lead anyplace good?”