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.

After writing about cloth and oil in The Circle of Reason (1986), spices and sugar in In an Antique Land (1992), timber and rubber in The Glass Palace (2000), now in Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), the first two volumes of a projected trilogy, Amitav Ghosh has yet again turned his attention to another material commodity, in this case, opium, as well as Britain’s Opium Wars with China in the nineteenth century and the relationship between China and India. Under Ghosh’s pen, the Sudder Opium Factory run by the British East India Company in Ghazipur in northern Bihar in India is made to resemble one of the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno: “a host of dark, legless torsos […] circling around and around, like some enslaved tribe of demons […] bare-bodied men, sunk waist-deep in tanks of opium, tramping round and round to soften the sludge” (2008a: 87). ¹ Ghosh’s novels speak to the concerns of our globalized twenty-first century, especially as the world reengages with China. Ghosh explains how the British ingeniously profited from selling opium from India to China, making an astute analogy between the opium trade of the nineteenth century and the machinations of the oil trade of today: “The reason that the English started pushing opium on China was the enormous trade deficit, the balance of payments. Today, the whole world is an enormous trade deficit with China, but especially America. And in a way, oil is the opium of today” (Page, 2008: n.p.).

Sea of Poppies revisits and expands in compelling ways some of the major themes in Ghosh’s earlier novels:

the incessant movements of the peoples, commerce, and empires which have traversed the Indian Ocean since antiquity; and the lives of men and women with little power, whose stories, framed against the grand narratives of history invite other ways of thinking about the past, culture and identity. (Chew, 2008: n.p.; [emphasis added])

What I wish to examine in Sea of Poppies are precisely these other 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” (1996: 195; [italics in the original]), a form of materialist (Spencer, 2011), actually existing, and rooted cosmopolitanism (Robbins, 1998: 1–2); second, more importantly and in greater detail in the latter part of the essay, in its vernacular, linguistic sense that reflects the way of words and the politics of language in the novel.

Ghosh’s work addresses two major problems with contemporary cosmopolitan discourse: its Eurocentrism and elitism. In an effort to “provincialize Europe”, Ghosh has drawn attention to interconnections between and among non-European places such as China and India in Sea of Poppies (he mentions for example, the sixteenth-century Chinese classic Journey to the West, the west being India; 387), as he did in examining the intertwining histories of India and Egypt in In an Antique Land, and of India, Malaya, and Burma in The Glass Palace (Luo, 2012: 147–8). Further, as illustrated below, and in a similar vein as Mica Nava’s fascinating study of Visceral Cosmopolitanism (2007) with its focus on lived experiences and their vernacular, quotidian, and domestic expressions, Ghosh, in his version of “cosmopolitanism from below”, turns his attention to the marginalized and dispossessed, whether it be the almost-forgotten slave Bomma in In an Antique Land, or the obscure orphan Rajkumar in The Glass Palace, or the illiterate fisherman Fokir in The Hungry Tide (2004), and in Sea of Poppies, the lowly lascar who “in the annals of nineteenth-century nautical writing […] is almost always a figure unnamed” (2008d: 58). In applying the term “vernacular”, I wish to bring to the fore — in the spirit of Sheldon Pollock’s groundbreaking work on “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”, as well as Ronit Ricci’s (2011) excellent study on the Arabic Cosmopolis and its literary networks — 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.

The cosmopolitan

Sea of Poppies tracks the trajectory of the Ibis, a former slave ship that is to be part of a fleet of opium transports, though first bound for the Mauritius Islands on its terrifying voyage across the “Black Water” of the Indian Ocean with its cargo of convicts and indentured labourers, a diverse group of characters of different castes, class, and cultures. Under the direst of conditions, amid wind and storms, life carries on nonetheless aboard ship: people form friendships and fall in love; they get married, give birth, and perform funeral rites; most importantly of all, they tell one another stories, re-invent their pasts and dream of the future. Indeed, once on the ship, the migrants form a “special and secret bond” (217), and, free from “the ties that bind others”, become a “brotherhood” of their own: “You will be your own village, your own family; your own caste” (290). Rai and Pinkey have commented thus on the impact of ship journey on identity formation among the girmitiyas: “The conditions on board ship made it difficult to sustain many of the taboos associated with religious ritual life, ruled by observances of relative purity and pollution of food, the boundaries of caste, marriage and religion” (2012: 74). The Ibis becomes for them “a vehicle of transformation” (388): “From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings — jahazbhais and jahazbahens — to each other. There will be no differences between us” (328). This notion of siblinghood and of change, thinks one of the central characters Deeti, is “so complete, so satisfactory and so thrilling in its possibilities” (328) that she realizes that

her new self, her new life, had been gestating all this while in the belly of this creature, this vessel that was the Mother−Father of her new family, a great wooden mái−báp, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come. (328)

The transcultural and translingual relationships the migrants form on the ship that Ghosh describes can be considered a form of “vernacular cosmopolitanism”, a term Pnina Werbner describes as an “oxymoron that joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment” (2006: 496). John Thieme, in his reflections on the possibilities for more open global dialogue and careful delineation of “internal” and “expansive” cosmopolitanisms, also acknowledges that

The historical provenance of “cosmopolitanism” suggests a wide continuum of cultural formations along which the term has been stretched, with meanings that relate to coercive colonial hegemonies at one extreme and practices that encourage a reciprocal, non-hierarchical cultural dialogue at the other end of the continuum. (2011: 191)

Nonetheless, Werbner argues persuasively for a “situated” cosmopolitanism (2008: 1), pointing out that not only is cosmopolitanism not singularly elitist or for that matter necessarily western, but also “it may be said that cosmopolitanism is always, in some sense at least, vernacular, historically and spatially positional, and hence also necessarily political, contested, dialectical” (2008: 13). James Clifford contends that “[w]hatever the ultimate value of the term cosmopolitanism, pluralized to account for a range of uneven affiliations”, in the end,

it points, at least, toward alternative notions of “cultural” identity. It undermines the “naturalness” of ethnic absolutisms, whether articulated at the nation-state, tribal, or minority level. Discrepant cosmopolitanisms begin and end with historical interconnection and often violent attachment. […] Such a perspective opens up a more complex, humane understanding of hybrid realities […]. It gives us a way of perceiving, and valuing, different forms of encounter, negotiation, and multiple affiliation rather than simply different “cultures” or “identities”. (1998: 365)

And, as Inderpal Grewal rightly emphasizes, Ghosh’s texts are important interventions which articulate a cosmopolitanism that “emerge[s] from a historical narrative suppressed by Western histories” and from “a world connected through its resistance to European colonization and the constructions of new histories” (2008: 180).

Ghosh has commented and written extensively on the fantastic heterogeneity and richly cosmopolitan nature of the crews of merchant ships in the “age of sail”. Jacob Crane points out, in his comparative work on Ghosh and Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, “the emphasis on the sailor as the cosmopolitan figure par excellence”, noting as well, the nature of the Ibis as a trope for “vehicles of diaspora and as polyphonic microsystems of linguistic and political hybridity” (2011: 5). In Sea of Poppies, the character Zachary, in his “first experience of this species of sailor”, “had thought that lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux; he discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese” (12-3). By tracing the linguistic, nautical, and colonial etymology of the word “lascar” — “an Anglo-Indian adaptation of the Persian/Urdu lashkar/lashkari, meaning ‘soldier’ or ‘army’” — that is “applied to all indigenous sailors of the Indian Ocean region”, Ghosh illuminates the historical realities of life on the ship for the lascars, writing “that a single word should cast so large a net seems puzzling only from a landward and contemporary perspective” (2008d: 57). Ghosh calls these earlier migrants “forerunners of today’s migrants” and his interest in the lascar has important contemporary resonances:

Like many paperless migrants in the west today, lascars were probably suspicious of public scrutiny, so it behoves us to note that theirs is not the least of the many curtains of silence which we seek to pierce when we inquire into their lives. But the truth is that their lives are of more interest today than ever before — for the very good reason that they were possibly the first Asians and Africans to participate freely, and in substantial numbers, in a globalised workspace. (2008d: 58)

Far from an elitist activity, the form of cosmopolitanism in Sea of Poppies comes through hardship and suffering and is based on survival and necessity. This is a space that is akin to what Derrida, in his essay on cosmopolitanism, terms “cities of refuges”, a space (borrowing from Hannah Arendt) for “those ‘without a State,’ the Heimatlosen, of the stateless and homeless, and of deported and ‘displaced persons’” (2002: 9). In these contexts, Clifford continues in his argument for “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”, “people have understood their fate, negotiated with difference, preserved a dignity in confrontation, survived as cultural/political subjects through complex tactics of separatism and accommodation” (1998: 367). Thus, we encounter in the novel many unusual forms of affiliations: between different classes (Neel and Parimal), between races (Jodu and Paulette), between religions (Jodu and Monia), and between castes (Deeti and Kalua).

Zachary, the son of a slave and a white man turned second mate on the ship, describes the bond between him and Serang Ali, an Arakan pirate turned lascar:

It is a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other. (403)

These bonds of “pure sympathy” provide the migrants with comfort and consolation; afford them dignity and solidarity; stir in them strength and courage for defiance and resistance, and desire for ultimate freedom. In the end, the novel celebrates a “miscegenation and mongrelism” that is condemned by the ship’s captain (442), and provides, as it were, “the key that could unlock the cages that imprisoned everyone, all these beings who were ensnared by the illusory differences of this world” (461).

The vernacular

Aside from Ghosh’s ability to juggle myriad interconnected stories of disguises and transformations taking place on board the Ibis, what I am most interested in exploring in this article, however, is the linguistic dexterity and virtuosity that Ghosh brilliantly displays in Sea of Poppies and the ways in which Ghosh delves into the “extraordinary complexity and heterogeneity of the resistance that is lodged in the many languages — not only the many languages of the world but the many idiomaticities of those languages” (Spivak, 2008: 254). All Ghosh’s work displays an engagement with etymologies and the provenance of cultural forms and practices, and he has always been concerned with the challenge of representing multiple languages in a novel: as he puts it in an interview with Shameem Black, “In these patterns of heteroglossia, everyone speaks many languages at once” (2009: 173). The concept of a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” is useful here because the term “vernacular” brings into play the translational and linguistic aspects of cosmopolitanism as well as privileging the space of the “in-between”, which for Bhabha is “an intervening space, a space of translation as transformation particularly apposite to the difficult, transnational world” (1996: 198):

Bear in mind, of course, that the “vernacular” shares an etymological root with the “domestic” but adds to it — like the “Un” that turns heimlich into unheimlich — the process and indeed the performance of translation, the desire to make a dialect: to vernacularize is to “dialectize” as a process; it is not simply to be in a dialogic relation with the native or the domestic, but it is to be on the border, in between, introducing the global−cosmopolitan “action at a distance” into the very grounds — now displaced — of the domestic. (1996: 202; [italics in the original])

In Sea of Poppies, the Ibis is for the migrants such an in-between space, between home and exile, between languages; it is a place of displacement and dislocation, but also of “unnatural” intermingling and transgression, of radical reinvention and transformation. Translation, etymologically, means the activity of carrying across, the transportation and relocation of the bones and other remains of saints. As Deeti inscribes the names of her deities onto the beams of the ship, transferring her shrine from land to sea, the Ibis’s voyage itself, transporting indentured labourers across the sea, signifies as a “transfer”, a “carrying over”, or a “bearing across”, as it were, the abyss of difference and death, both physical and cultural, as well as linguistic.

Most illuminatingly, Sheldon Pollock’s historical and comparative analysis of cosmopolitan and vernacular ways of being in his essay, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History”, further provides nuanced and complex ways to think about the linguistic cosmopolitanism in Ghosh’s work. As with Ghosh’s emphasis on lived actualities, Pollock’s intention is to think “about cosmopolitanism and vernacularism as action rather than idea, as something people do rather than something they declare, as practice rather than proposition” (2002: 17). Pollock warns against reifying either the cosmopolitan or the vernacular “by foregrounding doctrines while ignoring actions”: “Cosmopolitan is not necessarily to be equated with a cultural−political form of universal reason, let alone with a universal church or empire, any more than vernacular is to be taken to be synonymous with national” (2002: 19–20). In his comparative study of two cosmopolitan linguistic systems of Latin and Sanskrit worlds, Pollock distinguishes between a “coercive cosmopolitanism and a vernacularism of necessity, where participation in larger or smaller worlds is compelled by the state or demanded by blood” and “a voluntaristic cosmopolitanism and a vernacularism of accommodation, where very different principles are at work inviting affiliation to these cultural-political orders” (2002: 19). Discussing the correlation between language and community, Pollock calls for the latter as an exemplar of a possible alternative, against extremes of, on the one hand, globalization, and on the other, fundamentalism. This practice would “consist of a response to a specific history of domination and enforced change, along with a critique of the oppression of tradition itself, tempered by a strategic desire to locate resources for a cosmopolitan future in vernacular ways of being themselves” (2002: 47). A brilliant instance is in Ghosh’s description in River of Smoke of the “strange diction of pidgin” of the “Fanqui-town”, an enclave of foreign traders in Canton:

The common language of trade in southern China was a kind of patois — or, as some called it “pidgin”, which meant merely “business” and was thus well suited to describe a tongue which was used mainly to address matters of trade […]. The grammar was the same as that of Cantonese, while the words were mainly English, Portuguese and Hindusthani — and such being the case, everyone who spoke the jargon was at an equal disadvantage, which was considered a great benefit to all. (2011a: 163)

Ghosh has, of course, elsewhere shown great interest in such hybrid languages. In In an Antique Land, for example, he delved into the medieval merchant Ben Yiju’s documents, which were written in an “unusual, hybrid language […] known today as Judaeo−Arabic; it was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script” (1992: 101). Ghosh wondered even then about the common language of communication among the merchants on the Malabar Coast:

Common sense suggests that in an area as large and as diverse as the Indian Ocean, business could not possibly have been conducted in Tulu, Arabic, Gujarati or indeed any tongue that was native to a single group of traders […]. Given what we know about the practices of Arab traders in other multilingual areas (the Mediterranean for example) it seems likely that the problem was resolved by using a trading argot, or an elaborated pidgin language. (1992: 280–1)

Additionally, in Sea of Poppies, we see clear instances of both a “vernacularization of necessity” as in the politicization of English and a “vernacularization of accommodation” as in Laskari, the language of the lascars on the ship, a language, profoundly eclectic in its influences, of contact and accommodation. This is precisely the kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism that Ghosh is interested in and explores in the novel: how, more specifically, “in the Babel of tongues what was a lascar-manned ship, did people communicate? Or, to put it differently, how on earth could they afford not to?” (2008d: 58).

Ghosh acknowledges the “dictionarists and linguists” for the grammar of the Bhojpuri language, nautical lexicon, and glossaries of Anglo-Indian words and phrases in the novel. He has of course always been interested in language. As well as the multiple languages spoken in his books, his characters are often translators, students of languages, or speakers of many languages. In Sea of Poppies, he presents a world of heteroglossia that includes seafaring lingo, French, a fantastic spectrum of English, including Hinglish, Chinglish, and Franglais, pidgin and creole, as well as many indigenous languages — Bhojpuri, Bengali, Hindustani. Moreover, Ghosh describes not only the distinct languages, and their intermingling, but also the intricacies of any one language used in different circumstances. This sea of words clashes and mingles, evoking a vivid sense of living voices as well as demonstrating the linguistic resourcefulness of people in diaspora. As Shirley Chew acutely observes, “the ‘motley tongue’ is as much a part of the cultural scene at the lower reaches of the Ganges, and of the multi-layered history of the subcontinent, as the collision of peoples on one of the great rivers of the world” (2008: n.p.). Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi’s (1999) volume on postcolonial translation is useful here in reading the hybridity of languages in the postcolonial text — the cohabitation within a single text of multiple languages and heterogeneous codes. In a bilingual or multilingual situation, “transfer” or “interference” is inevitable, and it is important to examine “acts and choices: on shifts between different languages, between a standard and non-standard dialect or a mixture of all these, according to the social situation” (Tonkin, quoted in Prasad, 1999: 47). Further, code-mixing and code-switching are both communicative strategies and can have various motivations: to reveal or conceal regional, class, religious identities, or to establish affinity: “Many shades of social meaning can be conveyed by people by their choice of sound, word or grammar, and it is common for them to code-switch, that is move from one variety to another, even in the course of a sentence” (Prasad, 1999: 47). As Nicole Devarenne writes in her article on the dialect and linguistic hybridity in the work of Adam Small, “The speaker’s linguistic agility is a show of cosmopolitanism. […] It also displays his stylistic virtuosity. […] Speakers’ willingness to mix and switch language is not simply a matter of convenience but also serves stylistic purposes and can be used as an expression of identity or to signal subtle shifts in footing” (2010: 399). In the following sections, I go on to discuss three aspects of the languages used in the novel: the history of words, how languages reflect class and race, and the uses of English in different contexts.

History of words

On the Amitav Ghosh website is “The Ibis Chrestomathy”, a thirty-five-page treasure trove of fine words and their histories. This is a glossary created in one of the central characters Neel’s voice. Obsessed with words, Neel “was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives and destinies of their own” (2008b: n.p.). Neel is also described as a “linkister”, someone who translates between languages. In the Chrestomathy, the word linkister refers to Charles Leland, one of the most prodigious lexicographers of the nineteenth century, and his Pidgin English Sing-Song: Or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect; With a Glossary. Here are a few examples of words from Neel’s glossary, demonstrating vividly the etymology of words, as well as their political and cultural transformations:

Girmitiya:

“The genius of the Bhojpuri language derives this memorable term from the root girmit, which is a corruption of the English ‘agreement’ [or indenture]”.

Abihowa/abhowa:

“A finer word for ‘climate’ was never coined, writes Neel, joining as it does, the wind and the water in Persian, Arabic, and Bengali. Were there to be, in matters of language, such a thing as a papal indulgence, then I would surely expend mine in ensuring a place for this fine coinage”.

Ayah:

“Neel was contemptuous of those who identified this word with Indian nursemaids and nurseries. In his home, he insisted on using its progenitors, the French ‘aide’, and the Portuguese, ‘aia’”. (Ghosh, 2008b: n.p.)

In fact, there is an abundance of such instances when Ghosh delightfully and sarcastically demystifies and decodes some of the common misconceptions of the origins of words. Here is an example from River of Smoke:

A stickler for proper usage and [with] a great detestation of corrupted words, [Mr. Slade] particularly dislikes the word “bugger,” which is so much in use among the vulgar masses. He believes it to be a corruption of the word “Bulgar” or “Bulgarian” and insists on using those instead. This further deepened Bahram’s puzzlement for he had always assumed that “bugger” was the anglice of the Hindusthani word bukra or “goat”. (2011a: 220)

The history of words is of course linked to the history of the land and its successive empires. Neel is deeply aware of the link between language and history; his family, the opportunistic, aristocratic land-owning Halders, built their fortunes as they adopted the languages of the rulers:

In the era of the Mughals, they had ingratiated themselves with the dynasty’s representatives; at the time of the East India Company’s arrival, they had extended a wary welcome to the newcomers; […] After the British proved victorious, they had proved as adept at the learning of English as they had previously been in the acquisition of Persian and Urdu. (78)

This short passage gives a long view of history and places the British Empire, as it were, in perspective.

One of the most important languages in the novel, as mentioned earlier, is Laskari, the language of lascars. Ghosh describes a ship manned by lascars as “a kind of floating Babel” and explains how he had always wondered how the lascars communicated with their European officers and with one another, when he excitingly came upon a nineteenth-century dictionary of the “Laskari” language, which fascinated Ghosh since it not only contained elements of the many languages that he grew up with, but also “proved to be a wonderful nautical jargon that mixed bits of Hindi, Urdu, English, Portuguese, Bengali, Arabic, Malay and many other languages” (2008c: n.p.). Laskari is presented in the novel, as a “motley tongue”:

spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows — yet beneath the surface of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of boats. (96)

Thus, Zachary, as well as the reader, gets a thorough education in the way of words on the sea:

He had to learn to say “resum” instead of “rations”, and he had to wrap his tongue around words like “dal”, “masala” and “achar”. He had to get used to “malum” instead of mate, “serang” for bosun, “tindal” for bosun’s mate, and “seacunny” for helmsman; he had to memorize a new shipboard vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not: the rigging became the “ringeen”, “avast!” was “bas!”, and the cry of the middle-morning watch went from “all’s well” to “alzbel”. The deck now became the “tootuk” while the masts were “dols”; a command became a “hookum” and instead of starboard and larboard, fore and aft, he had to say “jamna” and “dawa”, “agil” and “peechil”. (14-5)

Through these vivid instances, Ghosh not only conveys a sense of the living language, but also demonstrates the languages’ entangled etymologies, as well as their intermingling realities through usage and necessity.

The language of class and race

There are many situations in the novel in which language is used to indicate class and the urban−rural divide. Deeti, living in the village, speaks Bhojpuri and is quite intimidated by a clerk to whom she has come to sell her opium:

The muharir behind the counter was a Bengali, with heavy jowls and a cataract of a frown. He answered her not in her native Bhojpuri, but in a mincing, citified Hindi: Do what others are doing, he snapped. Go to the moneylender. Sell your sons. Send them off to Mareech. It’s not as if you don’t have any choices. (143)

As we travel with the migrants along the river towards Calcutta and as land turns into river and then into sea, the languages change along with the landscape, conveying the increasing anxiety and uncertainty of the migrants. At first, for the migrants on the journey, “the greatest treat of all was when the pulwar pulled up to the ghats of some busy town or river port: in the interval between showers of rain the women would sit on deck, watching the townsfolk and laughing at the ever-more-outlandish accents in which they spoke” (222). However, “Soon after this, the pulwar crossed an invisible boundary, taking them into a watery, rain-drowned land where the people spoke an incomprehensible tongue: now when the barge stopped for the night, they could no longer understand what the spectators were saying, for their jeers and taunts were in Bengali” (227). Once the migrants arrive in Calcutta, Ghosh presents the reader with almost cinematic portrayals of nineteenth-century daily life from country to town: one can hear the sound of ships, men, accents. Jodu speaks “in a quicksilver, citified Hindusthani that Deeti could just about follow” (256); the townsfolk “make a mockery of [the migrants’] rustic tongues” (258); meeting with the migrants is the gomuster speaking in “heavily accented Hindi” (259). There are nuanced class differences even within the same language. Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zamindar of Raskhali, fluent not only in English and Bengali, but also in Hindustani, Persian and Urdu, and even with knowledge of Bhojpuri, speaks an aristocratic Bengali, with “silky phrasing and refined accent”, who could detect “a raffish, river-front edge” in Paulette’s Bengali from her inflection and accent (360). The family even developed its “own terminology” for the element of wind in the leisure activity of flying kites: “in their vocabulary, a strong, steady breeze was ‘neel,’ blue; a violent nor’easter was purple, and a listless puff was yellow. The squalls […] ‘suqlat’ — a shade of scarlet […] associated with sudden reversals of fortune” (37). Ironically, as Cathleen Schine (2009) points out in her review, a dinner scene reveals Neel’s far more sophisticated English, as well as his heightened sensibility, compared with those of his English-speaking guests. Neel introduces his son as

“My sole issue and heir. The tender fruit of my loin, as your poets might say.” “Ah! Your little green mango!” Mr. Doughty shot a wink in Zachary’s direction. “And if I may be so bold as to ask — would you describe your loin as the stem or the branch?” Neel gave him a frosty glare. “Why, sir,” he said coldly, “It’s the tree itself”. (99)

In the intermingling of languages, there is also an intermingling of races and cultures, and further, one is made acutely aware in the novel of the different linguistic registers related to class difference in the British characters as well. On the one hand we have Mr. Burnham, the pious and ambitious merchant from Liverpool, who “speaks the Queen’s English with none of the low and intrusive slang of other British characters in this novel. No ‘hot cock and shittleteedee!’ for him” (Schine, 2009: n.p.). Then on the other hand there is James Doughty, the pilot, who in one scene, enlightens Zachary on the necessity and art of speaking “the flash lingo of the east” and gives a performance of it in the process:

It was about time, the pilot said, that he, Zachary, stopped behaving like a right gudda — “that’s a donkey in case you were wondering”. This was India, where it didn’t serve for a sahib to be taken for a clodpoll of a griffin: if he wasn’t fly to what was going on, it’d be all dickey with him, mighty jildee. This was no Baltimore — this was a jungle here, with biscobras in the grass and wanderoos in the trees. If he, Zachary, wasn’t to be diddled and taken for a flat, he would have to learn to gubbrow the natives with a word or two of the zubben. Since this admonishment was delivered in the strict but indulgent tone of a mentor, Zachary plucked up the courage to ask what “the zubben” was, at which the pilot breathed a patient sigh: “The zubben, dear boy, is the flash lingo of the East. It’s easy enough to jin if you put your head to it. Just a little peppering of nigger-talk mixed with a few girleys. But mind your Oordoo and Hindee doesn’t sound too good: don’t want the world to think you’ve gone native. And don’t mince your words either. Mustn’t be taken for a chee-chee”. (45)

At the other end of the spectrum, “cut off from their own kind” (62), is a most fascinating character, Paulette, a French botanist’s daughter who, later orphaned, disguises herself to get on board the Ibis, following the example of her grand-aunt, Madame Commerson, a naturalist, who had disguised herself as a man and was the first woman to have completed a voyage of circumnavigation (235; based on the true story of Jeanne Baret). Paulette grew up with her Indian Muslim wet-nurse, whom she called “Tantima, or aunt-mother”, and her son Jodu, in a “confusion of tongues” and identities (61). Even her name takes on various incarnations in different languages: Paulette in French; Putleshwari in Bengali farrago; Putli, meaning “doll” (61) to her nurse; and Puggly/Pugli, meaning “mad” to her adopted British family (117; 327). In addition to French and English and Latin, she learns to speak fluently the native languages, Bengali, Hindustani, and Sanskrit, under the influence of her botanist father, who labelled his plants according to Linnaeus, but also in Bengali and Sanskrit whenever possible.

Baboo Nob Kissin, the gomusta, an agent in charge of shipping migrant labour, delivers to Paulette after her father’s death a telling passage which reveals not only the character of Pierre Lambert, Paulette’s father, and his willing immersion in native plants and culture, but also most intriguingly the curious psychological effects of language on the speaker himself, on the one spoken of, and the one spoken to, as the language shifts from English to Bengali to French:

“Lambert-sahib always discussing with me in Bangla,” the gomusta continued. “But I am always replying in chaste English.” But now, as if to belie his own pronouncement, he surprised Paulette by switching to Bengali. With the change of language, she noticed, a weight of care seemed to lift from his huge, sagging face: Shunun. Listen. (125)

The gomusta then goes on to tell Paulette her father’s story:

Your father, Miss Lambert — how well he knew our language. I used to marvel as I listened to him speak… But now, even as the gomusta continued, in the same sonorous tones, Paulette heard his words as though they were being spoken by her father, in French: … a child of Nature, that is what she is, my daughter Paulette. (125)

The gomusta generally puts on a performance of English while speaking to a European, but appears evidently more at ease in his native Bengali; while Paulette becomes closer to her father’s memory in the intimacy of French.

After the death of Pierre Lambert, Paulette is taken in by the rich merchant Benjamin Burnham, “to be properly domesticated and taught to stop wearing saris and climbing trees”, and she discovers that even “the servants, no less than the masters, held strong views on what was appropriate for Europeans, […] and they would often ignore her if she spoke to them in Bengali — or anything other than the kitchen-Hindusthani that was the language of command in the house” (113). Paulette works hard to learn how to speak the language expected of her, but the exchanges she has with Mrs. Burnham and “that lady’s brilliantly wrought Victorian memsahib chatter are moments of wonderful comic incomprehension” (Schine, 2009: n.p.):

Just the other day, in referring to the crew of a boat, she had proudly used a newly learnt English word: “cock-swain”. But instead of earning accolades, the word had provoked a disapproving frown. […] Mrs Burnham explained that the word Paulette had used smacked a little too much of the “increase and multiply” and could not be used in company: “If you must buck about that kind of thing, Puggly dear, do remember the word to use nowadays is ‘roosterswain’.” (118)

Many of the scenes with Paulette are comic because of her Francophone malapropisms, her ways of mixing English and French and inventing an ingenious form of Franglais, sometimes producing surprising results. Nonetheless, Paulette’s spirit of independence and her determination to join the Ibis come through her inventive use of language. In one case, Paulette challenges Zachary, trying to convince him to help her board the ship:

“Is that indeed so, Mr. Reid?” said Paulette, raising her eyebrows. “So it is not possible, according to you, for a woman to be a marin?” “Marine?” he said in surprise. “No, Miss Lambert, there sure aren’t any woman marines that I ever heard of.” “Sailor,” said Paulette triumphantly. “That is what I meant. You think it is not possible for a woman to sail under a mast?”. (235)

The politics of English

Finally, I would like to discuss the performative and political uses of English in different circumstances in the novel. Ghosh has not only “deterritorialzed English” (Paranjape, 2012: 371) in his work, but, when asked why he does not translate or italicize “foreign” languages in his novels, has also spoken of the radical influences of Asian languages on English, and how for example nineteenth-century English is profoundly permeated with words from Chinese, Arabic, and Hindustani (2011b: n.p.). In Sea of Poppies, there are many instances when English is spoken to entirely different purposes and effects, sometimes to indicate class and refinement, or a certain colonial mentality; other times to show defiance and subversiveness; and still other times to empower and form solidarity across linguistic boundaries among the migrants.

Neel, a colonial subject, is described by the English as a “bookish native”, who “gives himself all kinds of airs” (44). Ironically his knowledge of English philosophy, poetry, and politics does not serve him well in real-life situations. His reference to the philosophy of “Mr. Hume, Mr. Locke, and Mr. Hobbes” is misunderstood to mean colonial officers serving on the “Bengal Board of Revenue” (109); his allusion to the poetry of Thomas Chatterton is mistaken for a reference to a head clerk, a “Mr. Chatterjee” (185). More seriously, his colonial learning consistently lands him in trouble, as well as reveals his political naivety and illusions about the Empire. When he is sentenced into exile for seven years, blinded by his family inheritance and privilege, Neel seems oblivious of the dire politics of the situation he is in:

Neel’s schooling in English had been at once so thorough and so heavily weighted towards the study of texts that he found it easier, even now, to follow the spoken language by converting it into script, in his head. One of the effects of this operation was that it also robbed the language of its immediacy, rendering its words comfortingly abstract, as distant from his own circumstances as were the waves of Windermere and the cobblestones of Canterbury. So it seemed to him now, as the words came pouring from the judge’s mouth, that he was listening to the sound of pebbles tinkling in some faraway well. (220)

Because his education of English is a textual/written rather than a living/oral one, and because of his delusions about the justness of the Empire, the British judge’s words and the verdict itself are magically rendered abstract and unreal in Neel’s mind, as he unwittingly performs a mental translation of the words he is hearing from the oral to the textual.

When Neel is subsequently convicted and sent to jail, a British serjeant [sic] is so infuriated “by the mere fact of being spoken to in his own language, by a native convict” that he mistreats Neel and answers him “in rough Hindusthani” (264–5). Although in his most reduced state, while being stripped and humiliated, Neel realizes that English, the colonizer’s language, at this moment, is a powerful weapon and his to use to his own advantage, and he literally speaks back, in defiance:

“Sir”, he said, “can you not afford me the dignity of a reply? Or is it that you do not trust yourself to speak English?” The man’s eyes flared and Neel saw that he had nettled him, simply by virtue of addressing him in his own tongue — a thing that was evidently counted as an act of intolerable insolence in an Indian convict, a defilement of the language. The knowledge of this — that even in his present state, stripped to his skin, powerless to defend himself from the hands that were taking an inventory of his body — he still possessed the ability to affront a man whose authority over his person was absolute: the awareness made Neel giddy, exultant, eager to explore this new realm of power; in this jail, he decided, as in the rest of his life as a convict, he would speak English whenever possible, everywhere possible, starting with this moment, here. (266)

Neel proceeds to recite passage after passage in English, loudly, while enduring the torment and cruelty the guards deal him; his triumphant voice “rose till the words were echoing off the stone walls”, infuriating the guards and giving himself courage and strength to face the darkness ahead of him.

On board the Ibis, Neel gets beaten for conversing in English with Zachary: the subedar slaps him across the face, “You think you can impress me with two words of angrezi? I’ll show you how this ingi-lis is spoken…” (355). However, English also becomes a strategic choice, when Baboo Nob Kissin brings him food in secret. As Neel switches to Bengali to show his gratitude, the gomusta cuts him short: “kindly eschew native vernaculars. Guards are big trouble shooters — always making mischiefs. Better they do not listen. Chaste English will suffice” (426). It is in jail that Neel and his cell-mate Ah Fatt form a special friendship, one a tattooed criminal, the other an opium addict, and English their shared language. How are such attachments born? Neel is told that Ah Fatt “is all you have, your caste, your family, your friend, neither brother nor wife nor son will ever be as close to you as he will. You will have to make of him what you can; he is your fate, your destiny” (291). Ghosh captures a pathos in the gestures and words that foster such relationships between two people: a touch — when Neel takes care of Ah Fatt (“To take care of another human being […] a foreigner”; 300), a word — when Ah Fatt holds Neel in his nightmarish state (“‘My name is Lei Leong Fatt […] People call Ah Fatt, Ah Fatt your friend.’ Those faltering, childlike words offered more comfort than was in all the poetry Neel had ever read”; 315–6). As Ah Fatt tells Neel the story of his Indian father working in China, the connection between Canton and Calcutta becomes a “shared imagining” (345) between the two men, and “despite their chains and bindings, there was a tenderness in their attitudes that seemed scarcely conceivable in a couple of criminal transportees” (334). It is these words of friendship in their shared English language that give both Neel and Ah Fatt more than the will to survive and endure, but also the courage to strike back and strive for freedom. We have come a long way from English as only the colonizer’s privilege.

Conclusion: The migrants’ song

There is a moving section in Sea of Poppies when a childhood language comes back to Neel, that is the musical Bhojpuri, an inland and “rustic tongue” that has become the language of the migrants in the book: “of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation — of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home” (367). Suffering the fate of the exile, they are castaways, severed from all human connections. Rai and Pinkey have pointed out how Ghosh draws out the irony that “farmers in the Bhojpuri-speaking regions nourished by the Ganges River were among the least likely members of the rural Indian populace to embrace migration” (2012: 68). The migrants, negotiating their fate between home and exile, sing a heart-wrenching song of exile — “How will it pass / This night of parting”:

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart. (367)

In foregrounding the language of the Bhojpuri, Ghosh not only retrieves a vernacular language, but through it gives voice to the most destitute, those who are driven into exile and migration. Like the characters in the novel taking on different names and multiple identities and disguises, and forming bonds across religions, cultures, and castes, languages function on many levels and provide various identities and connections among the characters. Ultimately, in devoting attention to subaltern languages and idiolects, as well as to their interaction with elite discourses, themselves intercultural, Ghosh’s is a transcultural and translingual “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that demonstrates that languages can both unite and divide, betray and empower, and that they can serve as a means for survival, tactics for resistance, and agency for transformation. The words Neel gathers are no less powerful than the deities Deeti collects in her shrine. In the end, Ghosh’s writing explores most significantly the lived experiences of ordinary people who form bonds of love, kinship, and friendship across languages, borders, and boundaries, and who heroically adapt and improvise, struggle and survive, who refuse to yield to the “nightmare of someone else’s imagining” (Ghosh, 2000: 469).