Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies byAmitav Ghosh (FarrarStraus& Giroux, 2008) First aired on NPR November 12, 2008 Imagine if Charles Dickens had signed on for a voyage with the Pequod, and you get some idea of what Amitav Ghosh's sprawling new historical novel, Sea ofPoppies,has in store. Ghosh conjures up a former slave ship called the Ibis, in theyear 1838. It'spacked with amultitude of characters: a mixed-race novice sea hand from Baltimore named Zacha ryReid; amob of indentured Indian peasants, including a woman named Deeti and her giant of a paramour, Kalua, both important to the plot; and figures high and low, such as a rajah indebt to a British business man, a Chinese criminal, farmers and soldiers, Malay crewmen, and a female French stowaway. They're all sailing to the island ofMauritius, on a voyage that will somehow play a role?some sea fog rolls in here to make this end somewhat unclear? in theBritishwar to open up China to the opium trade. Ghosh tells the storyof how all these characters, Indians and crew alike, end up on this voyage in an appealing, somewhatmodified, lingo of theperiod?when British English mingled with Indian Englishes, and dallied with dozens of otherdialects: ship's lore,pirate talk,Lascar pidgin, and all theother verbalmusic of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. And beneath itall, like theendless rolling salt sea, Ghosh's own beautifully made sentences and paragraphs buoy up ship, plot, characters, and AMJgFAY cun tu 7 3 ppies ?.NOVEL B? THE AUTHOR OF The 6I8SS P Liketheendless rolling salt sea, Ghosh's own beautifully made sentencesand paragraphs buoy up ship,plot,characters,and the setting itself, with a natural ease and beauty. 12 i World Literature Today the setting itself, with a natural ease and beauty. As in this passage? pun intended?when the ship,with its indentured passengers, most of whom have never seen the ocean, anchors forone last night in Indian waters: "The last place from which themigrants would be able to view their native shore: this was Saugor Roads, a much trafficked anchorage in the lee ofGanga-Sagar, the island that stands between the sea and the holy river-The very name Ganga Sagar, joining, as itdid, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was ifthey were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jam budvipa, their homeland, reaching out tokeep them fromtumbling into the void." Reading this novel over a num ber of days?it takes its time and so it takes your time,but in only the best of ways?I came to understand thatall thegood books do that,don't they? Help tokeep us fromtumbling into the void. Du Fu: A Life in Poetry Trans. & ed. David Young (Knopf,2008) First aired on NPR November 24, 2008 An eighth-century Chinese poet named Du Fu, one of the most admired lyric poets in theworld, leftbehind some fourteenhundred poems and a record of a life that translator and editor David Young, himself a poet, has now turned into a biography in verse. Du Fu, who DU F U DAVID YOUNG lived from712 to 770, spent his life making his poems, raising a family, tryingto findpatronage at thecourts of emperors, and sometimes mov ing back and forthacross theChi nese countryside as warring armies advanced or retreated. The record he left of his ambitious apprentice days and inebriated young manhood as a poet taking in the natural world around him is superb. In a poem about crossing a famous lake near the capital, for example, he writes: "As we come to the lake's middle / we see in its dark depths // the southern mountains, mirrored / upside down in thewater // here and therea quiver / as ifthemoun tainmoved //maybe our boat will collide /with a highmountain tem ple //maybe the moon will swim / out of the mountain pass ..." But as a wife and children come to depend on him, he adds to his wonderful views of nature worrying lines about politics. "The State goes to ruin," he writes, but "mountains and rivers survive." He takes note of

Ancient history · Linguistics · Pidgin · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Studies and Diaspora