GUILT TRIP

Amitav Ghosh's new book examines how opium trade contributed to the rise in wealth across continents

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Amitav Ghosh has chased opium for decades. From the stash of opium papers in the British archives to the poppy fields from Bihar to Guangzhou, he followed the flower—the most potent force that, like Helen of Troy, launched a thousand ships, and more—for a considerable part of his life.

It is a few days after his 67th birthday and Ghosh, in a way, is back to the start with Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories. It has been almost a lifetime on the trail of the drug. He embarked on the Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, 2008) when his children were teenagers. Flood of Fire (2015) was out when they were adults. “I was completely unaware of before [opium story],” he says. “I studied history in college, I have been reading history forever. But even then it came as a complete surprise to me, this whole chapter of the Indian past.”

Ghosh is on a whirlwind tour across the country promoting his new book, which is a chronicle of the addiction—pushed by colonial powers. And it could be tied up intimately with his own history. “As I began to delve into it more and more, I suddenly discovered that it could have played an important role in my family,” he says. “Maybe some of my ancestors were employed by the opium department, which was by far the biggest game in Chapra and in Saran district. But I would say, what was true for me was to some greater or lesser extent true for virtually every family in the Gangetic belt in Malwa. This trade had such a massive role in the 19th century India. In fact, it affected most of us in one way or the other.”