Sea of Poppies
SynopsisPlot
At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.
Story
About this book
Sea of Poppies is set in the late 1830s, just before the Opium Wars between Britain and China. The story centers on the Ibis, a former slave ship now repurposed for a crossing of the Indian Ocean. Aboard are people from sharply different walks of life: a raja facing financial ruin, a village widow, an American freedman of mixed heritage, a French orphan, an evangelical opium trader, and a shifting crew of sailors, stowaways, and transported convicts. Each carries a distinct reason for being on the ship, and those reasons gradually intersect as the voyage takes shape.
The novel moves between the poppy-growing countryside along the Ganges, the port cities of colonial India, and the open sea. Ghosh uses this geography to trace how the opium trade connected distant economies and uprooted ordinary lives. Workers in the poppy fields supplied a commodity that would trigger armed conflict thousands of miles away in China, and the characters aboard the Ibis are caught at various points along that chain.
As old ties of caste, family, and nationality loosen during the passage, the passengers begin calling themselves jahaj-bhais, a Hindi term meaning ship-brothers. Sea of Poppies is the first volume of a trilogy known as the Ibis trilogy.
