How opium connects India, China and US

The opium poppy is one of the most powerful things humans have encountered in their time on earth, Amitav Ghosh writes in his new book Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories. The book traverses many archives, centuries and geographies on track of the plant as poppy goes about wrecking societies, creating fortunes and growing mightier all the time. Ghosh talks to Renuka Bisht about how the colonial opium trade once built the foundations of business and industrialisation from India to the US, but today addiction to it is gnawing away at both these countries.You cross ‘a Himalaya of the mind’ to see how Chinese influences run deep across India, from Banarasi sari to the civil service exam. But isn’t this an odd moment for such a journey?My book is not about current events and I can’t claim to be very well informed about developments along the border or anything like that. The point I am trying to make is a more general one, that between India and China there is a huge, mysterious veil of incomprehension. There is the enormity of China’s historical influence on India — both economic and cultural — and then there is our complete lack of understanding of Chinese culture. And their lack of understanding of ours. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to demonstrate that we are deeply interpenetrated, at many different levels.How did the colonial opium trade with China make the Bihar and Punjab of today?There is a ‘backward’ image of Bihar that’s quite common and has existed since my childhood. But in fact this entire Purvanchal region is the historic heartland of India. All the great Indian empires were based there. You just have to travel between Patna and Banaras and Avadh to see that this was an incredibly rich and culturally fertile region. So how did it come to be so profoundly underdeveloped? Very much because of this opium resource curse. This incredibly valuable commodity created the capital for the industrialisation of England and America, but devastated the agricultural economy of Purvanchal. medium101580660Then, after 1857 the British decided that they were going to completely change their army recruitment, and this was a second catastrophe. Until they were cut off, it had been a great source of secure employment for the Biharis. As the British started recruiting from Punjab instead, to make it happy they also started investing massively in the region. If you look at wealthy Punjabi families not just in India but also in Pakistan, almost always you can trace it back to army provisioning in some way.Despite all the opium-wrecked devastation, why do you say that ‘a single, unvarying pitch of sobriety…would probably be indistinguishable from clinical depression’?Almost all human societies have practised techniques of altering consciousness. And also found ways of keeping this under control. Like how wine-drinking in Europe is kept under control through various social procedures. And the same has been true in India, which is widely acknowledged to be the first really big marijuana-oriented culture. I don’t think it helps to be puritanical in relation to these problems. It’s not like you can ever get rid of all of this, so you have to focus on what is really dangerous. The high-grade opioids that are circulating today are really dangerous. In India today, as in the 19th century, we are again seeing very high rates of addiction. Especially in the border state of Punjab and also on the eastern border, the Northeast.Why is it important to recall the anti-opium chapter of the Indian freedom struggle?From the 1880s onwards both in India and China there was a huge movement against opium, which became a very important part of nationalist politics. For Dadabhai Naoroji, Tagore and so many others. And this was true in Southeast Asia as well. Unlike tobacco, opium was being handled by the world’s most powerful governments — the British, Dutch and French empires. But somehow a vast international coalition of activists, over a long period, forced them to come to the negotiating table.On the divergent trajectories of opium trade in eastern and western India, you say ‘Mumbai… got the economy, while Calcutta got the economists’!It’s a very interesting phenomenon actually, that the British were able to establish an absolute monopoly over opium cultivation in the eastern part of India, whereas in the western part they were thwarted by the resistance of various princely states. So that Bombay developed a very different commercial culture than Calcutta and the effects of that linger to this day. This is also why, although I never in my life thought that I would write a business book, this book really is about the foundations of Indian business, Indian commerce. medium101580676Like in India, in the US too many of the major business families had their beginnings in the opium trade.Opium played a very important role in the development of America but the avoidance of this reality has had very bad effects on it. Today it is facing a major opioid crisis. But just as in India, a tourist shall get no sense that there is a crisis underway because this crisis unfolds inside households, inside families, where there are codes of silence around it. I am sure you in Delhi have heard of many people who have had to deal with drug problems. In America opioids have become a leading cause of death and every effort to control them has failed. So in a way what happened in India and China in the 50s and 60s was a historical miracle. In China, opium consumption still remains dramatically reduced.How do India and China remember the Opium Wars?In India very little is taught about them. My Ibis Trilogy was perhaps one of the first works to bring them to public attention. But the Opium Wars were very, very big in Chinese history and, we have to acknowledge, in the history of Asia. Essentially, modern China has emerged from the Opium Wars and from the struggle against opium. So the Wars are memorialised everywhere.One event that has become absolutely salient in Chinese memory is the battle of Sanyuanli, which I describe at some length in the book, and it was basically a battle between Indian sepoys and Chinese villagers. This battle is regarded as the founding moment of Chinese nationalism. And the Indians were there. But neither side remembers that they were there.