This article analyses explores the transformation of the discourse of the novel to narrate the story of indenture. It shows how from the double insider-outsider perspective as a researcher-mic Amitav Ghosh uses anthropological and historical perspectives to renegotiate discourses of subalternity from the perspective of the indenture diaspora

1. www.ijlp-apm.com International Journal of Literature & Philosophy 1
IJLP, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (May 2014) e-ISSN: 1694-2256 | p-ISSN: 1694-2361
Recharting the Narrative of Subalternity in
Amitav Ghosh’ Sea of Poppies
Nandini Bhautoo
University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius
Email adress:
Email:nandinibhautoo@yahoo.com (Nandini Bhautoo), dbhautoo@uom.ac.mu (Nandini Bhautoo)
Abstract: This article analyses explores the transformation of the discourse of the novel to narrate the story of indenture.
It shows how from the double insider-outsider perspective as a researcher-mic Amitav Ghosh uses anthropological and his-
torical perspectives to renegotiate discourses of subalternity from the perspective of the indenture diaspora
.
Keywords: Postcolonialism, Diaspora, Subalternity
1. Introduction
With the publication of Sea of Poppies in 2008, Amitav
Ghosh gives fictional representation to the narrative of the
indentured diaspora from India who left the gangetic plains
in the 19th
century to work in the plantations of the Mau-
ritius, Fiji and the Caribbean in order to maintain the bal-
ance of proto-capitalist plantation system of the British
Empire which the newly freed slaves had abandoned.
As a novelist, with formation in anthropology, Amitav
Ghosh's novels have for the most part successfully at-
tempted to give voice to the voiceless, such as in The Cir-
cles of Reason or The Hungry Tide and in The Calcutta
Chromosome. In this Ghosh culmitates both his work as an
anthropologist of culture without the bias of objectifying
and fetichising the 'Other' which Said proposes as the in-
evitable concurrent of the Anthropologising discourse. By
virtue of his cultural location within the academy, Ghosh as
a novelist-researcher finds himself simultaneously inside
and outside the narrative he weaves.To some extent this
double distanciation is negotiated through his practical ap-
plication of his perception of subaltern existence and its
concurrent problematic awareness of the difficulty of self-
representation within the official discourses inherited from
colonial contact, such as the discourse of history of that of
the novel.
It is from the perspective of Amitav Ghosh's close in-
volvement with the Subaltern Studies project that we wish
to present Sea of Poppies as a renegotiation of Subaltern
discourse, as applied to the narrative of the Indentured di-
aspora of the 19th
Century.
2. Indenture diaspora and Subalternity
The fate of the diaspora of Indenture has been studied by
Vertovec(2000), Tinker(1993), Mishra( 1996 ) among others,
Mishra proposes a division between the old diaspora of
exclusivism and the new border diaspora who shares much
with all contemporary forms of transnational diasporas of
the twentieth century. He calls this a diaspora of exclusivism
because within this community transplanted to violent con-
ditions of multiculturalism, identity structures itself diffe-
rently in the course of imbrication within the capitalist
economy of the plantation and its subsequent multicuturalist
hierarchised reality. The historians Carter( 1996),
Bates(2000), Anderson(2000), propose that the mass of
migrants were from the peasant community which was
pulled to the city through widespread famine in the North
Eastern provinces. Through her study of archives Anderson
presents the ontological beginning of the establishment of
indenture society as being closely involved with the crea-
tionn of penal colony in British offshore islands and she
proposes convict origins for a substantial part of the inden-
tured population which entered the country upon different
terms than the girmit ideology. These peasants were India's
subaltern, impoverished peasants, who were struggling to
make ends meet under the double burden of zamindari

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(landlord) exploitation as well as colonial exploitation of
their land and labour.
2.2. Subaltern Studies and History
Chakraborty(2000) presents Subaltern studies as an
intervention in the discourse of history by using the
modes of poststructuralist study in order to effect a radi-
cal revision of the way peasantry inscribed itself through
non-elite means through rituals, rebellions, religion and
guerrilla like boycott and resistance to modes of colonial
and vertical domination, including caste and zamindari
domination, peculiar to indian society of the times. Cha-
kraborty shows that in lieu of the vertical understanding
of social constitution inherited from western leftist ide-
ology, Guha (1999) proposes alternative forms of com-
munity organisation where myths, gossip, folklore, fam-
ily and group solidarity form the main basis of the con-
stitution of peasant consciousness, as they co-exist but
remain consciously unaware with the demeaning struc-
tures of colonial imposition.
Prakash (1992) defines Subaltern studies thus:
“it...provides a mode of reading history different from
those inscribed in the elite accounts.Reading colonial
and nationalist archives against their grain and focusing
in their blindspots, silences, anxieties, these historians
seek to uncover the subaltern myths, cults, ideologies
and revolt that colonial and nationalist elites sought to
appropriate.'He also says that 'from Guha's account the
subaltern emerges with a form of sociability and political
community at odds with nation and class, and they defy
the modes of rationality and social action that conven-
tional historiography presents.'
2.2.1. Subalternity and the novel
Ghosh's novel has this particularity that it goes to the
known pages of history and deconstructs the very discourse
of historical representation. This is done by renegotiating
the discourse of the novel itself with its implicit under-
standing of the narrative ethos of rational enlightenment
perspective and the all-controlling gaze of the narrator,
protagonist who charts, defines and conquers the new
world through known discourses of denotation and recog-
nised frameworks of understanding.
In an interview with Soutik Biswas from the BBC Ghosh
states that his interest was with the Indentured workers
themselves. His novel starts in Ghazipur, renowned for its
opium factory in what can be called the Bhojpuri belt.
Boodhoo (1999) defines the Bhojpuri belt as consisting of
a widespread territory in the North Eastern region of India-
namely Ballia, Ghazipur, Benares, Mirzapur, Sonbhadra,
Jaunpur, Azamgarh, Gorakhpur, Deoria, Basti, Mau, Sid-
harth Nagar, Saran, Siwan, maharajganj, Bhojpur, Rohtas,
Eastern Champaran, Western Champaran, Palamau, Ranchi,
Gopalganj, Babhua
2.1.2. Writers from the Indentured Daspora
There have been many academic studies as well as fic-
tional rewriting of the ontological story of migration, as the
indentured migrants crossed the Kala Pani. Following the
inherited discourse of historical representation, for the most
part these studies have consisted of declining dates and
times of displacement and momentous recorded events in
the archives of the colonial empire, which gives a frame-
work from which to understand the narrative of these
displaced subalterns. Beyond orality preserved in the songs
and folkloric stories of these original migrants the voices of
indenture are virtually inexistent. It is true that by virtue of
education and social mobility some descendants of these
indentured diaspora have attempted to give voice to the
displaced migrants through literary narratives since the
1950's. The most famous of these writers is VS Naipaul,
and a host of other writers from the Carribbean such as
Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bisoondath, David Dabydeen, Harold
Sony Laddoo, Ismith Khan. Those writers have tried to
chronicle the narrative of survival after indenture as mi-
grants settle into the routine of the new nation and occupy
the bottommost position in the social ladder from which
they climb out through dint of hard work, education and
perseverance. We should also remember writers such as
Satendra Nandan, Subramani, Ramond Pillai, Sudesh Mi-
shra from Fiji and Deepchand Beeharry and Abhimanyu
Unnuth from Mauritius.
2.1.3. Ghosh’s Position as a Writer
It might seem problematic to study Ghosh's novel as
an extension of the possibilities offered by these postco-
lonial novels of indenture. For the most part these
writers function within the postcolonial burden as they
navigate between appropriated cultural understanding of
the nature of representation of the novel, which by virtue
of its inherited traditional form privileges the traditional
enlightenment subject render problematic the represen-
tation of Subaltern identity within these newly formed

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societies. Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is interestingly poised
between the late twentieth century discourse of the
transnational Indian Novel in English and the postco-
lonial narrative of indentured diasporas. The writer has
signified his investigative interest as residing as much in
the pull factors towards the plantation economy as much
as in the push factors – the socio-historical and political
reality of the times which lead to massive conscription
for the plantations despite the fear of the Black Waters,
the Kalapani ( the black water)
2.1. Retrieving the consciousness of the Subaltern
In their exploration of the nature of subaltern agency
Chakraborty and Guha propose modes of accessing the
subject position of the subaltern through the frames of un-
derstanding which comprise the supernatural, resistance
against the caste hierarchy and zamindari exploitation.
Retrieving the consciousness of the subaltern is a tricky
task indeed. Here Ghosh‟s subaltern protagonists are Deeti
and Kalua. Both characters are presented within the dire
socio-economic reality of village life which consists of a
life of poverty, deprivations but also the finely graded be-
liefs in caste difference as well. When the persona of Deeti
is introduced it is through the juxtaposition of a life of
menial labour and hard work accompanied by an inner in-
tuitive life, which disrupts her subaltern presence in the
official discourse of history, as one of the so many impor-
verished peasants. She has a vision of a big ship and re-
mains worried by what this ominous presence. It has to be
stressed that this vision comes to her well before she first
encounters the migrating peasants, or when she is first told
about the Ibis as she escapes Sati with Kalua.
Through the figure of Deeti's experience in the village of
Ghazipur Ghosh provides an understanding of the
co-habitation of parallel realities of the subaltern and the
elite narratives. The co-existence of the two historical
modes of consciousness come into contact as Deeti visits
the city to retrieve her husband who has been injured at the
Opium factory. Firstly as she travels through the village she
meets indian migrants- their description is from the pers-
pective of Deeti rather than a mere reproduction of the dis-
course of historical texts about them.
This crowd was trudging wearily in the di-
rection of the river. Bundles of belonging sat ba-
lanced on their heads and shoulders, and brass
pot hung suspended from their elobows. It was
clear that they had marched a great distance, for
their dhotis, langots and vests were stained with
the dust of the road. The sight of the marchers
evoked both pity and fear in the local
people...despite their exhaustion, the marchers
seemed strangely unbowed, even defiant, and
some threw the pebbles right back at the specta-
tors; their bravado was no less disturbing to the
spectators than their evident destitution. (p.65)
They evoke a feeling of fear as they embody the reality of
the rumour of peasants disappearing in the ominous Black
Waters.. This can be read as a rewriting of the dominant
idea that the indentured migrants first acquire subject posi-
tion within the narrative of empire as they are given a name
on the ship lists. Mishra says
“Since almost all the members of the Old Indian diaspora
can trace their lineage back to a name on these immigration
passes, the act of displacement meant that they were enter-
ing, for the first time a form of historical subjectification
for which in their homeland there was no precedent.”( Mi-
shra 1996)
2.2. Recovering the agency of the Sabaltern
According to this reading the migrants are about to be
subjectified by entering the records of colonial history. A
colonial history which is already present in Ghazipur as so
many landmark monuments which exist as ode, testimony
to offical recorded presence of British colonial powers in
India, such as the 'mausoleum of Lord Cornwallis, of
Yorktown fame, who had died in Ghazipur thirty-three
years before' (p.65). These landmarks of colonial history
are seen from the other side. A similar technique is applied
to the description of the Ghazipur Opium Factory. This
place is presented through the perspective of the peasant
woman- Deeti- who enters its confine without being aware
of its material and commercial reality within the tapestry of
the East India Company foray's into the East. She sees it as
a metaphor of damnation as perceived by her sensitive
womanly perception, as she sees the state of the workers,
objectified in so many poses of machine like exis-
tence.(p.87).
However, the migrating peasants are presented not as
co-erced but determined and defiant. They possess an
agency which begins before the official pages of history
discover them. Through Deeti and Kalua the narrative

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represents the complicated subjectivity of the peasants, as
their consciousness lie between an acceptance of poverty
and material hardship as a fact of life, which needs no cul-
prit in the stable scheme of minutely hierarchised social
stratifications they inhabit.
Kalua is the absolute embodiment of the subaltern within
the hierchised power structure in India. For the most part he
is silent and unobtrusive. Rarely spoken to, his services are
used but rarely recognized. For instance when Hukam
Singh goes to work he makes sure he does not talk to Kalua
though the latter is conveying him to work in his ox cart.
The demeaning of Kalua as a low caste person which
reaches culmination in the ill-treatment he suffers from the
landlords, is reproduced to a lesser degree by the impove-
rished peasants in the village, whose identity structure have
been conditioned within traditional modes of social organi-
sation of which caste constitutes one part. Thus it is that
when Deeti enters the village to look for Kalua, she fears
entering the „chamar basti‟ (the untouchable zone). She
thinks that Kalua‟s mind is slow and simple. Despite her
transgressive interest in the ox cart driver, Deeti cannot
help but reproduce the popular perception of Kalua as a low
caste and stupid person.
However, it turns out that the inner dimensions of Kalua,
who is not given the space and language to express himself
within the vertically regimented social structure of the vil-
lage are far more complex than even Deeti can imagine.
Despite his official silence Kalua is presented as a person
with emotional interest in Deeti and great human sympathy.
His key moment of struggle and agency comes as he res-
cues Deeti from the funeral pyre in a surprising conflation
of physical prowess and intelligence, which makes him
sabotage the voyeuristic interest of the village as they con-
gregate to see the the burning widow.
It is important that Deeti and Kalua, as they escape the
community of the village decide to recreate their identites
and become agencies in their own destinies. Thus it is that
when they decide to join the crowd aboard the Ibis, it is not
because they are coerced or fooled, as often reported in
the folk tales of indenture migration, rather Deeti and Kalua
consciously choose to be conscripted for practical reasons
and they go towards the recruiter rather than be recruited by
him. This is already showing that they are conscious sub-
jects of their own agency before entering the registers of
colonial history.
These two subaltern peasant figures are presented within a
larger narrative which fragments perception and narrative
focus, so that Deeti's and Kalua's' story is treated as one of
the multiple narratives of subject constitution, with nine-
teenth century colonial North Eastern India, so that the le-
verage implies a reorganisation of representation to include
multiplicity. This in itself is important in relation to refusal
of modes of hierarchised perception.
Recovering the agency of the immigrants in the process of
migration across the Kala Pani partakes of the enterprise of
reconstruction of their reasons for migrating, the voluntary
embracement of the experience, albeit for reasons of eco-
nomic and material dispossession, as well as their readiness
to bring their complete humanity to the recreation of com-
munity livelihood aboard the vessel of transfer. When Deeti
enters the ship hold, she meets women of all regions, with
varying life stories, some mischievious and uncowed
others more tragic. The reconstruction of family bonds start
straightaway. Munia calls her bhabhi and there develops a
relationsip of responbsibility as Deeti takes over the role of
protector to the young girls. Another woman-Sarju- hands
over her hoard of spices to Deeti as she lays dying.
Their ultimate moment of inscription in a history of their
making, is through the shrine of Deeti who records picto-
rially the events which mark her life, since prior to her own
migration, the trajectory of her crossing, either on betel
leves with kum kum, or on the inner keel of the ship. Sar-
jua's insistence to figure in Deeti's shrine is an insistence
to figure across time, beyond death, in a narrative of their
own making. Deeti's pictorial shrine represents therefore an
alternative to the ledgers of the East India Company, by this
she becomes their scribe, inscribing their passage according
to their own codes of representation.
2.3. Babu Nob Kissin
Babu Nob Kissin is probably the strangest figure to enter
the novel, stranger even that Ghosh's subaltern characters
in The Calcutta Chromosome(1995). When Babu Nob Kis-
sin enters the pages of the novel to visit Babu Burnham and
meets Paulette on that early morning, (p.121) he comes in

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as a representative of social power. He represents the East
India Company, he works for the British in recruiting mi-
grants; he also functioned as a money lender. It is because
of this alternative occupation that he can return to Paulette
her father's locket which had been in his keeping for years.
However, when he divests himself of his simultaneously
serious and comical public persona, as he crosses the river
to return to his dwellings his personal story begins to un-
fold. This reveals an ever present, though not always
conscious, constructed will to identity which will lead to
the unexplainable transformations he subsequently under-
goes as he becomes an androgynous being, who proves to
be crucial to the plot.However, what also makes him of
interest, in the constitution of subaltern presence is the
supernatural manifestations which accompany his trasn-
formation, as his belief in the holy word of Ma Taramoni
manifests itself in what can be termed irrational physical
and psychical transformation, which cannot be explaied
away through scientific rationality: “After having put on
the saffron coloured alkhala Taramoni used to wear, he
moved to undo his hair...As he gazed at his own image he
became aware of a glow, spreading slowly through his body,
as if it was being suffused by another pres-
ence...”(p.153)and he remembers her prediction: “ A day
will come when I will pour myself into you: but till then you
must be patient.'(p.153)
Irrational and unexplainable as this may seem to be in
scientific terms, it is yet as reality which is witnessed by all,
for instance Burnham comments about his strange new
women like appearance.
When the migrants first see him he is described as a
“strangely shaped man...with an enormous head, flapping
ears and a pair of bulging eyes that gave him the appear-
ance of goggling at the world around him,..”
Babu Nob Kissin's real transformation puzzles all the pas-
sengers and account for his improbably maternal behaviour
towards the prisoners- convicts as he helps them escape at
the end of the novel.
What sets off this transformation is the discovery in the
records of ship movement of the Zachary's condition of
“Blackness” in his subject position within the Empire's
ledgers, by virtue of being of mixed blood. The juxtaposi-
tion of the cruelty of race demarcation which is appended
to real cruelty (as testified by the narrative of Zacharia's
escape from the shipyard) and the unexplainable faith of
Babu Nob Kissin, the reality of that faith as experienced
within the parameters of his inner world, which yet over-
laps with the outer 'objective' world of historical records,
suggests lines of fracture traversing these very 'objective'
historical records. Lines of fracture which allows the possi-
bility of alternative perceptions of the experience with other
frameworks of understanding.
3. Hybridity as the sign of Subalternity
at the heart of Empire
It is significant that the supreme political presence of the
British empire is undermined from its core Hybridity enters
it through language, dress as well as decision making.
Notwithstanding Serang Ali's attempt to teach Zachary- the
ship captain- the lingo aboard the ship it is from Doughty
that Zachary receives the sharpest command to learn the
local lingo in order to survive his new role- “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.” (p.45). This hybrid lingua Franca made up of
British and dialectical variants of Hindi are spoken every-
where- by the officials of the company who find Neel Rat-
tan Halder stiff with his unaccented British English, when
they themselves are spicing their talk with Dekho, pucca,
etc,... It has also entered the more private precincts of do-
mestic life. It is thus that Burnham's wife interlaces her
conversation, even with her equals with traces of local in-
fluence: “Why yes-didn't I tell you Puggly? Here the Bee-
Bee cut herself short with a guilty start. “look at me, rat-
tling on like a gudda when I should be getting on with the
tumasher.”(p.192)
Zachary himself has been tutored into understanding the
difference between avast and bas, fore and aft, jamna and
dawa' through Serang Ali's painstaking attention to tutor
him. The fact that he is of 'impure' blood, the darkness' that
proves to be Babu Nob Kissin's salvation and Zachary's
own damnation in the land of his birth, interestingly decen-
tres the authoritative racial dichotomy implicit in the ex-
ploitative ventures of the Empire's confrontation of its co-
lonised territories. He is already, by virtue of his birth and
his personal experience, a hybrid presence at the command
of the Ibis. However, in one of these dreamlike scenarios,
Zachary learns very early on, even before he reaches the
shores of India for the first time, just after having picked up
the crew of lascar sailors off the coast of Cape Town that he
does not really control the ship ..”on issuing a hookum for a

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change of course, he discovered that the actual steering of
the ship had never been in his hands anyway.” (p.16)- that
the ship is manned by the long standing practical know-
ledge of this race of ancient mariners, amongst whom he is
a novice,. A novice who has to be protected for his symbol-
ic presence- not only to the empire but also for them- as
one able to reach status of authority within this multi-
formed changing landscape of the Indian Ocean, in a way
that they the lascars, cannot. “ For Serang Ali and his men
Zachary was almost one of themselves, while yet being en-
dowed with the power to undertake an impersonation that
was unthinkable for any of them; it was as much for their
own sakes as for his that they wanted to see him suc-
ceed.”(p.46)
The larger narrative of settlement is already heralded
through the multicultural crowd aboard the Ibis which re-
fuses compartmentalisation of historical identities and
agencies. This crowd is constituted of the romantic figure
of Zachary, Paulette and Jodu as well as Neel and the
Ah-Fat, a multicultural population- from venues and social
backgropunds as diverse as the world map! Paulette's pres-
ence among the women present the possibility of an alter-
native discourse of representing the narrative of the cross-
ing from the inside, as well as from an articulate, educated
understanding of the plight of the passengers.
The narrative of passage across the dark waters is punc-
tuated by events which mark similar disruption of official
narrative. Characters are presented with personal histories,
full of angst and anger, and with strong motivations and a
strong sense of personal and collective pride. This applies
not only to the men figures, of whom the five who escape
in the boat mark the most fiery spirit of resistanc,e but it
also applies to the figure of the women who live below
deck- Munia, Sarju, Heeru, Champa, Ratna, Dookhanee.
4. Conclusion
Altogether, the direction of narrative in Sea of Poppies lies
in decentering the story of indenture and colonisation away
from the dominant- dominated reading: Complex lives,
imbricated in complex networks, among which the British
were but one component and at that a not always dominant
and powerful component of nineteenth century life in the
palpitating life of the Indian Ocean.
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