Colonial History of Oppression and Immigration: A study of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

The present study is an endeavor to explore the unrevealed colonial history of oppression and immigration in nineteenth century India, presented in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first volume of Ibis trilogy. Colonization, a system of political, economic, psychological and cultural domination, always gives birth to a pattern of cultural and political marginalization of the colonized country. Colonial or imperial rule is a situation which in terms of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the colonizers means a consistently maintained distance and difference. Colonialism attains a historical specificity, noting particularly the impact it had and continues to have on all societies across the world. Amitav Ghosh is a novelist with an extraordinary sense of history and place. He is a contemporary IndianEnglish novelist like Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Mukul Kessavan, Gita Mehta, Allen Sealy etc., who combines his professional skills as social historian with literary flair to create works of art, concerned with civilization and history. Ghosh’s novels probe the ideology of colonialism in its various shades. The heroes and heroines of Ghosh’s novels are the native of India, Burma, Malaya, South Africa and Ghosh narrates the tragedy and triumph of these people against the backdrop of colonial history. His novels are considered ‘meditation on colonialism’ concentrating unexplored underbelly of the British Empire. This statement is applicable to all his works including Sea of Poppies where hitherto unrevealed aspects of colonial oppression are exposed through the illegal business of opium