As the novel gathers momentum, having only one identity becomes like having no identity at all. The movement of the book, as shown by its three sections, 'Land', 'River' and 'Sea', is from fixity to flux, a running together of categories that once seemed absolute. The British unheedingly break up traditional structures, but dislocation need not be experienced as pure loss. At this point, though, Amitav Ghosh is only clearing the decks for his story, which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration - and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment. circling around and around, like some enslaved tribe of demons'. Inside, men waist-deep in tanks of opium tread it to soften the sludge, 'a host of dark, legless torsos. The process of addiction is almost metaphysical - there comes a point when only opium can make people forget the damage opium has done.Īround the opium factory, even the monkeys are stupefied, from drinking the waste water. The drug seems to bring a moral numbness, not only to those who ingest it, but to those involved (however unwillingly) in its production. She grows poppies because she must (the destruction of the rural economy is of no concern to the British), but though she is not in any conventional sense a user, opium has infiltrated deep into her family life. Deeti, the first character to be introduced, is a young mother living by the Ganges some 50 miles east of Benares.
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