And yet Ghosh does so without excessive earnestness, leavening his narrative with nuggets of fact and insight, from the Uighur origins of the Indian samosa to the role of Canton in forging a common sense of an Indian national identity among disparate peoples. The novel celebrates the joys of cultural and culinary mingling, the mongrelization of language in the forms of pidgin and Creole, and the mixing of peoples across old barriers of acceptable sexual and racial intercourse.
These traditions are breached, however, in prose that is largely conventional, even old-fashioned. “River of Smoke” could almost have been written two centuries ago, except that it captures the distinctive voices of these characters in ways that would not have been open to writers of that era. Language becomes a vehicle for representing the mating of cultures, and it’s brilliantly done. What sometimes seemed forced in the earlier book is natural and convincing in this one. (But watch out for a variety of strange terms, such as — on just one page— “swadders,” “buttoners,” “mumpers” and “mucksnipes.” The words “cumshaw,” “gubbrowed,” “mudlarking” and “linkisters” are used so often that you tend to assume you should have known them all along.)
Ghosh’s historical judgments are largely rendered subtly, without any of the sledgehammer effect of retrospective moralism that a lesser writer might have employed. But he is not above the occasional anachronistic cynicism. “Democracy is a wonderful thing,” Bahram observes to a British merchant. “It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages – and China too, of course.” That’s too tendentious to be worthy of a fine writer.
But the novel’s strengths are considerable, its flaws barely apparent. With “River of Smoke,” Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is emerging as a monumental tribute to the pain and glory of an earlier era of globalization, an era when people came into contact and collision, intermixing costumes, customs, convictions, consonants, couplings and cash, shaping history all the while through their pettiness, their privations and their passions.
“Do you think they will remember what we went through?” Bahram muses as he watches young Indian Parsis playing cricket in Canton. “Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learned and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives?”
That is a haunting question. And there will be more, undoubtedly, when the final instalment of the Ibis trilogy arrives. I can hardly bear to wait.
Tharoor, an elected member of India’s Parliament, is the author of “The Great Indian Novel” and, most recently, “The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone.”
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