Shadows of Slavery

Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice, and Indian
Indentureship in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Nandini Dhar
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 48, Number 1,

January 2017, pp. 1-35 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2017.0000
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Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice,

and Indian Indentureship
in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Nandini Dhar

Abstract: In his novel Sea of Poppies, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh
emphasizes the fact that while the indentured laborer was not a
slave per se, the indenture of South Asian laborers developed in
the belly of plantation slavery. Without conflating the categories
of slavery and indenture, the novel demonstrates that the inden-
tured laborer’s decision to “accept” indenture was prompted by the
need to survive within a world of shrinking options for the Indian
peasantry rather than a desire for personal mobility. Indeed, the
Indian peasant-turned-indentured laborer faced a lack of choice,
which, while not equivalent to the forced abduction of the African
slave, must nonetheless be studied alongside it within an over-
arching framework of the epistemic and material violence of nine-
teenth-century global capitalist-imperialist formations. In other
words, the novel highlights the inadequacy of applying the binary
of freedom and bondage characteristic of the discourse of chattel
slavery directly to the narrative of indentured labor. Through his
portrayal of the decommissioned slave ship as a central metaphor
of capitalist modernity, around and within which all the social
relationships of the novel circulate, Ghosh represents indenture as
a form of “decommissioned slavery.” This reading interrogates our
understanding of both “choice” and “coercion,” enabling us to re-
examine the blurred lines between these two categories in a global
economy characterized by the structural transformations of plan-
tation slavery and territorial colonialism. As a text that rethinks
historical narratives as well as aesthetic ones, Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
also provides a meticulous reappraisal of the narrative strategies of
the liberal-realist novel.
1
Na n d i n i D h a r
Keywords: indenture, slavery, retrospective realism, historical
I. Introduction

novel, global plantation complex
On 10 January 2012, Kamala Persad-Bissessar, then Prime Minister of

Trinidad and Tobago, visited her ancestral village of Bhelupur, located
in Bihar, a state in eastern India. In her speech, Persad-Bissessar, whose
great-grandfather left Bhelupur for Trinidad-Tobago as a girmitiya (in-
dentured laborer) in 1889, described her ancestors as “immigrants who
had worked hard in foreign lands” (Banerjee). She observed that “while
for some the decision to sail was voluntary, there were others who were
‘dragged away’ to work as laborers” (Banerjee). While Persad-Bissessar’s
speech acknowledged the history of being “dragged away,” it also por-
trayed Indian indentureship as a variation on the pioneer narrative of
free labor migration wherein the indentured Indian laborer is rewritten
as a voluntary immigrant.
Of course, absent in Persad-Bissessar’s speech is the figure of the en-
slaved African whose shadow enables her to represent indenture as a
form of immigration while creating a narrative of affinity between it and
slavery, as is implied in her use of the phrase “dragged away.”This absence
is the site of an unavoidable representational dilemma that haunts nu-
merous depictions of post-slavery indenture throughout the Caribbean
and the islands of the Indian Ocean. In most of these representations,
indenture is read as either a volitional system of labor migration that is
somehow not quite free or a system of coercive traffic in human bodies
which is somehow not quite slavery. Notably, Guyanese-Indian-American
journalist Gaiutra Bahadur’s hybrid critical memoir Coolie Woman: The
Odyssey of Indenture uses the term “semi-forced” to describe indenture
(129; 158), implicitly acknowledging that the binary terms “coerced”
and “volitional” do not adequately express the complexities of indenture.
This article is based on the premise that any understanding of inden-
ture that is reflective of its history must confront this dilemma head-
on. Published in 2008—four years before Persaud-Bissessar’s speech in
2
Shadows of Slavery
Bihar—Bengali-Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies, the

first of his celebrated Ibis trilogy, is one of the literary texts in the recent
history of South Asian Anglophone postcolonial literature that engages
in such an endeavor. It does so by exploring the complex social materi-
alities and cultural geographies of colonial-era India and following the
trajectories of several characters who are enmeshed in the machinery
of indenture in the British-ruled India of 1838, just five years after the
formal abolition of slavery throughout most of the British empire.
One of the novel’s main achievements is its refutation of the notion
that indentured Indian laborers willingly came to the plantations as
migrants who embodied stereotypically South Asian traits of being
“hardworking and thrifty” (Roopnarine 109). Without conflating the
categories of slavery and indenture, the novel demonstrates that indi-
viduals made the decision to enter into indentured labor based on the
pragmatic necessity to survive in a world of shrinking options for the
Indian peasantry rather than “personal ambition and desire” (Pirbhai
55). The novel rests on the central observation that the Indian peasant-
turned-indentured laborer faced a reality of choicelessness which, al-
though not equivalent to the forced abduction of the African slave, must
nonetheless be studied alongside it—within an overarching framework
of the epistemic and structural-material violences of the global machin-
ery of a nineteenth-century imperialist-capitalism, which included but
was not limited to the institution of plantation slavery.
While recent scholarship on Sea of Poppies acknowledges the crucial
role of indenture in the narrative, scholars often overlook the novel’s
critique of indenture as a form of voluntary migration and reproduce a
representational conundrum similar to that in Persad-Bissessar’s speech.
For example, Anupama Arora describes the novel’s indentured charac-
ters as anxiously awaiting their “impending migration” through the dark
ocean waters of Kala Pani while also observing that the novel is a com-
mentary on how indentured labor turns the “native into a commodity”
(10). This is not a purely semantic point but is part of a widespread
tendency that regards plantation slavery and indenture as two separate
labor regimes, thus revealing a hesitancy as to what extent the knowl-
edge of slavery’s categories should inform studies of indenture.
3
Sea of Poppies’ signal contribution is its rethinking of the relationship

between slavery and indenture by representing indenture as a form of
decommissioned slavery. This rethinking is literally and figuratively em-
bodied in the form of the Ibis, an ex-blackbird or decommissioned slave
ship that has been refurbished into a transport vessel to ferry indentured
laborers to plantations. The Ibis is the single most important metaphor
of capitalist modernity in the novel, the hub around which the entire
plot and its complex cast of characters are organized. Sea of Poppies
grounds its fictional world in the insights of historical archives and
argues that the indentureship that developed in the shadow of slavery is
indeed a kind of reformed slavery, if not quite a euphemism for slavery,
as historian Hugh Tinker suggests (Tinker 19). This historical framing
enables Ghosh to avoid an overly simplistic separation of the legacies of
plantation slavery and territorial colonialism, interrogate the superficial
binary of “choice” and “coercion,” and place the legacies of plantation
slavery within a larger global colonial-capitalist political economy.
Literary critic Miriam Pirbhai articulates this duality succinctly. She
writes that “[t]he immigrant success story as another feature of the col-
lective saga of the indentured labourer and his/her descendants also con-
siderably rewrites the poetics of victimhood associated with the image
of bondage and servitude” (24). In fact, Pirbhai’s own work expresses
a marked anxiety around the dangers of using the experiences of the
African (slave) diaspora as the “master trope” (17), even as the figure
of the enslaved African and the material histories of African plantation
slavery become repeated referents through which she analyzes the figu-
ration of the indentured laborer in literary and cultural productions.
Pirbhai criticizes an “over-reliance” on the categories of “trauma,” “servi-
tude,” and “bondage” in the works of an earlier generation of scholars of
indenture, such as Vijay Mishra, who often took the originary tropes of
the ships from such seminal theoretical works as Paul Gilroy’s The Black
Atlantic to evoke the common coercive social relations that bind slavery
and indenture with nineteenth-century mercantile capitalism. Pirbhai is
committed to inserting the “element of choice” (Pirbhai 19) in her read-
ings of the representations of indenture in the literatures of the “old”
Indian diaspora.1
4
Shadows of Slavery
In her book-length reading of the literatures that emerged from the

indentured labor diasporas of the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, East and
South Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands, Pirbhai offers a number of
provocative statements which require critical interrogation. In particu-
lar, she argues that
[t]he impetus for the laborers’ journey, however, not only

speaks of the horrors of upheaval, servitude, and bondage, but
also recalls colonial quest narratives, such as the search for el
dorado (the mythical city of gold). This is because the labourer’s
journey is as fuelled by personal ambition and desire as it was
for the colonizer or imperial adventurer. In this sense, the mass
exodus is likened to religious or pioneer narratives, as the allu-
sion to the promised land (the land of milk and honey) sug-
gests. (55)
The consonance of this passage with Persad-Bissessar’s speech testifies to

the fact that indenture remains an active discursive and ideological site
whose historical significance is constantly being created, debated, and
renegotiated through the efforts of public figures, cultural producers,
and academic-institutional scholars.
In contrast to Persad-Bissessar, who accomplishes her cultural work
by alluding to the enslaved Africans who remain absent as concrete
figures in her speech, Pirbhai emphasizes the active agency among in-
dentured Indians, whose “quest” for a “mythical” form of New World
wealth prompts a journey that relieves them from the “protective veil
of . . . [the] ancient homeland” (55)—that is, India. It would be unfair,
though, to critique Pirbhai’s work as solely reliant upon the categories
generated by an effort to read the indentured Indian laborer’s trajec-
tory through the lens of a pioneer narrative. The introductory chapter
of her book Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture provides
a thorough listing of the “disruptive effects of colonial rule” (6) that
drove the Indian peasant’s acceptance of indenture in the first place.
Yet beyond this initial account, which functions more as a list than an
integrated analytical framework, these factors do not play a substan-
tive role in Pirbhai’s analysis. It would not be an exaggeration to say
5
that the issue of colonial violence appears almost as lip service, invoked
only to be dispensed with soon after. This is not unexpected given
Pirbhai’s emphasis on the category of “diaspora,” within which India
(or the subcontinent) increasingly comes to symbolize the “originary
culture” (12), the “ancestral land” (137), or the “ancient homeland”
(55). Notwithstanding the orientalizing subtext invoked by the rheto-
ric of antiquity that Pirbhai uses, which implies an unchangeable India,
such readings lose the complex materialities that constitute India’s dy-
namic political and cultural geography as well as a sense of how such
complexities enabled the genesis of indenture in the first place. One of
Sea of Poppies’ primary achievements is its innovative reimagining and
rewriting of these materialities.
My project differs from Pirbhai’s in the sense that I focus precisely
on those spaces and factors that Pirbhai invokes but leaves unattended.
My attention is not so much to the diaspora engendered by indenture
but to those moments and factors that prompt the reluctant acceptance
of indenture by the Indian poor. Furthermore, I contend that Ghosh’s
novel actively resists and defamiliarizes precisely that notion of an im-
mutable India that magically relieves the indentured of the fetters of
“ancient” traditions. Neither does it attest to the “quest” and “el dorado”
thesis that Pirbhai propounds. If her project is meant to insert an “ele-
ment of choice,” my project, through an analysis of Ghosh’s novel, is
to problematize the very framework of choice as an adequate analyti-
cal category for understanding indenture. Consequently, I argue, Sea of
Poppies utilizes the novelist’s tools—such as plotting, characterization,
and invocation of specific settings—to demonstrate that the process
of binding the Indian laborer to a contract or agreement was riddled
with everything from structural inequalities to barefaced lies and thus
reduced the notion of choice to a grim farce.
In the period succeeding the abolition of slavery in the British colonies,
after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, approximately 1.4
million Indians were indentured to colonial plantations in South Africa,
Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia, Reunion and the Seychelles.
Of course, one also needs to remember, between 1838 and 1917, ap-
proximately 551,000 indentured laborers from India “signed” contracts
6
Shadows of Slavery
that assigned them to the plantations in the islands of the Caribbean

and South America (Dabydeen and Samaroo 1). Mauritius became the
epicenter of Indian indenture, receiving its first group of indentured
Indian laborers as a sugar colony in 1834 (Carter et al. 19–21).
Given this history, in making Mauritius rather than the Caribbean
the final destination of the indentured characters in Sea of Poppies,
Ghosh is invoking the centrality of the former in the history of Indian
indenture. As the works of scholars such as Vijay Mishra, Sudesh
Mishra, and Pirbhai show, histories of indenture have provided narra-
tive material for writers of Indian descent from the Caribbean, South
Africa, Southeast Asia, and Mauritius for decades. While Sea of Poppies
is not the first fictional acknowledgment of indenture, it is the first
novel by a writer from the Indian subcontinent to rethink the memo-
rialization of indenture by using a wide array of historical and archival
strategies and literary forms. Ghosh’s own locational history matters,
because his commitment to exploring the social geography of India in
the 1830s immediately puts his novel on a divergent course from that
of the diasporic historical novel’s exploration of India. Guyanese-British
novelist David Dabydeen’s novel The Counting House, for example, de-
votes considerable space to exploring the lives of pre-indenture Indian
peasants; India prior to the experience of indenture appears only as a
memory. The names of various characters—Vidia, Jagnat, Kampta—
are creolized versions of original Indian names, and although the name
of an Indian village is mentioned, the novel does not reference its
actual location on the subcontinent. India is depicted as an anachro-
nism, as a place that is somehow already a nation, described as “India”
by Dabydeen’s characters in an English that is distinctly Caribbean. In
other words, Dabydeen’s India is not free from the diasporic imagina-
tion engendered by indenture.
There are similar depictions of India throughout the literatures of in-
denture. At their best, these depictions provide a space for writers to
narrativize India as a form of ancestral backstory. For example, writers
such as Khal Torabully, the Indo-Mauritian poet, recognize the impor-
tance of “India” as a “cultural element” in the coolie’s world (Carter and
Torabully 145). That said, this definition also prevents India from func-
7
tioning as a historical-material site that might provide the coolies with a

sense of place, identity, and belonging before they board the ships that
carry them away. In contrast to Dabydeen’s attempt to write India’s pre-
indenture feudal reality in Caribbean English, Sea of Poppies narrates its
tale in a subcontinental English that effortlessly and ingeniously com-
bines words and phrases in vernacular Hindi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, and
nineteenth-century English. The peasant protagonists who ultimately
become indentured laborers are given a specific geography (the eastern
state of Bihar), which is described in meticulous detail.
Ghosh seamlessly employs a self-conscious realism that painstakingly
documents the conversations, actions, and daily interactions of his
characters, thereby generating deep sociological and historical insight
into how precisely the crushing political might and economic weight
of British imperialism immiserated and destroyed eastern India’s local
peasantries.4 This narrative strategy enables the novel to escape the
trap of relying excessively on the trope of the African slave diaspora
while also putting the emergence of Indian indenture in the context
of a mercantile capitalism that has historically relied inordinately on
chattel slavery. In doing so, Ghosh also demonstrates how the colonial
restructuration of the subcontinental economy—something which in-
cludes but is not limited to the transformation of the land-tenure sys-
tems—is coterminous with chattel slavery. Instead of collapsing the
differences between the African enslaved and the Indian indentured,
a project Pirbhai is correctly skeptical of, Ghosh shows how these two
systems brush against each other. The friction between the two pro-
vides the novel with an indispensable metric of the early nineteenth-
century global political economy, revealing how internally fractured,
inconsistent, and non-uniform this latter is. In other words, Ghosh
is resisting precisely Pirbhai’s implicit assumption that if indenture is
not chattel slavery, it must be characterized by conditions of liberal
choice. Instead, his cultural work consists of delineating the multiple
forms of distinct but intersecting patterns of non-choice characteristic
of the global political economy of the 1830s. Rather than focus on the
quest of indentured laborers to find their voices and identities within
a plantation geography already inhabited by African slaves, which
8
Shadows of Slavery
often happens to be the domain of the diasporic writers such as David

Dabydeen, the novel emphasizes the place of indenture within early
nineteenth-century India’s society and economy and links that space to
a wider global political economy dominated by mercantile capitalism,
colonialism, and plantation slavery.
In this respect, Sea of Poppies joins a long and growing list of contem-
porary novels that take historical archives and the diverse socio-cultural
theories that frame the readings of such archives as key source texts. In
its self-conscious examination of unexamined histories and narratives
and its deliberate weaving together of diverse identities and geographies,
Sea of Poppies can be categorized as an example of what Judith Ryan
terms “the novel after theory—that precise strand of contemporary
novels which attempt to ‘know about’ literary and cultural theory” while
“building” on, “arguing against,” and “modifying it” (Ryan 1).
In the course of its almost five hundred pages, Sea of Poppies expands
on, takes issue with, and repurposes several contemporary academic
and critical strands of thought, including postcolonial studies, theories
of African diaspora, slavery studies, and South Asian subaltern stud-
ies. This results in what I call a “retrospective” or “critical-historical
realism,” a form of realism which, as I discuss in the first section of
this essay, reconfigures many of nineteenth-century realism’s narrative
strategies to document and dramatize the Indian peasant’s evolution
into an indentured laborer, through a microscopic exposition of the
multiple crises that confronted the Indian feudal-colonial land tenure
system in the nineteenth century. Second, I show through an analysis
of indentured protagonist Deeti’s vision of the ship that the novel self-
consciously manipulates the notions of the supernatural and ghostli-
ness to construct a trajectory of non-choice that guides the Indian
peasant’s reluctant “opting” for indenture. Finally, I analyze the novel’s
representations of the process of recruitment to demonstrate that the
text writes these moments in a way that suggests indenture’s evolu-
tion out of a system of slavery, which must then be transmuted to
accommodate the specific South Asian contexts. My analysis demon-
strates how the novel depicts recruitment as an absence of choice for
the Indian peasant.
9
II. The Peasant and the Coolie: Discourses of Choice, Ghosh’s

Retrospective Realism, and the Global Plantation Complex
As a novel, Sea of Poppies is a complex polyphony of themes, charac-
ters, and geographies that recombines a number of spaces which might
otherwise seem autonomous or disparate. These spaces include the East
Indian feudal peasant’s land and the dockyards of the American city of
Baltimore, the modern factory system and the lascars (sailors indigenous
to the Indian Ocean), the colonial Indian city and the post-abolition
plantations of Mauritius and the Americas, and the colonial prison and
the coolie barracks of Calcutta. All are connected by the Ibis, an ex-
slaver ship turned into a vessel that transports newly indentured workers
from Calcutta to Mauritius.
In addition to Deeti and Kalua, a peasant and a lower-caste cart-
driver, both of whom eventually become indentured laborers, the novel’s
main characters include Zachary Reid, the light-skinned son of an ex-
slave in Maryland; Paulette Lambert, the young daughter of a French
botanist who was raised in Calcutta, India and feels more comfortable
in Bengali saris than European gowns; a boatman, Jodu, who was raised
as Paulette’s brother; a disenfranchised Bengali zamindar (feudal land-
lord), Neel Rattan Halder, who is arrested by the British and forced to
board the Ibis; and Ah Fatt, a mixed-race Chinese prisoner. The stories
of these characters offer a panoramic view of early nineteenth-century
global political economy, namely the machinery of a fast-growing global
mercantile capitalism in which the global plantation complex, an impe-
rial opium economy, and indenture function as three interrelated cogs.
Sea of Poppies narrativizes the intimate lives of an 1830s capitalism in
places far removed from its acknowledged global centers. For some of the
characters of the novel, these centers—Great Britain, France, the United
States—appear as memories, as the characters’ lived pasts. Conversely,
their experience of the present is indelibly formed by the colonies—the
peripheries—created by the economic and cultural expansion of capi-
tal by means of colonialism and imperialism. For some of the other
characters, these colonial peripheries comprise their place of birth, the
only homeland they have ever known. This is why Sea of Poppies cannot
be categorized as what Pirbhai terms the “indenture narrative” (21),5
10
Shadows of Slavery
even though it borrows some of its conventions, such as the moment

of recruitment. As in the indentured narratives, there is no left-behind
Indian homeland, the memories and meanings of which need to be
grappled with. Additionally, the everyday realities of the labor-regimes
of indenture lie in the future. What constitutes the present of Ghosh’s
novel, then, is the homeland that is India itself—the factors and mate-
rial realities therein that cause the much memorialized “departure” of
the indenture narratives. As a narrative strategy, the novel prolongs the
moments that eventually lead to the event of departure, thus making
the subcontinental homeland a concrete present in the characters’ lives,
precisely where indenture narratives see the latter only as a past.
In doing so, Sea of Poppies thus employs what I term “retrospective
realism,” a literary genre that emerged in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries to critically reevaluate histories, materialities, and
subjectivities previously excluded, under-explored, and obliquely ex-
plored in literary genres that formed the dominant tastes of earlier read-
ing publics and literary marketplaces. For Ghosh, the most obvious site
of scrutiny here is Victorian realism, whose most dominant form depicts
the multifaceted realities of the colonized peripheries only as shadows
or tangential presences. Yet the novel does not merely re-examine the
literary tools and ideological implications of Victorian realism; it also
rewrites key aspects of the genres which emerged from the colonized
peoples’ experiences of imperial capitalism. These genres include the
slave narrative, the social-realist novels of 1930s colonial India, and the
contemporary neo-slave narrative. For the purposes of this essay, how-
ever, I am primarily concerned with Ghosh’s strategic redeployment of
the tools of the Victorian liberal novel to narrate subjectivities and cir-
cumstances that lie beyond the realm of the Victorian novel proper and
his implicit critique of the ideological assumptions of those Victorian
tools.6
One of the key strategies of the novel’s retrospective realism is its rewrit-
ing of the voice of an omniscient narrator, one of the classic techniques
of nineteenth-century European realism. In contrast to its historical pre-
decessor, Ghosh’s omniscient narrator functions as what literary critic
Paul Dawson calls a double-sided “rhetorical performance” (44). The
11
narrator’s voice evokes the socio-economic and political omniscience of

capital as market forces push their way into the farthest reaches of the
globe and unravel the fabric of everyday life. This omniscience signals
the novelist’s critical awareness of the overwhelming power of capital to
determine the social destinies of individuals and communities alike. Yet
the omniscient voice “posits fiction as a mode of historiography and sets
up the novelist as a kind of literary historian” (Dawson 110).
Part of this authorial work of historiography is quite literal, in the
sense that Ghosh provides readers with an exhaustive list of primary
and secondary historical sources in his acknowledgments section, thus
making it obvious that archival research has been central to the retro-
spective realism that the novel engages in. In this combination of his-
torical research and deployment of realism’s narrative strategies, Sea of
Poppies can be categorized as what literary critic Gerhard Hoffmann cat-
egorizes as a “post-postmodern” novel, which embodies a “return to tra-
ditional forms of narrative and storytelling” while withholding “a return
to the belief system of traditional realism” (Hoffmann 623). As Dawson
observes in The Return of the Omniscient Narrator, his analysis of recent
Anglophone historical fictions, what makes these historical novels post-
postmodern is their reliance upon the material nature of history. Unlike
postmodern novels, which were suspicious of the very process of history
and were keen on dubbing history as narrative, Sea of Poppies is inter-
ested in acknowledging the material violence of history, even as it tacitly
recognizes that the historical past remains beyond our complete com-
prehension and knowledge. One of Sea of Poppies’ primary achievements
is the elevation of fiction to a form of authoritative history—predicated
upon exhaustive archival research—and then the deployment of that
fiction to fill in the blanks of our historical knowledge about under-
explored and tangentially explored histories, even as such attempts are
bound to be incomplete. In that sense, then, Ghosh’s novel rethinks and
reimagines the historical archives.
This reimagination is written in the novel with the juxtaposition of
Zachary Reid, the light-skinned African-American second mate of the
Ibis, and Deeti, an upper-caste poor Indian peasant woman, engaged
in the work of cultivating poppy in her small plot of land. Zachary is
12
Shadows of Slavery
landing in colonial Bengal for the first time, while Deeti is seeing a ship
for the first time. The Ibis is the same vessel that later transports her and
numerous others as indentured laborers to Mauritius. The afterlife of
the slave ship thus intersects with Deeti’s and Zachary’s lives through the
site of indenture in a post-emancipation global economy. Scholars such
as Jacob Crane note that Ghosh’s Ibis is an “exact image” of the ship that
serves as the central chronotope of Gilroy’s analysis of the Black Atlantic
(Crane 2). In this essay I am less interested in the similarities between
Ghosh’s and Gilroy’s ships than the self-conscious historical commen-
tary established through this associative move. By making a slave ship
the object of an Indian peasant woman’s first experience of maritime
modernity and juxtaposing Deeti with a character who has been indel-
ibly formed by his black mother’s slave past, Ghosh makes it impossible
for readers to ignore the significance of slavery’s horrific history vis-à-vis
South Asia, a region not traditionally associated with plantation slavery
or the global plantation complex. While slavery was already technically
a thing of the past by 1838 in the British colonies—the year when the
novel opens—it continued to exist due to its indelible effects and trans-
mutation into the system of indenture.
The novel thus globalizes the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
by writing its post-history and linking the former’s traffic in human
bodies with that of other regions, most notably the traffic of inden-
tured bodies across the Indian Ocean. In effect, the novel narrativizes
the genesis of the coolie, the girmitiya or indentured laborer. This raises
the question of how this genesis was concretely experienced, given that
indentured workers are neither slaves, peasants, nor proletarians. While
slavery is predicated on the complete suppression of choice, indenture
involves a contract by which laborers allegedly choose to bind them-
selves, thus complicating the issues of choice and agency.
Sea of Poppies answers this question by providing a genealogy of the
material and social histories that transformed Indian peasants, the urban
poor, and untouchables into coolies. In doing so, the novel problema-
tizes the separation of the nineteenth-century colonial political econ-
omy, its land tenure regime in India, and the global plantation complex
into distinct and separate entities. To a large extent, the novel faithfully
13
and painstakingly documents a crisis over land—or more precisely, the

failure of the semi-feudal, semi-colonial land tenure system to accom-
modate the needs of the Indian peasantry. This becomes especially sig-
nificant, since Deeti’s life as a cultivator of poppy has been tethered to
the imperial opium economy.
In early nineteenth-century India, historian Carl A. Trocki writes, “[o]
pium cultivators were not free agents” and opium was looked upon as
an unprofitable venture by most peasants in India (66). Indian peasants
were reluctant cultivators of this particular cash crop, which they were
“forced” to cultivate even during famine years in lieu of food grains.
Trocki states that while the law did not make any space for force to be
used in the cultivation of opium, there is significant historical evidence
to show that coercion was used at the local administrative level to make
peasants cultivate opium instead of grain. The payments that the peas-
ants received from the colonial government were minimal. Trocki writes:
“For the period from 1820 to 1859, peasants in Bihar and Benares re-
ceived Rs. 3.5 per seer of raw opium. By contrast, at about the same
period, a ryot in western India, cultivating Malwa opium, was receiving
around Rs. 8 for a seer of ‘pukka’ or prepared opium” (66). This is a
historical context that the novel never states explicitly. Yet this is also the
structural context that works as one of the most important subtexts of
the novel, prompting the reader to imagine what previous experiences
Deeti might have had within the broader infrastructural opiumization
of Bihar’s rural economy. The knowledge of this subtext also precludes
any possibility of considering “choice” as a viable category that might
be applied to understand Deeti’s life-history, embedded as it is within
a larger network of colonial trade, capital investments, and agricultural
crises.
Instead, the novel documents the crises by showing how Deeti acts
and reacts to the intersection of caste, class, and gender within a feudal-
colonial rural economy, also haunted by the specter of the colonial cul-
tivation of opium. While Deeti is compelled to “choose” indenture, she
does not have innumerable alternatives. She embraces indenture not out
of any positive feelings of identity, affiliation, adventure, or achievement
but because it represents the best of the worst possible choices: concu-
14
Shadows of Slavery
binage, sati (immolation on her husband’s pyre), or death by starvation.

Indeed, Deeti’s embrace of indenture is a manifestation of her ultimate
choicelessness in life, which has as much to do with the operations of
colonial political economy as with those of caste and gender.
The novel documents large-scale social forces through small details,
spatial contextualization, and an ethnographic sensibility that detects
the fault lines of historical necessity in the smallest, most mundane de-
tails of everyday life. It takes painstaking care to establish India as a real
historical place, in contrast to mythical or folkloric narratives of the
diaspora. Consider the precise details relayed on the first page of the
novel:
The village in which Deeti lived was on the outskirts of the

town of Ghazipur, some fifty miles east of Benares. Like all her
neighbours, Deeti was preoccuppied with the lateness of her
poppy crop: that day, she rose early and went through the mo-
tions of her daily routine, laying out a freshly washed dhoti and
kamees for Hukam Singh, her husband, and preparing the rotis
and achar he would eat at midday. (Ghosh 3)
The passage maps an extensive subcontinental geography, locating the
latter within the larger structures of a British-dominated global capital-
ism more generally and the opium economy in particular. It also defines
the material conditions that constitute Deeti’s pre-indenture quotidian
life.
Ghosh sees the coolie primarily as an economic category rather than
as a racial or religious identity. Yet the coolie does not mesh well with
the canonic Marxist understanding of class, precisely because a coolie is
neither a peasant nor a proletarian. Rather, the coolie is stationed be-
tween the slave and the wage laborer. As Torabully observes, the coolie
occupies the precarious position of “salaried servitude,” a subject-posi-
tion typical of the post-slavery global plantation complex (Carter and
Torabully 150). Sea of Poppies demonstrates that, just as the arrival of
“capital” and “commodity relations” in the non-Western world did not
“appear to lead to the politics of equal rights that Marx saw as internal
to these categories” (Chakraborty 90–91), neither did the abolition of
15
slavery. Consequently, any attempt to separate the histories of slavery

and indenture falls prey to a false dichotomy.
Semi-feudal, semi-colonial patterns of modern Indian underdevelop-
ment and the norms of the plantation system converge on Sea of Poppies’
coolie figure. Faced with a specific form of feudal-colonial encroach-
ment on her livelihood in a rural community, the peasant is compelled
to “choose” indenture and is thus transformed into a coolie. As Tinker
writes, many Indian peasants-turned indentured laborers “found they
had exchanged one form of poverty and servitude for another, and many
more found only death and disease in the new life” (60). Ghosh’s novel
dramatizes how Indian peasants entered into that exchange without
knowing what lay in store for them in the plantation colonies.
Over the course of the novel, Deeti discovers that the semi-feudal
world in which she was born is too narrow to accommodate her person-
hood. She cannot go back to her natal village because she has married
the untouchable cart-driver, Kalua, thus demonstrating that apart from
issues of structural economic violence, Deeti is also haunted by caste
and sexual norms that confront her in specifically gendered ways. Yet
when she migrates to a nearby town with Kalua, both of them fail to
find employment. Urbanization, which has often been written in ear-
lier Indian social realisms as one of the vital sites of modernization in
South Asia, does not provide any viable liberatory modern alternative
for Deeti. It is only during a moment of desperation, when Deeti and
Kalua are begging for food, that indenture presents itself as a possibility.
This instance captures the historical specificity of indenture as a
moment in nineteenth-century colonial economic history, wherein one
form of economic crisis fed into another, putting individuals like Deeti
and Kalua at the mercy of social and political-economic forces beyond
their control. The novel reveals the project of colonial modernization
to be one of irrevocable structural violence in which the only choice
a gendered subaltern possesses is to exchange one form of deprivation
for another. Ghosh’s writing of the everyday specter of such realities
highlights the limits of nineteenth-century realisms, which defined in-
dividual subjectivities exclusively in terms of what Nancy Armstrong
calls the “class-and-culture specific subject” (3)—in other words, the
16
Shadows of Slavery
Anglo-American property-owning bourgeois individual. Nowhere does

this circuitous, and, often, traumatic route of modernization become
more apparent than in Deeti’s interpretation of what her vision of the
Ibis means. Rather than paint utopian visions of frontier conquests or
the prospect of progressive upward class mobility through indenture,
Sea of Poppies represents Deeti’s visions of the Ibis as spectral, shorn of
any associations with the utopic.
III. The Specter of the Ship and Deeti’s First Specter of Indenture
The Ibis first appears to Deeti not as a real-life presence but as a vision.
Even in that vision, Deeti recognizes that the “apparition was a sign of
destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream”
(Ghosh 3). To Deeti, then, the ship arrives not as a specter of the past
but of the future. It is a future that haunts her, even though she does
not yet know what fate it will bring. The ship symbolizes a fundamental
transformation in her relationship to the land and is an example of what
sociologist Avery Gordon terms a “haunting recognition,” a “special”
form of knowing and anticipating “what has happened or is happening”
(63).
Deeti’s vision is thus a form of narrative prolepsis, which Gérard
Genette defines as “any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or
evoking in advance an event that will take place later” (40). Yet when the
omniscient narrator states that Deeti’s vision of “a tall-masted ship, at sail
on the ocean” cannot be explained rationally because “her village was so
far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the nether-world: it was the
chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani,
‘the Black Water’” (Ghosh 3), it becomes apparent that it is not so much
a single event that is being narrated in advance but the entire history
of indenture, congealed within a single image. That is, the voice of the
omniscient narrator is a substitution for the historical common sense and
theoretical insights that enable the twenty-first-century reader to create
a conscious historical-political association between the ship, the rural
hinterland that is Deeti’s village, the ocean, and Deeti’s indenture-future
in a way that suggests an inevitability that cannot necessarily be averted
through individual rational agency and will.
17
What is perhaps most symbolically evocative here is the double enten-

dre in the term “Kala-Pani,” literally “black waters.” A term that is used
in many South Asian languages to refer to the ocean, it also has special
significance within the history of indenture, where it is used to refer to
the traumatic oceanic passage from the subcontinent to the plantation
colonies. Put bluntly, the Kala-Pani is to the South Asian labor diaspora
what the Middle Passage is to the African slave diaspora. The use of this
term in the opening paragraph of the novel, juxtaposed with Deeti’s
vision of the Ibis, foreshadows her indentured future in a manner that
suggests a doom that is unavoidable and unchangeable by any individ-
ual agency.
As a peasant, Deeti’s life has been predominantly bound to the spatial
territories of her village. Yet there is hardly any sight of a premodern
rural tranquility in her life, from which the specter of indenture and,
by extension, the ship can release her. Her life, the novel demonstrates,
is bound by the political economy of a colonial modernity. Her older
brother is a sepoy (soldier) in the British Indian army, her husband had
once been a sepoy and now works in the opium factory at Ghazipur, and
she manages the cultivation of a poppy field, the harvest from which
provides the raw material for the opium factory where her husband
works. Her life may have been circumscribed by the physical insularity
of the village, but she is by no means cut off from the economic struc-
tures of a colonial modernity. Another way to understand this conun-
drum is to recognize that Deeti’s village, located “so far inland,” is one
of the many villages significantly restructured by the British imperial
global drug trade. Consequently, the novel demands that we rethink
our understanding of how capital as a category fashions Deeti’s life in
ways that transcend any unilinear understanding. Nowhere does this
complexity manifest itself in more precise terms than in Deeti’s drawing
of the Ibis on a mango-leaf.
In contrast to her own rootedness within the village, the ship Deeti
draws on a mango-leaf for her daughter Kabutri looks like a flying
bird, featuring “two wing-like triangles hanging suspended above a
long curved shape that ended in a hooked bill” (9). The ship appears
in Deeti’s life as a symbol of motion that approximates a living being.
18
Shadows of Slavery
It has a life of its own, making it very different from any other material
object in her immediate experience. Indeed, even in the moment in
which she undertakes its visual representation, it is almost impossible
for her to recognize it or grasp its full significance. Put in the context of
a larger history of the global plantation complex, this moment is struc-
turally reminiscent of the enslaved African’s lack of knowledge about
the ultimate purpose of human trafficking in late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century West Africa.
The status of the ship in Deeti’s life is further complicated by the
fact that she chooses to place her drawing in her puja-room (place of
worship) along with figurines of gods and goddesses and other family
memorabilia, including family portraits. Drawn on poppy-petal discs by
Deeti, the portraits reveal the complex reality of an existence located in
colonial modernity. The discs invoke the world of commercial agricul-
tural relations and the opium economy imposed on India by the British
colonial government, dispelling the notion that Deeti’s life exemplifies
an instance of “perfect” rural insularity and revealing how the colonial
opium economy and the plantation economy were not only cotermi-
nous, but found one of their definitive intersections in the system of
indentured labor.
The complex interweb of objects and images that the novel repre-
sents—the poppy disc petal with the image of the ship, the image of the
ship with Deeti’s altar—suggests that Deeti’s acceptance of indenture is
not so much a step toward modernization as an exchange of one form
of modernity and capital relations for another. The Ibis thus embodies
a “new” form of plantation modernity into which Deeti awaits her in-
terpellation. The ship represents a form of capital that is more mobile,
conspicuous, and all-pervasive than those familiar to Deeti in her life
as a Bihari peasant woman. The ship’s entry into her personal shrine
signifies its literal transformation into a new god. Capital is transformed
into a new divinity in Deeti’s world. The ship becomes the conduit for
her transition from a “static” rural peasant into a “diasporic” plantation
worker.
The sense of inevitability that surrounds the ship from the moment
it enters Deeti’s sight is powerfully symptomatic of South Asia’s induc-
19
tion into the global plantation complex; Deeti, as a peasant woman, is

likewise powerless in the face of such a system. This inevitability over-
whelms her and signifies the choicelessness of those who were inden-
tured. If the primary difference between indenture and slavery is that
the former was based on a supposed choice or agreement, then Deeti’s
sense of inevitability contradicts this. Indeed, Ghosh makes ingenious
use of the literary tropes of supernaturalism, coincidence, and chance
meetings in order to express the choicelessness facing Indian peasants
who “opt” for indenture.
Every time Deeti encounters some aspect of indenture, whether in
the form of her vision of the Ibis, her running into the villagers who
have signed up as girmitiyas, or the final decisive meeting with the mid-
dleman Ramsharan, she encounters them as ghostly occurrences over
which she has no control and which leave her with an inauspicious feel-
ing. Taken together, these moments symbolize the impossibility of con-
structing any unilinear narrative of choice that might lay the foundation
for a study of indenture that would bear no historical connection to the
categories that have been influential in the studies of plantation slavery.
In other words, both indenture and slavery are best understood when
they are studied as continuities that form inextricable pre- and post-
histories of each other.
Ghosh’s careful and meticulous plotting of his narrative in terms of his
own archival-historical research keeps these moments from being heavy-
handed. For example, Deeti first comes into contact with the girmitiyas
while on her way to Hukam Singh’s factory in the cart of Kalua, who
later becomes her second husband. This coincidence, one of many in
the novel, is symbolic, since Hukam Singh’s collapse and eventual death
unleashes the cycle of events that compels Deeti to adopt the life of a
girmitiya. As Deeti witnesses the girmitiyas walk past Kalua’s cart, read-
ers intuit that she is seeing her own future. Like the vision of the ship,
the sight of the girmitiyas conveys the traumatic nature of the process of
indenture, which she can only experience through non-rational forms of
affect and knowledge—the feeling of ghostliness.
Of course, there is nothing supernatural about the ship or the march-
ers. They are as real and tangible as Deeti herself. The issue, rather, is
20
Shadows of Slavery
that the marchers embody her own future. The novel presents the gir-
mitiyas, like Deeti’s vision of the ship, as a form of narrative prolepsis, a
future that is both a spectral and material presence—a future that cannot
be fully interpreted, read, or analyzed but makes itself felt through its
inauspiciousness.
This future is thus tied to the eerie appearance of a new collectiv-
ity, the collectivity of the indentured laborers. When the girmitiyas first
come into view, they appear to Deeti as “a hundred strong or more;
hemmed in by a ring of stick-bearing guards, this crowd was trudging
wearily in the direction of the river” (65):
They are girmitiyas, said Ramsaran-ji, and at the sound of that

word Deeti uttered an audible gasp—for suddenly she under-
stood. It was a few years now since the rumours had begun
to circulate in the villages around Ghazipur: although she had
never seen a girmitiya before, she had heard them being spoken
of. They were so called because, in exchange for money, their
names were entered on ‘girmits’—agreements written on pieces
of paper. The silver that was paid for them went to their fami-
lies, and they were taken away, never to be seen again: they van-
ished, as if into the netherworld. (66)
The girmitiyas’ slow walk toward the river recalls the closely surveilled
walk of enslaved West Africans through the hinterlands to the slave-forts
on the coasts. Similarly, the novel’s references to money paid to fami-
lies in exchange for bodies is reminiscent of the specter of the trade in
human bodies. Just as the slave trade emptied the continent of Africa,
indenture empties out the hinterlands of India, leaving nothing behind
but bereavement and fragmented stories. Understandably, the sight of
the girmitiyas evokes fear in Deeti. If the ship makes her confront the
enormity of the global plantation complex, the sight of the girmitiyas
underscores the human cost of that plantation machinery in a visceral
and affective way.
This affective knowledge, to be sure, does not correlate with con-
crete knowledge of her future. Despite its heavy dependence on the
allegorical resonance of the ship, which in a post-Gilroy world is dif-
21
ficult to separate from the history of the slave trade, the novel does not
necessarily transplant the categories of the African (slave) diaspora un-
critically onto a South Asian social geography. Ghosh provides such a
persistently detailed account of Deeti’s life and keen narrativization of
her interiority and social consciousness that it is almost impossible to
imagine her belonging to a different context. But the novelist’s knowl-
edge of the slave trade and its affective dimensions have been deployed
here to construct a narrative of intertwined existence in which the
genesis of indenture cannot necessarily be understood without refer-
ences to slavery and the slave trade. The signal irony of this moment is
that Deeti is as unaware of the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
and plantation slavery as she is of post-slavery indenture. Indenture
can only enter her mind as a confused signification, unstable and lin-
gering between the figurative and the real, forever eluding rational
consciousness. When Ramsaran, the supervisor of the walking girmiti-
yas, informs Kalua that the latter will be taken to “Mareech,” which is
“an island in the sea—like Lanka, but farther away” (67), “the men-
tion of Lanka, with its evocation of Ravana and his demon-legions,
ma[k]e[s] Deeti flinch” (67). On one hand, the name invokes the lure
of wealth and gold and functions almost as a South Asianization of
the concept of el dorado. On the other hand, “Mareech” invokes the
ultimate downfall of the hero Rama, who, enticed by his wife Sita,
ventures out of the safe domain of his home in search of the golden
deer (the demon Mareech in disguise), only to be embroiled in the
battle of Lanka. The word “Mareech,” therefore, exists in the novel,
enmeshed in a duality: the promise of an illusory affluence, and the
horrific reality behind that promise.
When Ramsaran tells Deeti that a ship or a jahaz will take them
from Calcutta to Mareech, which becomes the South Asianized name

of Mauritius, she recognizes her vision. It is during this moment of
recognition that the apparition of the ship finally assumes a specific
historical and social context. This also marks the moment when the hor-
rors of the global plantation complex are finally translated into South
Asian indigenous terms. The ship, which stands for a very specific form
of capital-driven horror, is translated in Deeti’s mind into a figure of
22
Shadows of Slavery
mythic evil—the epic demon Ravana. Deeti’s intuition signifies the

emergence of forms of knowledge from below, which cannot necessarily
be classified as either traditional or modern but need to be understood
as complex and contradictory narratives that mark the intersection of a
capital-driven “global” and a feudal-colonial “local.”
It is striking that even though Deeti associates her initial knowledge
of indenture with a perception of evil, she does so with a sense of de-
tachment. Even when she encounters the girmitiyas, she sees herself
as completely separate and different from them. Not only can she not
understand the marchers’ still being “on their feet, knowing what lay
ahead” (67), but she cannot bring herself to think that she might have
anything to do with them:
She tried to imagine what it would be like to be in their place,

to know that you were forever an outcaste; to know that you
would never again enter your father’s house; that you would
never throw your arms around your mother; never eat a meal
with your sisters and brothers; never feel the cleansing touch of
the Ganga. And to know also that for the rest of your days you
would eke out a living on some wild, demon-plagued island?
(67)
Deeti understands that to be a girmitiya is to lose oneself and one’s fa-

miliar emotional world almost entirely. But she does not yet understand
what it means to occupy the position of a girmitiya. One of the narra-
tive’s central aims, then, is to show how the material conditions of her
life facilitate the transformation from this horror-ridden unknowability
to the adoption of indenture as the only “choice” and fatefully transform
her emotional world and subjective perceptions.
The subtle narrative problem Ghosh faces is that to give Deeti’s
thoughts clear linguistic articulation, to simply translate her visions and
intuitions into the language of the Anglophone novel, would be to in-
stantly transform her into the autonomous modern subject she later
becomes rather than the rural peasant woman in 1838 India she still
is. The novel repeatedly resolves this representational dilemma through
narratorial omniscience. The omniscient voice enables the novel to
23
access Deeti’s as-yet-unvoiced thoughts in a realm that lies beyond lan-

guage, in a place that is best described as an intersection of the unarticu-
lated and internal speculation and imagination. In doing so, the novel
de-emphasizes the centrality of voice-consciousness (and, by extension,
“choice”) as the primary form of historical subjectivity and suggests the
possibility of considering unarticulated thoughts as a site of potential
subjectivity.
The novel’s omniscient narrator critiques the relationship between
liberal bourgeois notions of rational choice, agency, and individual
personhood—the ideological foundation of the liberal realisms of the
nineteenth century. Ghosh’s recuperation of the rhetoric of nineteenth-
century European liberalism is thus neither an apology for such bour-
geois values nor their aesthetic reinforcement within the body of his
own novel but a means of revealing the inadequacies of the former.
The novel’s meticulous documentation of Deeti’s evolving subjectivity
through its narrativization of her unarticulated thoughts thus becomes a
critique of the liberal rhetoric of choice. It exposes the inadequacy of the
category of subjectivity in the Indian peasant’s “choice” of indenture.
Deeti’s conversation with the accounting clerk at the factory illustrates
this in painful detail. When Deeti realizes that the harvest earnings from
her poppy fields will not be enough to buy her family’s share of food for
the next season, the passage explicitly invokes the rhetoric of choice:
She looked disbelievingly at the discoloured coins that were

laid before her: Aho se ka karwat? she cried. Just six dams for
the whole harvest? It’s not enough to feed a child, let alone a
family.
The muharir behind the counter was a Bengali, with heavy
jowls and a cataract of a frown. He answered her not in her
native Bhojpuri, but in a mincing, citified Hindi: Do what
others are doing, he snapped. Go to the moneylender. Sell your
sons. Send them off to Mareech. It’s not as if you don’t have any
choices. I have no sons to sell, said Deeti.
Then sell your land, said the clerk, growing peevish. You
people always come here and talk about being hungry, but tell
24
Shadows of Slavery
me, who’s ever seen a peasant starve? You just like to complain,
all the time kichir-michir. (142–43)
The middle-class Bengali clerk’s invocation of the rhetoric of choice dem-

onstrates that there really is no choice at all. If anything, these choices
are life-threatening in their very essence. When the clerk includes in-
denture on his list of choices, he uses the word “sell” to refer to it, subtly
evoking the conceptual slippage between slavery and indenture. Like the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, indenture is interpreted in the popular Indian
imaginary as a form of coercive trafficking in human bodies, wherein
human beings are transformed into fungible commodities. The only real
choice available to impoverished peasants like Deeti is whether to die or
transform into a slave-like entity.
IV. Representing Indenture as el dorado, Shadows of Slavery, and

the Making of the Girmitiya
Just as Deeti’s accidental vision of the Ibis serves as a precursor to her
acceptance of the life of a girmitiya, the middleman she and Kalua meet
on their way to the factory at Ghazipur later shows up in Chhapra, the
town where Deeti and Kalua are living as mendicants. This plot twist,
which suggests the inevitability of indenture in the couple’s lives, is also
the moment when the word girmit definitively enters Kalua’s vocabu-
lary and assumes a more concrete form. When Kalua rows Ramsaran,
the duffadar, to the other side of the river, he finds eight men waiting
for him to enter “their names on paper girmits” (189). This legal pro-
ceeding, if not the very act of “signing” the agreement, presents itself
to Kalua as a context and a moment marked by the relative material
affluence of acquiring life-affirming objects. The men who “sign” the
agreement, or the “girmit”—a neologism derived from the word “agree-
ment”—are given a feast, a blanket, several articles of clothing, and a
brass pot.
A careful reading of this passage reveals a precise and exhaustive ac-
count of the events—seemingly mundane and inconsequential—sur-
rounding the process of “accepting” indenture. For readers familiar with
the fact that most of the indentured laborers came from the social strata
25
in India that did not have access to English education or basic literacy,
this moment of “signing” an “agreement” produces inevitable questions.
In what languages were the contracts for indenture written? Did Kalua
or the men he met know how to read? Were they aware of the conse-
quences of the contractual relationship that an “agreement” implies? If
not, how does this moment of “signing” a contract translate into their
worldviews?
Sudesh Mishra, an Indo-Fijian poet and literary critic, reads this
acceptance as a specifically girmit moment. The appellation girmitiya,
which is often used both in India and the diaspora to refer to inden-
tured laborers, was derived from the word girmit—the girmitiya is the
one who is bound to the girmit, or agreement. According to Mishra,
girmit is markedly different from the liberal understandings of an
agreement, choice, or intentional, subjective decision. This moment
is therefore “[n]ot agreement nor disagreement, but girmit” (Mishra
23). In other words, the act of signing a girmit never quite becomes
the moment of signing an agreement wherein the Indian laborer
enters into an equal, conscious, and contractual relationship with the
plantation authorities. In the novel, the moment of indenture is de-
scribed as individuals “entering their names” on paper agreements,
rather than a conscious process of signing into an equal contractual
relationship.
This is a clue to attentive readers that the moment has been en-
crypted in the novel as a form of non-consent and is as problematic
in its conceptualization as in its actualization. There are innumerable
shadows lurking behind this act of “signing” a contract, such that the
laborer’s “signature” falls into the crevice between choice and choice-
lessness. As it is used in the novel, the word girmit raises more ques-
tions than it answers. These shadows are immediately papered over by
the labor of ideological mystification. For example, Ramsaran repre-
sents Mareech as el dorado—a place where there is an abundance of
food and laborers feed on “fattened goats” (189). Additionally, when
he approaches Kalua for his labor, he describes indenture as a system
that is fair, appreciates the value of labor, and does not care about caste
restrictions or Kalua’s marital status:
26
Shadows of Slavery
Me? he said. But malik, I’m married.

No matter, said the duffadar. Many girmitiyas go with their
wives. We’ve had letters from Mareech asking for more women.
I will take you and your wife as well, if she wants to go.
After thinking about this for a bit, Kalua asked: And ját—
what about caste?
Caste doesn’t matter, said the duffadar. All kinds of men are
eager to sign up—Brahmins, Ahirs, Chamars, Telis. What mat-
ters is that they be young and able-bodied and willing to work.
(Ghosh 189)
To Kalua and Deeti, his answer obscures more than it clarifies. When
Ramsaran describes indenture as an egalitarian system of labor in which
neither caste nor gender matters, he is not being deceptive per se.
Indeed, caste does not matter on the plantations simply because the
organization of plantation labor renders such distinctions moot. As
noted, recent creative and critical works on indenture demonstrate that
it remade social identities and norms in unprecedented ways. In this, the
plantation functioned in a manner somewhat akin to its more industrial
counterpart, the factory assembly line. Plantations created an environ-
ment in which the overt identity-markers of feudal society were erased,
rendered functionally irrelevant, or reformulated to make space for the
new identity of the modern worker, who also happens to be indentured.
To be sure, in Kalua’s worldview work is still organized around caste
identity. Ramsaran’s conversation with Kalua opens up an unfamiliar
world that is utopian, precisely because in this new world, yet unexpe-
rienced by Kalua and Deeti, caste does not determine one’s everyday
realities. Yet Ramsaran’s enunciations omit the reality of the indentured
system’s own horrific past and present, its regime of forced labor and
corporeal discipline. Since it is impossible for Kalua to know that his-
tory and reality of the plantations, the possibility that there might be
horrors other than those of caste does not occur to him. His questions
to Ramsaran are, thereby, fuelled by this profound ignorance.
On the other hand, Deeti harbors no utopian illusions regarding the
future:
27
Having told his story, Kalua turned to look at Deeti and he saw
that her huge, dark eyes were illuminated by questions that he
could not bring himself to ask. . . . How could he conceive that
she would go to a place which was, for all she knew, inhabited
by demons and pishaches, not to speak of all kinds of unname-
able beasts? How could he, Kalua, or anyone else, know that it
wasn’t true that the recruits were being fattened for the slaugh-
ter? Why else would those men be fed with such munificence?
Was it normal, in these times, to be so profligate without some
unspoken motive? (190)
Deeti’s apprehensions, comparable to those she experienced during her

vision of the ship, are a form of affective subaltern perceptivity. She in-
tuits, much like Kalua, that the utopian narrative that Ramsaran paints
for them is incomplete. Yet this feeling of suspicion does not take on
any tangible form. Deeti and Kalua simply do not possess the theoreti-
cal tools or empirical information needed to articulate their fears. They
are limited by their historical moment. Just as the trans-Atlantic slave
trade forced the West African enslaved to confront a global machinery
of labor extraction for which they had no initial conceptual language,
Deeti and Kalua face the modified, 1838 version of the same machin-
ery and can only access its horrors and oppressive nature as premoni-
tions. They are familiar with poverty, caste oppression, sexual violence,
and the physical punitive regimes of a rural-feudal colonial system.
They cannot comprehend how agricultural labor, capitalized through
and within the plantation system, can produce its own specific brands
of horrors. Their lack of knowledge of this mode of production blinds
them to the possible configurations of social relations and power hi-
erarchies it entails. Ghosh’s omniscient narration, which moves skill-
fully and seamlessly from one character’s unarticulated thoughts and
consciousness to another, documents the possibilities and limits of
such subjectivities. The narrator locates these possibilities and limits
within the nineteenth-century colonial global economy that shapes
them in crucial ways, albeit ways that are radically divergent from West
European liberal subjectivities.
28
Shadows of Slavery
Deeti is finally convinced to make her decision not because of any pos-
itive or utopian understanding of what lies ahead for them in Mauritius
but because her ex-husband’s family is searching for her and Kalua and
has discovered they are in Chhapra, the town where they have momen-
tarily stopped. Deeti and Kalua’s decision to accept indenture is thus
based on a duality constituted by a form of desperate pragmatic inten-
tionality and helpless inevitability. They make a choice, but that choice
is neither unencumbered nor something to which they fully assent.
They choose to exchange a familiar world of deprivation and persecu-
tion with a reality whose everyday operations are completely unfamiliar
to them. The novel thus frames Deeti and Kalua’s final embrace of the
status of coolie or girmit as a complex repudiation of the argument that
portrays indenture as a system based on conscious modes of contractual
agreement.
V. Conclusion
Sea of Poppies performs important cultural work by locating India and
South Asia within a larger structural history of the global plantation
complex. Ghosh deploys the realist novel form, with its attendant formal
strategies, in the service of a profound rethinking of the nineteenth-cen-
tury colonial-capitalist global political economy and pays close attention
to marginalized identities and subjectivities that have rarely been given
the critical scrutiny they deserve in earlier literary and cultural realist
forms. One of the novel’s most important achievements is its demon-
stration of how the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery left
an imprint on subsequent labor regimes.
If slavery signifies the suspension of all contracts, agreements, and
will, then the system of indenture, by making the process of migration
dependent on a so-called contract, complicates notions of will, liabil-
ity, and choice. The onus of acceptance falls on the indentured South
Asian laborer who, by dint of “signing” the agreement, also agrees to
his or her subordinate status within a broader global economy based
on plantation capitalism. This is specifically where the novel demands
that we re-examine our liberal assumptions of choice and pay attention
to the historical-structural factors that compel impoverished peasants
29
to reduce “choice” to an exchange of oppressions. In so doing, Sea of

Poppies moves beyond the ideological realm of the liberal novel and cri-
tiques the ideology of individualism on which such novels often rest.
In the process, Ghosh reconfigures the device of the omniscient narra-
tor to provide a panoramic view of a post-abolition nineteenth-century
world—a world that can be narrated only by an omniscient narrator
whose ability to observe, document, and analyze far surpasses the geo-
graphical, intellectual, and cultural reach of any of the characters writ-
ten about in the novel. This is also a narrative tool that enables Ghosh
to critique the social and historical structures that make his novelistic
characters and are in turn made by them.
As a writer interested in what indenture and the long history of the
global plantation complex means for Indian history, Ghosh grounds the
experience of indenture firmly within Indian modernity and Indian un-
derdevelopment. At the same time, he locates India within a global con-
versation on the slave trade, plantation slavery, and the global plantation
complex, thus redirecting his reader to a more inclusive and expansive
global discussion about colonial capitalism. Because Sea of Poppies
emerged as part of an ongoing conversation with diasporic texts, it sig-
nificantly expands the archives of indenture narratives to include India.
More importantly, the complexity of its storyline underlines the point
that indenture needs to be understood as more than just the starting
point of a diasporic ethno-nationalism. It must be read in the context
of the multiple and often contradictory social, economic, and capital-
ist formations that characterized the historical moment of the system’s
birth.
Through its representations of multiple geographies, social and eco-
nomic institutions, and subjectivities, the novel urges contemporary
slavery studies scholars to enlarge the scope of their critical lens. This
expansion should include the study of the conditions that enabled the
global plantation complex to survive for more than a century after the
formal abolition of slavery under the aegis of the various colonial em-
pires. The multifaceted nature of the world created by slavery can be
fully understood only by seeing the intersections between histories of
the Black Atlantic and histories of feudal and colonial oppression in
30
Shadows of Slavery
the Indian Ocean and beyond. For narrative artists, such a project de-
mands that they perform the dual role of historian-theorist and story-
teller, thereby triggering a thorough reappraisal of the form of the novel.
As a historical novel, Sea of Poppies throws its gaze back on the spe-
cific economic moment of India’s induction into the global plantation
complex—a moment which inevitably contains memories of plantation
slavery. The novel demonstrates that for a peasant woman like Deeti,
inserted as she is within this complex web of global forces, there can be
no notion of any liberal-bourgeois subjectivity, nor any unified notion
of interrelated choice and agency. Sea of Poppies is the narrativization of
Deeti’s non-choices, suspended as they are between the absolute choice-
lessness of slavery and the limited agency of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial
rural South Asian economy.
Notes
1 In his monograph The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic
Imaginary, Vijay Mishra makes an important distinction between the “old” and
“new” Indian diaspora:
The old (that is, early modern, classic capitalist or, more specifically,
nineteenth-century indenture) and the new (late modern or late capital-
ist) traverse two different kinds of topography. The subjects of the old
(‘before the world was thoroughly consolidated as transnational’ [Spivak
1996: 245]) occupy spaces in which they interact by and large with other
colonized peoples with whom they have a complex relationship of power
and privilege as in Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guy-
ana, and Surinam; the subjects of the new are people who have entered
metropolitan centres of Empire or other white settler countries such as
Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States as part of a post-
1960s pattern of global migration. (3)
My reference to the term “old Indian diaspora” is in keeping with Mishra’s im-
portant categorization.
2 I place the word “sign” in quotation marks because the notion that indentured
Indian workers signed contracts as genuinely “free agents” should be problema-
tized and rethought.
3 The historical scenario described here does not exhaust the global histories of
plantation slavery. The history of legal abolition to which I refer is confined only
to the British colonies. Plantation slavery continued to exist in other parts of the
world for at least two decades, e.g., in Cuba until 1886 and Brazil until 1888.
31
4 Within the broad and expansive field of the study of cultural and literary rep-
resentations of Indian diaspora, a distinction is often made between the “old”
and “new” diaspora, as I note in one of my previous footnotes. The field of
South Asian diaspora studies in North America has arguably focused on studies
of the latter. Scholars such as Tejaswini Niranjana have discussed at length the
problems of pitting the indenture diaspora against the post-1965 “NRI (Non
Resident Indian)” narrative, delineating how the upper class and upper caste
status of the latter, and their access to a “Western-style education,” have been
operative in enabling their “entry into the new homelands” (21). Consequently,
the paradigms that have often been deployed to study the new diaspora cannot
necessarily be applied to the “old” indenture diaspora.
While a comparison of these two Indian diasporas is beyond the scope of this
essay, a cursory glance at the cultural and scholarly archives reveals that both
diasporas grapple with the cultural and political meanings of the homeland that
has been physically left behind. What marks these two strands of diasporic writ-
ings as different is the kind of homeland they represent. In indenture narratives,
the homeland is often the impoverished India of the disenfranchised, i.e., land-
less peasants, untouchables, and the precariat. These narratives give center stage
to categories of class, colonial capitalist violence, poverty, and regimes of intense
manual labor. This also happens to be the homeland that is predominantly ex-
cluded from the literatures of the new diaspora, whose representations come
closer to the “quest narratives” that Pirbhai evokes. The latter often focuses on a
search for individual mobility and identity which cannot exist in the same way
in the writings of indenture.
Complicated readings of class, class violence, and capital specific to India and
the subcontinent, and the manner in which these have influenced the different
Indian diasporas, have remained tangential to both the creative and critical pro-
jects that revolve around the post-1965 “new” Indian diaspora. Consequently,
the default homeland of such texts is defined by the experiences of middle- and
upper-class Indians. Sea of Poppies thus represents a move away from this genre
of diasporic writing and writes the homeland from the perspective of the de-
prived. In this, Ghosh’s characters represent the India V. S. Naipaul describes as
being insulated from the “great reform movements of the nineteenth century”
(13), movements that arguably heralded a liberal-bourgeois subjectivity amongst
middle-class and English-educated Indians. For a more detailed analysis of these
issues, see Vijay Mishra, Chatterji and Washbrook, Mani, Reddy, and Bhalla.
5 Pirbhai defines “indenture narrative” as
a story that functions as a revisionist reading of the initial impulse for and
experience of emigration in the colonial period, with particular emphasis
on the day-to-day vicissitudes of bonded labour and life in the colonies
under indentureship. The indenture narrative might also be referred to as
the kala pani narrative when emphasis is placed on the recruiting meth-
32
Shadows of Slavery
ods of the arkatis (the Hindi term for recruiters) and other functionaries
of the British Raj, and on the rewriting of the Middle Passage paradigm
in the depiction of similar degradations and failures for South Asian mi-
grants on-board colonial ships. (21)
Pirbhai further explains that an “indenture narrative” is a multigenerational saga
that narrates the complexities of “transplantation” (20) and resettlement in the
plantation colonies through the stories of the individual family members, often
mythologized in family and communal memories. Within such narratives, life
in India, the moment of the recruitment into indenture, and the voyage across
kala-pani or the black waters are often remembered as flashbacks and/or written
as sub-plots to memorialize “ancestral struggle in the formation of character and
his or her advancement of communal unity and cultural self-preservation” (22).
6 Scholars such as Kent and Ho read Sea of Poppies as an example of a “neo-
Victorian” novel. While I concur with much of Ho’s and Kent’s analyses of the
novel’s critical and historical reworking of the liberal-capitalist and imperialist
categories typical of Victorian colonialism, I also see Sea of Poppies as rewriting
tropes and categories brought into being by numerous other subcontinental and
other cosmopolitan literary genres. These other genres include the nineteenth-
century and early twentieth-century Bengali didactic novel, the 1930s social-
realist novel in Bengali and Hindi, the oral religious literatures of east India, the
African diasporic neo-slave narrative, the marine adventure novel, and others too
numerous to list. In other words, there is an excess in Sea of Poppies that resists
such a smooth categorization, an issue that is beyond the scope of this article.
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Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice, and Indian

Indentureship in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 48, Number 1,

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice,

Keywords: indenture, slavery, retrospective realism, historical

On 10 January 2012, Kamala Persad-Bissessar, then Prime Minister of

Bihar—Bengali-Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies, the

Sea of Poppies’ signal contribution is its rethinking of the relationship

In her book-length reading of the literatures that emerged from the

[t]he impetus for the laborers’ journey, however, not only

The consonance of this passage with Persad-Bissessar’s speech testifies to

that assigned them to the plantations in the islands of the Caribbean

tioning as a historical-material site that might provide the coolies with a

often happens to be the domain of the diasporic writers such as David

II. The Peasant and the Coolie: Discourses of Choice, Ghosh’s

even though it borrows some of its conventions, such as the moment

narrator’s voice evokes the socio-economic and political omniscience of

and painstakingly documents a crisis over land—or more precisely, the

binage, sati (immolation on her husband’s pyre), or death by starvation.

The village in which Deeti lived was on the outskirts of the

slavery. Consequently, any attempt to separate the histories of slavery

Anglo-American property-owning bourgeois individual. Nowhere does

What is perhaps most symbolically evocative here is the double enten-

tion into the global plantation complex; Deeti, as a peasant woman, is

They are girmitiyas, said Ramsaran-ji, and at the sound of that

from Calcutta to Mareech, which becomes the South Asianized name

mythic evil—the epic demon Ravana. Deeti’s intuition signifies the

She tried to imagine what it would be like to be in their place,

Deeti understands that to be a girmitiya is to lose oneself and one’s fa-

access Deeti’s as-yet-unvoiced thoughts in a realm that lies beyond lan-

She looked disbelievingly at the discoloured coins that were

The middle-class Bengali clerk’s invocation of the rhetoric of choice dem-

IV. Representing Indenture as el dorado, Shadows of Slavery, and

Me? he said. But malik, I’m married.

Deeti’s apprehensions, comparable to those she experienced during her

to reduce “choice” to an exchange of oppressions. In so doing, Sea of

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

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