Narrating from Below

In one of his journal entries, Neel Rattan Halder—former dispossessed Bengali zamindar, escaped convict, and now clerk-translator in Canton—records one of the many stories told to him by a widely traveled Tibetan lama, referenced in the narrative by his Bhojpuri name, Taranathji:

Taranathji told me also that over the years the Gurkhas have given the Qing many warnings about the British and their ever increasing appetites. If China did not act quickly, they had told them, then the British would threaten them too one day; they had even proposed joint attacks on the East India Company’s territories in Bengal, by a combined Gurkha and Qing expeditionary force. If only their warnings had been heeded in Beijing, if only the Emperors had acted decisively at that time, then China would have been in a different situation today.

(Flood of Fire 137)

Taranathji’s stories about the Qianlong Emperor’s “book about Hindustan” and of the failed alliance between the Gurkhas and the Qing to stem the rise of the East India Company in South Asia “astound” and “amaze” Halder (136–37). The reader shares these emotions, an astonished pleasure at the revelation of the buried connective historical threads that run through Nepal, India, and China. Flood of Fire, the final novel in the Ibis trilogy, both continues and expands one of the central concerns of Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre, “to attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations . . . interrupted by long centuries of European imperial dominance.”¹ Beginning with his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), and articulated as a historical and anthropological method in the nonfictional In an Antique Land (1992), Ghosh has always investigated and recreated cosmopolitanisms that predate European and Eurocentric versions. In his own words, he seeks “to reclaim the globe in [his] fashion” and “eavesdrop on ancient conversations” (“Confessions”).

In Flood of Fire, cross-cultural dialogue and transregional friendships emerge out of the “love of the other, the affinity for strangers” (“Confessions”). The Chinese emperor’s book on India and Taranathji’s theological disputations with Russian Orthodox priests exemplify these ancient and continuing conversations. The friendship between Neel Halder and Compton, the Cantonese publisher and translator, forged from a shared love for languages, is a friendship that is framed simultaneously by ancient cross-civilizational dialogue and by predatory European globalization. Nevertheless, their friendship, independent of national, regional, and cultural allegiances, is an example of a “love of the other.”² The novel’s “love of the other, or affinity for strangers” reconfigures borders and offers multiple alternative perspectives that continuously disrupt the grand imperial narrative of the Opium War, a narrative relentlessly and self-righteously voiced by unabashed British capitalist Benjamin Burnham.

Ghosh also reconfigures the historical, aesthetic, and literary terrain of postcolonial writing. The Ibis trilogy engages with many of the central tropes of postcolonial literature and theory: the interrogation of imperial power and European civilizational discourse; representations of diaspora and migration; disrupted indigenous epistemologies and social formations; and fragmented subjectivities. At the same time, the trilogy re-forms the world as we currently comprehend it. The historical and spatial scale of these novels is immense. Ghosh excavates the layered cultures that rim the Indian Ocean, predating the arrival of Europeans, as well as the autonomous worlds dialectically forged across cultures and regions in response to the European presence. In a narrative tracking across Nayanpur, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Baltimore, and Le Morne Brabant, Ghosh offers another history of transregional and transnational contact, moving postcolonial writing beyond imperial geographies to an exploration of alternative nodal points for trade, where dispossessed migrants remade themselves. In unveiling the histories of alternative transnational contact, the Ibis trilogy invites readers to consider other trajectories of globalization that Euro-imperial ambitions both used and disrupted. In the process, even as historical hindsight suggests the inevitable triumph of European imperialism, the narrative, with its multiple registers, moving seamlessly between British and Chinese military lines, reveals that such triumph is fragile and contingent. For instance, if the Qing...