Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice, and Indian Indentureship in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

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 indentured 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 nineteenth-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 reexamine the blurred lines between these two categories in a global economy characterized by the structural transformations of plantation 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.