Finding Oneself On Board the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies

In Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, a motley crew of people, who perhaps would have never come across one another on land in the Empire, are brought together at sea. Through the experience of displacement, they find their voices and redesign their new identities. Ghosh's novel becomes a vessel to renegotiate the discourse of subalternity from the perspective of this diasporic population as the ship in his novel navigates through the "dark water" of the Indian Ocean. This article explores the way in which Ghosh's characters—all victimized by various power structures, including gender, class, and race divisions—strive to find a place of their own, and the way in which the sea becomes that space.