Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Image from Telegraph Book Review Title: Smoke and Ashes Author: Amitav Ghosh Publisher: HarperCollins, 2023 History can be viewed from diverse perspectives. Academic historians usually look at it from political perspectives. As a result, we get very blinkered views of the past. Rulers do not constitute history. In fact, too many of them have been blatant exploiters of the common people to whom history should rightfully belong. The rulers, more often than not, snatch history ruthlessly from its real inheritors. Literary novelists give us better history than academic historians. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy comes to mind immediately. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is another commendable example. History comes alive in the hands of such writers as Mantel and Ghosh. What if they actually write history instead of novels? And that is exactly what Ghosh has done in Smoke and Ashes . Smoke and Ashes views history from a totally unexpected angle: opium. “Only by recognizing th

Book Review “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause.  It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” Captain Chillingworth of the ship Ibis utters those words in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies .  The novel is about power and how different people wield it over others as much as it is about the powerless who are destined to suffer the oppressions.  The novel presents a part of the India in the 1830s.  The British have become very powerful in India and they control the trade too.   As Benjamin Burnham, one of the traders in the novel, says, trade indicates the “march of human freedom.”  Even slave trade is part of that glorious march.  According to Burnham, the white man gave freedom to the African slaves from “the rule of some dark tyra