Sustainable Development as a Utopian Dream in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

 

Sustainable Development as a Utopian Dream in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Dr. Dipika Bhatt,

Assistant Professor,

Department of English,

H.V.M. (P.G.) College, Raisi, Haridwar,

Uttarakhand, India.

Abstract: Each and every living and non-living thing is a part of the ecological world. Literature with environment and human deeply connected into the vast natural world. In River Of Smoke Ghosh illustrates that humane are brutal to natural world and has made a worst impact in living things. The novel concerns the idea that the survival of humans on earth will be threatened by the fast deterioration of biological variety. The novel highlights how the pursuit of economic gain by imperial powers led to the commodification and exploitation of natural resources, the disruption of ecosystems, and early forms of ecological injustice that resonate with contemporary climate crises. Linking together the story of the British and Indian opium merchants as well as that of an horticultural voyage to this flora-rich region, the novel offers intuitive understanding into the outcome of the opium trade on local and international politics, the consequences of opium smoking on an otherwise industrious character of the Chinese, Chinese diplomacy, British imperialism that prevailed, the shipping industry of the time, the Chinese landscape, floating townships on the Pearl River, Napoleon's exile, horticulture, landscape painting, and many more subjects. Thus we can say that Amitav Ghosh’s main aim is to highlight the false notion of sustainable development and misuse of natural resources and its deep mental effect on people who collect the attractive natural resources of China and make them saleable and popular in the west world.

Keywords: Sustainability, Environmental Degradation, Imperialism, Colonialism, Opium Trade, Capitalism, Shallow Ecology.

Each and every living and non-living thing is a part of the ecological world. Literature with environment and human deeply connected into the vast natural world. Industrialization, urbanization, degradation of environment, pollution are some major causes and issues of ecological imbalance. In River Of Smoke Ghosh illustrates that humane are brutal to natural world and has made a worst impact in living things. The novel concerns the idea that the survival of humans on earth will be threatened by the fast deterioration of biological variety. Amitav Ghosh's novel River of Smoke in the context of "shallow ecology" refers to a perspective that links environmental exploitation to the superficial, human-centric focus of colonialism and capitalism. The novel illustrates how this shallow ecological approach, which sees nature as a resource for commodification and profit, leads to ecological imperialism, environmental degradation, and disruptions to natural ecosystems in India, China, and Mauritius during the 19th-century opium trade. British imperial ambitions and the powerful opium trade in the novel exemplify this shallow perspective. Nature is commodified, as seen in the exploitation of plants, botanical gardens, and maritime routes, all to serve colonial economic interests.

In River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh illustrates a lack of sustainable development by portraying the environmental degradation and social disruption inherent in colonial and capitalist expansion, particularly the opium trade. The novel highlights how the pursuit of economic gain by imperial powers led to the commodification and exploitation of natural resources, the disruption of ecosystems, and early forms of ecological injustice that resonate with contemporary climate crises, thus critiquing the unsustainable trajectory of such practices.

Amitav Ghosh is a prominent writer of present times. The novel River of Smoke explores again the connection of man to the opium trade to carry out the multiple successes. In his fiction, Ghosh meticulously deals with many things: the troubled legacy of colonial knowledge and discourse about formerly colonized societies and ideas, the ambivalent relationship to modernity of the so-called developing or ‘Third World’, and the formation and reformation of identities in colonial and post-colonial societies.

Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke is the second volume of his Ibis trilogy two others are Sea of Poppies and Flood of Fire. In River of Smoke historical events regarding to the opium trade with China are described in detail. The main plot of River of Smoke is set in Fanqui town, situated on a small piece of land used by merchants from other countries to transact business with local Chinese traders. The novel’s story begins before one year of Opium trade. In this novel Ghosh has created a rich and colourful cast of characters drawn from diverse geographical, cultural and historical backgrounds whose common interest is to make money by doing trade with China. The novel’s plot is set in Fanqui town, situated on a small piece of land used by merchants from other countries to transact business with local Chinese traders. When the story begins the time is a year before of the first opium war. River of Smoke transports the traders to the opium market place with the clipper ship Anahita, owned by Bahram Moddie, a Parsi Bombay businessman which is secretly loaded with the illegal cargo of opium. The Chinese authorities are trying to prevent illegal imports of drugs from many countries’ traders, as this drug has inflicted a plague of addiction on the population of China. The "River" in the novel, River of Smoke is the Pearl River, which runs through Canton and the "Smoke" comes from smoking opium.

This novel is set mainly in the islands of Canton, which in the modern-day are called Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Linking together the story of the British and Indian opium merchants as well as that of an horticultural voyage to this flora-rich region, the novel offers intuitive understanding into the outcome of the opium trade on local and international politics, the consequences of opium smoking on an otherwise industrious character of the Chinese, Chinese diplomacy, British imperialism that prevailed, the shipping industry of the time, the Chinese landscape, floating townships on the Pearl River, Napoleon's exile, horticulture, landscape painting, and many more subjects.

The protagonist Bahram Modi, after the death of his father-in-law Rustamjee Mistrie, is thrown out of opium business by his brother-in-law. In spite of a ban on trading he starts trading of opium. “He was, at best of times, a restless man: repose was a trial to him and at moments neither speaking nor moving…stench” (River of Smoke 30). The story focuses on three aspects- struggling after being caught up in the whirlwind, daring business of opium without caring for their lot if caught and punished thirdly it shows the importance of plants in our life. “Collecting plants on Hong Kong proved to be more of a challenge” (River of Smoke 272). Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose was in fact a man of unusual accomplishment and considerable wealth: a noted nurseryman and plant-hunter, he had made a great deal of money through the marketing of seeds, saplings, cuttings and horticultural implements his patented moss-scrapers, barkscalers and garden-scarifiers had a large and devoted following in England. His principal enterprise, a nursery called Penrose & Sons, was based in Falmouth, in Cornwall: it was reputed especially for its Chinese importations, some of which - like certain varieties of plumbago, flowering quince and winter sweet had gained enormous popularity in the British Isles. It was the plant-hunter’s avocation that had brought Fitcher eastwards again, in his own vessel, the Redruth, a two-masted brig. It was largely because of the Botanical Gardens that Port Louis had been included in the Redruth’s itinerary. The Pamplemousses garden was among the earliest of its kind and counted, among its founders and curators, some of the most illustrious names in botany - the great Pierre Poivre, who had identified the true black pepper, had worked there, as also Philibert Commerson, the discoverer of bougainvillea. Pamplemousses was not much more than an hour’s ride from Port Louis. Fitcher had visited the garden once before, on the return leg of his first voyage to China: at that time the island was a French colony - now it was a British possession and much had changed in appearance. But, somewhat to his own surprise, Fitcher had no trouble in finding the road that led to the village.

On the way, growing by the roadside, he noticed some fine specimens of a shrub known as Fire in the Bush, a handsome convolvulus that produced a great mass of flaming red flowers. At other times a find like this would have excited and exhilarated him; he would have dismounted to look more closely at the plants - but his state of mind now was not such as to allow this so he rode on without stopping. Reining in his horse, Fitcher appealed to an elderly passer-by: “ ‘Madam! The garden? D’ee know the way?’ The woman pursed her lips and shook her head: ‘Ah, msieu…le garden is no more…depwi twenty years… abandonné by l’Anglais …’ She wandered off, shaking her head, leaving Fitcher to continue on his way” (River of Smoke 37). Although Fitcher was saddened to learn that his own compatriots were responsible for the garden’s decline, he was not entirely surprised. Since the death of Sir Joseph Banks, the last Curator of Kew Gardens, Britain’s own botanical institutions had fallen into neglect, so it was scarcely a cause for wonder that a garden in a distant colony should be in a state of disrepair. “In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel” (River of Smoke 37).

When Paulette did not accept it as she thinks that she cannot live on his charity. Then he said to Paulette that he also had a daughter her name was Ellen and she was travelling with him. Since she was little she always wanted to go to China, to collect, as he had done. Month ago, she took ill and there were nothing we could do. She’s gone now, and without her he don’t know if he has it in my heart to go on. “Truth is, Miss Paulette, it’s ee who’d be doing a kindness for an old man, for me” (River of Smoke 60). The greenest part of the ship was the quarterdeck: here stacked along the deck rails, and around the base of the mizzen-mast, were rows of pots and cases. To provide additional protection for the plants, Fitcher had designed an ingenious arrangement of movable awnings; these could be adjusted, as desired, to provide shade, sunlight, and protection from rough weather. When there was rain, the awnings turned into water-traps: with so many plants on board, the Redruth needed more fresh water than other ships, and Fitcher was loath to let a single drop go waste. The Redruth plants had been handpicked by Fitcher himself: most were from the America’s and had only recently been introduced to Europe and were thus unlikely yet to have reached China.

Amongst this assemblage of flora were antirrhinums, lobelias and georginas, introduced from Mexico by Alexander von Humboldt; also from Mexico were the Mexcian Orange and a beautiful new fuchsia; from the American Northwest there was Gaultheria-shallon, a plant both ornamental and medicinal, and a magnificent new conifer, both introduced by David Douglas - Fitcher was certain that the latter species would appeal especially to the pine-loving Chinese. Shrubs were not neglected either: the flowering currant, in particular, was a species for which Fitcher had very high hopes. He told to Paulette this one plant had repaid all the costs of Mr. Douglas’s first American expedition - luckily, no one had yet thought of introducing it to China. According to Paulette’s father:

The love of Nature had been a kind of religion, a form of spiritual striving: he had believed that in trying to comprehend the inner vitality of each species, human beings could transcend the mundane world and its artificial divisions. If botany was the Scripture of this religion, then horticulture was its form of worship: tending a garden was, for Pierre Lambert, no mere matter of planting seeds and pruning branches - it was a spiritual discipline, a means of communicating with forms of life that were necessarily mute and could be understood only through a careful study of their own modes of expression - the languages of efflorescence, growth and decay: only thus, he had taught Paulette, could human beings apprehend the vital energies that constitute the Spirit of the Earth. (River of Smoke 78-79)

It took only a day or two for Paulette to feel completely at home on the Redruth: the crewmen were so glad to be relieved of their plant-tending duties that they accorded her an even warmer welcome than their employer. On the way she encounters with Baboo Nob Kissin Pandar, she takes some inquiries about Zachery and requests Baboo to tell Zachery that Mr. Penrose is travelling to China to collect plants and she also is going to China as his assistant. On the subject of soils for example: Fitcher would take a look at a plant that was wilting, even in the shade, and he would trace its ills back to the composition of the matter in which it was planted. He said some soils were hot and some were cold, by which he meant that some types of earth heated up quicker than others and some tended to retain their heat over long periods. Paulette was inclined at first to dismiss these notions of hot and cold soils as a far-fetched fancy - but there was certainly no denying that Fitcher’s methods sometimes effected miraculous resuscitations. Manure was another matter which Fitcher had studied in great depth. He was not by any means dismissive of some of the conventional materials that were used to enrich the soil - the Redruth’s holds contained many barrels of rape-cake, malt dust and ground linseed - but the fertilizers that interested him most were those that could be harvested or generated while under sail.

Seaweed for instance: he believed that certain varieties of it could be turned, through a process of soaking, drying and pulverizing, into matter that was extremely beneficial for plants. The Redruth’s flock of chickens was another important source of plant food. One of Paulette’s duties was to clear the droppings out of the coop every morning; Fitcher said this could be turned into a powerful fertilizer if mixed with water and fermented. The bird’s carcasses were not neglected either: when a chicken was slaughtered for the table, every part of it was put to use, including the feathers and bones which were cut up into tiny bits before being added to the compost barrels that hung from the Redruth’s stern. Meat bones were another much prized composting ingredient: bones retrieved from the provisions’ barrels were broken up with hammers and then added to the compost. Fitcher assured her that this was a common practice in London where butchers made good money by selling the by-products of their trade to farmers - not just bones, but also hair and horns. Even bone dust and bone shavings could be sold for a price; boiled down and powdered; they were turned into cakes that were rich in lime, phospates and magnesia. One day a small plump porpoise was found entangled in the Redruth’s fishing lines.

Fitcher was delighted to see the creature on the Redruth’s deck threshing about like a pilcher in a pan-crock. To Paulette’s dismay the porpoise was quickly slaughtered and stripped of its fat, which was put into a special barrel to decompose. He said that the value of liquid excrementations had been amply proven by chemists, who had demonstrated that all urine, human and animal, contained the essential elements of vegetables in a state of solution. One day Paulette asked to Fitcher, Sir what it was that first took you to China. He says when I was sailing for a living on a Cornish fruit schooner in London; I heard that someone was looking for sailors who had some experience of dealing with plants.

This person was Sir Joseph Banks who first described the flora of Australia, the curator of the King’s garden at Kew. Sir Joseph told Fitcher that the gardens at Kew possessed sizeable collections of plants from some of the remotest corners of the earth. But there was one region which was but poorly represented there, and this was China - a country singularly blessed in its botanical riches, being endowed not only with some of the most beautiful and medicinally useful plants in existence, but also with many that were of immense commercial value. Just one such, Camellia sinensis - the species of camellia from which tea was plucked - accounted for an enormous proportion of the world’s trade and one- tenth of England’s revenues.

The value of China’s plants had not been lost on Britain’s rivals and enemies across the Channel: the major physick gardens and herbariums of both Holland and France had also been endeavoring to assemble collections of Chinese flora - and for considerably longer than Britain - but they too had not had much success. The reasons for the lack of progress were not hard to fathom and the most important of them, without a doubt, was the peculiar obduracy of the Chinese people. Unlike the inhabitants of other botanically blessed countries, the Celestials seemed to have a keen appreciation of the value of their natural endowments. Their gardeners and horticulturists were among the most knowledgeable and skillful in the world, and they guarded their treasures with extraordinary vigilance: the toys and trinkets that satisfied natives elsewhere had no effect on them; even lavish bribes could not persuade them to yield their riches.

Europeans had been trying for years to obtain viable specimens of the tea plant, offering rewards that would have sufficed to buy all the camels in Araby - but the quest remained still unrewarded. A further difficulty was the fact that Europeans were not permitted into the country’s interior and were thus unable to wander about, helping themselves to whatever they chose, as they were accustomed to doing elsewhere: in China they were confined to two cities, Canton and Macau, where they were closely watched by the authorities. When Paulette asked to Fitcher about Canton he said that it’s the busiest, most crowded city he had ever seen. The biggest too bigger even than London. It’s a sea of houses and boats and the plants are in places ee’d never expect. There are carts that roam the streets, loaded with flower pots; there are sampans plying the river, selling nothing but plants. On feast and festival days the whole city bursts into bloom and flower-sellers hawk their wares at prices fit to make an English nurseryman turn chibbolcoloured with envy. Once he saw a boatload of orchids sell out in an hour and that too, with each blowth valued at a hundred silver dollars.

When Paulette expressed her great desire to see canton Fitcher said European women aren’t allowed to set foot in Canton. That’s the law. When Paulette disappointed to hear the law of Canton Fitcher shows her a chart of the South China coast, there is the Pearl River and the hundreds of tiny islands that lay scattered across it. At the eastern end of the river mouth, lay a sizeable island called Hong Kong. Fitcher said that’s as good a place as you could wish for Miss Paulette. You’ll be able to botanize in the wild there, just as you’d hoped. After many weeks on Redruth Paulette finds a collection of botanical paintings and illustrations.

Then Fitcher told her about European plant- hunters to work in China and among them a British botanist by the name of James Cuninghame, who had visited China twice in the eighteenth century. In Cuninghame’s time, travelling in China was a little easier for foreigners than it was later to become: on his first visit he had had the good fortune to spend several months in the port of Amoy. He had discovered there that Chinese painters were exceptionally skilled at the realistic depiction of plants, flowers and trees: this was fortunate for him because in those days no one could hope to bring live specimens from China to Europe by sea; the collector’s aims were rather to amass stocks of seed and to assemble dried gardens. To these Cuninghame had added another kind of collection, the painted garden: he had returned to England with over a thousand pictures. Cuninghame’s collection had contained pictures of many of the most notable flowers the world would receive from China- hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, flowering plums, tree peonies, the first repeat-flowering roses, crested irises, innumerable new gardenias, primroses, lilies, hostas, wisterias, asters and azaleas.

Fitcher said, he had never understood why Linnaeus had chosen to name the camellia after Dr. Kamel, an obscure and unimportant German physician. By rights the genus ought to have been called Cuninghamia, in honor of Cuninghame, for whom camellias had been a passion, a quest: it was he who sent back the first camellia leaf ever to be seen in Britain. It was not merely because of their flowers that camellias were of special interest to Cuninghame: he believed that next to the food grains this genus was possibly the most valuable botanical species known to man. This was not a far-fetched notion: the camellia family had, after all, given the world the tea bush, Camellia Sinensis, which was already then the fount of an extensive and lucrative commerce. Cuninghame’s interest in its sister plants was sparked by a Chinese legend, about a man who fell into a valley that had no exit: he was said to have lived there for a hundred years eating nothing but a single plant. This plant, Cuninghame was told, was of a rich golden color and yielded an infusion that could turn white hairs into black, restore the suppleness of aged joints, and serve as a cure for ailments of the lungs. Cuninghame named it the Golden Camellia and came to believe that it might surpass the tea bush in value if it could be found and propagated. Fitcher shows a picture of Camellia and inside the picture there are few lines in English translation: “The petals on their green tinged stem shine like the purest gold. A purple eye looks up from the centre, setting the bloom aglow, It remedies the pain of ageing bones and quickens the memory and mind, It puts to flight the death that festers in the lungs” (River of Smoke 124).

Fitcher told to Paulette in Hong Kong few houses were visible on the shore and even fewer trees; it was a wild, gale-swept place, not unlike the other islands nearby, only bigger, steeper and taller. Fitcher said the name Hong Kong meant fragrant harbor: this struck Paulette as a strangely whimsical description for such a desolate and forbidding place. The island’s slopes were precipitous on every side and the ridge that ran along most of its eight mile length was nowhere less than five hundred feet in height: it was topped with several peaks that rose to over a thousand feet, and the tallest of them, in Fitcher’s estimation, was perhaps only a little under two thousand feet. The soil was granitic and glinted underfoot with quartz, mica and felspar; on steep slopes it had a way of slipping and sliding so that a slightly misplaced shoe could send an avalanche roaring down a treeless gully. In some stretches the decomposed granite was covered with mould and ferns, which gave it a deceptive look of solidity; a moment’s carelessness could lead to a nasty slip or a fall. The hardships of collecting plants are given in the novel that reminds us how survival of plants gets possible. The Scottish Botanist Fitcher penrose’s devotion to collect the rare plants lets him forget the ageing problems. “As the weather turned colder, Fitcher’s hips and knees grew still stiffer and his pains worsened…” (River of Smoke 273). But there were no vehicles on Hong Kong and no roads either; even paths were few, for the island’s villages and hamlets were dotted along the shoreline and their inhabitants travelled between them mainly by boat. Horses would have provided an easy solution to their predicament, but there were none on the island - at least not to their knowledge: the only draught animals on the fields were bullocks and buffaloes. A sedan chair might also have provided a solution, but Fitcher would not hear of it. Baburao a courier taker arranged horses for Paulette and Fitcher from nearby a village. The horses carried them to a height of over a thousand feet, where they came upon more orchids: pale rose bamboo orchids, Arundina chinensis, and a small primrose-yellow epiphyte, growing in a nullah.

Paulette asked to Fitcher about Billy Kerr the man who introduced the world to the Tiger Lily and the Chinese Juniper and Christmas Camellia and he was or not a smoker of opium. Then Fitcher told a story of Billy Kerr to Paulette that Kerr had been in China a couple of years already when Fitcher meets him for the first time, in Canton, in the winter of 1806. He was in his mid-twenties then, a little younger than Fitcher: a tall, strapping Scotsman, he had more energy and ambition than he could put to good use. He had arrived in Canton bearing the gaudy title of ‘Royal Gardener’ but only to find that it carried no weight in the British Factory, which was as starchy in its own way as a manor house. A gardener was, after all, just a servant and was expected to comport himself as such, remaining below stairs and refraining from intruding upon his superiors. It was true certainly that Billy had been born with dirt beneath his fingernails- his father had been a gardener before him, and probably his grandfather too. But Billy was a sharp, hard-working fellow who had applied himself to his books and his botany with a mind to bettering himself. His position in the British Factory didn’t jibe with his idea of his own consequence and he was a little bit forward at times: as a result, instead of finding a place at the high table, he was fed a steady diet of snubs and slights. One summer he had run off to the Philippines, in defiance of Sir Joseph’s instructions.

Unfortunately for him the voyage had turned into a disaster: the collection he had put together in Manila was destroyed by a typhoon, on the way back to China. This city, which has absorbed so much of the world’s evil, has given, in return, so much beauty. Canton has sent out into the world: chrysanthemums, peonies, tiger lilies, wisteria, rhododendrons, azaleas, asters, gardenias, begonias, camellias, hydrangeas, primroses, heavenly bamboo, a juniper, a cypress, climbing tea roses and roses that flower many times over - these and many more. “One day all the rest will be forgotten - Fanqui-town and its Friendships, the opium and the flower-boats; even perhaps the paintings. But when all the rest is forgotten the flowers will remain. The flowers of Canton are immortal and will bloom forever” (River of Smoke 537).

Thus we can say that Penrose’s main aim is to collect the attractive natural resources of China and make them saleable and popular in the west world: “China is a country with rich botanical riches, not only medicinally useful plants but…of immense commercial value (River of Smoke 101). We can see clearly the exploitation of man through opium flower and exploitation of nature through the selling of indigenous flora and fauna. Paulette and Penrose both are polar opposites in terms of their attitude to nature for example, when a breathing porpoise is found entangled in the sea-net instead of releasing it, Penrose slaughters it and makes use of its fat. In contrast to Penrose Paulette was inspired by her naturalist’s father Pierre Lambert who thinks that the love of nature had been a kind of religion. Penrose was the follower of Sir Joseph Banks and Sir William Kerr who are the worshipers of money and business. While Paulette, adores the nature and busy in natural paintings. Paulette’s only hope of gathering knowledge about Canton is Robin Chinnery her childhood friend and son of the painter George Chinnery, who promises to find the rare flower for her. But finally, we come to an interesting end in which there is no flower of Golden Camellia and they falsely made it in their imagination for the use of money. Here we also find that Paulette is the follower of deep ecology while Penrose and others are the followers of shallow ecology.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Harcourt India Private Limited, 2001.

Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. Penguin, 2011.

Mahanta, Banibrata. “Book Review: Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sunderbans by Annu Jalais,” Research and Criticism, vol. 1, 2010.

“Review of River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh,” Research and Criticism, vol. 2, 2011.

Satya Narayan. “Cultural and Historical Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke: A Postcolonial Perspective,” The Creative Launcher, vol. v, no. 6, Feb. 2021.