Review of Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" and Salman Rushdie's "The Enchantress of Florence"
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ABSTRACT:
EXTRACT
By a curious synchronicity, two heavyweights of Indian Writing in English (IWE), Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, have, in the first half of 2008, published historical novels almost simultaneously. In addition, both novels have been placed on the longlist for the 2008 Booker Prize (which Rushdie's own Midnight's Children has effectively won three times over, having been voted "Booker of Bookers" for the prize's 25th and then for its 40th anniversary). Comparison thus invites itself: while my personal opinion is that Ghosh's historical vision impresses while Rushdie's disastrously fails, I shall await with interest the full-length studies that will no doubt appear comparing the two novels in detail.
Both are beyond doubt historical novels in the acceptation first popularised by Walter Scott, although there are immediate significant differences between the two writers' projects. Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence alternates between the Mughal empire under Akbar and the Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli, linking the two via the appearance of a Florentine wanderer, Mogor dell'Amore, at Akbar's court in Fatehpur Sikri and the presence in Florence of Qara Köz, a Mughal princess with magical powers. Ghosh's Sea of Poppies narrates a more recent period, namely earlier nineteenth-century India in the time of the East India Company: it relates India to the wider world since its theme is the transporting of indentured labourers and convicts to the island of Mauritius on the ship Ibis, and offers a remarkably broad canvas of characters - from the low-caste Bihari ox-cart-driver Kalua and Deeti, the woman he rescues from a sati, through Baboo Nob Kissin, pen-pushing clerk and flamboyant devotee of Krishna, to Paulette, Bengal-raised daughter of a French botanist, and Zachary, a deceptively white-seeming freedman mulatto from Baltimore who becomes the vessel's second mate.
It is new for Rushdie to attempt a fiction set back so far in the past, unless one counts the Arabian dream chapters of The Satanic Verses; Midnight's Children has been read, and with good cause, as a historical novel, but it deals with the recent past. Ghosh, by contrast, has already explored a (somewhat later) period of imperial history in Asia, starting from the late nineteenth century, in The Glass Palace. A further structural difference is that Sea of Poppies is the first part of a trilogy (incidentally a popular novelistic convention in the Bengali tradition), and its narrative is therefore unfinished, whereas Rushdie's is (I would say thank goodness) a single, self-contained narrative.
Generically, both are somewhat complex and difficult to define in a nutshell; a degree of experimentalism is common to both, as too are painstaking research and studied intertextuality. Rushdie's degree from Cambridge was in history, and Ghosh's training was as an anthropologist: these novels show the two at pains to demonstrate their research skills, with lengthy bibliographical credits appearing at the end of both. Rushdie, indeed, goes as far - in earnest or in play – as to blur the fiction/non-fiction divide by listing his historical sources in alphabetical order, over a six-page bibliography which might more aptly grace a straightline academic study.
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