Independence Day 2008

Just yesterday I finished reading Amitav Ghosh’s masterpiece of a novel “Sea of Poppies”. The timing is perfect for several reasons, a couple worth mentioning here. Today is India’s Independence Day and I have been able to experience the depth of my patriotism for India, which is for me a composite of my many experiences and readings. This book has made me appreciate our freedom from our colonists much more than anything I have read. The book, as the name suggests, is about the poppy trade between India and China. The colonists replaced all food crops with poppy fields, paid exploitive prices to the rural poor who farmed and processed them ready for the factories that sprinkled the west coast of India and exported them to the opium dens of china. Several English men became wealthy simultaneously as did the British Empire from the royalties and tariffs that filled their coffers to overflowing. The story is set at a crucial time in the mid 1800s when the Chinese authorities woke up to the devastation wreaked on their population as result of this malaise and issued an ordinance for the enforcement of its strict ban. The colonists had to resort to the only other profitable export they had, human labour. The novel is set against the backdrop of the poppy trade but the ripple effect of poppy not being profitable anymore was devastation of the rural poor’s lives and their consequently indenture as coolies to serve the colonists interests in other parts of the world, hazarding most treacherous journeys under utterly inhumane conditions in the high seas. In the past, I had some misplaced loyalties for the British rule in India, for their having set up our railways, postal service and most of all for giving us the English language. However, I know now that this was at the cost of the blood, sweat, tears and lives of our many brethren who suffered unspeakable oppression. Today, I bow to those who displayed such valour in the face of all their suffering.