A Voyage towards Utopia: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh is an excellent storyteller. His novels deal with themes like violence, exile, historical and cultural displacement and so on. This paper analyzes how in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Ibis, the once-slave ship brings together a wide range of people from all walks of life: from the Raskhali Zamindar to the Chinese convict; from the high caste Deeti to Kalua, who belongs to the low caste of the Chamars; and from the French stowaway Paulette to the Mulatto Zachary, who has been recently freed. It studies how all the barriers of caste, class and religion are shattered to pieces in the voyage from Calcutta to Mauritius. It also explores how each character in the novel changes and evolves at the end and the switching over of power from one to the other. This paper also attempts to bring out how Ghosh has presented colonial India and the mindset of the colonizers and the colonized through his characters, some of whom are trying to run away from their past that is fast approaching at their heels and some who look forward to the future so that they can return to their waiting lives from their past.