“The Opium wars were relatively fought on a small scale by the British, with just 4,000 soldiers. From a Euro-centric perspective, the French Revolution is considered as a defining moment of modernity. But, when seen from a non-Euro-centric perspective, in which China is a considered a critical power, these Opium wars ended up transforming China,” said celebrated author Amitav Ghosh, who was in Chennai to launch Flood Of Fire, the final installment of his Ibis trilogy.
After a conversation about the book with former West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi at a function organised in association with The Hindu , Mr. Ghosh affirmed that historical fiction was not any different from writing other kinds of fiction.
“All fiction is, in a sense, historical fiction. Most novelists do write about the past. While writing War and Peace , Tolstoy was writing about things that happened 50 years before and in his case, he thought of himself as a historian. So, I don’t draw these distinctions,” he said, adding, “But writing historical fiction would include reading through something as obscure as the record of essentials used by various regiments, but you have got to learn to enjoy it to write it,” he said.
Talking of how he came to write about the Opium Wars and not about the more important wars fought in India, he noted that the traditional view of history as taught in Indian schools was bunk. “We are taught that the battles of Plassey and Buxar were the most important wars fought in India when they are not. Actually, it was the battle of Assaye, which was fought in1803, where the Marathas came within a whisker of beating the British,” he said.
The author also rued the fact that much of India’s military history and its violent past had gone unrecorded. “There were two infantry units of the East India Company — Bengal Native infantry comprising Rajputs and Brahmins — and Madras Native Infantry, which was much more diverse and included Muslims. When the British were launching overseas campaigns, the Madras Native Infantry was deployed almost always. During the critical period of British empire, Tamil soldiers were in Java, Malaya and Burma. Almost nothing has been written about this,” he said.
He further divulged how he set about writing a fictional story on the Opium Wars, “If I were trying to write this story as history, it would be a very thin story and told entirely through the British prism. You do have to put yourself in a situation where you are trying to experience these predicaments. The characters may not have been documented, but these moments and instances did happen,” he said to a hall full of his ardent admirers. The author also signed copies of Flood Of Fire .
