Almost buried in Ghosh's Web site is a document titled The Ibis Chrestomathy. It is a meditation on words and language written by a character in Poppies, Raja Neel Rattan Haldar. Though it is not published along with the book in India, Ghosh hints that it may be included in some international editions. The Chrestomathy serves as the only partial glossary of the goulash of tongues that Ghosh has employed in his new novel.
Reacting to a comment on his mastery of the language, Ghosh told
rediff.com, "When you have experienced your life in a number of different languages you can reflect on different parts of yourself in different languages."
Indeed, what endures of Ghosh's characters long after the book has been read are their linguistic oddities -- outlandish enunciations, strange accents and Diasporic dialects. For instance, the lascars speak what appears to be Pidgin English winnowed with Arabic, Malay, Portuguese and Chinese. The British ladies and gents of the East India Company have imbibed so much 'Hindostanee' that to answer a call of nature becomes to 'drop a chitty in the dark'. There are snatches of Bhojpuri folksongs, a richness of cuss-words, and interludes of entertaining Indian English from a pot-bellied Bengali gomusta. Yet, the linguistic opulence of the narrative does not weigh it down. Rather, it only sharpens the individuality of the characters.
Ghosh, whose research for
Poppies took him through Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood series, Hobson-Jobson -- the 19th-century dictionary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases -- and the relatively unknown English and Hindostanee Naval Dictionary of Technical Terms and Sea Phrases, is piqued that many Indian writers in English use italics to represent Indian words. He argues that words like mandir and sahib have been in the Oxford English Dictionary since the 19th century.
Reading Sea of Poppies is a bit like watching a fascinating foreign-language film without the subtitles. Your readers will savour the beauty of unfamiliar words and the foreignness of flavour. But maybe the book will baffle the impatient...
It might. But because Indians grow up in a very multilingual circumstance, we are very tolerant of linguistic incomprehensibility. And that's exactly what I wanted to get at in this book.
If you are writing about the Indian Ocean as a region, the first and most important thing about it is that it is multilingual. Anyone who lived or worked in it had to cope with a certain amount of incomprehension. Think of Zachary. There he is on the ship surrounded by people who speak other languages but he makes his way. Think of the migrants -- they are surrounded by people who speak languages they don't understand. But they cope.
Obviously, you can't write a book in many languages but it's necessary -- just in terms of realism -- to give people a sense that you are in a situation where you don't understand what is happening. And what's wrong with that -- why should you need to understand everything?
Hobson-Jobson gave you the words and phrases. But to bring them to life as they were spoken means the reader has to place a lot of trust in you...
I hope so, but the fact is we don't know how those people spoke. It's the sort of language you make up in your head, and while you're making it up you hope to be truthful to it. Pidgin English, for example, has a very complex grammar and its own vocabulary. In fact, it's like learning another language. And I like learning languages.
Image: The author takes a break between morning to evening interviews in Mumbai
Also read: Language is a mask for conquest
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