“Spoken Nowhere but on the Water”: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Lost-and-Found Languages of the Indian Ocean World

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s fictional oeuvre makes a major contribution to contemporary sea fiction, particularly that written from a non-Eurocentric perspective. His Ibis trilogy, for instance, paints a vivid picture of historical oceanic mobility in the form of ship journeys and littoral interconnections, centered on and in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter explores one aspect of that mobility, a language “spoken only on the water,” a roving dialect that Ghosh both painstakingly and playfully recreates in the first novel of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies. Laskari is a dialect that was spoken among lascar sailors born of, and borne on, the Indian Ocean. This essay examines the ways in which two dominant areas of Ghosh’s experimentation and interest—language and the sea—intersect in Sea of Poppies, through a focus on laskari as a lingua franca of work. It argues that the intersection can be approached in three ways: through the lens of Ghosh’s production of Indian Ocean space, as a language of South-South mobility; through the lens of sailor speech as a vernacular associated particularly with the craft of sail, participating in a tradition of sea fiction that harks back to Conrad and Melville; and, briefly, through the lens of postcolonial ecology, as a language that has been lost and only partially recovered.