For Amitav Ghosh, the celebrated Indian author, the fumes of the opium trade are still as intoxicating as it was 20 years ago when he explored the subject in his Ibis trilogy. The books Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), revolve around the First Opium War with marvelous characters conjured by Ghosh. While these were fiction, his new non-fiction book ‘Smoke and Ashes: A Writer‘s Journey Through Opium‘s Hidden Histories’, which comes after Jungle Nama (2021) and Gun Island (2019), circles back to opium.

It is one that he arrived at after spending many years researching about the trade when he was writing the trilogy between 2005 and 2015. Interestingly, at the time, he thought it would mainly be about the transportation of indentured workers from India to Mauritius in the early nineteenth century but there was more. He stumbled upon how opium was being transported between India and China, and that piqued his curiosity.