Displacement in Sea of Poppies

Derya BİDERCİ DİNÇ

Vol-3,Issue-3,May - June 2018

Author: Derya BİDERCİ DİNÇ

Keywords: postcolonial ecocriticism, place, displacement, diaspora, identity.

Abstract: In Sea of Poppies, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh presents the nineteenth-century British imperialist activities including the cultivation of opium as a cash crop in India for the Chinese market, the transportation of the Asiatic to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius Island, the introduction of the free trade, and the approach of opium wars. This paper will look how the environmental injustice created social injustice. British imperialists’ intensification of the production of the poppy planton the bank of the River Ganga to maintain the opium trade between India and China transformed local people first to peasant labour and then to the indentured workers. Ghoshre imagines their loss of local place and dispersion in global place as the indentured labour. He plots the afterlife of a former slave ship, the Ibıs, which was in the service of the East Indian Company to carry the indentured labour. This paper sets out to discuss how its traumatic movement to sugar plantations characterized diaspora; the ship became shared past, home, parent for the diverse characters. The emphasis will be put on Ghosh’s construction of identity in relation to the place from postcolonial eco critical perspective. In his engagement with the connection of place and people, both place and displacement are the essential parts of identity construction. Both places and identities are related and changed through the experience of displacement, mobility. The characters went beyond developing personal identification, fixity, and attachment to a local place within a national border, they were situated in a world of mobility and flexibility which promoted cultural and self-development.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.3.3.15