About 10 years ago Amitav Ghosh began work on a new novel about departures. His experience of moving from India to Britain in the 1970s had been “wrenching” and set him wondering what it was like for Indian people travelling to England in the 19th century. “So I began to write about some characters who might have been among the first people to leave India, and immediately I came up against this immense canvas that lies behind relations between India, Britain and China. It was essentially all about opium and it was clear this was not a story I was going tell in a single book.”

So Ghosh set about writing a fictional account of the period leading up to the first opium war (1839-42), in which UK and China clashed over the British importation of opium, grown on their Indian plantations, into China. Sea of Poppies was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It was the first part of what has become the 1,600-page Ibis trilogy, named after the schooner that ferries both opium and human traffic. In 2011 River of Smoke, the second part, was shortlisted for the Man Asian prize and the series culminates this week with the publication of the final volume, Flood of Fire, Ghosh’s eighth novel in a career that has seen his work translated into more than 20 languages. This week his entire body of work was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, which was awarded to László Krasznahorkai.

Ghosh, who was about to turn 50 when he embarked on the trilogy, says he found it daunting: “For the next 10 years, this was what I was going to do. But I also knew that I had to set myself something really difficult and ambitious. And that has proved to be the case. I was determined that the individual books should stand alone – it’s indefensible, aesthetically, for it be just one huge book chopped into three. One of my favourite experiences was reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Alexandria. I love his writing and it is strange how he is kind of forgotten now. He had an incredible range and the books capture all aspects of a cosmopolitan life in the eastern Mediterranean. They do articulate with each other so that you get glimpses of characters across books, but they are not all meshed together. If I had a model, that was it.”

Despite the darkly cynical and violent subject matter, Ghosh’s trilogy is funny, sexy and rip-roaring. “The material is so grim for so much of the time I had to have some leavening. But I also think there is a contemporary sentimentality that assumes people living difficult lives are always gloomy. That is just not the case. I’ve spent a lot of time in very difficult places, and I can tell you that people in desperate circumstances can also be incredibly cheerful and good-natured, often more so than people on the streets of London, for instance.”

The co-option of Indian labour, and soldiers, by the British empire underpins much of the trilogy. “The indentured system was self-consciously a replacement for slave labour,” he explains. “It is strange that people don’t put together that India was to the 19th century what Africa had been to the 17th and 18th: a global sink of labour.” There are obvious echoes of the conditions endured by some migrant workers today, and while Ghosh does not labour the point, there are also inescapable parallels between the opium and Iraq wars. “British merchants were saying in the lead-up to the opium war that there will be joss sticks lit in the streets and the people will be grateful for the overthrow of the Manchu tyrant,” he says. “It is a complete echoing across two centuries and was eerie to see. The other striking thing was the degree of corruption. You have to read between the lines, but the opium war was one of the first to be fought in a complete public and private partnership. The merchants were given contracts to provide services and provisions to the soldiers and they made out like bandits. Paying off British generals, and bad provisions probably killed more soldiers in China than did the Chinese army.”

The book jacket for Flood of Fire features an admiring quote from the historian Christopher Clark and Ghosh has been acclaimed for providing a plausible account of events that had previously been underexamined. “Puzzlingly, there is no military history of the first opium war,” he says, “although it saw the first major use of steam-powered warships which revolutionised naval warfare forever. So I found myself piecing much of the battlefield details together from primary sources. But the difference between writing fiction and writing history is that fiction doesn’t commit you to one view. That is why I was never a historian or an academic. I don’t think theoretically. What interests me about history is that there are so many alternative ways of telling it. I have had my life and experiences and I have my opinions. But I have also forced myself to see the world through, say, the eyes of an opium trader, and that is one of the great strengths of historical fiction. It encourages you to step out of your skin and see the world from other points of view.”

Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and was brought up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as his family moved around with his ex-soldier father on various secondments to the Indian government. The peripatetic life meant that books became particularly important to him – one early childhood favourite was Richmal Crompton’s Just William series before he moved on to the novels of Sir Walter Scott, for many the inventor of the historical novel as we know it today. “Scott had a huge influence on many early 19th-century Indian writers and I found his books utterly absorbing and remember curling up in bed with them at boarding school”. He was at the prestigious Doon School where Vikram Seth, a pupil a couple of years ahead of him, came back to teach and they talked a lot about writing to each other. “Not long ago I went back there and looked at those same editions of Scott in the library. I was the last person to have checked them out.”

As a teenager, Ghosh enjoyed Indian classical music as well as Deep Purple, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, “all the stuff my kids still listen to” – he is married to the writer Deborah Baker, they have two children and live in Brooklyn and India. “We also had the radical politics of the 1970s. I came of age in the middle of the Naxalite-Maoist uprising. But even then I was much more interested in Gandhism and thought Naxalism was a fetishism of violence of a very ugly kind. Yes, I was sympathetic to many of their aims, but I was not a joiner.”

He completed an MA in social anthropology in Delhi before going to Oxford for a PhD in the same subject. “It was all a bit of an accident. I was reading a lot of Naipaul and James Baldwin and all I really wanted to do was travel. In those days it was difficult to get visas, unless you were an academic.” He lived in Egypt where he studied village life, travelled to Tunisia to learn Arabic and hitchhiked across the Sahara. “That DPhil was my equivalent of writing school in that I read a lot and wrote a lot. I also think I hold the world record for one of the fastest DPhils in that it took two years and three months. When I finished, in January 1982, I went back to India and literally that day I started writing my first novel.”

Historically, writers in England or France may have been frozen in their garrets, he says, but he was boiling in one in Delhi. “I got by for three years doing little jobs, but it was scary. In my late 20s all my friends seemed to be getting good jobs and I was just labouring away on a book. People don’t tell you that about the writing life. A lot of it is about risk. I didn’t tell people I wanted to be a writer as they would have laughed. Delhi was a city of politics and bureaucracy. Even after my book had been accepted by Hamish Hamilton in the UK, I had to go around Delhi showing it to publishers, and when I said it wasn’t a textbook they weren’t interested. Now there is this flourishing and vibrant literary world in India. It is marvellous. I think it really began with Naipaul. He was the pioneer who created an audience for himself and for others that followed.”

The Circle of Reason, Ghosh’s prizewinning 1986 debut novel, featured an exuberant blend of phrenology, weaving and appalling violence. It was reviewed in the New York Times by Anthony Burgess, who asserted that “Mr Ghosh writes at least as well as Mr Rushdie” and praised a novel that “smells of cow-dung fires, and tastes of chilies”. Ghosh followed it up two years later with The Shadow Lines, set against a backdrop of vicious communal conflict and which, he says, “remains far and away my most popular book in India. But writing it was emotionally draining. I’d lived through those terrible conflicts. When I finished I just wanted to do something different.”

He changed tack in his next two books. In an Antique Land (1992) was a broadly non-fiction study emerging from his studies that investigated the relationship between Egypt and India, alternating his experiences of living in villages and towns in the Nile Delta with an imagined history of an 11th‑century Jewish trader and his slaves. Different again, The Calcutta Chromosome won the 1997 Arthur C Clarke award, but Ghosh says he never thought of the book “as being science fiction. It is in many ways a historical novel that is projected into the future as well as the past. And what does such labelling achieve anyway? It just separates what is called the literary mainstream from this other kind of writing. Who are among the most memorable writers from the mid to late 20th century? John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing. And from the supposed mainstream who reads Angus Wilson today? To the literary establishment Lessing’s later books, about planets and so on, were a kind of embarrassment. But she very strenuously resisted that sort of partitioning and these writers have staying power because they were saying things about society that was in many ways more perceptive than what the literary mainstream was saying.”

Since 1999, Ghosh has spent more time in New York, where he has taken a series of university teaching posts, but the focus of his fiction has remained on Indian life and the implications of its history. His 2000 novel, The Glass Palace emerged out of stories told by his father and uncle who had fought with the British-Indian army in Burma in the second world war. “It began as a family story but I was led into something bigger.” The multi-generational history went on to win awards in Burma and to be translated three separate times, “although, of course, none of them told me they were happening,” Ghosh laughs. The Hungry Tide, described as both Conradian and Forster-ish by one critic, brought him even closer to home, to the Bay of Bengal in the form of a 400-mile river journey in search of a rare dolphin. The vast and complex web of salt and fresh waterways, partially submerged forests and precarious lives are at the heart of the novel, and in recent years Ghosh has become an outspoken commentator on climate change.

“If you are from my part of the world, climate change hits you in the face. In front of my eyes I’ve seen islands disappearing. I’ve seen saltwater invading deeper and deeper. This is the most vulnerable part of the world apart from the low-lying islands, and unlike the low-lying islands, Bengal has 250 million people. What is of much interest to me is why the arts, which are meant to be in the avant garde, have been so slow to recognise this. It is a profound challenge to all our procedures, and while I don’t primarily think of myself as an activist, if I did I would be very depressed.”



So should fiction be a way of educating, or warning people about such issues? “I don’t think that fiction should be didactic and I’m not there to teach anybody a lesson. For me, writing the trilogy has been an incredible voyage of discovery and when I find something that is new to me and excites me, it finds its way into the book. I hope it excites the reader, too.”

Flood of Fire closes with a list of historical sources so long it is easy to imagine there is still plenty of material to explore. Is this really the end of the story? “It is certainly the end of the Ibis trilogy. These books now stand on their own and I wouldn’t want to disturb that. But yes, there are a lot of unfinished stories, a lot of threads that I thought I would pick up but was unable to, and so I think I almost certainly will revisit it at some point. But that will be a different book.”

Flood of Fire is published by John Murray at £20.