“A Gobful of Goatshit”: Opium as Non-food in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

The paper explores how non-food functions at the border of edibility and inedibility, both as a transgression, where the boundaries between the two are breached, and as a transaction, where a mutually sustaining relationship between the two sides is established. It does so by focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and its depiction of colonialism’s intervention in reshaping food production and availability in India during the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the novel illustrates, the forced cultivation of opium in place of food crops across vast sections of the Indo-Gangetic plains sharply polarized the region’s foodscape. At one end of the spectrum were individuals battling famine-like conditions, with their only hope of escape lying in selling themselves to colonial agents as indentured labourers. At the other end were colonial and indigenous elites, whose extravagant rituals of food consumption are evoked in the novel through tropes of disgust.

Ghosh presents opium as the non-food that connects these two sides of the spectrum. Situated at the border of edibility, the heavily commodified opium mediates the relationship between deprivation and excess in what Ben Fine would describe as a new “system of provision.” This paper unpacks Ghosh’s complex representation of opium as non-food, framing it as a critique of the economic, social, and political structures that determined both the availability and absence of food in nineteenth-century colonial India.