Amitav Ghosh’s zubben: Confluence of languages in the Ibis trilogy

Abstract

“Zubben”, Amitav Ghosh explains, is “the flash lingo of the East”. This article examines how his trilogy of historical novels supplements English with (at least) 23 other languages and invites readers on a verbal voyage in which interpretation is required but inhibited. The challenges of navigating through his rich prose expose readers to a verbal cornucopia, which feeds a series of related themes sustained by a narrative rhythm of convergence and divergence, all stemming from asymmetrical colonial relations during the opium trade. These themes include: abundance and poverty, intimacy and exclusion; hybrid languages; authority and self-deception; chance and fate; the ineffable.

Keywords:

• India
• Amitav Ghosh
• China
• opium wars
• colonialism
• narrative
• interpretation
• zubben

Notes

1. The “Chrestomathy” is available at http://www.amitavghosh.com/chrestomathy.html.

2. I am aware that Hindi, Urdu and Hindusthani are closely related, but differ in vocabulary, script and political import, but I cannot tell if Ghosh exploits these differences in the trilogy. Ghosh has said: “Words are like toys to me. They are interesting, pleasurable things. They are almost like friends” (quoted in Nair 2011). He learned Cantonese while writing River of Smoke (Rollason 2011, 1), and called himself a “xenophile” who loves to “eavesdrop” on strangers’ conversations (2012).

3. Julia Lovell (2011) reports that opium merchants used missionaries as translators, notably Karl Gützlaff, who was “fluent in both self-deception and China’s south-eastern dialects” (27). Brian Inglis (1976) quips that when deciding between God and mammon, Gützlaff chose both (90).

4. The smuggler William Jardine said, at his farewell dinner in Canton (depicted in River of Smoke), “We are not smugglers, gentlemen! It is the Chinese government, it is the Chinese officers, who smuggle, and who connive at and encourage smuggling, not we” (Grace 2014, 225); whereas his partner, James Matheson, irked that a ship’s captain refused to receive opium on the Sabbath, admitted “We have every respect for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited for the drug trade” (265).

5. Christopher Rollason (2011) uses the word “matricial” to describe this “third-person, extradiegetic narratorial voice” (2), because it speaks fluently in a matrix of languages.

6. Ricoeur (1981) explains that “the polysemy of words calls forth as its counterpart the selective role of contexts for determining the current value which words assume in a determinate message, addressed by a definite speaker to a hearer placed in a particular situation. Sensitivity to context is the necessary complement and ineluctable counterpart of polysemy. But the use of contexts involves, in turn, an activity of discernment which is exercised in the concrete exchange of messages between interlocutors, and which is modelled on the interplay of question and answer. This activity of discernment is properly called interpretation” (44).

7. Edward Sapir (1958) describes this relativistic theory: “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” (69).

8. Studies of postcolonial translation defend the uniqueness of vernaculars as a defence against the violence of imperial assimilation, while others seek means of resistance or rapprochement. See Shankar (2012) for a survey of the issue and Tageldin (2016) for a careful account of untranslatability in a global context.

9. For example, Greg Forter (2016) distinguishes a “secular pilgrimage” in Sea of Poppies, which allows Deeti to make “her own destiny” in seeking a “utopian recovery” of community (1338).