At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camellia in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Abstract

This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisition, assimilation and dissemination of colonial knowledge in River of Smoke (2012). The paper highlights the cultural exchange of botanical and horticultural knowledge between Europe and China in the nineteenth century narrativized by Ghosh. The novel illustrates the significance of non-Eurocentric modes of conserving knowledge that would otherwise suffer from the violence of utilitarian models of European epistemology. The paper explicates how Ghosh represents the Chinese as successful in ensuring that the Golden Camellia – a rare flowering variety in China – is preserved from falling prey to the profiteering logic of botanical expeditions and epistemic hegemony by European naturalists. Using Pramod Nayar’s imperial cosmopolitanism and Robert Proctor’s agnotology as critical frames, the paper maps Ghosh’s fictional representation of Chinese horticulturists using botanical illustration to disable Europeans from accessing the Golden Camellia. By circulating the nonexistence of the plant variety as the truth, the Chinese horticulturalists in the novel prevent the Golden Camellia from being usurped and profiteered by European botanists and plant traders. The paper also establishes how Ghosh’s work functions as a significant addition to works foregrounding the South-South connection in the South Asian literary imagination.

Keywords:

• Amitav Ghosh
• River of Smoke
• Golden Camellia
• agnotology
• colonial botany
• South Asian literatures

Acknowledgments

This paper is a part of my doctoral work that studies the dimensions of cosmopolitanism in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr V. Sivaraman, Presidency College, Chennai, for his comments and directions. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their extensive comments that helped me refine parts of this work. Thanks are also due to the Dr Madhurima Chakraborty, for pointing me in directions that have helped strengthen these ideas.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some of his works like The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Ghosh 2016) also contextualize these intersections with our contemporary condition today.

2 “Cunningham” in James Cunningham’s name is spelt as “Cuninghame” as mentioned in the novel while referring to the character in the novel, and as “Cunningham” while referring to the naturalist James Cunningham.

3 Ah Fey that is fictionalized in the novel is also borrowed from an historical fact. Fa-ti Fan (2004, 37) notes: “Chinese gardeners occasionally went abroad with Chinese plants. Following the instruction of Joseph Banks, William Kerr sent a Chinese boy brought up as a gardener, Au Hey, on board to take care of plants he shipped to Kew Gardens. While at Kew, the young gardener greatly amused Banks and others.”

4 This idea is further developed by Fa-ti Fan (2004, 3). He studies the cultural encounter between Britain and China through the concept of ‘contact zones’ or “borderlands.” He treats these spaces as crucial to developing any idea about the “hybrid and performative aspects of cultural encounter.”

5 The manner in which Penrose and Paulette go about “botanizing the wild” and naming species in the Linnaean method of taxonomy is important here. Consider this:

The horses carried them to a height of over a thousand feet, where they came upon more orchids: pale rose “bamboo orchids”, Arundina chinensis, and a small primrose-yellow epiphyte, growing in a nullah–the first was already familiar to Fitcher, but not the second.

“Why Miss Paulette, I think ee may have found something new there. What’d ee like to call it?”

“If it were up to me, sir,” she said, “I would call it Diploprora penrosii.” (Ghosh 2012, 275)

6 Note here is that there is already an established knowledge about tea which has also set in its place a clear commercial route to establish itself as one of the most valuable botanical species of the time known to man.

7 Batra (2013, 330) in her work “City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke” informs us how the golden camellia was a plant that was put on the list of endangered species and since then the Chinese government has taken several measures to preserve it from extinction. “One of these includes the Golden Camellia Park and gene bank in the city of Nanning in Guangxi where it is showcased as a major tourist attraction.”

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Gaana Jayagopalan

Gaana Jayagopalan teaches courses in literary studies at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest include colonial discourses; Indian English Fiction; postcolonial literatures, and Higher Education in India among others.