Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm very pleased

to have us my guest, Amatov Ghosh. He is the author most recently of Sea of Poppies.

Sea of Poppies is going to be

the first book of a trilogy

called the Ibus trilogy,

and I think really that it's an extraordinary book.

Many of the people I've spoken to

did not know, as I did not know, that the opium that was the subject

of the opium wars was grown in India, and it was the British colonialization of India

that was growing and essentially stealing this crop to capture and possess the Chinese.

What we see in this new novel, Sea of Poppies, is a whole world of international relations as reflected in all of the languages

of the cultures that are involved in this navigation, this trade. It includes because the British have been forbidden to have slaves. Well, we can have

coolies now, can't we? And who are the coolies? Well, they're being brought from Mauritius or

to Mauritius or from China to India, a whole new way of organizing essentially the slave trade

and the addiction trade, the dependency trade, and all of it with many languages brought

about by trade and navigation that enter the Indian language and enter

the English language and eventually even appear in the OED.

...