India, May 7 -- The opium trade that impoverished and crippled India also financed and helped forge the modern state

In the final pages of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories , Amitav Ghosh volunteers a startling confession. Though he had spent many years working on the book and had "accumulated an enormous amount of material", he decided he could not go on with it, as he was overwhelmed by the "despicable meanness" of the subject matter. Accordingly, he cancelled the contracts he had signed and returned the advances to his publishers.

Beside the despair occasioned by the catalogue of exploitation, brutality and misery, Ghosh also had to reckon with an unusual narrative challenge: at the heart of his book was "a non-human protagon...