احمد قلی

Award-winning novelist, cultural anthropologist, and environmental advocate, Amitav Gosh is well known for his Ibis trilogy: Sea of Poppies (2008), River Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015) wherein he dramatizes the First Opium War between England and China in the first half of the nineteenth century. His nonfictional Smoke and Ashes (2023) is the fruit of his research notes collected while writing the trilogy providing good background information for the trilogy’s intricate world. Besides Gosh’s scholars, the book will prove worthwhile for postcolonial historians and anyone interested in the complex machinery of the British Empire in nineteenth-century India and China. The book’s great intellectual charm and strength lie in its genre-defying quality. It synthesizes historical analysis with travel narrative, personal memoir, socio-cultural investigation, and the examination of artistic works related to the opium industry. In addition, it does not confine its analysis to the colonial past since it tracks the vicious consequences of the opium trade in modern times, in particular America. Indeed, the book is a scholarly endeavor to expose not only the fictionality of Western capitalism but also the depth of the British Empire’s gross injustice to subjugated people and their world through critical engagement with extensive colonial archives. He achieves his goal thanks to his lucid prose, powerful arguments, thorough research, and ethical stance.

Once treated like a pariah in the realm of literary criticism, the genre of travel writing becomes a legitimate object of critical inquiry after Said’s Orientalism in which he critically examines French and English travel books written in the context of colonialism. Similarly, this article embarks on reading Alexander Burnes’ Travels into Bokhara in the light of Orientalism. The travelogue recounts Burnes’ journey to Afghanistan and Turkistan during the Great Game. Instead of extracting and interpreting orientalist tropes in Burnes’ travel book, the present article seeks to study its antinarrative components: those statements and praxis which are inconsistent with Orientalism’s policing and regulatory norms. It contends that the travel writer exhibits his disenchantment with orientalist vision in three ways. Firstly, through recoiling from reiterating the trope of the alleged ‘Oriental’ despotism. Secondly, via unsettling the trope of the ‘monarch of all I survey’, and finally, by demonstrating cultural receptivity towards indigenous people and their Islamic culture.