'Smoke and Ashes': Amitav Ghosh's story of how opium has contributed to creating today's world

At a recent meeting with Amitav Ghosh in one of Calcutta's colonial era clubs, he asked me about my parents and I told him that my mother's family has been living in Bihar for many generations. I knew that Bihar had been home to his father's family too, for more than a century, and this connection, besides my engagement with climate change as a writer, spurred an interesting discussion. Now after reading Smoke and Ashes, which in its breadth of research, depth of argument and novelty of form is easily one of the most important works about the colonial opium…