ABSTRACT
In Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, a dying woman hands a cloth bundle to Deeti on board the Ibis, a former slave ship bearing coolies from Calcutta to the plantations of Mauritius. Ghosh's recounting of the objects coolies carried with them allows us to understand the binary of the coolie as an agent of his or her history, and the coolie as a 'commodity' for which orders were placed by plantation owners to recruiters in Calcutta. The early coolie export trade to Trinidad and Demerara from Calcutta, for example, was dominated by the famous Blackwall teakwood frigates. The commodities that the coolie ships carried helped to recover costs and register profit. Ships that operated between Calcutta and Fiji often triangulated their Indian Ocean passages in order to transport commodities and passengers to and from Australia. The shipping lines also increased profits by transporting Indian foodstuffs and other commodities required for coolies already settled into plantation life in the island colonies.
