Colonial Subjectivities and Shifting Legalities in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

The objective of this paper is to examine the representation of shifting legalities in Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies within the context of emerging legal regimes in early nineteenth-century British India. I argue that the novel makes two important interventions in the corpus of research interested in intersections of colonial histories and the development of socio-legal institutions. First, through overlapping stories of numerous characters who are differentiated by multiple levels of subalternity in terms of race, class, and gender as they navigate the colonial and customary legal regimes, the novel foregrounds the interconnections between law and the colonial enterprise and moves beyond the binary categories of legal subjects under colonial rule. Second, by showing the possibility of collective agency in the liminal space of the ship, the novel contributes to the growing attentiveness of scholars to the potential for legal subjects to individually or communally intervene in the formation of alternative and less-coercive legal regimes.