The Opium Clerk

Name: The Opium Clerk
Rating: 3.05 (166 reviews)

by Kunal Basu

First published 2001

Amazon

3.0(166)

Hiran is born in 1857 as rebellion spreads across northern India and his soldier father is killed. Raised by his widowed mother in Calcutta, he seems to possess little advantage beyond an uncanny talent for reading palms. A chance appointment at an auction house draws him into the administrative machinery of the British Indian opium trade, where his superior Jonathan Crabbe combines commercial authority, addiction and fraud. Hiran’s commission to find a child for Crabbe’s wife entangles him in the family’s private life as well as its illicit business.

The story follows Hiran through maritime travel, colonial China, war and the consequences of decisions made in the auction rooms of Calcutta. Across changing households and generations, opium links Indian cultivation and finance to Chinese markets while exposing the violence hidden behind respectable imperial commerce. The novel combines family saga and adventure with a critical portrait of the bureaucracy, racial hierarchy and moral evasions that sustained the nineteenth-century trade.