In Hackney, the London borough where I live, “hipster” is an essential bit of anthropological vocabulary. For they are everywhere, and come in various subclassifications. But where does this term-of-art, associated closely with East London and the trendier bits of many cities, actually come from? The poppy fields of India, apparently. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century those who smoked opium, the powerful drug derived from the poppy, did so while resting on one hip. This preferred drug-taking posture came to America via immigration from China, where opium smoking had taken off in the nineteenth century, then became a favourite of some famous jazz musicians in the twentieth. Jazz equals cool, equals “hipster”: voila!
This is just one of the many branching tales of opium’s impact on our world recounted in Smoke and Ashes. And though I’m a little sceptical about its accuracy (there are competing claims about the etymology of hipster), it serves to illustrate the globe-trotting, history-spanning ambitions of this curious book. In it Amitav Ghosh, a Booker-shortlisted Indian writer, traces the story of the opium trade, and its co-related phenomena, from past to present, combining a relatively unsystematic account with sketches of memoir and travelogue.
