For their support and assistance at various points in the writing of this novel, I owe many thanks to: Kanti & Champa Banymandhab, Girindre Beeharry, the late Sir Satcam Boolell and his family, Sanjay Buckory, Pushpa Burrenchobay, May Bo Ching, Careem Curreemjee, Saloni Deerpalsingh, Parmeshwar K. Dhawan, Greg Gibson, Marc Foo Kune, Surendra Ramgoolam, Vishwamitra Ramphul, Achintyarup Ray, Debashree Roy, Anthony J. Simmonds, Vijaya Teelock, Boodhun Teelock and Zhou Xiang. I owe a great debt of gratitude also to the following institutions: the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England; the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius; and the Mauritius National Archives.

The lines quoted in Chapter Two (Ág mor lágal ba…) are from a song collected by Edward O. Henry (Chant The Names of God: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-Speaking India, San Diego State Univ. Press, San Diego, 1988, p. 288). The lines quoted in Chapter Three (Majha dhára me hai bera merá…) are from a song collected in Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 307. The lines quoted in Chapter Five (Sãjh bhailé…) are from Sarita Boodhoo's Bhojpuri Traditions in Mauritius, Mauritius Bhojpuri Inst., Port Louis, 1999, p. 63. The lines quoted in Chapter Nineteen (Talwa jharailé…) and the lines quoted in Chapter Twenty-one (…uthlé há chhati ke jobanwá…) are from songs collected by Sir George Grierson for his article "Some Bhojpuri Folksongs," Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society 18, p. 207, 1886. In all these instances the translations are my own.

Without the support of Barney Karpfinger and Roland Philipps, the Ibis could not have crossed the Bay of Bengal; at critical moments in her journey, when she lay becalmed in kalmariyas, James Simpson and Chris Clark blew wind into her sails; my children, Lila and Nayan, saw her through many a storm and my wife, Deborah Baker, was the best of malums: I, no less than this frail craft, owe them all a great debt of gratitude.

Amitav Ghosh

Kolkata

2008

THE IBIS CHRESTOMATHY

Words! Neel was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives and destinies of their own. Why then were there no astrologers to calculate their kismet and make predictions about their fate? The thought that he might be the one to take on this task probably came to him at about the time when he was first beginning to earn his livelihood as a linkister – that is to say, during his years in southern China. From then on, for years afterwards, he made it his regular practice to jot down his divinations of the fate of certain words. The Chrestomathy, then, is not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man who was obsessed with the destiny of words. Not all words were of equal interest, of course, and the Chrestomathy, let it be noted, deals only with a favoured few: it is devoted to a select number among the many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language. It is, in other words, a chart of the fortunes of a shipload of girmitiyas: this perhaps is why Neel named it after the Ibis.

But let there be no mistake: the Chrestomathy deals solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language. Indeed the epiphany out of which it was born was Neel's discovery, in the late 1880s, that a complete and authoritative lexicon of the English language was under prepara tion: this was, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary (or the Oracle, as it is invariably referred to in the Chrestomathy). Neel saw at once that the Oracle would provide him with an authoritative almanac against which to judge the accuracy of his predictions. Although he was already then an elderly man, his excitement was such that he immediately began to gather his papers together in preparation for the Oracle's publication. He was to be disappointed, for decades would pass before the Oxford English Dictionary finally made its appearance: all he ever saw of it was a few of the facsicules that appeared in the interim. But the years of waiting were by no means wasted: Neel spent them in collating his notes with other glossaries, lexicons and word-lists. The story goes that in the last years of his life his reading consisted of nothing but dictionaries. When his eyesight began to fail, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were made to perform this service for him (thus the family coinage 'to read the dicky', defined by Neel as 'a gubbrowing of last resort').

On his deathbed, or so family legend has it, Neel told his children and grandchildren that so long as the knowledge of his words was kept alive within the family, it would tie them to their past and thus to each other. Inevitably, his warnings were ignored and his papers were locked away and forgotten; they were not to be retrieved till some twenty years later. The family was then in turmoil, with its many branches at odds with each other, and its collective affairs headed towards ruin. It was then that one of Neel's granddaughters (the grandmother of the present writer) remembered his words and dug out the old band-box that contained Neel's jottings. Coincidentally, that was the very year the Oracle was finally published – 1928 – and she was able to raise the money, by joint family subscription, to acquire the entire set. Thus began the process of disinterring Neel's horoscopes and checking them against the Oracle's pronouncements – and miraculously, no sooner did the work start than things began to turn around, so that the family was able to come through the worldwide Depression of the 1930s with its fortunes almost undiminished. After that never again was the Chrestomathy allowed to suffer prolonged neglect. By some strange miracle of heredity there was always, in every decade, at least one member of the family who had the time and the interest to serve as wordy-wallah, thus keeping alive this life-giving conversation with the founder of the line.

The Chrestomathy is a work that cannot, in principle, ever be considered finished. One reason for this is that new and previously unknown word-chits in Neel's hand continue to turn up in places where he once resided. These unearthings have been regular enough, and frequent enough, to confound the idea of ever bringing the work to completion. But the Chrestomathy is also, in its very nature, a continuing dialogue, and the idea of bringing it to an end is one that evokes superstitious horror in all of Neel's descendants. Be it then clearly understood that it was not with any such intention that this compilation was assembled: it was rather the gradual decay of Neel's papers which gave birth to the proposal that the Chrestomathy (or what there was of it) be put into a form that might admit of wider circulation.

It remains only to explain that since the Chrestomathy deals exclusively with the English language, Neel included, with very few exceptions, only such words as had already found a place in an English dictionary, lexicon or word-list. This is why its entries are almost always preceded by either the symbol of the Oracle (a +) or the names of other glossaries, dictionaries or lexicons; these are, as it were, their credentials for admittance to the vessel of migration that was the Chrestomathy. However, the power to grant full citizenship rested, in Neel's view, solely with the Oracle (thus his eagerness to scrutinize its rolls). Once a word had been admitted into the Oracle's cavern, it lost the names of its sponsors and was marked forever with its certificate of residence: the symbol +. 'After the Oracle has spoken the name of a word, the matter is settled; from then on the expression in question is no longer (or no longer only) Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind. [1], Laskari or anything else – in its English