In Sea of Poppies (2008) Amitav Ghosh sets the individualist love ethic of the great tradition of the western novel into dialogue with traditions of Indian culture 1 that emphasize the generalizing force of love. The plot of the novel generates a reciprocal critique between character and "lifeforce," between individual happiness and communal energy. As the two views of love meet in Sea of Poppies, each carries a history of its articulations in the modern novel. Their encounter locates the novel

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... in the fictional force-field first articulated by Salman Rushdie and raises a question of genre: how to read Sea of Poppies as it interrogates the scope and force of love. Sea of Poppies not only creates a hybrid language of love appropriate to its representation of the power of love across social, class, caste, cultural, and national divides but also accommodates a multiplicity of selves, endowing this multiplicity with the power to disrupt colonial hegemony. The linguistic difficulties of bridging different cultural practices with many historical and ideological points of contact have generated critical responses which emphasize different aspects of these cultural practices; several important essays direct the reader to the ways in which Sea of Poppies engages multiple languages, dialects, and cultures deployed by characters and narrator. 2 They contextualize Ghosh's fiction as a historical novel, and thus recall the reader to the question central to that genre and convention: how to negotiate a multicultural, multi-temporal labyrinth. Furthermore, the novel also leads the reader through a learning process. Just as children acquire language, so little by little the reader begins to understand the expressions and terms of the many languages of the characters in the novel. The reader in effect re-enacts the experience of Partial answers 12/2: 375-387