Ghazipur

Ghazipur is an inland town about 50 miles from Benares and more than 500 miles from Calcutta. The town is a center of poppy cultivation and opium production for the East India Company. The company's opium factory, Sudden Opium Factory, where Hukam Singh works, lies in Ghazipur. All of the people living in surrounding villages, including Deeti, grow poppies that they milk. Then they bring the raw substance to the factory to be processed into various kinds of opium. Although the caste system is still intact, Ghosh depicts the people of Ghazipur as losing their traditional relationship to land because of poppy cultivation. Before the era of the flowers, people used to grow food and grass for their thatched-roof huts. But since the British have moved in and forced area farmers to grow only poppies, the farmers must buy basic supplies and food from elsewhere. People from Ghazipur are rural...