Lascars at war: Maritime labour and the logistics of empire in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy

This article foregrounds lascars, an indispensable yet overlooked category of imperial labour, in its analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. Rather than being identifiable as subaltern heroes or figures of cultural hybridity, lascars are understood as agents who navigate the material conditions of empire and negotiate their status as shipboard, commercial, or martial units of labour discipline. Drawing on James C. Scott’s everyday resistance, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s heterogeneous temporality, Aaron Jaffer’s maritime history of the lascars, and Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery’s Indian Ocean methodology, the article offers a labour-centric, counter-archival reading of the novels. Through a focused reading of command, punishment, coercion, and dispersal, the article positions Ghosh’s work as a counter-archive of imperial logistics, ultimately arguing that the trilogy reframes empire as a system sustained by the exploitation of colonial labour for commerce and war.