Author: Dr. Tarun Kanti Halder
DOI Link : https://doi.org/10.70798/Bijmrd/020500024
Abstract : Opium’s complicated relationship to pleasure, addiction, commerce, and colonialism has made it a prominent topic in literary and historical discourse. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) feature two different but related depictions of opium. Ghosh places opium within the larger framework of British colonialism and the international drug trade, whereas De Quincey offers a more personal description of addiction, examining the psychological and physical effects of opium intake. The destructive repercussions of addiction and the criminality linked to opium use in both texts are examined in this study. It makes the case through a comparative analysis that De Quincey and Ghosh demonstrate how opium serves as a tool for social disintegration, moral decay, and economic exploitation in addition to being a substance of individual dependence. The data also shows that Ghosh highlights the structural brutality and societal repercussions caused by the opium economy, whereas De Quincey concentrates on the inner anguish of the addict.
Keywords: Opium, Addiction, Delinquency, Colonialism, Thomas De Quincey, Amitav Ghosh, Drug Culture, British Empire.
Page No : 179-187