ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature
Department of English University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW
Calgary AB Canada T2N 1N4

Dear Editor(s),

First of all, I would like to thank you profusely for the attention you have given to my scholarly work. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose careful attention to the details of my work has challenged me in productive ways, and made me rethink and develop my analysis of Amitabh Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies. I hope some of that productive rethinking will be evident in the revised version of the paper I am submitting along with this letter.

I have taken up most of the suggestions offered by the reviewers and the editorial board, the most important of which was to expand on the formal elements of the novel in question. Keeping in view the fact that my article is primarily invested in exploring how Ghosh's novel is committed to documenting the forms of non-choice that contributed to the emergence of the Indian indentured labor, and how such a project is predicated on a critical understanding of the categories brought into being by plantation slavery and the subsequent post-abolition plantation economy, I have concentrated in my revised version on showing how such a representational project has been facilitated by Ghosh's masterful deployment of the categories of a classic realism.

In that regard, I have not gone into a close analysis of the novel's examination of the opium economy. While I acknowledge the centrality of the latter in Ghosh's project, I will also contend that a multilayered work such as Ghosh's can also be approached through multiple other vantage-points, each of which exists in relative autonomy to the opium economy, while thriving alongside and within that economy. Additionally, there are other critical works that pay attention to the representation of the opium economy in Ghosh's novel. On the other hand, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which Ghosh writes the history of the global plantation complex as coterminous with the opium economy, and which survives through complex intersections with the latter. It is this aspect of Ghosh's work – his critical attention to the global plantation complex and to the after-histories of chattel slavery
that I want to draw attention to in my work.

One of the reviewers has noted that the article has taken into consideration only a small portion of the novel. Admittedly, I focused on those sections of the novel which are directly relevant to my article- project. For a novel as complex as Sea of Poppies, which features such a diversity of characters and spaces, it is indeed difficult to take into account everything within an article-length project. Consequently, while I would not necessarily disagree with the suggestion from one of the reviewers that the conclusion of the novel is concerned with Ghosh's understanding of indenture, I have decided not to include a reading of the conclusion in this paper. While in my bigger project (a monograph-length work), I do pay close attention to that conclusion, analyzing this latter in this article would lead the overall argument in a different direction than the one I intend to concentrate on.

Thanks once again for the critical attention that you gave my work, and for the opportunity to revise it further	and	submit	it	to	your	journal	for	reconsideration.

I look forward to hearing back from you. If there is anything that you need to know in the process of making a decision, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,