Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace - Essay Example

Amitav Ghosh's "The Glass Palace" starts off in Burma in the year 1885, showing monarchy, at its last gasp at the hands of the British, through a stark contrast between the life of a penniless orphan who would later become rich and the unfortunate royal family with its luxurious graces to be condemned to downfall and destitution. The change of power is sudden, and dramatically affects the lives of those involved: "This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next, in an instant when the world springs free of its moorings of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation." But there is more; the sweeping saga that covers continents and generations in its span is at once a political and social commentary on colonialism, an epic tale of the dehumanizing effects of racism and dispossession. Also remarkably, it is a few family chronicles intertwined as a romantic narrative of serendipitous meetings and reunions between more than a dozen characters. Rajkumar, the primary protagonist, is an orphan eleven-year-old stuck in Mandalay. An extremely resourceful boy, he is a survivor, a child with no relations who forges some as he goes along in the form of Saya John and his son, Matthew. He witnesses the tragic irony that marks the deposition of the King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat, and the subsequent loot of abode of the most venerated couple in the country at the hands of his simple, worshipful subjects who turn to robbery at the combined behest of desperation and unforeseen opportunity, and it is here he meets the memorable Dolly, the "most beautiful girl he had ever seen". Ghosh's depiction of the court are picturesque, painting a Burma of former glory and his description of the King's exile in its anguish and inevitability is almost lyrical, "He sat in one of the armchairs and watched the ghostly shadows of coconut palms swaying on the room's white plaster walls. In this room the hours would accumulate like grains of sand until they buried him." The story continues with the plight of the royal family in Ratnagiri, India, where Dolly is still taking care of the daughters. The family is under the protection of District Collector Dey, (who is somewhat of a motif for oppression by those who were not British, but served Britain nevertheless, a continuing theme in the novel) whose restless, intelligent and vivacious wife Uma befriends Dolly, to begin a relationship that would last a lifetime. Rajkumar, on the other hand remains with Saya John in Burma, where under his tutelage and support works in the lumber industry, because the British have turned their ravenous eyes on teak by this time, and there is much money to be made. Again here is an underlying theme of Indians and not the colonial Britishers being the direct agency of exploitation, because the Indians profited out of the business that drained Burma, a fact that does not escape the author's scathing notice. Rajkumar, after earning his riches sets off to find Dolly, and with some help from Uma, marries his first love. The rest of the novel spans the generations of connections between Rajkumar, Dolly, Saya John's family, and Uma's family against the backdrop of Burma, India, Malaya, New York and modern Myanmar. From the breed of those that worked within the confines of a British-ruled system, by harvesting teak and rubber using slave labor in order to build a prosperous family dynasty, like Rajkumar and Saya John, we come to a generation of those that are caught up in the dilemma between a British upbringing and education and the conscience that speaks to them of an independent India, like Uma's nephew, Arjun. Once widowed, Uma sets about traveling the world and gains radical views on India's independence. The ties between her and Dolly are further reinforced when her niece Manju marries Dolly's son Neel. Neel's brother, Dinu, meets and falls for Alison, the granddaughter of Saya John, who had taken Rajkumar under his wing decades ago in Burma. Near the end, the present day Jaya, Dolly's granddaughter, sets off on an Internet search for her uncle Dinu, now a very old man who runs a small photo studio called The Glass Palace Studio, and we get glimpses of modern Myanmar and meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the most famous opponent of Myanmar's military regime. One area of the novel where the author definitely succeeds is in his reading of colonialism, and all that it involves. He has been able to show how honor, loyalty or the capacity for self-sacrifice which are normally considered virtues, can have inverted meanings when displayed in the service of an exploitative governance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the role of the Indian soldiers in the British army, doing their dirty work in the name of high soldierly ideals, and Ghosh highlights their dilemma amidst World War II and the clarion calls for Indian independence, especially in the context of the Indian National Army and its charismatic leader, Subhas Chandra Bose. An Indian soldier's tragedy comes out the clearest at the point of Arjun's death, when he says to Hardy (The name Hardy is an anglicized version of Hardip, an Indian name)."Just look at us. What are we We've learned to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn't even recognize us as Indians." And later: "Did we ever have a hope We rebelled against an empire that has shaped everything in our lives; colored everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves." This is a mature handling by Ghosh of certain sensitive historical and political issues and conflicts, where he goes into the shades of gray, and does not limit himself to black and white. The class that the english-speaking Indian elite Arjun or the Collector Dey belong to is the result of pragmatic and premeditated British thought, far removed from any ideas of personal and political freedom. The very idea behind providing a western education as pithily summarized by Macaulay, was conceived to breed Indians ''who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect.'' The modern concepts and liberalization behind some of the measures taken by the British was not to take India towards enlightenment, but to ensure their continued slavery, a fact Ghosh has underlined time and again in the novel, through Uma and otherwise. And he has not limited himself to that, he has worked through dialogs and often subtle imagery to peel away layers of complex political and ethical topics like servitude, mutiny, societal roles for women and self- rule. But most of the characters in "The Glass Palace" do not reflect the same hearty conviction of portrayal as the political views some of them express. Uma and Arjun are only two of the characters who seem more fleshed out not just because of their vocal outpourings but because of the dramatic and almost abrupt volte-face in their respective beliefs and thoughts. Uma is more of a mouthpiece for Ghosh and his standpoint, but Arjun is brought to life with his self-doubts, frailties and inconsistencies. Rajkumar is not very interesting despite being the spearhead of action, particularly because he is painted over with a rag-to-riches determination so much as to make him hackneyed. Only near the end of his term does Rajkumar reveal different facets of his personality when he realizes that: "At that moment the world held no more beautiful sound than this utterance of rage: this primeval sound of life proclaiming its determination to defend itself". Most of the characters starting from Dolly who is "a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines" and joins a monastery at the end of the novel or the next generation of Neel, Dinu, Alison or Jaya are not well outlined. In fact, towards the end of the novel, Ghosh seems to add a lot of characters to his cast but does not establish any of them fully, serving up mere lightning sketches instead of full technicolor. Moreover, the characters as well as themes do not appear to fit in as part of a seamless whole. The characters are so involved in the political and sociological issues of their time that they do not sufficiently engage with each other, or show real emotions and motives. They are very obvious pawns of the plot, and seem deliberately placed in their various locations: Rajkumar spends much of his time forging bonds with people on his way to becoming a patriarch, and the offspring of these people fall in love with his own, or vice versa, in a seemingly contrived fashion. Ghosh treats the romances as if they were borrowed from romance novels, and all his women are described as "beautiful beyond belief, beyond comprehension"or some variation of the phrase, and though the general atmosphere of kindliness between the characters is done well, the actual romantic encounters are left wanting in emotional depth and vigor. Not only does everyone become duly happily married before the World War II, at the end of it a lot of these relationships break apart, making them feel as arbitrary as the former matchmaking. Everything seems conveniently arranged, one could say almost too conveniently arranged: Neel, the elder son of Dolly and Rajkumar makes an appearance as if on cue in a Calcutta film-studio after hailing from faraway Burma at the exact moment when Manju, Uma's niece, needs to be extricated from an embarrassing situation, and they do the obvious and fall in love, knight-in-shining armor et al. Alison and Dinu meet under similarly improbable situations, and the love matches seem more an exigency of the plot than a product of genuine emotion. Such coincidences mount, especially towards the end of the novel, and though coincidences are known to happen in real life as well as in fiction and are perfectly legitimate, these particularly smack of the author's schemes more than anything else. Not only do the characters at the end of the novel seem to have been created first and connections between them established later, there do remain certain redundant elements in the story, for example, the continued descriptions of the deposed Burmese King's life in exile has been detailed masterfully and in abundance, but contributes nothing towards the essential plot: it is made too important to be just a background, and not well-integrated enough to be part of the novel. INA, Indian independence struggle and other historical events are also touched upon in an attempt to unify South-east Asia as one land with common heritage, and a common history of oppression by the British but this could be better achieved through a work of non-fiction. The themes of colonialism, servitude, moral and ethical dilemmas struggle to integrate with the family saga, they are not interwoven through cause and effect but seem to run like two parallel stories. In the end, the congress between Rajkumar and Uma, the war veterans ,as an escape from history seems a little trite, especially if one has read Ghosh's "Shadow Lines", where he has turned out a similar encounter with better assurance, not to mention the quick trip to Myanmar and the meeting with Suu Kyi, which is a touch too rushed, if not far-fetched. All this naturally affects the pace of the novel, which plods in the beginning but suddenly takes up a breathless pace towards the end. Also, though Ghosh's novel is thoroughly well-researched, with bits that are really interesting and informative, and a lot of it provides colorful background, especially the part related to the teak industry, the King's court or the oil-wells; his long encyclopedia styled explanations bring the story to spectacular halts, it is as if a work of non-fiction meant for reference in educational environments is embedded inside a work of fiction. The information does not become part of the plot or action, it merely comes in as chunks of input, intriguing but nevertheless fatal for the pace of the story. Thus, Ghosh has written a brilliant political novel cloaked in a family saga, a cloak that tends to dim its brilliance. He would have perhaps done better to separate the two. As it stands, we have some very straightforward and incisive analysis, stretches of almost lyrical prose, scathing attacks on colonialism and all its evils, and learned pages of academic interest to those fascinated by the charm of South-east of Asia, but an unconvincingly drafted and unevenly paced and novel at best. Read More