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There was a fabled hall called the Glass Palace in Mandalay before the British annexed Burma in 1885.Its walls of shining crystal and mirrored ceiling "shimmered with sparks of golden light" when the lamps were lit. Situated in the spacious garden of the fort where the Burmese royal family lived, it was a dazzling emblem of the country's elegance and self-sufficiency until devastated by foreign rule. Towards the beginning of the novel the readers are given a brief glimpse of the palace through the awe-struck eyes of an eleven year old urchin as it was being sacked and plundered by the local people before the British troops arrived to take possession. After that, for nearly five hundred pages there is no mention of the building which gives the novel its title. Just before the novel ends, the Glass Palace is mentioned twice,: we find a young research student of Rangoon University writing a dissertation on a famous nineteenth century history of Burma called The Glass Palace Chronicles; later, one of the few survivors in this vast saga of intertwining families, rediscovered in the final chapter, is seen to be running a modest photo studio called The Glass Palace where young people, stifled by the military dictatorship of present day Burma, gather to open their minds, to discuss books, pictures and ideas. Without labouring a symbolic point, in retrospect the author is able to imbue the title with images of loss as well as hope. This is how most of the novel works. There are so many issues, so many events and so many people involved that the author rarely ever pauses to create special effects or heavily underline an idea. The story spans more than a century in the history of the subcontinent, people get involved in unexpected relationships across countries and cultures, wars are fought, rebellions quelled, political and ethical issues are debated, fortunes are made and lost. The writer reports everything accurately, thoughtfully - his precision backed up by meticulous research. Military manoeuvres, models of automobile and aircraft, drilling of oil, timber trade,food, clothing, every detail is historically specified. No one is directly indicted in the novel, not a single person idealised. Yet casually mentioned details get linked across space and time to form haunting patterns, their cumulative effect staying with the reader long after the novel is over. For all its vividness of description and range of human experiences, The Glass Palace will remain for me memorable mainly as the most scathing critique of British colonialism I have ever come across in fiction. The novel begins and ends in Burma, a country physically so close to us yet about which our ignorance and indifference have been abysmal. In our childhood we occasionally heard of rich Indian families who had come back from Burma to escape Japanese bombing. No school book taught us anything about the country's past before it became part of the empire and I am embarrassed to admit that my first acquaintance with Mandalay and emperor Thebaw was through a silly Rudyard Kipling jingle about a British soldier and Burmese girl: "Her petticoat was yellow and
little coat was green Thebaw's proud queen, I am chastened to learn now from Amitav Ghosh's book, was Supayalat, feared and admired blindly by the people of Burma. The unceremonious removal of the king and the pregnant queen from Mandalay to distant Ratnagiri in the west coast of India ( the reverse movement of Bahadur Shah Zafar's deportation to Rangoon a generation ago ) was an astute move by the conquering British, successful in humiliating the royal couple completely, also erasing them from public memory at home. Forgotten and abandoned, the king and queen led a life of increasing shabbiness and obscurity in an unfamiliar territory while their country got depleted of its valuable natural resources - teak, ivory, petroleum. The rapacity and greed inherent in the colonial process is seen concentrated in what happened in Burma, and the author does not gloss over the fact that Indians were willing collaborators in this British enterprise of depredation. Not only did two-thirds of the British army consist of Indians when Burma was conquered, years later the Saya San rebellion was brutally suppressed by deploying Indians soldiers. A small news item appeared in a Calcutta newspaper with the gruesome picture of sixteen decapitated heads on display but in the thirties the Indian public was too pre-occupied with its own national movement to notice what was happening in Burma. The novel also lays bare the process by which Indian agents became rich by transporting indentured labourer to work in the plantations. The actual protagonists in this novel are not kings and queens but ordinary people - some of them orphaned or displaced - buffeted around by forces greater than themselves. "There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began. But that is not something that is owed to us ", says one of them. As in other Amitav Ghosh novels, human lives spill over national boundaries, refusing to stay contained in neat compartments. A person is remembered not as Burmese, Indian, Chinese,Malay or American - but merely as Uma, Dolly, Saya John, Alison, Dinu, Neel or Daw Thin Thin Aye. That Dinu is also called Tun Pe and Neel's other name is Sein Win further destabilises nation-based identities. Yet, paradoxically, nationalism is a major concern in this novel. Two of the most crucial debates in are predicated upon this. These debates are not ancillary to the narrative, one cannot skip them in order to get on with the story. As in a classic Indian novel about nation and identity written early in the century - Gora (1909) whose plot progressed through discussion of ideas - in The Glass Palace too - meaning lies not in individual utterances, but in their dialogical negotiations, the emphasis being on the plurality of viewpoints. The stances of most of the major figures get gradually modified during the course of the novel through mutual interaction - theory and experience, duty and emotion often getting into each other's way to complicate both polemics and praxis. Among the many debates ( e.g. about colonialism and women, Gandhi and Ghadar party, Congress vs. anti-Fascist position on the Second World War etc.) the one that reverberates most resonantly in the novel relates to the ethical dilemma of the Indian officers in the British Army some of whom later deserted to form the INA ( Indian National Army). Prefigured in scattered episodes involving other characters, this debate gets finally crystallised through two young officers in the Ist Jat Light Infantry, commissioned just before the Second World War: Arjun Roy and Hardayal Singh. First ever in his bhadralok family to join the army, Arjun is overwhelmed by its glamour, takes pride in the fact that his regiment has received medals for "putting down the Arab rebellion in Mesopotamia" and "fighting the Boxer rebels in China".But it is Hardayal, born in a family which had served the army for three-generations who is beset by doubt. The inscription at the Military Academy in Dehra Dun had said "The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time." Where was this country they were supposed to defend ? The moral crisis comes to a head in a forest hide-out in Burma where they lie injured after a Japanese attack. Hardayal confesses he cannot carry on with his divided life: " In the trenches...I had an eerie feeling. It was strange to be sitting on one side of a battle line, knowing that you had to fight and knowing at the same time that it wasn't really your fight... knowing that you risked everything to defend a way of life that pushes you to the sideline. It's almost as if you're fighting against yourself." Arjun's code of honour will not permit him to think these thoughts and to him the idea of joining the Japanese for the liberation of India would be a senseless exchange of one set of rulers for another. The conflict is further tangled by Arjun's relationship on the one hand with his loyal batman Kishan Singh who wants to know what the English word `mercenary' means and whether it can be applied to them, - and his admiration for and allegiance to his British commanding officer. Each of Amitav Ghosh's books, (except Countdown), invariably focuses on themes in history and connections across geography that have seldom been explored before, and does so with imagination supported by archival research, his narrative inventiveness matched by his luminous prose. The Glass Palace, his most ambitious work so far, makes no effort to be lyrical or evocative in style, the careful chronicling of an eventful century prioritised over experiments with language and technique. Yet there are many moments of sheer incandescence that seem to appear almost incidentally. For example, the description of Alison waiting under the tin awning of a railway station "wearing sunglasses and a long black dress. She looked limp, wilted, - a candlewick on whom grief burnt like a flame." Or in another instance when the English soldiers marched towards Mandalay and people ran in panic. "Rajkumar was swept along in the direction of the river. As he ran, he became aware of a ripple in the ground beneath him, a kind of drumbeat in the earth, a rhythmic tremor that travelled up his spine through the soles of his feet." In this clear lucid narrative, vividly concretised characters, their desires, longings and ambitions are constantly swayed and disrupted by the tide of history but the blending of the public and the personal spheres is seamless. Some of the concerns of Ghosh run through several texts. A scene of mob violence which was at the centre of The Shadow Lines reappears in different contexts at least twice in The Glass Palace foregrounding the helplessness of individuals during collective frenzy., an increasingly common feature of our time. The incubus-like military regime in Burma today, which sucks its life from the rest of the country had been mentioned Dancing in Cambodia.As I write this review, reports of further repressive measures by the government in Myanmar on Aung San Suu Kyi and her followers appear in our newspapers, almost as a sequel to the novel I have just finished reading. One would have expected a sense of dejection at the end of a novel that deals with so much human tragedy, wars, deaths, devastation and dislocation. But the last section of the novel is electrifying. When the two surviving members of the families in Calcutta and Burma meet through their common bond of photography - which incidentally is a running motif in the novel - there is in a sense an opening up of doors. The most unexpected are the last three pages which encapsulate past and present, evoking a mood of reconciliation and peace through a startling and bizarre image. Each reader of The Glass Palace will pick out a different strand from this weave of many stories. " A word on the page is like a string on an instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it sounds different", says a writer in the novel, using a different metaphor. Whichever story or music one prefers, no reader is likely to come out of the experience of reading this remarkable novel unscathed. Read Chandra's review of The Glass Palace _________________ Reviews of other novels by Amitav Ghosh: All at: _________________ Indian
Review of Books _________________ Read about Amitav Ghosh: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Ghosh.html Visit Amitav Ghosh's website: http://www.amitavghosh.com For info on Anglo-Burmese Wars and history of Myanmar
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