The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Review by Aparita

Anthropologically inclined academic turned writer Amitav Ghosh's latest work, The Glass Palace, may seem like a daunting task to embark upon, as indeed it is. However, it is a task that is well-worth undertaking. As you read the five hundred odd pages of a meticulously researched history that spans nearly two centuries and several countries, you will be taken on a voyage that will give you a sense of the epic proportion of the material that Ghosh is dealing with. In doing so, Ghosh invariably addresses several issues that are nascent to the writings of an academic such as himself.

The novel opens introducing us to one of the main characters, Rajkumar Raha. We see the world through the eyes of the precocious eleven-year-old boy who is left to fend for himself as he watches the disintegration of his family, the British invasion of Mandalay that brings about the collapse of the royal family of Burma and, towards the end of the novel, the crumbling of a nation that was once known as the 'golden land'. The Glass Palace then follows the meteoric rise and fall of Rajkumar, who establishes a flourishing teak industry business with the help of his half Chinese mentor Saya John and his son Matthew, and embarks on a mission to find Dolly, one of the child attendants of Queen Supalayat. Since the royal family had been sent to exile in Goa, Rajkumar follows the trail and marries Dolly, with some assistance from Uma, the wife of the District Collector of Goa. Uma gets involved with the Indian independence movement. Rajkumar and Matthew enter the rubber plantation business under guidance of Saya John. Years pass and various offspring are produced. Not entirely unexpectedly, the paths of the two generations cross. In fact you can understand why the novel has come under some attacks that call it a "middlebrow family saga"; but the novel is much more than that.

Amongst other issues, The Glass Palace raises the issue of dislocation by imbuing it with political and social realities that afflicted India and her southeast neighbors at the time of the downfall of the British Empire. In doing so, Ghosh opens a can of worms that is not often dealt with in current Indo-Anglian literature - the complicity of India with the imperialistic operations of Britain. Just as he deals with the racism faced by the Indian officers of the Indian Army under British rule through the characters of Arjun and Hardy, Ghosh also deals with the problems that the Indian Army faced when fighting 'Indians' in Malaya. By dealing with such uncomfortable parts of the Indian history Ghosh treads those paths that we usually ignore when we deal with the history of India in relation to it's struggle for independence. The interesting part about this questioning is that Ghosh deals with the history of Southeast Asia, an area that South Asian writing has not yet explored fully despite the strong links between the two.

Blurring boundaries between nations and between fact and fiction, while questioning the standard history that we are brought up, Ghosh does not hesitate to meander from the track and gives us vistas of vivid descriptions of Burma and Calcutta, a testament to his journalistic eye, whether it be the painful account of diseased elephant or the pomp and splendor of Neel and Manju's marriage. In the midst of the expansive details, however, epic moments of global history are dealt with within a few sentences, immediately drawing back the reader into the action of the story.

If you have a few languid afternoons to spare and someone to dole out endless cups of chai, this is a book that you can curl up with. The straightforward narrative will tell you a story that asks a lot of questions and leave you asking a lot of questions, which is the point of good book.