I am still hooked on to Amitav Ghosh, and took up The Glass Palace again. In this brilliant and universally acclaimed novel, the author captures the forgotten memories of our past and present in a fine balance that reflects his meticulous research and carries the cadence of evocative lyricism. The Glass Palace captures the mood, reality, and history of a time and event that is not always a part of the collective Indian consciousness.
The book traverses a vast canvas of historical, political, and social events, starting with the British invasion of Burma in 1885 to Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta-ruled Myanmar of 1996. Between the two framing epochs of repression and dominance, we find Russo-Japanese turmoil, the World Wars, India’s epic struggle for independence, and a family’s search for its roots. The characters that dominate these events and places are fascinating as real people with real struggles, not angst-ridden traumatized people stilted in their ability to carry on with their lives.
The story starts with the British entry into Burma, as seen and heard by the young orphan Rajkumar, who becomes the central figure of consciousness in the novel. Entering the Palace changes his life forever for there he meets the defeated Queen’s beautiful maid, Dolly, the woman who will shape his life and thoughts for years to come. Many lives intersect—Dolly, Rajkumar, Uma and her Collector husband, and later, Jaya, Bela, Kishan Singh, Arjun, Dinu, and even the iconic Aung San Suu Kyi. Through these intersecting and defiant characters, imperialism and colonialism become bywords for political upheavals that rend asunder a nation and its culture and people. The Burmese royal family’s removal to Ratnagiri reflect an earlier national shame, the removal of Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon, in an imperialist attempt to wipe out a nation’s history and the collective conscious. With royalty banished from its kingdom, the Burmese people, as were Indians earlier, lose their symbol of resilience and defiance. The symbol is resurrected in the book much later, in another epoch, through the riveting figure of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Glass Palace tugs at our memory of a past that nobody remembers, an era that changed the course of history, repression that needs to be remembered in order to fight modern day imperialist tendencies. Most importantly, the novel chronicles the history of two nations that were intrinsically related through commerce and shared traditions.
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