A Subaltern Perspective to Amitav Ghosh’s the Glass Palace

A Subaltern Perspective to Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

U.Vivek

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Thanthai Hans Roever College (A),Perambalur-621 220.

Tamil Nadu.

(Abstract)

        The present paper deals with  Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palaceon subaltern perspective. Ghosh’s novels, broadly speaking, reflectthe colonial as well as postcolonial society, the patterns of history, subaltern consciousness, and issues of crossing national boundaries, the meaning of political freedom, impacts of globalization and dynamics of displacement in his own distinctive style.

His novel The Glass Palace begins with the shattering of the kingdom of Burma, and tells the story of  people’s fortune,  a family and its fate. It traces the life of Rajkumar, a poor Indian boy, a subaltern, who is lifted on the tides of political and social turmoil to build an empire in the Burmese take over forest. No one is directly indicted in the novel and not a single person is idealised however some of them are casually mentioned. The details get linked across space and time to form haunting patterns. The Glass Palaceis memorable mainly because of its  scathing critique of British colonialism.

Key Words: Subaltern, colonialism, Globalization, displacement, consciousness

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghose, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army and he was educated at the Doon School, St.Stephen’s College, Delhi; Delhi University;India. He was awarded a D.Phil. in social anthropology by the Delhi School of Economics and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Ghosh’s novels reflect, besides the colonial as well as postcolonial society, patterns of history, subaltern consciousness, and issues of crossing national boundaries, the meaning of political freedom, impacts of globalization and dynamics of displacement in his own distinctive style. Amitav Ghosh is at the forefront of this newly acquired fearlessness and freedom of Indian writers. A critical study of the prime thematic concerns of Amitav Ghosh’s novel is thus an opportunity not just to peruse a substantial body of work that meditates upon a core set of issues concerning postcolonialism in the contemporary fictional writing with special focus on the marginalised subaltern; but also to view history with a perspective of fiction. Attempt in the proposed research work, would be to make a thematic study of the fictional works by Amitav Ghosh and try to unravel the patterns inherent therein.

The Glass Placeis a perfect manifestation of almost all the major concerns of Ghosh, blended into a wonderful epic narrative. But overriding all the thematic concerns is the theme of postcoloniality. The homeless and displaced migrant native is an inseparable part of a postcolonial novel.

Nation formation is a major tool in the process of colonization, as in journeying from an amorphous nation less state to that of conscious nationhood, the new nation people feel privileged and subsequently relegate their apparently disorganised past to the realms of history. This nation-formation involves a poignant dispersal and scattering of people across man-made borders. The wide movement of people in the recent history of human race in the wake of imperialist and expansionist programmes across Africa and eastward in Asia bear adequate testimony to this. The Glass Palacerecords and incites the experiences of first such races inhabiting British occupied territories in South East Asia, who are dying to make their own nation.

The Glass Placecontains a proliferation of characters which include the privileged as well as the subaltern. The royal family-Thebaw, Queen Supayalat and the Burmese princesses; and commoners like Dolly, Rajkumar, Saya John and Uma are united ironically by the gales of colonial displacement. These protagonists forced by the rough historical winds are displaced from Burma to India, Malaya, Singapore and back again, each time involving a pattern of panic, crowded mobs and soldiers on the march as already illustrated in the very opening of the novel.

Rajkumar, initially a subaltern, comes out as a true transnational postcolonial subject firstly by being a Kalaa, a foreigner in an alien territory, then by being subjected to colonization of a more severe kind in participating in the great national upheaval that the British occupation of Burma entails, followed by another turbulent experience in imperial India and his foray into the Malayan forest resources. He inhabits a truly borderless post-colonial space beyond the interstices of race, class and nation in which his life is enmeshed.         The hybrid nature of the colonized-subaltern who evolves himself into an affluent businessman and comes to resemble the colonizer is revealed through the character of Rajkumar, who graduates from a petty immigrant lad, through his apprenticeship as a luga lei under Saya John, to a merchant who is revered in the timber trading circles of Burma. Saya John, his mentor, is another transnational from China who evolves himself into a semblance of Europeans in his garb and manner. Saya John instructs Rajkumar in the life of young Europeans who taught them how “to bend the work of nature to your will” (TGP75). Saya John’s conception that the whole enterprise of logging timber from the forests could not have been possible without the Europeans’ ingenuity; Saya’s knowledge of this and his imitation of the white Sahib’s lifestyle, involves a compromise between the complete separation from the empire and complete dependence upon the empire for its existence.