The Glass palace

“The Glass Palace” is a fairytale soaked with anger, despair and tragedy….that may seem to be a funny way to describe a storyline but that was the closest definition in words that I could get….

Amitav Ghosh, once again, effortlessly puts a face to people and places that have been relegated to the sidelines of history or worse, forgotten completely….in that sense, this book can be called a fictionalized storytelling of his book “In an Antique Land”. Even though the subject matter is different, the essence remains the same…chronicling of a forgotten people, forgotten events, forgotten values, forgotten lives, a forgetting that is as much deliberate as not…..

Through four generations, starting from an intrepid ten year old boy, Rajkumar, Ghosh takes us into a world that few of us could have imagined, a world that starts from Burma (now Myanmar) and in a sense ends there as well, about 80 years apart….Its a world that starts with the toppling of a king and the mowing down of a way of life, a symbol of an end of an era, by the greatest imperialistic machine then known - the British Empire and ends with a maniacal military Junta (that still holds power today) and in between, we are witness to the changing of lives of Rajkumar and his family amidst a world that is radically being transformed, both violently and quietly….

From the first page, the story of “The Glass Palace” draws you into itself and weaves a magical yarn around you….as the British cannons displace the last king of Burma (King Thebaw) and begin the transformation of Burma, one gets a sense of a story that is going to be almost epical…..through Rajkumar’s quest for Dolly, the six year old girl that he sees as a ten year old and never forgets, one gets the sense that the various relationships will be quite out of the ordinary and the extraordinary situations that the relationships find themselves enhance their volatility, the relationships constantly colliding with the changing circumstances, sometimes strengthening themselves and sometimes being extinguished….

Through King Thebaw and his wife Queen Supalayat and their four daughters, Rajkumar and Dolly, Uma and her husband-the collector, Dinu and Alison, Arjun and Alison, and Neel and Manju, we navigate a world which is being re-born, both figuratively and physically……through the exile of the King and the collector, we are witness to the hypocrisy of Empire-building and the myths that it generates to survive; through Uma’s assertion of her individuality, we are witness to the emerging feminist ideas sweeping the world; through Rajkumar we are witness to the changing equations of the world where an underdog gets more than an even chance of making it; through Dinu and Alison, who are brought together and torn apart by a world undergoing convulsions and caught in the maelstrom of the Japanese invasion, we are witness to a relationship that leaves a deep mark on the reader; with Arjun and his dilemma of being an Indian foot-soldier in the pay of the government that oppresses his own country and yet claims for itself, the ideals of freedom, equality and democracy (déjà vu anyone??), we move on to his ultimate decision and his great individual tragedy and through all this we are witness to a side of history that is seldom treated properly in our fiction and non-fiction, possessed as we are with a history that is largely one-dimensional and often worse - manufactured……

The story has a very powerful message that becomes self-evident as we end it….its not put down in a line of course; the message, as we end the book, seems to resonate throughout the book….maybe to find it in a single line, the closest we come is to the thoughts that rage through Manju’s mind as she cranes up her neck to see the long line of Japanese bombers up in the sky that has just shattered her life and everything that mattered to her…..”who are these people who take upon themselves to change the course of history, these faceless killers who kill families who have not done harm to them or their own, even remotely”….

The message of the ultimate tragedy and the small triumphs of the underdogs of history constantly trying to claim themselves, is told with great compassion and insight. It is told with a sense of regret, when we witness along with the characters, the merciless march of history that marches on regardless of right or wrong…..the message that this never ceases and that there are at all times, throughout history, Dinus and the Alisons, Rajkumars and Umas have existed and exist at all times, now and later is perhaps what gives this tale a feeling of an epic…..and the fact that the message is never shouted from the rooftops makes it all the more potent, and the reason why its message perhaps stays with you for a long time (forever?) after one closes the book….

It’s a scholar’s story (it was five years in the making) told by a master story-teller who believes in and feels for his characters, the reason why the characters almost seem in flesh to us and its also a story which is revolutionary in its cry for an alternative retelling of history, from the point of view of the common people….if its true that history has been written by people who have hanged heroes, it’s a story told through the eyes of the hanged….if its true that history is a set of fables agreed upon, then this story is written about a people for whom the fables are anything but fables but are perhaps the blood soaked garments of reality…..the retelling of history shorn of dry facts and figures and dates and one line events, and instead a history made of flesh and blood and tears and sweat is perhaps the greatest and not the only triumph of this book…..