Questions of Allegiance

What an exciting time for Indian writing in English. Every month, it seems, another young Indian writer publishes a novel capturing the migratory pangs of the new Indian diaspora, an immigrant group that now ranges from dot-com engineers in Silicon Valley to taxi drivers in New York. In “The Glass Palace,” Amitav Ghosh has staked a different claim: turning the clock backward to examine a lesser-known, earlier Indian diaspora, and in doing so exploring the foundation of modern Indian identity.

Ambitious, multigenerational, “The Glass Palace” is a saga akin to a 19th-century Russian novel. Opening with the British invasion of Burma in 1885, its early chapters focus on Rajkumar, a penniless boy who, through sheer intelligence and pluck, becomes a rich merchant in Burma and marries Dolly, a lady-in-waiting from the exiled Burmese royal court.

From Rajkumar, the novel expands to a vast array of characters in Burma, India and Malaya, all connected through the broader currents of history and the intimate links of friendship and marriage. Out of this large cast, the two most searing portraits are of Rajkumar, the unquestioning empire builder, and Arjun, the tormented warrior who tries desperately to break free of the empire that has molded him.

In the 19th century, Britain was expanding its commercial interests, especially in its colonies. India in particular had become not just a continent to exploit and rule, but a source of raw labor and military muscle that bolstered British dominance worldwide and kept the imperial machine humming. With the end of slavery in the empire in 1833, thousands of poor, willing Indian workers were recruited for work in Burma, Fiji, the Caribbean and Africa--on plantations, in docks, mills and railroads--while others were conscripted into the British army, turning India into what one character in “The Glass Palace” calls a “vast garrison.”

In 1857, the Sepoy Mutiny, a failed rebellion of Indian soldiers, contributed to a jittery mistrust between English and Indians. By World War II, when Indian soldiers were forced to put the fight against Japan ahead of their own independence, this simmering tension culminated in a group of soldiers rebelling and forming their own Indian National Army.

This is the complicated backdrop for Ghosh’s novel, which centers on the fascinating story of Indians in Burma. By the late 19th century, there was a sizable Indian community in Burma; many were recruited to fill the lowly positions; others, such as Rajkumar, came to prosper as merchants in the growing economy. In the 20th century, as India’s independence movement gained strength, and England and Japan faced off in East Asia, these overseas Indians stood at a particularly agonizing crossroads, which tested their sense of national identity. Tragically, the idyll of Indian families in Burma ended in 1942, during the Japanese invasion, when thousands were forced to flee by foot through jungle and mountains back to India.

Rajkumar is the quintessential opportunist, in the best sense of the word. He makes his first money recruiting indentured workers in India, then builds up a teak export business in the hills of Burma. Through Rajkumar we can observe the wheels of British commerce transforming the subcontinent and its other colonies into a vast network of trading and exploitation. And though this book aims at a deep critique of empire, Ghosh does not have so narrow an agenda as to simply bash the imperial masters. After all, in the new colonial system, someone like Rajkumar is not stuck in his born station in life, but given a greater chance to succeed on his own initiative. Instead, through the novel’s characters, Ghosh shows the subtle questions of allegiance that come to torment them all.

The first real stirrings of disquiet occur in the transitional figure of Beni Prasad Dey, the district collector responsible for the welfare of the king of Burma, who was exiled to Ratnagiri in India. The Collector, as he is known in “The Glass Palace,” has achieved the ultimate status for an Indian, as an esteemed civil servant in the bureaucratic Raj. And yet the Collector is plagued by doubts, “haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues.” On a deeper level, though, the Collector is confronted with the awkward position of being a willing servant to an alien power.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire had evolved from being a powerful trading presence into a huge government apparatus, imposing its hierarchies and protocols on its colonies. Figures such as the Collector were instrumental in enforcing its myriad colonial rules--even the most absurd ones, such as treating the king of Burma like a caged animal and controlling who his daughters, the princesses, could marry. As the Collector’s wife, Uma, reflects, “Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what it had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules?” The Collector, a tragic figure, is seeded with an incipient nationalism, one that is thwarted by time and place.

A generation later, in the late 1930s, Arjun, the nephew of Uma, takes this self-questioning to new, agonizing heights. Arjun joins the British Army and becomes one of the first Indian officers to rise in its ranks. At first, as a colonized subject, even eating at the officer’s mess hall was an exhilarating barrier to smash, “an adventure, a glorious infringement of taboos. They ate foods that none of them had ever touched at home. . . .” Arjun is venturing where few Indians had ever gone: mingling with Englishmen and talking and behaving like them, too. If the West represented progressive modernism, Arjun throws himself headlong into this frontier in the hopes of turning himself into a “new, more complete kind of Indian.” Eventually, though, Arjun is troubled by the slights of the British officers and the rumblings of dissatisfaction among fellow Indian soldiers who question the Crown’s aims when their own cause--freedom--has been delayed.

In the Indian epic the “Mahabharata,” Arjun is the warrior who pauses in battle to question the purpose of war and the kingdom he is fighting for. So too does this modern Arjun begin to doubt his soldier’s training--during World War II, when he encounters those drawn to the aims of the Indian National Army. As a fellow soldier remarks, “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 . . . “ During the Japanese invasion, Arjun comes to understand what it means to literally give over his trained body in bloody battle, and he wonders whether he even possesses his own self. He sees himself as molded by “an unseen potter . . . he had become a thing unto itself--no longer aware of the pressure of the potter’s hand.” Worse yet, in surrendering himself so completely to the British army, he realizes that “he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness.” He had become an unthinking machine, well-oiled and well-trained to fight for the Crown. “Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion.” He was sacrificing his very life, and yet this life was no longer his own.

“The Glass Palace” is saturated with these questions of agency and volition. The danger in such a novel is that the fiction can become schematic, as characters fulfill a particular facet of history and the balance tilts toward fact and overwhelms the imaginary terrain. Some of the portrayals in “The Glass Palace” seem to be willed, workmanlike representations: Uma, for instance, a sheltered wife, has an abrupt transformation after the disgrace of her bureaucrat husband and reinvents herself as a leader in the independence movement. Characters often pause to deliver articulate disquisitions on their place in history and politics. “The Glass Palace” is crammed full of historical minutiae, as if the scholarly nonfiction writer in Ghosh could not resist squeezing in yet another detail, be it how teak was extracted from the forests; the exact symptoms of anthrax, a disease that destroyed the load-bearing elephants; or the engine specifications for new model cars. These nearly textbook descriptions sometimes detract from the flow of the story.

Still, there is something irresistible about the novel’s ambition and how thoroughly it dissects the impact of the British colonial enterprise. “The Glass Palace,” like its far-ranging subject, is capacious; it reflects the author’s own curiosity and hunger for understanding. Ghosh shows how, for all its oppression, British colonialism helped to create a cosmopolitan culture in which Indians and others recreated themselves in foreign lands. Ghosh has taken great care to depict these mingled identities, where questions of allegiance are not so clear-cut. There is the figure of Saya John, for instance, a Europeanized, Christian Malayan, who speaks Hindustani and builds up a successful rubber plantation, which his son and American wife come to run. Character, for Ghosh, is built up through the careful accrual of culture and history, and it is against this complex panorama that his creations are most vibrant.

Toward the novel’s end, a Burmese writer remarks: “In classical writing, everything happens outside--on streets, in public squares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens--in places that everyone can imagine,” yet a modern writer must take the terrifying step “past the threshold, into the house.” Ghosh’s aim here is to do both: to cross the threshold of the private sphere, yet never to lose track of the larger sweep of history--all the while mounting a devastating critique of how the British Empire left its indelible mark on the souls of Indians.

This is “The Glass Palace’s” most profound point: that human beings are molded in large part by forces beyond their control. The result is a rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland--a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.