The Glass Palace and its contours of  British colonial exploitation of Burma

‘THE GLASS PALACE’ functions as a metaphor, ‘glass is brittle
and implies transparency. Palace is the symbol of power. Glass Palace
is an illusion that is created around power. The people in the glass palace
do not have the liberty to throw stones at others. The colonized people
are always imprisoned in the glass palace and they have lost the capacity
to throw stones at colonial masters.

Auradhkar, Sarika,“The Glass Place”, Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Study, New Delhi: Creative Books, 2007

The Glass palace (2000), an alluring historical fiction written by Amitav Ghosh details a story of three generations, spread over three interlinked parts of the British Empire—Burma, Malaya, and India. The novel is woven around the entwining relationships among four families: the Burmese King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat (deposed by the British in 1885 and exiled to Ratnagiri in India) and their daughters and attendants; Rajkumar Raha, a Bengali orphan emigrant to Burma, and his descendants; Saya John, his son Matthew and his family; and Uma, the wife (and later widow) of the Collector of Ratnagiri. Their fortunes are set against a backdrop of stirring historical events—the British conquest of Burma, the consolidation of the Empire in India and Malaya, the First and Second World Wars—conceived and executed on an epic scale, in a time frame ranging from 1885 to 1996.

The novel begins and ends in Burma. In spite of being geographically so close to us, our history text school textbooks had no mentions of Burma’s history and our ignorance and indifference regarding Burma have been appalling. Burma, now Myanmar finds its mention in civics textbooks as an egregious example of military dictatorship. Burma was a prized possession under the British empire due to its timber, minerals, oil and other natural resources. It erupted into a ferocious nationalist movement after World War I and a large-scale boycott of British goods and administration were launched in protest. Burmese nationalists allied with the Indian National Congress and in order to weaken the Burmese nationalist movement, British partitioned Burma from India in 1937 After World War II, under the leadership of U Aung San, this movement reached its pinnacle, and Burma gained independence on January 4, 1948.

The Glass Palace opens in Burma the ‘Golden Land’, one of the richest lands in Asia, a courtly society, free from abject poverty and illiteracy ruled by a revered king and feared queen capable of legendary cruelty. Lying in a geo-sweet spot and passageway between trade relations of the east and the west, Burma hosted a number of foreigners including envoys and missionaries from Europe, traders and merchants of Greek, Armenian, Chinese and Indian origin labourers and boatmen from Bengal, Malaya and the Coromandel coast,white-clothed astrologers from Manipur and businessmen from Gujarat amongst the many others. The turmoil in the comparatively peaceful state began over a very petty dispute with a British timber company- a technical matter concerning some logs of teak. It was clear that the company was in the wrong; they were sidestepping the kingdom’s customs regulations, cutting up logs to avoid paying duties. The Englishmen carried their complaints to the British Government in Rangoon and humiliating ultimatums followed. The Burmese court refused to yield to the British ultimatum. Consequently, the British forces invaded Burma within days with the help of Indian soldiers and the royal family was sent into exile to a quiet part of India, Ratnagiri. This exile is a dichotomy to the exile of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was captured in Delhi and sent to Rangoon, Burma. 

Burma in British hands suffers immensely with the plunder of its natural resources. As the author puts it “ The British occupation had changed everything: Burma had been quickly integrated into the Empire, forcibly converted into a province of British India. Courtly Mandalay was now a bustling commercial hub; resources were being exploited with an energy and efficiency hitherto undreamt of. The Mandalay palace had been refurbished to serve the conquerors’ recondite pleasures: the west wing had been converted into a British Club; the Queen’s Hall of Audience had now become a billiard room; the mirrored walls were lined with months-old copies of Punch and the Illustrated London News; the gardens had been dug up to make room for tennis courts and polo grounds; the exquisite little monastery in which Thebaw had spent his novitiate had become a chapel where Anglican priests administered the sacrament to British troops. Mandalay, it was confidently predicted, would soon become the Chicago of Asia; the prosperity was the natural destiny of a city that guarded the confluence of two of the world’s mightiest waterways, the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin.” (Pg 58) Many like Rajkumar and Saya John take calculated risks and become part of the British exploitation for livelihood and earn enormous profits out of it. In the case of Rajkumar, it was initially contracting Indians from Bengal and then later timer trade. Meanwhile, the King and Queen lived a life of utter despair and decay. The Queen greeted her occasional visitors with her proud, thin-lipped smile. “Yes, look around you, look at how we live. Yes, we who ruled the richest land in Asia are now reduced to this. This is what they have done to us, this is what they will do to all of Burma. They took our kingdom, promising roads and railways, and ports, but mark my words, this is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone—all the gems, the timber, and the oil—and then they too will leave. In our golden Burma, where no one ever went hungry and no one was too poor to write and read, all that will remain is destitution and ignorance, famine, and despair. We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of their progress; millions more will follow. This is what awaits us all; this is how we will all end—as prisoners, in shantytowns born of the plague. A hundred years hence you will read the indictment of Europe’s greed in the difference between the kingdom of Siam and the state of our own enslaved realm.”

Her vision was not in vain, Burma’s future was not far from her prognostication. After the initial decades of Timber boom and petroleum extraction, monoculture forest plantations of rubber were fetching the empire heaps of profit and duly dubbed ‘the money tree’ by the author. While the land for the plantation was an easy acquisition, labour shortage became an issue. The British Colonial Government looked to India to supply coolies and workers for the plantations. South Indians, especially Tamils were recruited to the plantations of the Malayan plateau. The indentured labours, mired in caste discrimination found an escape option to begin a new life through the plantation recruitment drives. These migrant labourers might have been a lot better off than they had been back home, but they still remained slaves tending to the protests of nature against domestication. Decades later, wounded by the Depression, world wars and the availability of cheaper substitutes rubber will no longer be as profitable as it had once been. 

The social tapestry of Burma had tremendously changed during the colonial period. The root cause of the issues that arose was the pattern of imperial rule and its policy of ensuring its necessity through the division of its subjects. A lot of anger and resentment began scourging at the foreigners, and much of it was aimed at Indians as they were moneylenders taking over all the farmland and running shops and the natives presumed that the rich Indians lived like colonialists, lording it over the Burmese. Marriage to foreigners began to be frowned upon and the Burmese who married foreigners began to be considered traitors. Amongst students and nationalists, an agitation was underway to separate Burma’s administration from that of British India. 

The city life transformation in Rangoon can be easily explained through Uma’s visit after fifty years. “The city seemed transformed beyond recognition to Uma. There were stately hotels, enormous banks, fashionable restaurants, arcaded department stores, and even nightclubs. The one landmark that seemed to be proof of these changes was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It was exactly as Uma remembered, its graceful, gilded rising above the city like a benediction.” (Pg 209) Quite incidentally in an earthquake that soon befell Rangoon, Shwe Dadon topples over. 

The smoking rancor paved way for bloody riots, slaughtering Indians. The riots often lasted several days and the casualties numbered in the hundreds. The toll would have been higher still if it had not been for the many Burmese who had rescued Indians from the mob and sheltered them in their homes. There were whispers of an even more tremendous upheaval in the offing. The British tacitly defended its empire in Burma, and ruthlessly suppressed the rebels by using Indian soldiers. Indians, who were to be supporters of the anti-colonial uprisings in its periphery, donned British army uniforms and killed their friends, their neighbours for the empire. In conversation with Arjun, a Burmese student asks him, “Do you know what we say in Burma when we see Indian soldiers? We say: there go the slaves—marching off to catch some more slaves for their masters” (Pg 250).  The Indian public consumed with the preoccupations of local politics spared little time for Burma. 

The author aptly a starking contrast between technological achievements and the narrowing of human sensitivity. On one hand, the newly launched aeroplane service replacing the steamer service assured hopes for the dawn of a new era, an age when aviation would make the world so small that the divisions of the past would disappear. On the other hand, the empire’s barbaric ways of containing rebellion- displaying heads of Burmese rebels to strike horror into the hearts of rebellion inclined gives a starkly medieval image as could be imagined. It displays the uncanny skill and ruthlessness of the empire, in the deployment of its overwhelming power and incredulous expertise in the management of opinion.   

When World War II broke out, Burma found itself conflicting with European Fascism, Japanese militarism as well as British colonialism. The mood among Burma’s student activists was summed up in a slogan coined by a charismatic young student leader, Aung San: Colonialism’s difficulty, he said, was Freedom’s opportunity. The Japanese invasion of Burma was one of their last major successes on land during the Second World War (outside China). They forced the British and Indian forces and their Chinese allies out of the country in a campaign that lasted six months. The purpose of the Japanese invasion of Burma was to cut the Burma Road land supply route to China and to take control over the oil and other mineral resources. The Japanese occupation in Burma lasted from 1941 to 1945, till the end of WWII.  With frequent air raids, tanks, loot, and an exodus of refugees, Burma suffered considerably during the war.

 Through the late 1940s, the shadows of the Second World War deepened over Burma. In 1947, in preparation for the British departure, Burma’s first national elections were held. They were won by General Aung San. It was widely believed that he alone would be able to ensure the country’s unity and stability. But on July 19, shortly before he was to assume office, Aung San was assassinated, along with several of his would-be colleagues. Within months of the assassination, a Communist-led insurgency broke out in central Burma. In a short time, there were sixteen insurgencies raging in Burma. The mid-1950s were a relatively quiet time, there was a stand-off in the insurgencies and the Government was a functioning democracy. Then, in 1962, General Ne Win seized power in a coup and the country became subject to the bizarre, maniacal whimsies of its dictator: Burma, ‘the golden land’ became synonymous with poverty, tyranny, and misgovernment. “Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. After the coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not until many years had passed that they realized that this was a storm that had come to stay. With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the country grew ever feebler: the military was like an incubus, sucking the life from its host.” (Pg 461) 

The author ends Burma’s segment with resilient hope for its democracy and its charismatic leader Aung San Sui Kyi and her non-violent protests. Two decades after the book, Burma now known as Myanmar still lies hapless trapped in the imaginary ‘“waiting hall of history”. 

Sarika Auradhkar’s remark sums it up, ‘THE GLASS PALACE’functions as a metaphor, ‘glass is brittle and implies transparency. Palace is the symbol of power. Glass Palace is an illusion that is created around power. The people in the glass palace do not have the liberty to throw stones at others. The colonized people are always imprisoned in the glass palace and they have lost the capacity to throw stones at colonial masters.”

Thus The Glass Palace thus proves to be an exceptional work of fiction with a remarkable critique of colonialism and its repercussions in Burma. It embodies the genuine attempt by Ghosh to revisit and reframe the colonial past which may be prefigurative of the perturbing detrimental ramifications of neocolonialism.

References

• Auradhkar, Sarika,“The Glass Place”, Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
  Study, New Delhi: Creative Books, 2007
• Ghosh Amitav, Interview with Frederick Luis, World Literature
  Today, 76:2,2002.
• ————The Glass Palace, Noida: Harper Collins Publishers,
  First Impression, 2011.
• http://www.amitavghosh.com.