I had heard about Ghosh before but he was recommended to me by my good friend Eric Gustavson, who taught with me at Western Reserve Academy for a number of years. He liked Ghosh's SEA OF POPPIES enough, one of his most recent novels, to teach it to his seniors at Peddie School. So, I picked up THE GLASS PALACE, one of his first novels to win some awards.
Ghost sets it in Burma, a country I know little about despite the fact that Ghosh grew up in India. It's a historical novel, one that spans a good part of the 20th century. It begins in Mandalay, as a young indigent Indian, Rajkumar, watches the King and Queen of Burma leave Rangoon, exiled by the power of the British Empire to a small town on the coast of India, Ratnagiri. The book then follows the rise of Rajkumar before WW II, as he becomes teak king in Burma, despite the fact that he's a foreigner, an Indian. And the usual animosity exisits between the indigenous Burman's and the upstarts from other countries, India, in Rajkumar's case, but also the British who have colonized Burma, made it another part of the empire to exploit. It's also a love story, as Rajkumar marries one of the retainers of the King, one Dolly, an orphan who is a retainer to the Princess. He goes in search of her, finds her in India, and convinces her to be his wife. They have two children, Neel and Dinu. Neel becomes his father's favorite, going into business with his father, marrying Manju, a twin of Arjun, both children of his mentor and friend, Saya John. We see how Rajkumar, with the help of Saya John, becomes wealthy through the 1920's and 1930's, but then things begin to fall apart, as WW II looms. Burma is torn apart by the war, Rajkumar loses all of his wealth, and Indians are torn between fighting with the British, against the Japanese, or with the Japanese, against their colonial masters, the British. Arjun, Rajkumar's son in law, the symbol of this conflict, as he proudly joins the British army, one of the first Indians to become an officer, but as time goes by, he increasingly understands that he's been used by the British, a puppet, trained to be their seal. He agonies over this conflict, eventually joining the Indian Revolutionary army along with a number of his officers, and join the Japanese to fight the British. Arjun ends up dying after the war ends, as his group continues fighting the British even though the Japanese have surrendered.
When Rajkumar's son and daughter in law die in an accident, and his properties are confiscated, he and Dolly return to India, destitute, to live on the good will of Anu, a friend who has stood for everything that Rajkumar hated, women's rights, the end of colonial rule, things like that. He is brought from the heights to the depths but finds solace in his granddaughter Jaya. She becomes a professor and in the late 1980's, she seeks out Rajkumar's long lost son, Dinu, who has lived in Burma through the aftermath of the war, the end of democracy in Burma, the rise of the communists and their attempts to destroy any semblance of freedom. So the novel does span almost a hundred years, up to the millennium. Jaya finds Dinu, and through his photographs, his passion, she is able to reconstruct much of her past. The novel ends with the words of a charismatic Burmese woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is leading the anti communist faction: "But she is the only leader I've ever been able to believe in. Why. Because she's the only one who seems to understand what the place of politics is...what it ought to be...that while misrule and tyranny must be resisted, so too must politics itself....that it cannot be allowed to cannibalize all of life, all of existence. To me this is the most terrible indignity of our condition----not just Burma but in many other places too...that politics has invaded everything...there is no escape from and yet what could be more trivial in the end? She understand this...and only she...and this is what makes her much greater than a politician." How true and what wonderful understanding of the world. All our politicians should read this book. On to SEA OF POPPIES.
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