Dr. Meetu Bhatia Kapur
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4171-9301
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies- Tc, New Delhi
Dr. Rumi Roy
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0237-085X
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies-Tc, New Delhi
Abstract
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace intricately examines the nexus between precarity, hybridity, and resistance within the colonial and postcolonial landscape. The novel unravels how colonial modernity systematically displaces individuals, dismantles indigenous socio-political structures, and imposes an enduring state of vulnerability. Through its transnational characters Dolly, Rajkumar, Saya John, and Dinu Ghosh interrogate the complexities of identity, migration, and socio-economic exclusion, exposing the paradox of hybridity as both a survival strategy and a source of alienation. The narrative underscores the existential instability engendered by imperial exploitation, where economic ascent does not guarantee social acceptance, and resistance often comes at the cost of greater precarity. Moreover, the novel’s engagement with photography as a tool of historical reclamation highlights the tension between erasure and defiance, mirroring contemporary struggles against hegemonic narratives. By foregrounding the colonial production of precarity and its lingering reverberations in modern crises such as forced displacement and environmental degradation, Ghosh’s work challenges readers to confront the structures that perpetuate marginality. This paper critically examines The Glass Palace through the lens of postcolonial theory, exploring how its characters navigate the fragile space between erasure and resistance in a world where belonging is perpetually deferred.
Keywords: Colonialism, Precarity, Hybridity, Migration, Resistance.
Introduction: Precarity and the Colonial Encounter
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace stands as a searing indictment of colonialism’s capacity to manufacture systemic precarity, weaving a narrative that unravels the intricate interplay between imperial domination, socio-cultural disintegration, and existential vulnerability. The novel’s incisive portrayal of the British annexation of Mandalay in 1885—an event that exiles Burma’s royal family to the coastal enclave of Ratnagiri, India—serves as both a historical anchor and a metaphorical fulcrum. This cataclysmic rupture, emblematic of colonial violence, dismantles indigenous sovereignty, scattering shards of cultural memory and identity across hostile geographies. Through the fractured lives of characters like Dolly, a palace attendant severed from her Burmese roots, and Rajkumar, an orphaned labourer navigating the treacherous currents of colonial capitalism, Ghosh lays bare the mechanisms through which empire imposes a state of perpetual instability. Colonial modernity, as depicted in the novel, operates not merely as a political or economic project but as a pervasive force that corrodes the socio-cultural scaffolding of communities, leaving individuals adrift in a labyrinth of alienation and exploitation. The fall of Mandalay epitomizes colonialism’s dual assault on space and psyche. The forced exile of King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat once sovereigns of a thriving kingdom into the claustrophobic confines of Ratnagiri’s colonial outpost mirrors the broader dislocation of Burmese society (5). Stripped of their regal authority and cultural agency, the royals become spectral figures haunting the margins of their history. Ghosh’s meticulous attention to their psychological unravelling Supayalat’s futile attempts to preserve Burmese rituals in exile, Thebaw’s descent into despondency reveals how colonialism weaponizes displacement, transforming it into a tool of cultural erasure. This disintegration of indigenous structures is paralleled in the trajectories of ordinary individuals like Dolly, whose identity fractures under the weight of exile. Once tethered to the rhythms of the Mandalay court, she finds herself marooned in an alien landscape, her sense of self diluted by the relentless tides of foreign customs and languages. Colonialism’s exploitation extends beyond territorial conquest, embedding itself in the sinews of global capitalism. Rajkumar’s ascent from a penniless orphan to a timber magnate, while superficially a narrative of upward mobility, lays bare the paradoxes of colonial economics. His wealth, amassed through the extraction of Burma’s teak forests, is inextricably tied to the British imperial machinery system that commodifies nature and labour alike. Yet, his material success remains hollow, shadowed by racial exclusion and cultural liminality. Denied acceptance by both the Burmese, who view him as an interloper, and the British, who reduce him to a “native” collaborator, Rajkumar embodies the schizophrenic identity of the colonial subject: perpetually proximate to power yet irrevocably alienated from it. Ghosh’s critique here is unequivocal: colonial capitalism thrives on the creation of fragmented identities, leveraging socio-cultural hierarchies to sustain its extractive logic. The teak trade, emblematic of this dynamic, transforms forests into commodities and laborers into expendable cogs, illustrating how colonial modernity reduces life to a calculus of profit and loss.
The novel’s exploration of hybrid identities further complicates the discourse on precarity. Characters like Saya John, a Chinese-Burmese merchant navigating the interstices of empire, exemplify the fraught resilience of those who inhabit liminal spaces. His transnational existence negotiating British commercial networks, Burmese cultural codes, and Chinese familial ties grants him a tenuous agency, yet it also renders him perpetually suspect in a world obsessed with racial purity. Saya John’s hybridity, while a testament to adaptability, underscores the vulnerability of those who defy colonial categorizations. Similarly, the younger generation Dinu, the introspective photographer, and Alison, Saya John’s granddaughter grapple with inherited dislocations, their identities shaped by the residue of colonial violence. Dinu’s photographic endeavours, which document Burma’s silenced histories, emerge as acts of quiet defiance, challenging the colonial archive’s sanitized narratives. Yet, even his lens cannot fully capture the totality of loss, reflecting the incomplete nature of resistance in a world structured by erasure. Ghosh’s narrative, however, transcends mere historical critique, resonating with alarming contemporaneity. The novel’s excavation of colonial precarity finds eerie echoes in modern ecological and socio-economic crises. The rampant exploitation of Burma’s teak forests prefigures the “slow violence” of environmental degradation a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe attritional disasters that disproportionately afflict marginalized communities. Colonialism’s extractive ethos, which reduced ecosystems to reservoirs of raw materials, finds its progeny in contemporary climate crises, where deforestation and resource plunder displace vulnerable populations, eroding traditional livelihoods (Nixon 3). The cyclical displacement depicted in The Glass Palace from the exile of Mandalay’s royals to the indentured labour of Indian migrants in Burma mirrors the present-day realities of climate refugees, whose existences are destabilized by rising seas and corporate land grabs. Ghosh implicitly argues that the precarity engendered by colonialism is not a relic of the past but a living legacy, its tendrils entwined with modern systems of exploitation. The Glass Palace compels a reimagining of precarity as a structural rather than incidental condition a reality woven into the fabric of global power dynamics. Through its polyphonic narrative, the novel illuminates how colonial modernity fractures identities, displaces communities, and institutionalizes vulnerability, while simultaneously gesturing toward the resilience that emerges in the interstices of oppression. Characters like Uma, whose metamorphosis from a colonial bureaucrat’s widow to an anti-colonial intellectual embodies the transformative potential of dissent, and Dinu, whose photographs reclaim marginalized histories, exemplify the dualities of resistance: fragile yet tenacious, localized yet universal. In framing precarity as both a colonial inheritance and a contemporary reality, Ghosh challenges readers to confront the enduring scars of empire, urging a reckoning with the systems that perpetuate vulnerability across temporal and spatial divides.
Colonialism and the Manufacture of Precarity
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace vividly portrays colonialism as an engine of precarity, systematically dismantling indigenous sovereignty and imposing exploitative economic structures that entrench social and cultural vulnerability. The British annexation of Burma not only results in political subjugation but also fractures long-standing social systems, rendering individuals and entire communities susceptible to displacement, dispossession, and systemic marginalization. The forced exile of the Burmese royal family to Ratnagiri serves as a stark emblem of this rupture, severing the monarchy from its cultural and historical roots while reducing its members to political relics in a foreign land. Queen Supayalat, once the embodiment of Burmese sovereignty, becomes a spectral figure, stripped of power, forced to navigate an alien existence in which her very identity is rendered obsolete (33). Her personal dislocation mirrors the broader disintegration of indigenous autonomy, as the Burmese people themselves are subjected to imperial policies that prioritize economic extraction over human dignity. The novel meticulously exposes how colonial rule manufactures instability, leveraging socio-cultural differences to fragment communities and erode traditional structures of belonging. The expansion of the teak trade under British control epitomizes this dynamic, transforming a once sustainable industry into a mechanism of relentless exploitation. Rajkumar’s trajectory within this economy highlights the paradox of colonial capitalism his ascent from destitution to economic prosperity is inextricably linked to an industry that thrives on disenfranchisement, forced labour, and environmental degradation. Despite his material success, Rajkumar remains an outsider, never fully belonging in either Burma or India, (5) illustrating how colonial economies foster a condition of perpetual marginality. His wealth does not shield him from precarity; rather, it underscores the transient and fragile nature of social mobility under colonial rule, where economic gain is no safeguard against exclusion and rootlessness. Ghosh’s depiction of colonialism thus transcends a purely political critique; he illustrates its insidious reach into the very fabric of personal and communal identity. By orchestrating large-scale migrations, eroding indigenous industries, and exploiting labour, colonialism does not merely impose a new order it manufactures a reality in which uncertainty, alienation, and vulnerability become permanent conditions of existence. Through the intersecting fates of displaced royals, disenfranchised labourers, and uprooted merchants, The Glass Palace underscores how colonial modernity is built upon the calculated production of precarity, ensuring that even those who momentarily thrive remain susceptible to systemic instability and cultural dislocation.
Gender, Displacement, and Psychological Fragmentation
The interrelationship between gender, displacement, and political fragmentation is central to Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, where women’s experiences of precarity are uniquely compounded by both colonial upheaval and entrenched patriarchal structures. Displacement, in this context, is not merely a geographical dislocation but a profound rupture in identity, agency, and cultural belonging. For women like Dolly, exile becomes a condition of perpetual instability one that is shaped as much by political conquest as by the deeply embedded gendered hierarchies that render women particularly vulnerable in times of socio-political transition. Dolly’s trajectory exemplifies this precarious intersection, where the collapse of the Burmese monarchy is not just a national tragedy but a deeply personal one, redefining her existence from royal attendant to an unmoored figure adrift between worlds. Her forced departure from the court marks the beginning of an identity fracture that is exacerbated by her subsequent exile to India, where she is neither fully accepted as Burmese nor assimilated into Indian society. Her lament, “I will never belong anywhere,”(119) captures the existential weight of her condition one shaped by both colonial displacement and the social structures that deny women autonomy over their own destinies. Unlike men, who may reconstruct their identities through economic or political reinvention, Dolly’s options are constrained by societal expectations that tie her value to her roles as a servant, a wife, and a mother.
Ghosh’s portrayal of Dolly illustrates how colonialism, far from being a gender-neutral force, deepens existing inequalities by limiting the possibilities available to displaced women. While men like Rajkumar can leverage colonial economies for financial gain albeit within precarious conditions Dolly’s displacement leaves her with little recourse beyond adaptation. Her marriage to Rajkumar does not grant her stability but rather reinforces her status as an outsider in a foreign land, where she is expected to assimilate yet remains an object of difference. The loss of her cultural and geographic anchors fractures her psychological world, intensifying a sense of estrangement that is not easily reconciled. However, even within this structure of imposed vulnerability, Dolly resists the totalizing erasure of her identity through acts of cultural preservation. Her recounting of Burmese folklore to her children is more than an intimate maternal act; it is a quiet yet profound assertion of continuity, a refusal to allow displacement to sever the lineage of memory. In doing so, she challenges the colonial and patriarchal forces that seek to render her past obsolete, demonstrating that resistance is not always found in overt defiance but in the quiet insistence on remembering. Through Dolly’s story, The Glass Palace underscores the complex and deeply gendered dimensions of displacement, illustrating how women’s precarity is not merely an outcome of colonial conquest but is also inextricably linked to societal structures that restrict their agency. Her psychological fragmentation is not just an individual affliction but a reflection of the larger fractures that colonialism inscribes upon the displaced, rendering identity itself a contested and unstable terrain.
Economic Precarity and Racial Exclusion
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace exposes the illusion of economic mobility under colonial rule, where material success often masks deeper vulnerabilities rooted in racial exclusion and socio-political instability. Rajkumar’s ascent from an impoverished orphan to a wealthy timber merchant is, on the surface, a story of resilience and ambition. However, beneath this trajectory lies a far more precarious reality one in which prosperity remains contingent on an exploitative colonial economy that thrives on dispossession, forced labour, and the subjugation of indigenous populations. Rajkumar’s wealth is inextricably linked to the British-controlled teak trade, a system that enriches a select few while devastating local communities and natural resources. His economic rise is thus not one of true self-determination but of participation in an imperialist machinery that extracts from Burma without empowering its people. This complicates his position in the social hierarchy: though he amasses wealth, he never attains genuine belonging. As an Indian in Burma, he remains an outsider viewed with suspicion by the Burmese, yet never accepted by the British elite who control the colonial order. His foreignness becomes an indelible mark, ensuring that no amount of financial success can translate into social legitimacy. Ghosh critiques colonial capitalism as a paradoxical force it dangles the promise of economic advancement while simultaneously reinforcing rigid racial and social hierarchies that deny true integration. Rajkumar’s material gains ultimately do not shield him from the fundamental instability of his position. He is neither Burmese nor fully Indian in the traditional sense, nor can he ever occupy the privileged space of the colonial rulers. His success, then, is deeply fragile, resting on a system that could discard him as easily as it had once elevated him. This realization the understanding that he will always be a “perpetual outsider”(113) comes not as a singular revelation but as an accumulation of moments where exclusion manifests in both overt and insidious ways. Whether through the disdain of British officials, the skepticism of Burmese communities, or the unspoken barriers that keep him from wielding real power, Rajkumar ultimately confronts the limits of his aspirations. His story, rather than being one of triumph, becomes a sobering meditation on the cost of ambition in a colonial world where prosperity is never synonymous with security. Through Rajkumar’s journey, The Glass Palace lays bare the precarious foundations of colonial-era capitalism where economic success remains a precarious illusion for those outside the racial and cultural elite, and where wealth, instead of granting stability, often deepens one’s alienation.
Nationalist Consciousness and the Precarity of Resistance
Nationalist consciousness emerges as both a unifying force and a site of contestation in anti-colonial struggles. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, argues that decolonial resistance necessitates a psychological rupture, wherein individuals must break from the colonizer’s ideological hold to assert a liberated identity (Fanon 168). However, this process is fraught with precarity social, psychological, and material risks that accompany resistance. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony further elucidates the challenges faced by nationalist movements, as colonial powers instil narratives that subjugate and discipline resistance (Mahajan 1188). Judith Butler’s concept of precarious life adds another dimension, emphasizing how political dissent exposes individuals to existential threats, reinforcing the vulnerability inherent in acts of defiance (Butler 20). Within this framework, nationalism is not merely a political project but an affective and embodied experience that reshapes subjectivity. Anti-colonial figures often navigate complex terrains where personal sacrifice, societal condemnation, and ideological transformations become integral to their resistance. Amitav Ghosh’s novel portrays nationalist figures Uma, Arjun, and Dinu each engaging with anti-colonial resistance in ways that underscore the precarity of their position. Uma, a widow turned nationalist, challenges gendered norms by embracing political activism (163). Her participation in the nationalist movement disrupts the colonial-patriarchal order, yet it comes at the cost of societal censure. She embodies a Fanonian rupture, as her resistance necessitates a transformation not just of political structures but of her own social identity. Her precarity lies in the dual oppression of colonial rule and patriarchal expectations, making her defiance both radical and dangerous. Arjun’s journey from the British Army to the Indian National Army (INA) encapsulates the psychological turmoil of nationalist awakening. His defection signifies a break from colonial allegiance, aligning with Fanon’s assertion that decolonial resistance demands psychological violence against the internalized oppressor. However, Arjun’s struggle with selfhood leads to existential despair, illustrating how nationalist consciousness does not offer immediate resolution but rather deepens internal contradictions. His narrative underscores the fraught nature of resistance, where ideological commitment and personal identity often remain in conflict. Dinu’s engagement with photography serves as an act of defiance against colonial erasure. By documenting spaces, people, and moments that imperial narratives seek to obscure, he enacts a resistance that aligns with Gramscian counter-hegemony (Jackson Lears 568-570). However, his defiance does not go unnoticed; his work places him in direct confrontation with authoritarian regimes, highlighting the precarious position of those who wield art as political resistance. His vulnerability underscores Butler’s notion of precarious life, where acts of political witnessing render individuals susceptible to repression. Ghosh’s portrayal of nationalist figures underscores the risks inherent in the pursuit of liberation. Nationalism, as depicted in the novel, is not a monolithic or triumphant force but a precarious endeavour that demands profound sacrifices. The psychological fractures, social alienation, and existential uncertainties experienced by Uma, Arjun, and Dinu reflect the deeply personal stakes of anti-colonial resistance. In this way, Ghosh complicates the nationalist narrative, foregrounding the vulnerabilities that accompany political awakening and the enduring costs of defiance.
Hybridity as Survival and Vulnerability
Saya John, the Chinese Burmese merchant in The Glass Palace, embodies the paradox of hybridity where fluid identity offers both opportunity and insecurity in a colonial world obsessed with racial categorization. His ability to navigate multiple cultural and economic spheres grants him a certain flexibility, allowing him to operate within the interstices of empire. Yet, this very adaptability, rather than securing him a place of belonging, leaves him perpetually unmoored, caught between shifting allegiances and the rigid boundaries imposed by colonial rule. As a man of mixed heritage, Saya John moves between Burmese, Chinese, and British networks with an agility that enables his commercial success. His transnational connections make him indispensable in the teak trade, where cross-border relationships dictate economic power. Unlike those whose identities are firmly rooted in a single cultural tradition, Saya John’s hybridity allows him to negotiate different worlds, leveraging his position to carve out a space within an otherwise exclusionary system (10). However, this mobility comes at a cost. He is never fully embraced by any community viewed with suspicion by the British colonizers, who see him as an economic rival, and regarded as an outsider by the indigenous Burmese, for whom his mixed lineage makes him neither truly one of them nor entirely foreign. Ghosh presents Saya John’s story as a meditation on the double-edged nature of hybridity. In an imperial system that thrives on rigid racial and social hierarchies, those who do not fit neatly within its categories become anomalies figures who are tolerated for their utility but never fully accepted. His existence is a testament to the ways in which colonialism weaponizes identity, turning hybridity from a potential strength into a liability. Unlike Rajkumar, whose exclusion is tied to his Indian origins in Burma, Saya John’s precarity is more diffuse, stemming from his very ability to move between worlds without ever fully belonging to one. Despite the inherent vulnerability of his position, Saya John’s survival strategy lies in his adaptability. He understands that in a world governed by empire, stability is an illusion, and flexibility is the only real defence against displacement. Yet, his resilience does not negate the fundamental loneliness of his condition. His success is not accompanied by the security of a fixed cultural identity but by the constant need to negotiate his place in a world that refuses to grant him permanence. Through Saya John, The Glass Palace underscores how hybridity, while often romanticized as a form of cosmopolitanism, is in fact a precarious condition in colonial settings. It offers pathways to survival but denies the comfort of rootedness, forcing individuals to exist in liminal spaces where belonging is always conditional and identity is never fully secure.
Photography: Documenting Precarity, Asserting Agency
In The Glass Palace, Dinu’s journey as a photographer reflects the powerful intersection between art, memory, and resistance. His lens becomes more than a mere instrument for capturing images; it serves as a tool for witnessing, documenting, and asserting the dignity of those rendered invisible by colonial and post-colonial histories. Through his photography, Dinu both records the lived realities of displaced communities and exposes the mechanisms of systemic violence that perpetuate their precarity. His work becomes an act of defiance against the erasure imposed by imperial narratives, challenging the way history is constructed and whose stories are deemed worthy of preservation. Ghosh presents Dinu as an observer who, unlike his predecessors Rajkumar, who seeks economic gain, or Saya John, who navigates empire through adaptability chooses to engage with history through documentation rather than participation in its exploitative systems. His photographs capture the suffering of forced labourers, the displacement of communities uprooted by war and colonial policies, and the silenced anguish of political prisoners. In doing so, he disrupts the sanitized colonial archive, which often sought to justify imperial rule by omitting the violence, dispossession, and human cost of its expansion. His lens offers an alternative narrative one that acknowledges the precarious existence of the colonized, whose histories were otherwise manipulated, suppressed, or erased (376-377). Walter Benjamin’s idea of photography as a democratizing force is particularly relevant in Dinu’s case. In a world where colonial power dictated the production and circulation of knowledge, photography emerges as a medium through which marginalized perspectives can be centred (Elo 116). Dinu’s work is an assertion of agency not only his own but also that of his subjects, who are often depicted in ways that affirm their humanity rather than reducing them to abstract symbols of suffering. His images resist the dehumanization that imperial and nationalist histories often impose on the disenfranchised, ensuring that their struggles are neither forgotten nor misrepresented. Yet, Dinu’s photography also reveals the fragility of truth-telling in oppressive regimes. The very act of documentation carries risks: his work is susceptible to censorship, confiscation, and even destruction, as authoritarian powers seek to control historical narratives. The precariousness of his mission mirrors the instability of the subjects he photographs both are vulnerable to the whims of political forces that seek to dictate what can and cannot be remembered. This underscores a deeper existential theme within The Glass Palace: the struggle for authenticity in a world where history is often shaped by those in power. Through Dinu’s perspective, Ghosh explores the broader implications of photography on human existence. His images do not merely record moments; they challenge the structures that manufacture suffering and dispossession. They affirm that to document is to resist, to remember is to assert agency, and to bear witness is to fight against historical erasure. In the end, Dinu’s work embodies the precarious balance between vulnerability and resilience—an act of defiant remembrance in a world that thrives on forgetting.
Precarity in the Liminal Space
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace intricately examines the condition of liminality a state of being neither here nor there, where belonging is always deferred and identity remains in flux. The novel’s transnational characters Dolly, Rajkumar, Saya John, and later, Dinu and Alison embody this perpetual in-betweenness, caught within the forces of colonialism, migration, and shifting nationalist ideologies. Their existence in this liminal space is not one of fluid cosmopolitanism but of deep-rooted precarity, where displacement does not lead to reinvention so much as it exposes the fragility of identity in an unstable world. Colonialism, by engineering large-scale migrations, creates hybrid identities while simultaneously reinforcing exclusion. Rajkumar, an Indian orphan who makes his fortune in Burma, exemplifies this paradox. His economic rise within the British-controlled teak trade grants him financial security, but it does not offer him true acceptance. The Burmese perceive him as an outsider, a reminder of British-facilitated Indian migration that fuels xenophobic anxieties. His wealth does not shield him from racialized hostility, illustrating how transnational existence under empire often exacerbates, rather than alleviates, socio-cultural vulnerability. Saya John, too, navigates multiple worlds Chinese, Burmese, British without ever fully belonging to any, his hybridity both an asset and a liability in an empire that demands rigid categorizations. Dolly, in contrast, experiences liminality as a deeply personal fracture. Her exile from Burma to India following the fall of the royal court severs her from the cultural and social world she once inhabited. Unlike Rajkumar, whose precarity is rooted in economic and racial exclusion, Dolly’s is more existential she is displaced not just geographically, but emotionally and culturally. Her marriage to Rajkumar offers no real stability; instead, she remains caught between two worlds, neither fully Indian nor truly Burmese. This intergenerational struggle with liminality extends to Dinu and Alison, whose hybrid identities become battlegrounds for competing nationalisms. Born into a world shaped by colonial entanglements, they inherit the consequences of forced migrations and fractured loyalties. Dinu, deeply invested in photography, attempts to document the precarious existence of displaced communities, using his art to grapple with his own rootlessness. Alison, on the other hand, is torn between British, Burmese, and Indian identities, unable to fully claim any as her own. Their struggles underscore the novel’s broader commentary on how transnationalism, while often romanticized as a space of cultural blending, is in reality a condition of dissonance and displacement. The implications of this liminality extend beyond the novel, mirroring the contemporary human condition where globalization continues to create precarious hybrid identities. Migration whether forced by conflict, economic necessity, or political upheaval leaves individuals in states of perpetual transition, where belonging remains elusive.
The novel suggests that while hybridity can foster resilience, it also denies individuals a stable socio-cultural anchor, forcing them into constant negotiation with histories and identities that do not fully accommodate them. Through The Glass Palace, Ghosh unearths the unsettling truth of the liminal space: it is not a realm of infinite possibility, but one of perpetual uncertainty. It breeds resilience, but also alienation. It offers adaptation, but at the cost of rootedness. In portraying characters who exist on the margins of nations, cultures, and histories, Ghosh does not merely chronicle the personal struggles of individuals he captures the precarity of human existence in a world where displacement is the defining condition.
Conclusion
Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is not merely a historical novel; it is a profound meditation on the fragile fault lines of identity, power, and displacement. The characters who navigate its intricate narrative Dolly, Rajkumar, Saya John, Dinu, and Alison are not just victims of colonial upheaval but also agents of their own survival, caught in the turbulent currents of history where erasure and resistance coexist. Their lives unfold in a world where hybridity does not promise liberation, but rather exposes them to the vulnerabilities of exclusion, suspicion, and cultural dissonance. The novel reveals how precarity is not simply a condition imposed by material deprivation but is deeply embedded in the structures of colonialism, migration, and nationalism. Ghosh does not romanticize transnationalism; instead, he exposes its paradoxical nature, where mobility often amplifies instability rather than alleviating it. The colonial world of The Glass Palace thrives on rigid categories racial, economic, and cultural forcing individuals into a liminal existence where belonging is perpetually deferred. Yet, in this space of fracture, resistance emerges not through grand political gestures, but in the quiet acts of remembering, documenting, and preserving identity against the forces of erasure. Dinu’s photographs, Dolly’s storytelling, and even Rajkumar’s relentless pursuit of a place to call home become acts of defiance against the forgetting imposed by empire. Their stories remind us that while history often seeks to silence the vulnerable, their survival is, in itself, a form of rebellion. Ghosh leaves us with a sobering truth: to exist in the liminal space between cultures and histories is to live in precarity, but also to persist, to challenge, and to assert one’s humanity against the tide of dispossession. In a world still grappling with forced migrations, racial exclusions, and contested identities, The Glass Palace resonates beyond its historical setting. It compels us to ask: What does it mean to belong when the very structures of power are designed to exclude? Can hybridity ever be a sanctuary, or is it always a site of struggle? And in the face of historical erasure, how do we resist not with arms, but with memory, with stories, with the refusal to disappear? Ghosh does not offer easy answers, but he forces us to confront the unsettling reality that in the dance between erasure and resistance, human vulnerability is both the wound and the weapon.
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Bionote
Dr. Meetu Bhatia Kapur, an Associate Professor at Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies-TC, New Delhi, earned her Ph.D. from Rajasthan University in 2005, specializing in the novels of Amitav Ghosh. With nearly 25 years of teaching experience, she has contributed extensively to academia through national and international publications, seminars, and panel discussions. She has authored and edited books on ecology, feminism, and technical communication. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Kapur is an accomplished poet. Her poetic works include Because Every Poem Has A Story, an anthology of English poems, and Manthan: Ek Soch Ek Nazariya, an anthology of Hindi poems. Her contributions to literature and education have earned her several prestigious awards, including a Certificate of Appreciation from the Prime Minister’s Office for her winning article on Pariksha Par Charcha 2023, the Shabd Shikar Samman 2022 by the Gwalior Sahitya Kala Parishad, and the Dushyant Memorial Award 2021 for her creative writing. She can be reached at: meetu.b.kapoor@vips.edu
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4171-9301
Dr. Rumi Roy (M.Phil., Ph.D.) is an academician with a decade of teaching experience. She is currently a faculty member at Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies-Technical Campus, New Delhi. She earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has published research papers in reputed national and international journals, including Scopus and peer-reviewed indexed journals. She is a content developer for the M.A. Political Science distance learning programs at Gauhati University and Delhi University. A life member of the Centre for Education Growth and Research (CEGR), New Delhi, she was also a member of the British Association of South Asian Studies, London, in 2020. She has served as the convener of the Youth Parliament and Model United Nations (MUN) at both the centralized and department levels at her institute. She was also invited as a speaker at IIT Kanpur for a workshop on Business, Human Rights, and Law. She can be reached at : roy.rumi@gmail.com
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0237-085X
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