36. “The Glass Palace” by Amitav Ghosh

Year of first publication: 2000
Genre: novel, historical novel, family saga
Country: India (the author is Indian, but the novel also has strands in Burma and Malaysia)

In italiano: Il Palazzo degli Specchi di Amitav Ghosh, edito da Neri Pozza (2007), € 14,00

Plot: The novel begins in Mandalay, Burma, in 1885, when the British are about to seize the city with a powerful army of Indian sepoys. The Burmese royal family will be sent into exile in a small Indian village and the royal palace ravaged. Rajkumar, a Bengali orphan boy, has a chance to enter the “glass palace” during the chaos following the fall of the Ava Kingdom, and there he meets one of Queen Supayalat’s maid servants, a breathtakingly-beautiful young girl called Dolly. Rajkumar will make a fortune with teak and finally marry her. In the meantime, the royal family is “incarcerated” by the British in a place called Ratnagiri, on the western coast of India, almost forgotten by the Burmese and everyone else. They make friends with their jailers nonetheless: Uma Dey, the District Collector’s wife, and Dolly become close friends. When her husband dies, Uma reinvents herself as an activist for Indian independence and has a chance to travel to Europe and America. Another strand follows Uma’s nephew Arjun, a dedicated officer in the British Indian Army, who has a conversion and starts to fight for India’s own side after realizing the contradictions of being a colonial and fighting for the British. The novel follows three generations and three families across borders, giving us a multi-layered portrait of colonial and post-colonial India, Burma and Malaysia. The novel spans more than one hundred years, finally ending in the 1990s, when Rajkumar’s grand-daughter Jaya embarks on an internet search to find her long-lost uncle Dinu, who now lives in Rangoon. Burma, now called Myanmar, is no longer the “golden country” it used to be: bad politics, famines and the selfishness of its rulers have turned it into an impoverished land, where the military junta has seized the power and incarcerated opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Some thoughts: This is a superb and unique novel. There is so much in this book that I don’t know where to start. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long time. Once again Ghosh confirms his gift for storytelling, giving life to unforgettable characters such as Rajkumar, Uma or Dolly.
He demonstrates that South East Asia in the 19th and early 20th century could be as multicultural as cities like New York or London are today. Ghosh’s novel has nothing to envy from multiracial family sagas set in the late 1990s or early 2000s as written by Zadie Smith or Hanif Kureishi. Rajkumar is a Bengali-born peasant who makes his fortune in Burma and feels more at home in Mandalay or Rangoon than in Calcutta, whereas Dolly is an attendant of the royal family, a Burmese by birth who ends up feeling more at ease in India than in Burma. Saya John, Rajkumar’s mentor in the teak trade, is a Malay raised by Catholic priests, whereas Uma is an upper middle-class Indian widow who lives between New York and the subcontinent. Their nephews, children and grand-children Neel, Dinu, Arjun, Manju and Alison are part Indian, part Burmese, part Malay and part American. All of these characters cross borders between countries and social classes, having multiple identities that Ghosh loves to explore. Rajkumar’s rags to riches story is only an example of social mobility in the novel, but there are many others (for example Mohan Sawant, a coachman, who ends up marrying one of the exiled princesses, but keeps leading a modest life). Ghosh wants to demonstrate how common it was at that time to float between borders of social class (the novel is obviously highly-researched). The theme of multiculturalism and social mobility in the British Raj is also featured in Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s latest novel.
A lot is devoted to reflections on British colonialism in South East Asia. For example, when Uma criticizes Dolly for her faith in Queen Supalayat because she is believed to have had a lot of people killed, Dolly answers that she is scared by the picture of Queen Victoria hung at Uma’s, instead. She reminds her friend of how many people have been killed in the name of Queen Victoria. Uma starts to be more conscious about the injustices of the British rule while she is travelling abroad. Initially, her point of view is that of the Indian Independence League, but later in the novel she becomes a supporter of “the velvet glove”, that is to say a supporter of Gandhi. Her nephew Arjun has a slower transformation from officer of the British Indian Army to revolutionary fighter for the independence of India. Ghosh details the doubts of Arjun’s fellow soldiers: they swore to be loyal to their country but which one is their country, India or the British Empire? They resent the fact that they are sent to Malaysia to defend the British Empire, which prevents them from defending India, their own country. Uma debates with Rajkumar’s youngest son, Dinu: shall India fight in the Second World War with the British and against the Nazi or shall India fight only with a concrete promise of self-rule? Uma thinks that fascism and colonialism are both evil and she doesn’t see much difference between them. Uma and Arjun’s transformation equals that of Indian people from subjugated colonials to fully independent members of a big democratic nation.
The Glass Palace is an ambitious novel, with vivid descriptions and complex characters. It has a “gloss” of history without being boring or difficult and it’s multi-layered, packed with details and undoubtedly cinematic. It has some minor flaws nonetheless. Sometimes Ghosh alternates tales of war and distress with accounts of sappy relationships including sex scenes on the beach, falling into the stereotypes of Bollywood movies too often. Towards the end it feels like it’s several novels edited into one (I think it’s inevitable when you write such a long book, unless your name is Lev Tolstoj!). Ghosh is not able to leave his characters to their faith, telling us exactly what happened to each one of them. Sometimes years pass in a paragraph and characters who where children are suddenly grown up. Also, the ending is a bit rushed and sloppy: Ghosh wants to comment on the current situation in Myanmar, where the democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi is at house arrest, but it all feels a bit too sketchy, also considering the details crammed in the rest of the novel.
Something curious and albeit interesting about The Glass Palace: the book was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, but Ghosh, unaware that the publishers had submitted his book, withdrew the novel from the competition, objecting to the idea of his work being classified as “Commonwealth literature” when the prize is only open to books written in English. By doing this, he didn’t betray the spirit of the novel, which criticizes British colonialism quite harshly.

Ghosh also wrote a non-fiction book, Incendiary Circumstances: A Cronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (2006) where there is an essay on Burma called "At Large in Burma". Here he writes about an uncle who used to live in Burma and was probably the inspiration for one of the characters in the book.

About the author: read this post or follow this link.

21. "Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh

Year of first publication: 2008
Genre: historical novel, epic saga, adventure novel
Country: India

In italiano: Mare di papaveri di Amitav Ghosh, edito da Neri Pozza, € 18,50

About the author: Amitav Ghosh was born in Kolkata in 1956 and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. Ghosh's fiction is characterised by strong themes that may be somewhat identified with postcolonialism but could be labelled as historical novels. His topics are unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious themes. He is the author of The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004) and Sea of Poppies (2008).

Plot: Set just before the Opium Wars, in the 1830s, Sea of Poppies is the story of a an old slaving ship named Ibis, sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius with a diverse cargo of passengers. The fate has in fact thrown together a motley crew of sailors, coolies and convicts, including a bankrupt raja, a French orphan girl who is running away from an arranged marriage and a woman who escaped her opium-addicted husband’s funeral pyre. Everybody is hiding something, but while the ship is sailing towards Mauritius, they come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, ship brothers.

Some thoughts: Sea of Poppies is supposed to be the first book in a projected trilogy on the Ibis (which will be awfully long, seen that this book only is 530 pages long!). In my opinion, it should have won the Booker Prize last year instead of The White Tiger (link to my review in Italian), because it was so much better than any other book in the shortlist. It is one of those 500-pages-long books that you can read in just a few days, never growing tired of the characters.
Much space is given to the second mate, Zachary Reid, an American whose mixed origins will leave him a target for blackmail. Then there is Paulette Lambert, an orphan French girl who grew up in India and speaks perfect Bengali and Hindi; she wants to escape to Mauritius and is in love with Zachary. Neel Rattan is a bankrupt raja who is being deported and has lost all his privileges, while Deeti, the widow of an opium grower, is travelling with a low-caste Oxen driver considered by everybody to be her husband. On board there are also the “lascars”, the Asian sailors who crew the ship, among them Serang Ali and Ah Fatt, half Parsee and half Chinese. It is an unlikely group of passengers for a ship: they all come from very different backgrounds and are divided by race, gender and cultural heritage. In particular, there is a hierarchy among people on the ship, even though many people (Zachary, Paulette and Neel in particular) are hiding their true identities. There are strong bounds that connect the characters and others are made on board of the Ibis. The voyage that many passengers were seeking as a refuge becomes in fact a nightmare.
Sea of Poppies is an adventure novel and an epic saga at the same time. It would be perfect for the silver screen, as many features would perfectly fit in a movie (the love between Zachary and Paulette, for example, or the cruelty of British officers on board towards the “coolies”). There is even a website (http://www.seaofpoppies.com/) where all the words in the Pidgin English of the lascars are explained, imagining that Neel Rattan devoted the last years of his life to a dictionary of nautical jargon used by the lascars (who came from many different parts of Asia and Africa and therefore created a pidgin language).

Riporto la recensione di Alessandro Monti, tratta da La Stampa del 13 settembre 2008:

Sulla nave dei papaveri c’è Dickens
Amitav Ghosh. Lo sfruttamento coloniale nel Bengala dell’800

Siamo nel 1835 in Bengala, gli inglesi hanno appena abolito la schiavitù e hanno bisogno di manodopera coatta per le piantagioni nei Caraibi e alle Mauritius. Nel contempo hanno stravolto l’agricoltura bengalese, imponendo la monocultura del papavero, che lavorato è avviato in Cina. La nave Ibis, una negriera, convertita al trasporto dei lavoratori indiani a contratto, salpata da Baltimora raggiunge Calcutta per le Mauritius e su di essa, imbarcati come lavoratori o galeotti si troveranno tutti i protagonisti del romanzo Mare di Papaveri di Amitav Ghosh.
Tra di essi un mulatto affrancato, in origine carpentiere; una contadina che, rimasta vedova firma il contratto per sfuggire al cognato, unendosi a un fuoricasta. S’imbarca anche, in panni maschili, una giovane orfana francese, destinata dalla comunità inglese a sposare un vecchio; un giovane pescatore bengalese, compagno di giochi della ragazza e di lei innamorato. Tra i personaggi dell’assortita compagnia troviamo un nobile proprietario terriero bengalese, rovinato in modo fraudolento dagli inglesi e deportato alle Mauritius, insieme ad un cinese oppiomane, e per finire un Baboo, impiegato, bengalese a servizio degli inglesi, seguace di Rama e che si veste da donna, per impersonificare, nel suo innamoramento mistico, la sposa del dio.
Ghosh recupera con gusto la narrativa tradizionale ottocentesca, si pensi a Dickens, non dimenticando che tra le radici della narrativa indiana, c’è il romanzo storico. D’altra parte l’autore incrocia i drammi e le vite problematiche dei personaggi sullo sfondo dello sfruttamento coloniale. Il paese è dominato dalla Compagnia delle Indie e dai mercanti privati, che detengono il monopolio degli affari. In particolare, il commercio dell’oppio imposto alla Cina, e di lì a poco causa di guerre, arricchisce le tasche dei mercanti e affama i contadini, costretti a sostituire i raccolti alimentari con il papavero.
E’ impressionante la descrizione fatta da Ghosh dei capannoni dove si lavora l’oppio: una via di mezzo tra gli antri cavernosi e immensi di Piranesi e la futura fabbrica tayloriana, in cui la produzione è sincronizzata e l’uomo stesso ridotto a macchina. Ma un altro aggancio è possibile con il mondo contemporaneo, se pensiamo alla coltivazione del papavero in Afghanistan. Ghosh rappresenta il processo di controllo egemonico coloniale attraverso lo straniamento linguistico provocato dall’uso dell’anglo-indiano, ovvero il gergo parlato dagli inglesi in India, che corrompe deformando le lingue locali con termini criptici, comprensibili solo da chi appartenga al chiuso mondo coloniale. E’ una lingua ormai arcana, di comando e di potere, ebbra di false assonanze con l’inglese: per esempio mysteries rimanda a maistri, qui artigiano. A tale lingua autoritaria si oppongono il multilinguismo indiano e le lingue di intercomunicazione tra etnie diverse. Dall’apparente babele dei subalterni nasce la speranza: se viaggiare per mare implicava la perdita della casta, la convivenza forzosa a bordo tra caste diverse darà origine a uno spirito nuovo di solidarietà, che prefigura come avrebbe potuto essere un’India ispirata a Gandhi dopo l’Indipendenza. Dall’altra parte, il lavoro sporco di controllo e di repressione è svolto nel romanzo da indiani, carnefici dei loro fratelli: forse un apologo amaro su come oggi possa essere interpretato il rapporto tra le masse diseredate e chi detiene le chiavi del potere. Visto l’impasto linguistico di cui sopra, il romanzo era pressoché intraducibile, ma i traduttori se la sono cavata con onore, anche se mi piacerebbe discutere con loro le scelte tipografiche e i problemi posti dal lessico composito, che rischia di allontanare il lettore. Certo una dieta lessicale a base di gomusta, di chobdar e simili può risultare alla lunga indigesta. Anche i lettori colti si sono trovati in difficoltà.

Un breve commento all'articolo: Anche in inglese i lettori più colti si trovano a disagio di fronte a così tante parole indiane e al gergo marinaresco dei "lascar", ma nonostante ciò il romanzo continua ad essere perfettamente leggibile. Non conoscere il bengali o il Pidgin English non impedisce di godersi il romanzo. E poi che cosa avrebbero dovuto fare i traduttori italiani: sostituire "gomusta" con "sacerdote indù" o qualcosa del genere? E dove finiva tutta la ricchezza culturale e linguistica del libro?

And finally, read my review of A Fraction of the Whole, another book shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize (in English).