I was twenty when I first opened The Glass Palace, and I am not sure I have ever entirely closed it since.
There is a particular way of reading that belongs only to youth; before you have learned to hold a book at arm’s length, before you have taught yourself the polite distance of the critic. At twenty I had no such defenses. Amitav Ghosh’s novel walked straight in and rearranged the furniture of my imagination, and it never quite put it back the way it found it.
It begins, as the best stories do, with the sound of the world breaking. English cannon on the outskirts of Mandalay, 1885, and a small orphaned boy named Rajkumar at a food stall, watching an empire arrive. When the crowds surge into the royal palace to loot it, he sees a girl among the queen’s attendants – Dolly – and something in him fastens to her and never lets go. A palace of mirrors, a fallen dynasty, a boy from Chittagong with nothing, a girl about to be carried into exile. I remember thinking: I will follow these two anywhere. And Ghosh, generously, took me everywhere.
The enchantment of it
What I loved first, at twenty, was simply the world of the book, its width. Most novels I had read up to then were rooms; this one was a continent, and then several. Mandalay and its glass-walled palace. The teak forests, with elephants moving logs through green half-light. The Konkan coast at Ratnagiri, where a deposed king and queen were kept like ornaments and quietly forgotten. The rubber estates of Malaya. Rangoon before the war, and after.
I am the kind of reader who falls in love with places as hard as with people, and Ghosh gave me places I could smell. I finished long passages half-convinced I had actually been somewhere; that I could find my way back to Saya John’s timber camps, or to the strange, becalmed house at Ratnagiri where the princesses grew up in a gilded cage, one of them scandalising everyone by loving the wrong man. The characters were so vividly themselves that I argued with them, worried over them, mourned them. That is the mark it left: it made history feel like family.
Reading it as a young woman
I have thought about why it landed so deeply on me then, at twenty, and I keep returning to the women.
Dolly was the first. She is introduced as almost nothing – a servant girl, one of many, easy to overlook. And yet she becomes the still centre of the whole vast book. She is quiet where others are loud, watchful where others grasp. At twenty I was drawn to her stillness the way you are drawn to a thing you suspect you might need to learn. She is swept up by forces immeasurably larger than herself – conquest, exile, marriage, war and somehow keeps an interior life that no one can invade. Later she turns towards faith, towards retreat, and even that felt to me less like defeat than like a woman finally choosing the one thing she could truly own.
And then Uma, the collector’s wife who becomes the collector’s widow, and then something else entirely: a thinking woman, a political woman, moving through the world of the independence movement on her own terms. If Dolly showed me endurance, Uma showed me appetite for ideas, for argument, for a life larger than the one arranged for her.
Reading them side by side at twenty, I understood something I hadn’t had words for yet: that women are so often the ones carried by history, and yet they carry it too, hold it, remember it, hand it down. The Glass Palace let me see both truths at once. I was young and unformed and quietly frightened of everything the future might do to me, and here were women being done to by the century, and surviving it, and staying themselves inside it. It felt, at the time, like instruction.
Two Indias, and the road between them
The other thing that has never left me is the way the novel holds up two Indias, pre-independence and post-, and lets you feel the difference in your body rather than your head.
The early world is the world of empire: Indian soldiers in British uniforms, Indian labour building someone else’s fortune, a Burmese king exiled to an Indian town by the same power that ruled them both. Ghosh is unsparing about the strangeness of it, the way colonised men were made into the instruments of colonising others, the quiet violence folded into the ordinary. And then, slowly, the ground shifts. The soldiers begin to ask whose war they are fighting. The nationalist current rises. By the end we are in another country entirely, one that has paid an almost unbearable price to become itself.
At twenty this was the first time a novel taught me history as loss and cost rather than as dates. I came away understanding independence not as a triumphant full stop but as something torn out of people’s lives, generation by generation.
Nowhere is that cost heavier than in the journey I still cannot read without stopping, the flight from Burma to India during the war. When the bombs fall on Rangoon and the family’s world collapses, they join the great tide of refugees walking home on foot: hundreds of miles through jungle and monsoon, the road lined with the ones who don’t make it. Ghosh does not look away, and so I couldn’t either. The family loses so much on that road that “struggle” feels too small a word. That trek – the mud, the exhaustion, the grief carried in arms alongside the children – is the passage that turned the book, for me, from a story I loved into a story I carry.
I am no longer twenty, and I have read the novel differently in the years since with more history behind me, and more of my own losses to bring to it. Some books shrink when you go back to them. This one only opens further. What I read at twenty as romance and adventure I now read as a meditation on displacement, on what we owe the people who came before us, on how a family holds its own memory when the world keeps trying to erase it.
But I am grateful I met it young before I knew enough to protect myself from it. It taught me, at exactly the right age, that a novel can be a whole world, and that the people inside it can become part of your own weather. I fell into the glass palace at twenty and came out changed, and I have been carrying its light ever since.
Leave a Reply