Colonialism In The Glass Palace

Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is a major text in the field of postcolonial literature or New Literature. This novel is suffused with various postcolonial issues ranging from the deconstruction of nationalism, an inkling of hope in cosmopolitanism, exploring the dark legacy of British Imperialism, the predicament of the displaced colonized subjects and the ambivalent nature of the identities of the colonizer and the colonized. This paper seeks to investigate how the author shows a deliberate consciousness in this novel to deconstruct the binary of the colonized and the colonizer and how fragile this dichotomy is, with the evidence of showing various characters assuming different roles with simultaneous shift in power structure. This discourse of ‘ambivalent’ nature of the colonial subjects has caught the attention of the literary postcolonial theorists. This novel shows testimony to the postmodern and post-structural awareness of the pluralities and multiplicity of subjectivity and how a character becomes a ‘text’ (a text with language) or a dialogic ‘space’ where different contrary ideologies collide for dominance. Further, the paper seeks to demonstrate this role

Amitav Ghosh may be regarded as one of the best writers of the post- Midnight’s Children period to reflect upon the emerging new trend in Indian English literature. His exploration of the imperial legacy of the British rule in Asia, his acute consciousness of modern problems of nationalism and his cosmopolitanism as an antidote to the these problems of boundaries and constraints have garnered him much reputation in the field of world