History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

3. The Glass Palace: Reconnecting Two Diasporas

3 The Glass Palace Reconnecting Two Diasporas NANDINI BHAUTOO-DEWNARAIN THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON the fictional representation in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace of the two major types of Indian diaspora— the new diaspora of the twentieth century, with its connection with the mainland relatively intact and the old plantation labor diaspora of indentured workers who went to the outposts of the erstwhile British Empire in conditions of extreme material and cultural dispossession. The Glass Palace is one of those rare texts which explore the interconnection between these two historico-cultural narratives. The more well-known of the two types of diaspora is the twentieth-century diaspora of professionals to the West, mainly the United Kingdom and the United States. There have been interesting studies of the twentieth-century Indian diaspora to the West by Cohen, Ballard, and Brah, among many others. In the fields of literature, sociology, and politics, this diaspora has become increasingly visible, especially in the wake of India’s new strategic engagement with its diaspora through the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas conference instituted since 2003. The old diaspora of indentured workers which started in the mid-nineteenth century and ended in the early decades of the twentieth century is less well known and the literature which has come out of the descendants of these indentured diaspora, grappling with issues of multiculturalism, hybridity , and social identity within social frames which problematize these internal reconstructions of collective Indian identity, is less well known. This chapter explores to what extent Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace has begun to address the complex reality of Indian labor diaspora as he attempts 33 34 NANDINI BHAUTOO-DEWNARAIN to reconnect the two types of experiences and address the issue of displacement and rootlessness for both the elite Indian diaspora and the “subaltern” labor diaspora. In 1988 Amitav Ghosh was commissioned by Canada to begin research for an article on the Indian diaspora, which was published in Public Culture in 1988 and republished subsequently in the collection The Imam and the Indian. It was one of the early articles about the Indian diaspora, long before the term became fashionable in scholarly circles under the combined effect of South Asian migrant populations to the West and their new visibility at all levels of the host societies, as well as through the new postmodernist valorization of hybridity and transnationalism as the new paradigms of postmodern identity. Whether out of the interest Ghosh developed then or his long-term interest with migration and movement across the boundaries of nationhood, his novel The Glass Palace, published in 2000, seems to begin to sketch the project of the grand narrative of the various migrations of the Indian diaspora . Amitav Ghosh said in a World Literature Today interview: For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life—history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality. As I see it the novel is a meta-form that transcends the boundaries that circumscribe other kinds of writing, rendering meaningless the usual workaday distinctions between historian, journalist, anthropologist, and et cetera. (2002: 84) And indeed we can see within the parameters of this novel one of the mostly thoroughly researched fictional publications which has come out of the new global voice of the Indian diaspora. Whether we call it the postRushdie effect or not,1 it is clear that since the early 1990s a combination of factors due to the facilities of international publication, an increasingly prolific Indian middle-class readership, both in India and among the migrant diasporas in the West, have helped uncover a host of new global Indian fiction writers of the ilk of Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, Jumpha Lahiri, and others. Interestingly, all of these writers can be categorized as coming from the new twentieth-century diaspora to the West, commonly referred to as NRI diaspora. This diaspora is commonly referred to as the blue collar diaspora, which migrated for purposes of education and work in the middle of the late twentieth century. It is this category of writers who in the wake of the 1990s have been contributing to shape the fictional boundaries of the mutant individual within the frame of migration between the nation and the host country , whether it is the United States or the United Kingdom. The Glass Palace 35 In...