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4. Resignifying “Coolie”: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace
- State University of New York Press
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47 4 Resignifying “Coolie” Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace SHANTHINI PILLAI IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Usha Mahajani’s The Role of Indian Minorities in Burma and Malaya, H. N. Kunzru writes: No Indian can read the story of Indian labour emigration in different parts of the world without a deep humiliation. Its emigration was favoured and supported by the Government of India. The workers were sent, for many years, as indentured labourers, which affected not merely their own status but also that of their country. (v) One can find an echo of this sentiment in the words of a colonial official, H. L. Stevenson in the Burma Legislative Council, as cited in Narayana Rao’s Indian Labour in Burma: the honourable mover’s indictment . . . has harrowed our feelings with a description of the exactions, the impositions, the hardships, of which the cooly is a victim, from the time he leaves his home in Madras, to the day when broken, debilitated, a moral and physical wreck, he is thrown aside . . . to die in the gutter. (12) Then there is also George Orwell’s depiction of the Indian coolie in Burmese Days: Old Mattu, the Hindu durwan who looked after the European church, was standing in the sunlight below the veranda. He was an 48 SHANTHINI PILLAI old fever-stricken creature, more like a grasshopper than a human being, and dressed in a few square inches of dingy rag. . . . Looking piteously up at the veranda, he massaged the earth-coloured skin of his belly with one hand, and with the other made the motion of putting food into his mouth. (41) In all three excerpts, images of the Indian coolies’ docility and their status as outcastes are overtly predominant. The general assumption of Indian coolies in the Southeast region (as well as in most of the other colonies that they migrated to under classic colonial capitalism) rests mainly on such lines. Yet, as Hugh Tinker asserts, though “units of production, not people, were exported across the seas to supply the demand [for labor] . . . somehow they remained people all the same” (38). It is precisely this human feature that we see articulated in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. While the abject poverty and hardship is undeniably presented as part of the coolie’s world, signs of docility and malleability to imperial dominance are resignified and what we encounter are people who faced the onslaught of imperial capitalism and overcame its bitterness with strengths of their own. The Indo-Caribbean community has been actively involved in resignifying the term “coolie.” As veteran IndoCaribbean scholar Rajkumari Singh significantly asserts, the word “coolie” “conjures up poignancy, tears, defeats, achievements. The word must not be left to die out, buried and forgotten in the past. It must be given a new lease of life” (353). This sentiment has not taken full seed in Southeast Asia, and this is where literary works can play a role in changing set perceptions of the coolie experience in the region. Amitav Ghosh aids significantly in this area, as gleaned from the various narratives of coolie characters in The Glass Palace.1 Consequently, attendant subaltern signposts to the figure of coolie are duly resignified. One of the leading interrogators of the issue of subalternity and voice is notably that of Gayatri Spivak, especially as conceptualized in her now well-known assertion that one has to consider whether the subaltern can speak, a predicament that she sees entwined in the perplexities of “the permission to narrate” (citing Edward Said) a subject whose “itinerary has not been left traced” (Spivak 270–272). Her reservations about the task of relocating subalternity lie mainly in the following questions: How does one assume that one has the permission to narrate what has never really been fully outlined? Textual formations of the subaltern admittedly never give us the full range of the experience of subalternity simply because we do not hear the subaltern. How then do we begin to put that experience together without ourselves appropriating and representing in turn the subaltern experience? [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:59 GMT) Resignifying “Coolie” 49 Another point of contention that Spivak has articulated is with regards to the “condition of impossibility,” which is intertwined with any status of colonial subalternity. For, if, in the end, all we have to go by are merely fragmented representations of the subaltern and not their experiences in their own voices, how do we assume that there is...