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Threads of British Empire

A Postcolonial Study of Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace

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  • Sudhir Kumar Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana.

Keywords:

Postcolonialism, Hegemony, Imperialism, Empire

Abstract

 In Postcolonial literature, a new frontier less writing has emerged to challenge the atrocities of the British Empire. The imperial past still haunts the innocent souls of the postcolonial world, which includes the voices of the Asian, African and Australian continents. This paper describes the anti-imperial struggle and celebration of their ancient glory. At the same time, it also tries to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the hegemonic power structure. Most of the writers have the colonial hangover and try to create some resistance towards the former colonizer’s ideology along with the life of people during and after the British Empire. As a result, the postcolonial writers practice taking the path of counter-narrative and resist the approaches of colonizers in the postcolonial structures of administrative, educational, legal, political, religious, cultural and even social constructs. Amitav Ghosh is a versatile author and genius voice in the writings of Indian English novels after Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. In his novels, he introduces some new areas in the ambit of colonial/postcolonial narrative enquiry. He has an excellent knowledge of South-Asian history, ranging from the British invasion of Burma in 1885 to the Indian independence. The main objective of this paper is to analyse and present Amitav Ghosh's efforts to peep into silenced and hidden episodes of colonial history and narrativizing them through the subaltern's point of view. The novel The Glass Palace presents the story of three generations and parts of the British Empire: Burma, Malaysia, and India. The novel The Glass Palace describes the domination of the Empire and the annexation of the Kingdom of Burma. Now, due to the extension of the colonial Empire, the last King of Burma, 'Thebaw', has been dethroned by the Britishers and sent into exile to India. This paper studies this novel under the canon of the postcolonial approach in literature.

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Posted

2023-12-12

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