In February this year at the Inya Lake Hotel, Burma, the countrys first ever

international literary festival took place. This event is symptomatic of the series of
ongoing fundamental changes occurring in a country which, after half a century of
ruthless dictatorship and state-imposed silence, is finally emerging from the wilderness
and making a tentative transition to democracy. We are witnessing a crucial moment in
Burmas history and in Burmese literature and its engagement with the Western world.
In June last year the literary world witnessed another significant event. The first
anthology of Burmese poetry published in English outside of Burma appeared in the
shape of Bones Will Crow, co-edited by Ko Ko Thett and James Byrne. Within this
context it is now an urgent matter for the field of literary postcolonial studies to begin to
draw Burma and Burmese literature into the critical fold, from which it has been
relatively absent. As a corollary, those texts produced in the West that have in some way
depicted or imagined Burma should be re-examined.
I will be conducting a comparison of two literary texts that in some way deal
with Burma; George Orwells Burmese Days and Amitav Ghoshs The Glass Palace.
The former offers a perspective on the nature of colonial rule and its impact on
Europeans and Burmese alike, religion and the clash of culture, and Burmese history at
moments of great change, although its narrative focus is not on Burma, nor the Burmese
themselves. The Glass Palace goes further: the specific economic problems and
political struggles of Burmese pre- and post-colonial history are mapped into the written

lives of particular individuals within the narrative. From this starting point, it would
seem to me that a comparison of Orwells and Ghoshs fictional universes would
provide ample opportunity to trace the discursive evolution of the representation of
Burma in Western fiction across a turbulent century. The driving force of my analysis is
the concern with how each text interacts with the realities of colonialism in Burma and
their effect on the consciousness of the human subject, on the lives of ordinary
individuals; be they European, Burmese or Indian.
Only one critical text to date, to my knowledge, has taken account of the
relationship between these two novels. Its author, Christopher Rollason (2009),
comments upon this striking paucity, a significant absence when one considers the raft
of criticism that both texts have separately generated. Rollason offers an account of the
intertextual relationship between the two novels, giving particular weight to both
biographical parallels and shared textual threads that seemingly allude to the work of
Rudyard Kipling. This paper seeks to build upon Rollasons analysis, drawing out key
differences between the two texts that not only mark the evolution of literary discourse
about Burma but also may provide a basis upon which to develop our understanding of
contemporary events in that nation and designate a critical space in which to examine its
literary output. It is writers such as the Bones Will Crow co-editor Ko Ko Thett who are
providing the next English-language narratives on contemporary Burma. Thett is the
unique literary product of the complex history of Burma - a self-proclaimed poet by

choice, Burmese by chance (Thett, 2001-2013: n.p.) - an exiled Burmese voice, living
in Vienna, publishing almost exclusively in English; an example of the bridge now
being erected across the chasm of silence between the West and Burma. However, as we
shall see, Ghosh has already established a trans-textual dialogue with Burmese
literature, and provides us with a range of subaltern voices in The Glass Palace,
something which is markedly absent from colonial narratives like Burmese Days.
Having served in Burma as Assistant Superintendent in the Imperial Police
Force from 1922 to 1927, George Orwell would later criticise the British presence,
revealing that this period represented a passage into disquieting political awareness. The
narrator of Shooting an Elephant (1936) is explicit in this regard: I had already
made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thingI was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
than I can perhaps make clearyou see the dirty work of the Empire at close quarters
all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt (Orwell, 2003: 32). Before he
wrote Burmese Days, Orwell had already published essays on the British rule in Burma.
In How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma, written in 1929, he
depicts the ruthless economic exploitation by the British of the Burmese: the British
are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelesslythe Burmese hardly notice it for
the moment...they are not conscious of being exploited (Orwell, 2001: 6). Burmese

Days follows a similar pattern of condemning colonialism whilst denying the Burmese
population either conscious agency or a distinctive voice.
The novel is set in 1920s British Burma in the fictional Kyauktada district and
focuses on thirty-five-year-old English timber merchant John Flory and his vexed
relationship with the ideal of the pukka sahib. The text very clearly presents Florys
sympathies towards Burmese culture and history as well as his disgust of the
despotism of Britains Empire in the East. Although Florys desire to immerse himself
in Burmese culture is a welcome contrast to the attitudes of the rest of the sahiblog,
the Burmese remain inescapably positioned as the silent, disabled object of study
(Moosavinia et al., 2011: 106). Elizabeth is disquieted by Florys forever praising
Burmese customs and the Burmese character; he even went so far as to contrast them
favourably with the English (121). Surmising incorrectly that Elizabeth is different
from the herd of fools at the European Club, Flory takes her to a pwe. In honour of the
European guests, U Po Kyin instructs a performance from the best dancer, which
Elizabeth watches with a mixture of amazement, boredom and something approaching
horror (107). Florys intercultural project ultimately fails because the code of the pukka
sahib that constructed his identity simultaneously disavows his attempt to bridge the
cultural gulf. To be interested in Burmese culture, according to the sahib mentality, is to
be degraded to the level at which that inferior culture is seen. It evokes the horror of

miscegenation; of infiltration; most explicitly portrayed in the fierce opposition to the

proposal to allow the entry of a native into the all-white European Club.
Florys appreciation of the pwe is decidedly orientalist in essence. In prospect
of the dancer, he whispers to Elizabeth:
Its grotesque, its even ugly, with a sort of wilful ugliness. And theres
something sinister in it tooyet when you look closely, what art, what centuries
of culture you can see behind itthe whole life and spirit of Burma is summed
up in the way that girl twists her arms. (108)
Flory describes the pwe as an exotic spectacle; an alien experience to the uninitiated.
But he also attempts to give it a standard of value established in Western culture by
making a broad appeal to its substantial history. Despite his attempts, he meets only
blanket incomprehension in Elizabeth, who registers only the foreignness of the scene.
Florys failure to interest Elizabeth in Burmese culture is repeated at least twice, with
the visit to the bazaar (128-131) Elizabeth had recoiled from the stench and din, but
he did not notice it, and led her deeper into the crowd and Li Yieks tea shop (131137). We learn from these episodes that the gulf of incomprehension exists, moreover,
between Flory himself and Elizabeth, for he did not realize that this constant striving to
interest her in Oriental things struck her only as perverse, ungentlemanly, a deliberate
seeking after the squalid and the beastly (137). The tragedy of Flory lies in the
impossibility of his being able to communicate his condition. He is both the product of

imperialism and its outspoken critic; he seeks to immerse himself in Burmese culture
and communicate with the Orientals but cannot do so outside the rigid hierarchy
established by colonialism. As Rollason points out, Flory cannot completely break out
of the imperial conditioning, and his suicide may be read as symbolising the total
impasse arising from what seems the near-impossibility of intercultural communication
(2009: 7).
Flory declares that the English mentality must adapt to the environment of a
foreign land These peoples whole outlook is so different from ours. One has to
adjust oneself, he explains to Elizabeth, as they leave Li Yeiks tea shop (136). This
declaration is grounded in the fact that he has been so long in Burma that it has affected
his ideas about homeland. Orwell leaves us in no doubt about where Flory considers his
homeland, his native soil and that is Burma:
For he had realizedhe was glad to be coming back. This country which he
hated was now his native country, his home. He had lived here ten years, and
every particle of his body was compounded of Burmese soilHe had sent deep
roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country. (72)
This passage appears to problematise received ideas about the colonial subject as it no
longer posits Flory as a foreigner or usurper, an intruder in an invaded territory,
without complicating this notion. His relationship with Burma is drawn with great
sensitivity by Orwell and Emma Larkin writes in her introduction to Burmese Days that

Burma had got under Orwells skin (xi). However, this sensitivity is not free from
imperialist motives and the reasons why Flory feels this way about Burma are still
bound up in a discourse which cannot shed the accusation of imposition.
Florys love of Burmese culture and history is to a large degree premised on his
contempt for British colonial culture, explicitly the emptiness of conversation at the
Club and the views of its members. Florys world is one in which the dichotomy which
imperialism seeks to introduce and entrench anchors his appreciation of Burma, and its
people, as inescapably positioned as Other. Orwell is concerned to show how the
colonial subject in Burma is displaced. In these moments of displacement, Burma for
Flory is elsewhere a nowhere-ness where Flory can come to terms with the feelings of
abandonment and betrayal he ultimately experiences in his life. His ties to England
crumble every day (He had no tie with Europe now, except the tie of books [72]) and
so his ties to Burma strengthen. The location of Burma, as elsewhere, at times seems
almost arbitrary to the wider concern with Florys contradicted and troubled
consciousness. What is emphasised is the overwhelming loneliness which he tries to
counteract with Elizabeths companionship. His predicament is one in which he is
desperate to share and a significant component of that is the sharing of his love, and
hatred, of Burma. His aesthetic appreciation of his exotic surroundings is channelled
through the fraught perception of his own solitude:

A pang went through Flory. Alone, alone, the bitterness of being alone! So often
like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something bird,
flower, tree beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to
share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared. (57)
Orwells Burma is a pictorial entity and the anguished condition of Flory is
privileged over an appreciation of the landscape in itself. Of the encounter with the
scenery of Burma experienced by the average Englishman, Orwell wrote: In the
beginning the foreign landscape bores him, later he hates it, in the end he comes to love
it, but it is never quite out of his consciousness and all his beliefs are in a mysterious
way affected by it (cited by Larkin in Orwell, 2009: xi). Landscape and consciousness
interact continuously in Burmese Days. It is aspects of the physical scenery which
repeatedly remind Flory of his predicament. Even when in embrace with Elizabeth, it is
the properties of the frangipani tree that seep into Florys thoughts:
The sickly scent of the treegave him a feeling of remoteness from Elizabeth,
even though she was in his arms. All that that alien tree symbolized for him, his
exile, the secret, wasted years it was like an unbridgeable gulf between them.
How should he ever make her understand what it was that he wanted of her?
(183)
Burma becomes the imagined product of the colonial mind. Florys vexed relationship
with Burma is a projection of the tormented loneliness he feels in being unable to live
truthfully, fully conscious of the reality of the colonial enterprise, and unable to share
that truth. Burma is an imagined hell; and an imagined paradise: This countrys been a

kind of solitary hell to meand yet I tell you it could be a paradise if one werent
alone (186). Later, with Verralls departure and Elizabeths acceptance of him, hell
was yielding up Eurydice (282). Since Burma is imagined as the product of the
tortured mind of Flory, we can only ever see Burma or its indigenous population
through the colonial gaze.
With The Glass Palace, Ghosh creates what he calls a contemporary family
memoir which spans several generations and transgresses geographical boundaries,
tracing the lives of his characters in Burma, India, Singapore and Malaya (Aldama,
2002: 87). Perhaps the most fully developed character is Arjun; a British Indian officer,
who Neelam Maharaj sees as Ghoshs instrument for investigating the motivations of
those who resisted joining the Indian National Army (2006: n.p.). In Burmese Days,
only English troops march into Mandalay. The child U Po Kyin witnesses a race of
giants entering the city (2). In contrast, Ghosh does not shy away from depicting the
role played by Indians in the conquest of Burma: as the vanguard passed and the next
squad came into view, an amazed silence descended on the spectators: these soldiers
were not English they were Indians (28). Saya John describes his horror at the
innocent evil of sepoys, drawn as uneducated Indian peasants, men who submit to
orders and kill without conscience. The narrative contrasts the simplicity and innocence
of the sepoy to the knowingness and hunger of Rajkumar, who condemns them as tools
without minds of their own (30). In Ghoshs initial exploration of the Indian role in

the conquest of Burma the acquiescence of the sepoys to the imperial hands that man
the military machine show them to be mere automatons (Pillai, 2012: 55). This
sentiment is reiterated by Alison later, who, contrasting Arjuns helplessness with the
self-awareness of Dinu, attacks the former: youre not in charge of what you do; youre
a toy, a manufactured thing, a weapon in someone elses hands (376). Ghosh depicts
the contradicted consciousness of Arjun, beginning with an affirmed loyalty to the
British Indian army, as one of the first generation of Indian officers, to a gradual
awareness of the impossibility of defending a country he has never known and a people
who would readily deny his worth, let alone his equality with them; the paradox of
having to fight, as Hardy puts it, knowing that youre risking everything to defend a
way of life that pushes you to the side lines (406).
Arjuns progress is a dilemma of realization of the perpetually conflicted situation
he is bound to occupy as an elite member of the British army, in India, sent to repress
rebellious uprising in various parts of the empire (Bhautoo-Dewnarain, 2012: 37).
Hardy recognises the disjunction between his hand and heart, feeling himself to be just
a tool, an instrument (407) and resolves to find out how to become human again.
Wounded, and hiding in a ditch with Kishan Singh, his batman, to wait out the advance
of Japanese soldiers, Arjun begins a brooding self-examination, disordered by the pain
from his leg. He experiences a hallucinatory vision in which he and Kishan Singh are
disfigured:

They were both lumps of clay, whirling on potters wheels. He, Arjun, was the first
to have been touched by the unseen potter; a hand had come down on him, touched
him, passed over to another; he had been formed, shaped he had become a thing
unto itself no longer aware of the pressure of the potters hand, unconscious even
that it had come his way. Elsewhere, Kishan Singh was still turning on the wheel,
still unformed, damp, malleable mud. It was this formlessness that was the core of
his defence against the potter and his shaping touch. (431)
In a moment of anguished physical pain, it is an intuitive understanding of the complex
nature of the material basis of identity formation which leads Arjun to question his
loyalty to the British (Bhautoo-Dewnairan, 2012: 38). He realises that his very
consciousness had been moulded by acts of power of which he had been entirely
unaware. He, as a subject of imperial authority who believed in the promise of equality
and freedom, who believed his acts were his own, his choices made consciously, comes
to an awareness that he had never had a moment of true self-consciousness (431).
It is a self-consciousness of his collusion with colonial exploitation that burdens
Flory with a guilt that he cannot escape and which spells his dissolution. Orwells
narrative voice suggests, as we have seen, how acts of imperial power have formed
Flory but also indicate that Flory sees a way out in Elizabeths companionship. Arjun,
too, resolves to decipher a way out his predicament; an opportunity to become human
again; he changes his political attitudes and joins the Indian National Army, but cannot
escape the overwhelming nihilism that has poisoned his life. Arjun, like Flory, is shaped
and delimited by structures of imperial authority that exist both outside of, and which,

precede him. Whilst fighting in the INA unit in Burma, Arjun experiences renewed
tensions, this time between the Indian officers who had fought for the British Indian
army, and subsequently switched allegiances, and the Malayan plantation recruits. The
latter laughed about the pampered lives the professionals had experienced under their
colonial masters, and recognised that theirs wasnt the same struggle as that of the
professionals (521). These plantation recruits were fighting and dying for an India they
had never known, just as Arjun had fought for a Britain he had never seen. To them,
India figures as a metaphor for freedom, an escape from the slavery of the plantation.
As Arjun begins to see himself through their eyes, he espies a mercenary unable to
slough off the taint of his past and the cynicism that came with it, the nihilism (522).
Florys birthmark fades immediately with death, so that it was no more than a
faint grey stain (294). Moreover, it is during his rare moments of defiance that he
becomes more conscious of his birthmark, and attempts to turn it away from his
companions gaze (Gopinath, 2009: 216). Flory is inescapably someone who is
stained by imperialism. His defiance of the lies of colonial exploitation are played out
across the plane of his inner being, translating only intermittently into uncertain actions
against the sahib code. These instances are accompanied with a textual signifier of his
physically embodied symbol of having been shaped by imperialism; his birthmark, his
stain, which becomes inescapably visible and humiliating. This birthmark is
manifestly depicted as a disfiguration in Flory, and he and his fellow Europeans are

exposed as deformed human beings because they reflectthe ultimate deformation:

colonial imperialism (Lieskounig, 2012: n.p.). The capitulation represented in Burmese
Days is not of the imperial framework but of the colonial subject: the secrecy of your
revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of lies (69). The
awakening of political consciousness in Flory results in internal collapse in the face of
the rigorous codes of the external frameworks underpinning colonial authority. In
Arjuns final meeting with Dinu, we find a striking textual echo of Florys stain:
We rebelled against an Empire that has shaped everything in our lives; coloured
everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain which has
tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I
suppose, is where I am. (518)
Arjuns individual identity has patterned itself to the surface of his consciousness, only
to prove an illusion; a shadow of a self; something constructed and moulded by external
forces. Motivations that are figured directly from ideologies and historical forces
become ghosts that haunt the human agent, that displace his being, catapulting him into
the unstoppable flow of events. It is Arjuns recognition of his own deformity that
enables him to execute Kishan Singh before Kishan, too, should become stained by the
self-consciousness of the colonised subject; before his malleability takes concrete shape.
Of Arjun, Ghosh himself says: he has been formed and shaped by the manipulative
hand in such a way that he himself has ceased to understand who he is or what he is
(Aldama, 2012: 90). It is Arjuns painful realisation of this that leads to his dissolution.

Both Arjun and Flory are guilty, perhaps, of privileging too much those
historical forces they recognise as having been instrumental in the formation of their
subjecthood. It is Dinu who recognises this, in his poignant final encounter with Arjun:
This is the greatest danger, he thought, this point at which Arjun has arrived
where, in resisting the powers that form us, we allow them to gain control of all
meaning; this is their moment of victory: it is in this way that they inflict their
final and most terrible defeat. (519)
In the jungles of Malaya, Arjun becomes aware of the paradoxes of his double
subjectificationwithin the two narratives of empire and emerging Indian nationalist
discourse (Bhautoo-Dewnairan, 2012: 38). Arjun cannot become human again; he
cannot detach himself from those forces that have both shaped him and spared him.
Instead, he swings back and forth between the counterpoints of master and slave, as they
are posited by the two discourses. The balance of power between the individual human
subject and the forces of history or ideology (autocracy, colonialism, Communism,
Fascism) is a fundamental concern of both authors and in Flory and Arjun it is given its
most vivid and haunting literary representation. How far we sympathise with either
character may just be determined by how far we are willing to accept the capacity of
impersonal forces to shape individual identity and being. It is particularly striking,
however, that Ghosh explores how lives engage and can resist such forces. This
sentiment of hope is wholly absent from the overriding pessimism of Burmese Days.

Burmese Days offers very little in the way of a distinctly Burmese voice. As
Stephen Keck has pointed out, Orwell is hardly interested in any type of Burman point
of view (2005: 38). The novel effectively denies both individual agency and
psychological interiority to any of the indigenous population. They are crudely
sketched: the corrupt local Burmese official, U Po Kyin, and his cronies, the anonymous
crowd, a handful of local farmers, Dr Veraswami (who is very much the figure of the
mimic, an Indian doctor in awe of the civilised British and repulsed by the backward
native ways), Old Mattu, the nameless waiter at the European club, Ko Sla and other
house-servants and Ma Hla May, and other sundry characters. Orwells indigenous
characters are drawn on the periphery and somewhat caricatured in a rather satirical
fashion. Burma in the 1920s was characterised by social unrest and the novel is indeed
permeated by the threat of rebellion and spreading sedition. Despite this, Orwell
includes no nationalist figures in the main plot (Boehmer, 2005: 154). It was Orwells
concern not so much to capture the social realities of life in Burma, nor to offer the
perspective of its indigenous population, but rather to show how British rule protected
and promoted the systematic exploitation of the land and its peoples. The novel fails to
explore the direct impact of the colonial system on the local people who must serve it;
how it altered them and how it impacted on their lives and thought.
Keck argues that Burmese Days repeats the constructions of stereotypes which
scholars have come to associate with orientalism and that, although Orwell did not

write to create categories of difference or to promote racial hierarchies, his novel has
the effect of supporting some of these patterns of discourse (2005: 40). Indeed,
Veraswami, U Po Kyin and Ma Hla May remain figures that are essentially articulated
through a discourse which, although critical of imperialism, is ultimately premised on it
and, at times, complicit with it. We only glimpse the effects of colonialism upon the
Burmese population from the distanced colonial gaze of Flory (for example, the
crouching gait of the old village headman the result of rheumatism combined with
the constant shikoing needed in a minor Government official [164]). The focus on the
effects of imperialism on the Western consciousness is a theme which ultimately is
bound up with twentieth-century European political and social concerns (consider the
accusations levelled at Flory by his fellow club members of Bolshevism and
Socialism). Orwells focus on how systems of thought are appropriated as political
weapons to repress the individual consciousness derives from a specifically Western
discourse. Burmese Days depicts what Flory calls the horrible death-in-life (289) of
the sahib in British India. It is not concerned with the experience of the colonised
subject of Burma. Ultimately, Orwell shows us in Flory that the reluctant colonial figure
is, like the colonised, a victim of empire. Flory is an anti-hero, Western modern man
supplanted to a colonial outpost, tormented by the painful self-consciousness of one
aware of the evils of Empire but impotent to act against it.

Whereas we are encouraged to see Flory as a victim of colonialism, Ghosh refuses

to draw any of his characters as colonial victims. In Burmese Days, as we have seen,
there is no explicitly voicing of the subaltern; by focusing on notions of subjugation and
the authoritative voice of the imperialist, the Burmese/Indian subject remains encased in
silence. In The Glass Palace, the subaltern finds many different voices, and Ghosh
skilfully depicts the heterogeneity of identities that inhabit the arena of Southeast Asia.
He explores both the painful contradiction and potential opportunities for reinvention
that living in a colonised region offers. He capably figures both resistance to, and
collusion with, colonialism within the consciousnesses of colonised subjects; interior
lives that we are unable to access in Burmese Days. He abolishes the myth of dichotomy
between coloniser and colonised constructed by the traditional colonial narrative,
recording instead the significant political, social and ethnic tensions between the
Burmese and Indians, and yet refuses to draw simple victims of history without
examining the type of interior struggle we witness with Arjun. Ghoshs exploration of
the subaltern experience in the novel provides inroads into the lives of these previously
unsighted and unvoiced figures of subalternity (Pillai, 2012: 51). The underlying
mechanism is Ghoshs profound concern with the human; the individual lives that make
up the distinctly varied and patterned patchwork of the Southeast Asian region.
Although both texts portray a Burma that is multicultural a mlange of
intertwining peoples, languages and ethnicities in Burmese Days the limits of the

colonial mentality are such that the text cannot resolve the pieces into a broad pattern
(Rollason, 2009: 7). In contrast, the Burma imagined in The Glass Palace is a space of
diffusion and interpenetration of heterogeneous cultural and ethnic groups, recording an
historical pan-Asian process which precedes and interacts with colonialism. Historical
evidence confirms the accuracy of Ghoshs depiction. British colonialism sought to
homogenise the complex Burmese realities. Sheila Nair points out that:
British policy challenged the fluidity of ethnic identity and politics in the
precolonial state, and instead solidified racial, tribal, and ethnic differences
along socio-economic lines. This was true not only of indigenous minority
communities but also of immigrant groups such as the Chinese and Indians. (2002:
262)
Furthermore, Marja-Leena Heikkil-Horn has shown how, even down to the point of
physical geography, the British colonial administration successfully created ethnic
categories in the process of their geo-mapping of a nation called Burma, which
otherwise did not exist as an entity and was wholly imagined by colonial discourse.
Against this uniformalising impellent, the lives of the characters of The Glass Palace
affirm the multilingual and pluricultural as signifiers of human interconnectedness
(Rollason, 2009: 8). The narrated individual lives of those absent from Burmese Days
are, in The Glass Palace, postcolonial signifiers which act as a source of hope and a
guidance to future engagement. Ghoshs methodology is to draw different subaltern
characters, all affected by colonialism but all engaged with it through a sense of

becoming an agent, all endowed with an interior life which renders their threedimensionality to his readers far more powerful than if we were to view them simply as
postcolonial types or tropes.
Pillai shows how The Glass Palace re-signifies the figure of the coolie of colonial
narratives in Rajkumar who, with a capitalistic spirit and inner determination, manages
to reinvent himself from poor Indian immigrant labourer into transnational wealthy
businessman. Rajkumars success is not without substantial collusion with British
colonialism; in both his investments and his coolie recruitment from village districts
near Madras for oil mining firms in Yenangyaung and later for the rubber plantation in
Malaya. In contrasting Rajkumars agency with the docility and outcast status of the
coolie of colonial narratives, Pillai quotes a passage from Burmese Days describing Old
Mattu begging next to the veranda upon which Flory and Veraswami are chatting (41).
The contrast is effective to her argument, but she misses a more direct intertextual
relationship, spotted by Rollason, between U Po Kyin and Rajkumar articulated through
an image which appears in not only Burmese Days and The Glass Palace, but also
Kiplings poems, arguably the literary origin. The image is that of the British troops
entering Mandalay to lay claim to the sovereign rule of Burma, and it is this event that
haunts both narratives and with which both novels begin. We learn that U Po Kyins
earliest memory, back in the eighties, was of standing, a naked pot-bellied child,
watching the British troops march victorious into Mandalay (2). On the second page of

The Glass Palace the infant Rajkumar quite literally walks down Kiplings road to
Mandalay entering the capital shortly before the British capture it: And so it happened
that at the age of eleven, walking into the city of Mandalay, Rajkumar saw, for the first
time, a straight road (4). U Po Kyin and Rajkumar share this early experience of
witnessing the British conquest and, in a sense it shapes their early resolution to succeed
in life, not without exploiting some of the indigenous people of Burma and India in their
rise to prominence.
Ghosh depicts the consciousness of the child Indian labour immigrant in Rajkumar
(and with lesser detail, his illegitimate son Ilongo); it is one irrevocably shaped by the
history of colonial conquest but this is not simply characterised by loss, absence and
displacement but also by opportunity and by the driving motivation to provide for
oneself:
He wasunaware that in certain places there exist invisible bonds linking people to
one another through personifications of their commonality. In the Bengal of his birth
those ties had been surrendered by a century of conquest and no longer existed even
as a memory. Beyond the ties of blood, friendship and immediate reciprocity,
Rajkumar recognised no loyalties, no obligations and no limits on the compass of
his right to provide for himself. He reserved his trust and affection for those who
earned it by concrete example and proven goodwill. Once earned, his loyalty was
given wholeheartedly. (47)
This sense of self-preservation develops what manifests itself within Rajkumar as an
entrepreneurial spirit, the first glimmer of which we encounter shortly after Ma Chos

departure, as Rajkumar recognises in the British conquest that there must be some
hidden wealth secreted within the forest and resolves to find out for himself. It is the
commercialisation of Mandalay by the British that enables Saya Johns business
providing supplies to teak camps to flourish.
Ghosh even depicts life in a teak camp, something which is missing from
Burmese Days, since when Flory is absent from the narrative it is because he is in the
jungle extracting teak for the timber firm. This is another example of ways in which we
are able to access in The Glass Palace that which is on the periphery in Burmese Days.
Rajkumar and Saya John encounter British forest assistants in these camps, described as
distant, brooding men (71) who were generally very correct in their manner to
suppliers like Saya John. When one berates Saya John, Rajkumar feels a burning
indignation, but Saya John defends the assistant as himself a victim of capitalist
imperialism. His sketch of the assistant is strikingly similar to that of Flory:
Think of the kind of life they lead here, these young Europeans. They have at
best two or three years in the jungle before malaria or dengue fever weaken
themThe company knows this very well; it knows that within a few years
these men will be prematurely aged, old at twenty-oneThat man issick and
alone, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people the likes of whom
he has never knownthere he is, reading his book. (74)
The description recalls the haggard features of Orwells timber merchant. At twentyseven, Flory begins to age prematurely for eight years of Eastern life, fever, loneliness

and intermittent drinking, had set their mark on him and we learn that he learned to
live in books (68). Saya John refuses to condemn the Englishman outright, instead
giving an account that displays a profound concern for individual humans and their
circumstances.
It is the concern for his own circumstances, to make his own place in the world,
for which Rajkumar resolves to enter the timber business, following Baburao as a
labour contractor initially, and then showing complete ruthlessness in indenturing fiftyeight coolies from India immediately after having left Baburao to raise cash (124-8).
From the boy in dusty rags, orphaned in the streets of Mandalay, Rajkumar rises to
prominence by thirty. Teak, timber and rubber contribute to his and Matthews rise and
Morningside is described by the latter as a monument to wood (219). That it could
equally be described as a monument to imperial capitalism does not go unregistered in
the novel, with Uma being particularly sensitive to this perception. Ghosh, in carefully
crafting the lives of these characters as not only being affected by but interacting with
colonial domination, draws a far more complicated picture than that offered by Orwell,
ultimately suggesting that the line between collusion and resistance in the colonised
subject is anything but clearly marked.
Critics have failed to note an important influence on Ghoshs novel, one emanating
from Burma itself; the author is Mya Than Tint and the work I am referring to is On the
Road to Mandalay: Tales of Ordinary People (English translation, 1996). Tint was a

widely-known writer and translator; his biography is captured in small scale in the
chapter The Author of On the Road to Mandalay. Born in 1929, Tint joined the antiJapanese resistance in 1944, making contact with Burmese Communists before fleeing
to Mandalay as the Kempetai took interest in his activities. After independence, Tint
wrote fiction alongside earning a living as a journalist. His first period in jail was under
Burmas 1958 caretaker military government led by General Ne Win. He spent the first
two years of it in Rangoons Insein Jail life there was as good as in a hotel (Tint,
1996: 11) before being transferred, in 1959, to a jail on the Coco Islands in the
Andaman Sea. He was released in 1960 when U Nus civilian government came briefly
to power, but was back in prison in 1963 when peace negotiations between the
Revolutionary Council and opposition groups broke down. He spent three years in
solitary confinement in Insein jail. Tint recalls how some detainees went mad, some
died there for lack of medical treatment (11). In 1968 he was transferred again to the
Coco Islands, an open jail where the authorities told inmates they were free to swim
away through shark-infested seas. Protests by the prisoners against the cruel conditions
on the island led to the jails closure in 1972, and Tint was released. In the face of strict
censorship, he would shift his energies to translation and non-fiction.
Tint was hugely influenced by Western literature and On the Road to Mandalay was
inspired by the work of the American oral historian Studs Terkel, and continued the
tradition of profiling ordinary Burmese, begun by Ludu U Hla in 1958 with his series of

portraits of prisoners, The Caged Ones. Tint translated a great deal of Western literature
into Burmese and, in a manner of speaking, was one of many who conducted a transtextual dialogue with the West decades before the nation became as accessible as it has
become today. At the beginning of On the Road to Mandalay, he states that he is not
writing for the outside world but for the Burmese people (12). His interviews are
specifically intended to paint the social realities of life across Burma, to depict the
contemporary lives of ordinary people as a means of establishing cross-cultural
understanding in a nation characterised by ethnic and social division: ours is a closed
society, we dont understand enough about one another (12). Tint had a significant
influence on Ghosh, who credits him with having been a key inspiration in his writing
of The Glass Palace, stating in the Authors Notes that everyone who knew him will
recognise at once the pervasiveness of his influence on this book (551). Ghosh
describes Tint as a symbol of the inextinguishable fortitude of the human spirit. The
absence of a mention of Tint in Ghosh criticism may perhaps be symptomatic of a wider
phenomenon of privileging influences emanating from the West rather than from
indigenous sources; one very important aspect of what postcolonial studies generally
tries to combat.
In an interview with The Myanmar Times last year, Ghosh explicitly acknowledged
his debt to Mya Than Tint, who he had met in Rangoon in 1996 and had been astonished
to discover that Tint had read him:

Our interests coincided in many ways. He was a writer who had a deep interest in
people and real life. When I left his house he gave me a mimeographed, translated
version of the book he was then working on, which was called Tales of Ordinary
People. For this book he went out and interviewed people, almost at random. These
are wonderful stories that come alive in this book. Many of the little stories that
went into The Glass Palace were inspired by Saya Mya Than Tint, and I feel a deep
sense of gratitude toward him. (Long, 2012: n.p.)
It is the concern that Ghosh shares with Tint with ordinary people, with human lives,
which sets The Glass Palace outside the frequently politicised parameters of the
postcolonial text. Ghosh not only explores the myriad and heterogeneous nature of the
subaltern experience in post-independent Burma in his novel, but, in the
acknowledgement to Tint, what is suggested is that the novel itself comes to exist as the
result of a similarly complex and mixed set of interactions and influences, as Ghosh
traces both his family history and his literary and personal influences back to Burma. In
The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of my Grandfathers
Bookcase, an essay published two years before The Glass Palace, Ghosh makes an
explicit link between his grandfathers bookcase and that belonging to Tint (1998: 16).
This link is echoed textually in the figure of Dinu and his full bookcases at The Glass
Palace studio. When Jaya asks Dinu how he acquired books and magazines in a heavily
censored country, his answer is an exact replica of Tints to Ghosh: I made friends with
ragpickers and the people who sort through refuse. I told them what I wanted and they
saved them for methe military does not have the imagination to control their trash
(508). This is not the only resemblance. Tint described to Ghosh a tradition that took

place in which writers and artists would make public appearances around the country,
delivering talks and holding recitations and readings. These writers and artists were
careful to avoid explicit mention of politics; they discussed political matters only
through allusion, oblique references, satire and humour (recorded by Ghosh in his
blog, 2012). Tint had stressed the necessity of finding secret languages with which to
communicate with the audience. Dinus weekly sessions at the studio are a clear
example of this: when we talk of politics it is in such a way that they cannot
followeveryone learns other means of communication, secret languages (509).
It is the power of communication; of diverse ways to enact discourse; that
underpins the thrust of the resistance to overbearing political systems in The Glass
Palace, that is depicted as the failure of Flory in Burmese Days and that underscores the
very purpose of Tints On the Road to Mandalay. Dinu finds himself able to believe in
Aung San Suu Kyi just because shes the only one who seems to understand what the
place of politics iswhat it ought to bethat while misrule and tyranny must be
resisted, so too must politics itselfthat it cannot be allowed to cannibalise all of life,
all of existence (542). It is the charisma and attractiveness of Suu Kyi as a human
which draws in Dinu and induces in him a renewed hope for the future of Burma. On
the Road to Mandalay records, in transcription form, interviews Tint conducts with the
people he meets in everyday life: they are individual narratives of suffering, of triumph,
of disease, of addiction, of crime, of family, of relationships. They disclose the lives of a

petty criminal, a fortune-teller, a type-setter, a theatres scene-shifter, a festival trader, a

newspaper seller, among others. These are lives that cross boundaries, both geographical
and ethnic, as the profiles of Burmans, Karens, Tamil, Mon, and others, are sketched.
An observation from the story, The Twelve Festival Trader, sums up the
heterogeneous social realities of life in twentieth-century Burma: There are so many
different types of people in the world, and so many different ways to earn a living. My
father was just one more of them, trying to earn a living by following the festivals (60).
Tints concern is to record a life without privileging one from the next. Every narrative
is worthwhile and his are of lives that are very likely to be otherwise forgotten by
history. The interviewee of Bitter-Sweet Taste of Success initially complains that the
people the author writes about are all too ordinary before concluding that, ultimately, all
are about human beings and everyone has a story to tell (237). Tint focuses on how
lives interact and engage with their surroundings and with the forces of history;
individuals experiencing poverty or dislocation caused by the long-running insurgencies
that ravage the country even today. The influence on Ghosh is evident, and the
relationship between Tints book and Ghoshs is trans-textual in its shared
preoccupation with human lives; with the individual and his story. The voices that The
Glass Palace captures ring with the same sense of reality as Tints. These are the same
voices that are absent from Burmese Days.

The Glass Palace carries with it an implicit sense of hope and a resistance that
originates not with the external structures of politics but with love, friendship, and
everyday life. In the interaction with everyday life and in the essentialness of sharing
memories, of communication and of dialogue with others, Ghosh figures a potential
resistance in the subject consciousness to its ensnared condition, possessing a capacity
to remould itself in the face of the overwhelming forces of colonialism; the reinvention
of Rajkumar, the resistance of Uma, the rebellion of Hardy, the existential struggle of
Arjun. It is the particular failure to communicate and share his thoughts and memories
that is Florys unravelling. The poignancy of the pessimism of Burmese Days lies in the
total failure of its protagonist to conduct a normal life. Orwell sketches the perils of
imperialism as they are played out upon the site of the fundamental human will to
communicate with others. Flory, talking of he and his fellow Anglo-Indians, describes
to Elizabeth a demon inside us driving us to talk. We walk about under a load of
memories which we long to share and somehow never can. Its the price we pay for
coming to this country (184). It is upon this same site that Ghosh figures both defiance
and hope, the ability to communicate across cultural and intellectual chasms; an
intrinsic hope born from the essentialness of conversation that underpins the life stories
of his characters, presented as ordinary people. The final image of Rajkumar and Uma
is a tender image of domestic bliss, of union and interconnectedness, figured through
the interlocking of their dentures; two characters in which the extremes of nationalist

resistance and capitalist collusion had been personified. Their previous antagonism
dissipates throughout the narrative, as the ties of friendship, family and companionship
are shown to outlast political disagreement.
Emma Larkin comments in her Finding George Orwell in Burma that, with
regard to Orwells penning of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four,
it is a particularly uncanny twist of fate that these three novels effectively tell the story
of Burmas recent history (2011: 2). But perhaps it is not Orwell alone who could be
seen as visionary. One could perhaps add that in The Glass Palace, Ghosh has given us,
in his focus on human lives rather than political systems, his trans-textual dialogue with
Mya Than Tint and the figuring of resistance to totalising politics, a framework of how
we can begin to understand the even more contemporary events in Burmese history.
Contemporary Burmese history and Burmese literature should ultimately impact upon
postcolonial studies rather than be reduced to a unit of analysis by it, and it is with open
dialogue and a willingness to listen to the individual narratives of todays Burmese
writers that this may be achieved.

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