"That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him": Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace and the Colonial Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[The Empire is] huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us. --Amitav Ghosh (1) Now that fifty years or so have passed since the colonies in Asia and Africa became free--with the strident anticolonial passion somewhat abated and the shrill rhetoric muted--it seems possible take dispassionate view of the significant social, political, economic, and cultural phenomenon known as colonialism. This is what Amitav Ghosh sets out do in The Glass Palace. Ghosh's earlier novels, The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), firmly established as leading Indian English novelist. The Glass Palace, published in 2000, has range and sweep not easily matched in Indian English fiction. A story of three generations, it is spread over three interlinked parts of the British Empire--Burma, Malaya, and India. The Glass Palace is structured around the intermeshing relationships among four families: the Burmese King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat (deposed by the British in 1885 and exiled Ratnagiri in India) and their entourage; Rajkumar Raha, Bengali orphan emigrant Burma, and his descendants; Saya John, foundling brought up by Catholic priests, and his son Matthew and his family; and Urea, the wife (and later widow) of the Collector of Ratnagiri. Their fortunes are set against backdrop of stirring historical events--the British conquest of Burma, the consolidation of the Empire in India and Malaya, the First and Second World Wars--conceived and executed on an epic scale, in time frame ranging from 1885 1996. As Dinu goes cycling on morning in Malaya, he finds a massive square stone, with rectangular opening carved in the centre. Whatever its original use, the opening was now hole ... colonized by family of tiny green frogs (334-35). In contrast this rather innocuous process of colonization in the natural world stands the human colonizing process, which is fueled not by need for shelter or survival, but by greed and desire for economic and political expansion. The initial impulse for colonial enterprise, as is well known, is often commercial, leading the establishment of trading post or some such outfit. Thus, it is the Burmese teak and the Malayan rubber that spur the British colonial drive. With prescience beyond his years, the seven-year-old Matthew reports his unbelieving friend Rajkumar what his father, Saya John, has told him, namely, that the English want all the teak in Burma. The King won't let them have it so they're going do away with him (15). Once the colonial power is firmly established and has clear military superiority over the hapless and unprepared native rulers, it looks for, and often fabricates, dispute with an inconvenient native ruler so as justify dethroning him, annexing his state, and sending into exile. A dispute with British timber company, in which the company was clearly in the wrong--it was sidestepping the kingdom's customs regulations ... avoid paying duties (21)--is used as an excuse for waging war against King Thebaw in Mandalay. One of the king's senior ministers suggested discreetly that it might be best accept the terms: that the British might allow the Royal Family remain in the palace in Mandalay, on terms similar those of the Indian princes--like farmyard pigs in other words, be fed and fattened by their masters; swine, housed in sties that had been tricked out with few little bits of finery (21-22). But the fiery queen contemptuously turns down the suggestion. The colonial powers usually win not because their cause is just but because of superior power, manipulative skill, and weaponry. Ghosh carefully charts the progress of British invasion and wryly points out that it proceeds with smoothness to surprise even its planners (25), the war (if such one-sided affair could be called that) lasting only fourteen days. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".