The Glass Palace

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000

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Symbols & Motifs

The Glass Palace

The building that gives the novel its name, the Glass Palace is the name of an older historical account of the Burmese Royal Family, commissioned by one of King Thebaw’s ancestors.

Though the royal palace is abandoned at the very beginning of the novel, there are many characters who spend the entire book trying to return to a nostalgic past. The king and queen hope to return to Mandalay, Uma wants India to return to independence, and Manju wants to return to a time when her family was still alive. This lusting for a romanticized past–one that is almost impossible to reclaim–is symbolized in the recurring image of the Glass Palace.

In the end, characters are forced to either settle for a half-achieved version of their objective or to discover a new palace of their own imagining. The best example of this is Dinu, who builds a photography studio and names it the Glass Palace. Unlike the glass palaces of the past, it is a modern space, one in which he can encourage political action in a younger generation. He is no longer looking toward the past when he christens his studio; instead, he’s looking toward the future. Accordingly, these two versions of the Glass Palace bookend the novel and give it a cyclical structure.

Language

Though the novel was originally written in English, language becomes a key motif in the Glass Palace. Characters learn and struggle with learning one another’s languages, just as they struggle to comprehend cultures, behaviors, and histories. Certain characters never learn Malay, Burmese, or Hindustani, while others are fluent in all three.

Rajkumar is shown to be almost illiterate, yet he is able to wield language almost as though it were a weapon. He is a deft communicator, quickly picking up various languages as a young child and using them to his advantage. This kind of cross-cultural understanding is, at the time, a very useful tool. But as the novel progresses, it gradually becomes more nefarious. Rajkumar’s cross-cultural skills, manifested in his multilingual abilities, serve to replicate the British colonial practices on a smaller scale.

In addition to actual languages, discourse also plays an important role in the political awakenings within the text. Characters such as Arjun and Uma struggle to express their true emotions until they are given a linguistic framework with which they can vocalize their feelings. For Uma, this education takes place in America. She talks to Irish anti-colonialists, as well as members of the Indian Independence League, and they give her a language she can use to fight back against colonialism. She puts this to good use, using her language skills to become a famous writer and spread her message.

Arjun, on the other hand, learns a number of different discourses but still struggles to find the truth. His initiation into the military equips him with slang and jargon that makes him a more impressive, more confident person. It provides him with a purpose in his previously-meandering life.

But the better acquainted he becomes with this language, the more he begins to understand that it will be his downfall. In talking to men like Hardy and Kishan Singh, he learns new modes of communication, a language which does not fit into army regulations. Though he might be able to converse in Hindustani with his batman, he realizes that they are still speaking entirely different languages, informed by different experiences with the colonial forces. By the close of the novel, he is still struggling to square these disparate discourses.

Photography

The consistent presence of photos is a motif in the novel. At the beginning of The Glass Palace, photographic technology is still relatively new. At the wedding of Dolly and Rajkumar, the presence of a photographer is an accident and a novelty. But over the course of the book, camera technology develops and provides a concurrent reflection of increasingly-complicated ideologies.

The best representation of this is Dinu, whose photography skills mark many of the turning points in his life. He photographs Arjun in the station, he captures the Japanese bombers in the air, he photographs Alison as they fall in love, and his obsession with his hobby eventually drives her away and into Arjun’s arms. By the end of the book, he is running a photography studio of his own and using it as a cover to organize youth movements in Burma.

The author depicts the emergence of photography as an artform, running parallel to the Burmese fight for independence. By the time Dinu has mastered his hobby and has passed on his knowledge to the next generation, Burma is on the cusp of freeing itself from the military dictatorship.

Likewise, actual photographs become important cultural artefacts. When Jaya eventually tracks down Dinu, she does so thanks to her ability to recognize his photography skills. Jaya herself is an academic who focuses on photography, which again charts the development of the medium through a novelty, from hobby to artform. Just as the medium reaches maturity, so do Dinu’s political ideas and the Burmese population’s appetite for independence.

Furthermore, photographs are an important symbol in the text. With so many characters chasing an idealized past, a photograph helps to capture exactly what they are chasing. Each photograph is a moment in time, captured precisely. Whether it’s Uma photographing Alison and Dinu among the ruins where they will eventually fall in love or the family keeping a picture of Arjun’s arrival in the train station on a shrine after his death, each photograph carries with it a historical weight. It becomes an objective, an idealized past the characters can strive toward. But just like that past, it’s ultimately unreal, just a collection of inks and ambitions on a page.

The Glass Palace focuses heavily on the pursuit of history and the recurring motif of the photograph helps to illuminate what a fundamentally unattainable pursuit this is.