Elusive Idea of Nationhood and Bifurcated Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract

The question of nation has always been a problematic one. For the people of the postcolonial countries, the notion of nationhood is more intricate because the colonized mass had continuously been persuaded by the manipulative colonial discourses and colonial hegemony to accept the supremacy of the colonial masters and to abnegate their indigenous culture. This colonial interference has not only troubled the notion of nationhood but also jeopardized the identity formation of the colonized subjects. In The Glass Palace (2000) Amitav Ghosh taking the backdrop of the third Anglo-Burmese war and India’s freedom struggle sheds light on the problematization of the formation of nationhood of Indian soldiers and portrays the psychological dilemma and struggle those Indian soldiers and officers went through in response to the call of duty to rescue their own nation from the grip of the colonizers. Focusing on the major characters of The Glass Palace this paper is an attempt to enquire into the causes how for the colonized mass the concept of nationalism since its inception—being marred by the conflicting ideologies—has turned into an elusive idea and how the identity formation of the postcolonial subjects is always entangled and bifurcated due to the influences of the legacy of colonization.

Keywords

• Nation
• Nationhood
• Colonial discourse
• Mimicry
• Bifurcated identity
• Nation, Nationhood, Colonial discourse, Mimicry, Bifurcated identity

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