The Role Of Cosmopolitanism In Ghosh's The Glass Palace

Introduction:

In the present century as in the last decades of the earlier one, large-scale migration created massive challenges to the ideas of nation-states and civil societies. It has drawn the attention of the scholars to the study of transcultural space and identity. It sheds much light on the re-imagining of communities and the subject’s ‘multi-locationality’ within and without the boundaries of one’s culture or territorial region. Cultural purity has become a fluid term, almost a misnomer for it hardly seems to exist in its purest form. What we find instead in the present synchronized world is the practice of mixed cultures that give rise to cosmopolitanism which, in its turn, encourages trans-culturalism. In fact, in the earlier colonial as well as in today’s globalised world, the iconography of one’s cultural identity becomes plural rather than singular – adapted, shaped and reshaped rather than inherited as one comes in contact with other cultural spaces. The historical event of colonisation, as evidenced in Ghosh’s ‘The Glass Palace’ as in his other novels, has

It was a time when the British were ruling over a large part of the world including India. The greed and martial power of England drove the nation towards expanding territories across other parts of the world. The wealth and richness of dense teak woods aplenty in Burma attracted their attention and the land was invaded. King Thebaw was supplanted and the royal family was sent into exile at Ratnagiri in India. But the striking fact about the invasion was that the imperial army consisted of as many Indians as it could accommodate and there were only a handful of white officers and soldiers executing their plans. As the King was on his way into exile he encountered the army near the