Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

I greatly regret that, for fear of reprisals against those concerned, I am unable to thank either my friends in Myanmar or those of their compatriots who went out of their way to speak to me, often at no little risk to themselves. I trust that, should any of them ever happen to read this, they will know who they are and understand the depth of my gratitude to each of them.

Sadly, circumstances permit me to acknowledge only one of my most salient debts in Yangon: to the late writer Mya Than Tint, who has been removed by his untimely death from the reach of the regime whose oppressions he had so long and so heroically endured. Mya Than Tint was, for me, a living symbol of the inextinguishable fortitude of the human spirit: although I knew him only briefly, I felt myself to be profoundly changed and deeply instructed by his vision of literature. Everyone who knew him will recognise at once the pervasiveness of his influence on this book.

In the course of writing this book I lost a close friend: Raghubir Singh, the photographer, who was my mentor and teacher in all things relating to photography. It is my great regret that I was unable to acknowledge the depth of my gratitude to him in his lifetime: if I do so now, it is not in the hope of making amends, but rather, in order to record an unrepayable debt. Naturally, neither he nor anyone else named above bears any responsibility for any aspect of the contents of this took, the onus of which rests on me alone.

Amongst published sources my greatest debt is to the monograph Deposed King Thebaw of Burma in India, 1885–1916 (Bharatiya Vidya Series, Vol. 25, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay 1967) by Walter A. Desai. In his memoir, The Changing of Kings (Peter Owen, London, 1985), Philip Glass describes Desai as ‘a quiet old Indian historian from (Rangoon) University’. I like to think of the ‘quiet old Indian’ living in India in his retirement, sifting through the archives of New Delhi and Bombay as an act of homage and restitution to the country he had lost. Desai’s attempt to recover traces of this erased life is to me, in its slow careful unemphatic accumulation of detail, a deeply moving work; an affirmation that every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen.

Much of the travel and research for this book was supported by The New Yorker. I am grateful to many members of the staff of that magazine for their consistent support, and would like to thank, in particular, Tina Brown, Bill Buford, Alice Quinn, Peter Canby and Liesl Schillinger. Thanks also to Laura McPhee, for her help and advice, and to my old friend James Simpson, who has enriched this book immensely by his reading of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to my editors Susan Watt, Ravi Dayal, Kate Medina and Rukun Advani. To Barney Karpfinger, my agent, who found me the time I needed to write this book and was a pillar of strength through its most difficult moments, my gratitude is beyond measure. To Debbie, my wife, for her unfailing support, and my children, Lila and Nayan, for their forbearance, I am, as ever, deeply beholden.

In the end my greatest debt is to my father, Lieutenant-Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh. He fought in the Second World War as an officer of the 12th Frontier Force Regiment, a unit of the then British-Indian Army. He was in General Slim’s Fourteenth Army during the Burma campaign of 1945 and was twice mentioned in dispatches: he was thus among those ‘loyal’ Indians who found themselves across the lines from the ‘traitors’ of the Indian National Army. He died in February 1998 and never saw any part of my manuscript. Only in his absence did I come to understand how deeply my book was rooted in his experience, his reflections on the war and his self-questioning: it is to his memory that I dedicate The Glass Palace.