Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

‘Welcome, welcome.’

At dinner, Uma and Dolly sat between Matthew and Saya John. The men worked hard at keeping their plates filled with food.

‘That’s gulai tumis, fish cooked with pink ginger buds, bunga kuntan.’

‘And this?’

‘Prawns roasted in pandanus leaves.’

‘Peanut crumpets.’

‘Nine-layered rice cakes.’

‘Chicken with blue flowers — bunga telang.’

‘Pickled fish with turmeric leaves and lime leaves and leaves of purple mint.’

‘A salad of shredded squid and polygonum and duan kado, a creeper that smells like a spice-garden.’

With every morsel their mouths were filled with new tastes, flavours that were as unfamiliar as they were delicious. Uma cried: ‘What is this food called? I thought I’d eaten everything in New York, but I’ve never tasted anything like this.’

Saya John smiled: ‘So you like Nyonya cooking then?’

‘I’ve never eaten anything so wonderful. Where is it from?’

‘From Malacca and Penang,’ Elsa said smiling. ‘One of the world’s last great secrets.’

Replete at last, Uma pushed her plate away and sat back.

She turned to Dolly who was sitting beside her.

‘So many years.’

‘Twenty-three, almost to the day,’ said Dolly, ‘since I last saw you in Rangoon.’

After dinner Dolly accompanied Uma to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, cross-legged, while Uma combed her hair at the dressing table.

‘Uma,’ Dolly said shyly, ‘you know I’m still wondering. .’

‘About what?’

‘Your reception at the port today — all those people. .’

‘Oh, you mean the League?’ Uma put her comb down and smiled at Dolly, in her mirror.

‘Yes. Tell me about it.’

‘It’s such a long story, Dolly. I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Never mind. Just start.’

It went back to New York, Uma said. That was where she had first joined the League, inducted by friends, other Indians living in the city. The Indians there were few in number but closely connected; some had come to seek shelter from the surveillance of the Empire’s intelligence services; others had been drawn there because of the relative affordability of the education. Almost without exception they were passionately political; it was impossible, in that circumstance of exile, to remain aloof. At Columbia there was the brilliant and intense Dadasaheb Ambedkar; there was Taraknath Das, gentle in manner but stubborn in spirit. Midtown, there was the Ramakrishna Mission, housed in a tiny, loft-like apartment and manned by a single, saffron-robed sant and scores of American sympathisers; downtown, in a tenement south of Houston Street, there was an eccentric Raja who believed himself to be India’s Bolivar. It was not that America was hospitable, either to them or their enterprise: it was merely oblivious, uninterested, but indifference too provided shelter of a certain kind.

Soon Uma’s apartment had become one of the nodes in this small but dense net of Indian connections. She and her compatriots were like explorers or castaways; watching, observing, picking apart the details of what they saw around them, trying to derive lessons for themselves and their country. Witnessing the nascency of the new century in America, they were able to watch at first hand the tides and currents of the new epoch. They went to visit mills and factories and the latest mechanised farms. They saw that new patterns of work were being invented, calling for new patterns of movement, new ways of thought. They saw that in the world ahead literacy would be crucial to survival; they saw that education had become a matter of such urgency as to prompt every modern nation to make it compulsory. From those of their peers who had travelled eastwards they learnt that Japan had moved quickly in this direction; in Siam too education had become a dynastic crusade for the royal family.

In India on the other hand, it was the military that devoured the bulk of public monies: although the army was small in number it consumed more than sixty per cent of the Government’s revenues, more even than was the case in countries that were castigated as ‘militaristic’. Lala Har Dayal, one of Uma’s most brilliant contemporaries, never tired of pointing out that India was, in effect, a vast garrison and that it was the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britain’s eastern campaigns.

What would become of India’s population when the future they had glimpsed in America had become the world’s present condition? They could see that it was not they themselves, nor even their children who would pay the true price of this Empire: that the conditions being created in their homeland were such as to ensure that their descendants would enter the new epoch as cripples, lacking the most fundamental means of survival; that they would truly become in the future what they had never been in the past, a burden upon the world. They could see too that already time was running out, that it would soon become impossible to change the angle of their country’s entry into the future; that a time was at hand, when even the fall of the Empire and the departure of their rulers would make little difference; that their homeland’s trajectory was being set on an unbudgeable path that would thrust it inexorably in the direction of future catastrophe.

What they saw and thought, seared them, burned them: they were all to some degree mutilated by the knowledge of the evil that was their enemy. Some became a little unhinged, some went mad, others simply gave up. Some turned communist, some took to religion, searching the scriptures for imprecations and formulae, to apply on themselves, like balm.

Among Uma’s Indian contemporaries, in New York there were many who took their direction from a newsletter published from the University of California, in Berkeley, by Indian students. This publication was called Ghadar , after the Hindustani word for the uprising of 1857. The people who were involved with the magazine were known as the Ghadar Party. Much of their support came from the Indians who’d settled on the Pacific coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these immigrants were Sikhs— former soldiers of the British Indian army. The experience of living in America and Canada served to turn many of these former loyalists into revolutionaries. Perceiving a link between their treatment abroad and India’s subject status, they had become dedicated enemies of the Empire they had once served. Some of them concentrated their efforts on trying to convert such of their friends and relatives as were still serving in the British Indian army. Others looked for allies abroad, developing links with the Irish resistance in America.

The Indians were, comparatively, novices in the arts of sedition. It was the Irish who were their mentors and allies, schooling them in their methods of organisation, teaching them the tricks of shopping for arms to send back home; giving them instruction in the techniques of fomenting mutiny among those of their countrymen who served the Empire as soldiers. On St Patrick’s Day in New York a small Indian contingent would sometimes march in the Irish parade, with their own banners, dressed in sherwanis and turbans, dhoties and kurtas, angarkhas and angavastrams.

After the start of the First World War, under pressure from the British intelligence services, the Ghadar Party had gone underground, metamorphosing slowly into a number of different groups. Of these the Indian Independence League was the most important, with thousands of partisans among overseas Indians: it was their offices that Uma had been visiting in eastern Asia.