Amitav Ghosh throws light on the imperialist modes of social, cultural and ecological dominance in his fourth novel The Glass Palace. The novel points out that how colonialization has brutally exploded in the South Asia and results into the environmental degradation. The novel is interlocked in the various historical events like colonization of Burma by the British, the First World War, and conquest of Japan over Russia, the intense changes wrought by World War II etc. It’s a story that initiates in Mandalay in the year 1885 and extents up to the three generations. The British force, consists with more Indians, invaded Mandalay and King, Thebaw and forced to leave Mandalay with Queen, Supayalat along with the attendants and compelled to live
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The Glass Palace is a truly example to justify the term “Ecocriticism” which focuses on one of the major concerns of ecocriticism, the environmental degradation. The novel has an ample of incidents of ecocidal damages which occur during the colonialization in Mandalay. The prime intention of British invasion over Mandalay is the teak forests which they want to convert into the timber yards for their commercial purposes. Therefore the logs of wood is the cause of the war and the British intervention in the South Asia results into an unusual eruption of deforestation where the large species of flora and fauna were rubbed out to make for commercially money spinning plantations, timber factories and industries. Such green devastation has been observed by one of the major characters of the novel, Dolly, while roaming around the rubber plantation, observes the changes in landscape and …show more content…
depicts this picture in his essay Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis and mentions that the Europeans became mighty by the end of the fifteenth century, “By the end of the fifteenth century the technological superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually hostile nations could spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing.” (White:7) The Glass Palace instigates how the colonization of people devastated the human and non-human world for their commercial purposes and misuses the wilderness. Amitav Ghosh points out to this business of nature at the hands of the British colonialists. Christopher Manes opines in his essay Nature and Silence, “Nature is silent in our culture….”(Manes:15) This is the reason Man always considers himself superior to nature as he is the only creature on this earth who is bestowed with the ability to speak and is destroying the physical environment for its contentment. This statement can be clearly found in the novel where the writer serves the unkind behavior of timber merchants towards our environment. This incident proves to be the best example of degradation of green culture by Amitav Ghosh as he describes the chopping of the trees as assassination and killing of the trees; which also reflects his ecological vision and his concern for the non-human forms that are degraded day by
The Glass Palace is a truly example to justify the term “Ecocriticism” which focuses on one of the major concerns of ecocriticism, the environmental degradation. The novel has an ample of incidents of ecocidal damages which occur during the colonialization in Mandalay. The prime intention of British invasion over Mandalay is the teak forests which they want to convert into the timber yards for their commercial purposes. Therefore the logs of wood is the cause of the war and the British intervention in the South Asia results into an unusual eruption of deforestation where the large species of flora and fauna were rubbed out to make for commercially money spinning plantations, timber factories and industries. Such green devastation has been observed by one of the major characters of the novel, Dolly, while roaming around the rubber plantation, observes the changes in landscape and …show more content…
depicts this picture in his essay Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis and mentions that the Europeans became mighty by the end of the fifteenth century, “By the end of the fifteenth century the technological superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually hostile nations could spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing.” (White:7) The Glass Palace instigates how the colonization of people devastated the human and non-human world for their commercial purposes and misuses the wilderness. Amitav Ghosh points out to this business of nature at the hands of the British colonialists. Christopher Manes opines in his essay Nature and Silence, “Nature is silent in our culture….”(Manes:15) This is the reason Man always considers himself superior to nature as he is the only creature on this earth who is bestowed with the ability to speak and is destroying the physical environment for its contentment. This statement can be clearly found in the novel where the writer serves the unkind behavior of timber merchants towards our environment. This incident proves to be the best example of degradation of green culture by Amitav Ghosh as he describes the chopping of the trees as assassination and killing of the trees; which also reflects his ecological vision and his concern for the non-human forms that are degraded day by