EMPIRE, SENSE OF PLACE AND CULTURES IN CONTACT - GEORGE ORWELL'S BURMESE DAYS AND AMITAV GHOSH'S THE GLASS PALACE Christopher Rollason, Ph.D - rollason@9online.fr NOTE: This text was given as a guest contribution to a postgraduate seminar at the University of Manchester, England, in July 2008 ** Criticism does not, to date, appear to have done more than note briefly the significant literary, historical and cultural issues that are generated by the intertextual relationship between George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934) and Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace (2000), two novels which have in common the rather obvious point that both deal with Burma 1 and the impact of empire on that country. Burma (today officially Myanmar) was annexed piecemeal by the British across three wars between 1824 and 1885, when Mandalay was captured and Thibaw, the last king, was exiled 2 . The country was directly incorporated into British India until 1937, when it was placed under separate administration, was occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945, and won independence in 1948, a year after India and Pakistan. This history finds significant literary reflection in the 'Burmese' novels of Orwell and Ghosh. The two texts manifest clear intertextual links and parallels, while, furthermore, the work of both writers exhibits other more general similarities of an arresting nature. To juxtapose their respective fictional and discursive universes - one colonial (or pre-independence), the other postcolonial - may shed significant light on empire and its aftermath. The biographical similarities are curious, linking the two via both Bengal and Burma. Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, in 1903, to a father employed in the Indian civil service, in the Opium Department 3 , Orwell had relatives on his half-French mother's side, including his grandfather, in Burma, established in the teak and shipbuilding businesses: to quote his biographer, D.J. Taylor, 'the Limouzins, whose family base lay at the port of Moulmein, south of Rangoon, were long established in Burma' 4 . This connection explains Orwell's period of service, from 1922 to 1927, in the India Police in that country, then still part of British India: to quote Taylor again, 'asked to state his preferred choice of posting he placed Burma first, (…) on the grounds that he had relatives [there]' 5 . Ghosh, born in Calcutta in 1956, also had family members in Burma. He has explained: 'Most middle-class Bengali families of pre-independence days had some kind of a Burma connection. So did my grandfather and father.' 6 Specifically, he had 'an aunt who had married into a wealthy Bengali family that had settled in Burma. My aunt's husband ran a prosperous timber business' 7 . Both 1 In both Burmese and Indian contexts, I use throughout the familiar or conventional toponyms - Burma, Rangoon, Calcutta, etc - rather than the more recent official names. 2 See Courtauld, 34-40. 3 This forms a curious connection with Ghosh’s historical novel, set in the nineteenth century, Sea of Poppies (2008), where production and trade in the then-legal drug loom large. 4 Taylor, 16. 5 Taylor, 63. 6 Ghosh, interview with Chandan Mitra (2005), 2. 7 Ghosh, 'At Large in Burma', in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, 65-114 (66).