A Study of Blurred Demarcation between History and Fiction in Amitav Ghosh'sThe Glass Palace

Abstract

Inaugural postcolonial author, Amitav Ghosh, portrays the issue of colonial discourse and its immediate aftermath in the novelThe Glass Palaceby exposing the brutality of Anglo-white's regime in South East Asia; and also the impact these events had on lives of families and individuals as well. Ghosh depicts the tide of political and social chaos caused by the horror of colonialism on Burmese lives in the 1880s with the help of recalled memories and experiences that fabricate the history of the then Burma during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through this novel which proves to be the history in an alternative version, challengingthe official version of national history that blurs the age-old contradistinctionary dispute between history and fiction.