The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
Contributed by Thurman Rieser
Chapter 16-18
Summary

Each year, Rajkumar’s family visits Huay Zedi, where Doh Say lives with his family. During one of these visits, Dinu falls sick. The king comes to Dolly in a dream and warns her that her son’s illness is serious, so they rush to a hospital. Dinu is diagnosed with polio; Dolly’s quickness in getting him to the hospital saves the boy’s life. The next day, she hears the news that the king has died.

In Ratnagiri, the Second Princess has eloped with a commoner. When she refused the king’s request to return, he suffered a heart attack and died ten days later. Money has been found to build the royal family a new palace. The First Princess writes to Dolly, detailing the king’s funeral.

Dinu recovers, though loses partial use of his right leg. He must learn to walk again; Dinu’s recovery obsesses Dolly, harming her social life. One day, she attends the races. One the way home, after Rajkumar’s horse has won and he is slightly drunk, he tells Dolly that she has changed. Though she dismisses the complaint, she takes her husband’s words to heart and resolves to get out more.

The queen requests permission to return to Burma but is only allowed once the war in Europe is over. She travels with the First Princess, who leaves Sawant behind temporarily. Once they arrive in Rangoon, however, she decides to return to her husband and never leaves his side again. The queen takes residence in Rangoon and declines Dolly’s every attempt to visit. She dies six years later, and the city mourns.

In 1929, Uma writes to Dolly, telling her that she will be returning to India after twenty years away. She proposes to meet Dolly and her family in Malaya, at Mathew and Elsa’s home. Dolly is apprehensive but travels with her two boys. They arrive and Uma is due to join them the following day. As they wait for her on the jetty, a crowd gathers, all waiting to see the famous Uma Dey. The people are from the Indian Independence League. Before Uma can explain her newfound celebrity, they travel back to Morningside House.

At dinner, Uma explains the crowds’ presence. In New York, she met political thinkers and discussed with them the state of India and the Empire. Uma tells of how she became politized. She hopes to open the Indian people’s eyes to the state of their oppression.

Uma decides to become better acquainted with her friends’ children. She begins to understand all of them, though Dinu proves difficult to comprehend. Realizing that his shyness is tied to an infatuation with Alison, she goes with both of them into the jungle. They find an abandoned structure and Uma photographs Alison and Dinu together.

One day, Uma goes with Mathew to his offices. The workplace perturbs her and reminds her of something archaic. When she voices these concerns to Mathew, he shows her the intricacies of the plantation.

She begins to walk through the rubber trees early each morning and notices that she is being followed. She asks Alison and is told about a boy named Ilongo from the coolie lines. After offering him gifts, Uma strikes up a conversation and agrees to meet him at his house. There, she discovers that Ilongo is Rajkumar’s bastard son. This angers Uma, who wants to do something, but Ilongo’s mother pleads for her to keep the secret. Reluctantly, Uma agrees.

Analysis

For the first time in the novel, these chapters begin an explicit discussion of colonialism. After touring Europe, Uma returns a changed woman. Draped in garlands and applauded from the deck of her ship, she is not the woman with whom Dolly spent her quiet afternoons. Uma confess about politics that, “once you get involved in it, it pushes everything else out of your life” (196). This bears out in the following chapter, when Uma visits the rubber plantation and sees the treatment of the workers first hand. She is “disturbed by this spectacle” (202) and shares harsh words with Timmy. Through their discussion, her hardened political views are confronted with everyday realities and social graces. She does not want to offend her host but does not want to back down from her absolute condemnation of many of the practices on the plantation. The discussion about how colonialism manifests will continue throughout the novel and, to some extent, never truly be resolved.

Indeed, Uma’s acquiescence to realities is evident again in her treatment of Ilongo. When she finds Rajkumar’s ill-begotten son working on the plantation, she feels as though she has solved a puzzle. Though she is adamant that the truth must be put out into the world, she is compelled not to by the boy's mother. Uma sheds “tears of frustration” (208) and finds her political views difficult to apply to the real world. This conflict between ideology and reality will become the struggle that defines Uma, Dinu, and many of their relatives.

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