It is why to know oneself and one's subject - always a difficult task for a writer - is an especially fraught project for the Indian It is now fully in charge of the once British-dominated areas in hundreds of Indian cities and towns, the cantonments and district courts, theĮxclusive polo grounds and clubs, where it maintains the style, and often the substance, of that British romance called the Raj: a romance that depended on a real distance, both physical and psychological, between theĪlmost all of the Indian writing in English has been produced by members of this still relatively new and raw elite. Half a century after the British left India, this middle-class elite appears to be their most enduring legacy. Whom we govern a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect.'' Intention behind setting up Western-style schools and universities in India, as very pragmatically specified by Macaulay, was to have a class of Indians ''who may be interpreters between us and the millions The English-speaking Indian elite Arjun belongs to was a carefully thought-out creation of the British, and was well protected from ideas of personal and political freedom. There is much melancholy truth in this confession. Is not sure that ''we can undo all of that just by putting up a new flag.'' We wanted to be sahibs and that's what we've become.'' He He is aware that ''except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn't even recognize us as Indians. Nicknamed Hardy, to desert and join a group of renegade Indians who plan to help the Japanese defeat the British and liberate India.Īrjun hesitates, and with good reasons. He is in Malaya during World War II when he is asked by a much less Anglicized colleague, Ne of the leading characters in ''The Glass Palace,'' Amitav Ghosh's fourth and most ambitious novel, is Arjun, a middle-classīengali, who as an officer in the British Indian Army has learned to dance the tango and to eat roast beef with a knife and fork.

FebruThere'll Always Be an England in IndiaĪmitav Ghosh's novel traces the impact of colonialism on middle-class society.

The glass palace a novel