“Mimic Men” versus Conscientious Women in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract

Abstract The paper attempts to read the narrative of colonial modernity which runs throughout Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace and then also examines how that modernity is gendered. I have shown how the novel unfolds the various layers of this modernity which exposes the abrasive opposition between the ideas of colonialism. This opposition is not limited to the ideological realm only but spills and then creates an uncomfortable silence between the native men and women, particularly in the bhadralok section (Western educated urban middle or upper middle class Bengali people). I have approached the text through the theories of Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault principally.