Subversive Narratives of Borders and Nations: A Reading of Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Introduction

Nation as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) invokes a sense of collective presence where resides the idea of diversity or difference. Notwithstanding the definition invoking a sense of connection with one state machinery and legislation, ‘nation’ has always been disruptive and subversive especially on its borders. Keeping in mind the two significant characters of borders as disruptive entities allowing various aspects of negotiation, this paper proposes a reflection on the works of fiction that offer subversive readings of border and belonging. Jangam (1982), an Assamese novel by Debendranath Acharya, is different from Amitav Ghosh’s English novel The Glass Palace (2000) in terms of language and narrative technique, and yet they share an interconnectedness that lingers throughout the narratives built. Acharya’s vernacular text was written well before Ghosh’s and yet it appears as if Jangam has taken up a thread from the many subplots of The Glass Palace and delineated a historical episode which Ghosh did not explore in detail. Jangam weaves a compelling and meticulous narrative on how millions of Indians living in Burma during the colonial rule had to leave the country on foot as the Japanese attacked in the 1940s. The Glass Palace begins with the defeat of the last king of the Konbaung dynasty of Burma, King Thibaw, in the hands of the British army in 1885 and delineates the subsequent turn of events in the lives of the Burmese exiles in India who had accompanied the royal family and goes on to discuss the entwined lives of several generations of Indian migrants in Burma until the 1980s. The historical march taken up by the Indians—a poor peasant Ramgobinda in Jangam and a rich merchant Rajkumar Raha in The Glass Palace—intersects both the novels in probing how families cope with the state-defined policies of borders and nations.

India and Myanmar share an international land boundary that is 1,643 kilometres long, marked by mountainous ranges passing along the states of Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. Until 1 April 1937, the India–Myanmar border was merely an administrative line between the provinces of British India, Burma and Assam. Prior to the separation of British India from Burma under the colonial Government of Burma Act (1935), (Desai 1954; Saikia and Choudhury 2020: 29), the porous geography continued to allow for mobility, affiliation and immigration between the two countries. The colonial occupation of Burma started with commercial connection between the British and the Kingdom of Ava (Burma) in 1619 as part of which factories were set up in Rangoon (Topich and Leitich 2013). The British formally occupied Arakan and Tenessarim on the Burmese side and Assam on the Indian side in 1826, and subsequent boundary lines through Manipur and Assam were formed by 1837. The annexation of Lower Burma (the port of Martaban, the city of Rangoon and Pegu) in 1852 and the occupation of Upper Burma in 1886 included all of current-day Burma as a province of British India (Desai 1954; Saikia and Choudhury 2020; Topich and Leitich 2013).

The Indian community living in Burma formed an important minority group during the British rule, having a significant role in the socio-economic, political and cultural praxis of Burma. According to Uma Shankar Singh, an escalation in the immigration of Indians to Burma can be dated to 1852 with the annexation of Lower Burma by the British. The Indians migrating to Burma prior to this were mostly located in Rangoon and were traders of various kinds. The expansion of the economy and bureaucracy created several other opportunities during 1852–1941, and the Indian population in Burma attained a sizeable status (Singh 1980). The consideration of Burma and India as separate British provinces and yet technically Burma being part of British India until 1937 accentuated a complex cross border relation. Historians and scholars have termed this relation as ‘heuristic’ and the separation of the provinces as ‘unfinished’ (Guyot-Rechard 2020; Saha 2015: 23). Moreover, the colonial introduction of the Western practice of fixed and rigid boundaries in the non-Western world can be seen leading to complications around questions of belonging, territorial division and citizenship claims. The pre-colonial forms of sovereignty, administration and control (Goswami 2007) can very well be contrasted with the Western notion of rigid boundaries.

The significant status of the Indian migrants as participants in the Burmese and Southeast Asian landscape as traders, mercenaries, priests at the royal court, occupants of administrative jobs and mingling with the Burmese culture through marriage remains quite strong (Mazumder 2013). The migration of Indian people to Burma in the words of Desai is ‘as old as the history of the two countries’ (Desai 1954: 19). The two prominent routes via Assam to Upper Burma and by sea via Madras to Lower Burma (Harvey 1925) over time brought Indians to Burma to occupy important status in the country. The Indian population in Burma in 1941 counted over 11 lakh. They built shrines continuing their faith on Hinduism and brought their clergy with them (Desai 1954: 21). This long-term presence of the Indian community over time accentuated their acceptance of Burma as home, which, at the wake of nationalist movements after 1937 and the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942, had been tested against the new state policies related to land and citizenship claims. The colonial occupation of Burma, besides the modernisation of law, education and economy of the province gradually brought discontent among the Burmese people. In the course of economic progress financed through the export of rice, teak, oil and minerals, and the import of cotton goods and machinery, the foreigners constituting the Europeans, Indians and Chinese grew richer, reducing the number of openings for Burmans. The Indian moneylenders had a strong hold over the new economy and the best of the rice lands were owned by Indians. The moneylenders and the cheap labour together transformed the Burman cultivators into rack-rented tenants and landless labourers and this eventually led to mass discontent. The rise of the national sentiment, the economic frustration and the agrarian distress not properly addressed by the colonial authority further got fuelled by the Japanese invasion. The mobilisation of the educated Burmese class to overthrow colonial rule, the introduction of quasi-democratic machinery subsequent to the First World War, the growing economic and political unrest after the great depression significantly led to communist–nationalist force and distrust over foreign rule simultaneously gave rise to resistance to Japanese rule (Desai 1954). As a result of this new nationalist fervour, a new narrative of the Indian immigrants as outsiders gained popularity and resistance to their claims to citizenship led to the mass exodus of 1942. I discuss the statelessness experienced by Indians following this nationalist resurgence in Burma.

This historical and complex cross border relationship and the mass exodus of 1942 had been sparsely presented in literary narratives. Historical representation of India–Burma border relations can be found in two Assamese novels Eta Alibatar Itikatha (2008) by Purabi Bormudoi and Durgam Pathar Jatri (2007) by Shaila Khargharia. The first provides a quasi-historical account of the making of the Stilwell road connecting India and Burma, and the second novel is a semi-autobiographical account of the writer’s escape from wartime Burma. Besides these fictional accounts, the memoirs and autobiographical accounts written by both Indians and British officers record the plight of the Indian migrants in 1940s Burma. We also notice several personal narratives written by Indians such as Ujan Srote by Nilima Dutta, Biday Burma by Manasi Mukhopadhayay, Manoranjan Chakraborty’s Bomar Bhoye Burma Tyag and Burmay Jakhan Boma Pare by Sourindramohan Mukhopadhyay (Bhaumik 2016), travelogues in Assamese such as Patkair Xipare Na Basar (1993) by Purnakanta Buragohain and Maanor Dexot (2015) by Tapan Sarma. The first four accounts in Bangla record the narrators’ journeys back to India as part of the mass exodus, and the two travelogues in Assamese record the writers’ visit to Burma subsequently to trace the connections between Burma and the Tai-Ahom community living in Assam. Further migrant narratives such as a collection of memoirs titled New Songs of the Survivors: The Exodus of Indians from Burma (2007) edited by Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, Through the Jungle of Death: A Boy’s Escape from Wartime Burma (2000) by Stephen Brookes present the precarious lives of migrants across the borders. Similar accounts of wartime Burma and the colonial acts of evacuation and exodus find mention in some British military officers’ personal accounts such as Fighting Through to Kohima: A Memoir of War in India and Burma (2003) by Michael Lowry, Chindit Affair: A Memoir of the War in Burma (2011) by Frank Baines, and Burma 1942: Memories of Retreat (2009) by Ralph Tanner. Notwithstanding these narratives on the complex cross border relations between the nations, the select novels are studied for the multifarious nature of borders unveiled by the novelists. The rigidity of man-made borders and the performance of lives around these have been poignantly studied by both the novels. Although the class identity of the people presented by Acharya in Jangam puts them in a less privileged position to that of their Burmese counterparts presented in The Glass Palace, i.e. the royal family of King Thibaw, cutting across these man-made borders of class and community, both these groups of people converse through states of exile and posit lives lived under state machinery. Whereas the Indian migrants in Burma formed a major group in all these accounts, the exile of the last Burmese king to Ratnagiri in India by the British brought another group of Burmans to India. It is this connection between the cross border experiences of nationalism and belonging that unites these two otherwise detached groups of migrants. An investigation into how both the novelists have dealt with the pertinent questions of belonging to a ‘state’ unveils the subversive natures of how people deal with borders and nations both in the contexts of India and Burma.

Borderlands and Precarious Lives

The creation of borderlands in South Asia through complex processes of political partition of the subcontinent saw extreme forms of violence over time. This in subsequent times brought environments of ethnic expulsion, disruption in political order, the problem of cross border refugees and heralded further demands for dividing territories at the subnational levels. Such a layered narrative of borderlands further necessitated the maintenance of rigid boundaries and border regimes (Saikia and Choudhury 2020). What remains buried in such a process is the distorted and precarious lives of people across borders and when inspected closely these vulnerable lives offer a counter narrative to the ‘rigidity’ of boundaries between nations.

Deniz Kandiyoti’s discussion on the questions of women and nationalism points out an important facet of the modern project of nationalism as discussed by scholars such as Benedict Anderson, H. K. Bhabha and A. D. Smith states,

A feature of nationalist discourse that has generated considerable consensus is its Janus-faced quality. It presents itself both as a modern project that melts and transforms traditional attachments in favour of new identities and as a reaffirmation of authentic cultural values culled from the depths of a presumed communal past. It therefore opens up a highly fluid and ambivalent field of meanings which can be reactivated, reinterpreted, and often reinvented at critical junctures of the histories of nation–states. These meanings are not given, but fought over and contested by political actors whose definitions of who and what constitutes the nation have a crucial bearing on notions of national unity and alternative claims to sovereignty, as well as on the sort of gender relations that should inform the nationalist project. (2004: 47)

Taking cue from this framework of borders and nations, which highlights fluidity and ambivalence of meanings and experiences, I interrogate the validity of state’s imposition of bindings like nation and nationalism on diverse groups of people situated diversely within a broad spectrum of class and culture. Both the writers’ have specifically emphasised on the space of everyday life where instead of a strict adherence to clearly defined territories as ‘home’ and demarcated lines as ‘borders’, these are constantly negotiated and interrogated. The stories of both Ramgobinda, the protagonist of Jangam and Rajkumar, the protagonist of The Glass Palace are centred on one pertinent question: what is ‘home’? To present the other side of the picture, there is Dolly, Rajkumar’s Burmese wife, who experiences similar fluidity in defining her ‘home’. Their stories, then, are representative of all those people whose lives are entangled between international borders and border policies. The so-called static nature of border lines and their assumed divisions of lands as specific nations are questioned by both the writers as we see almost all the major and minor characters of the novels ponder over the ‘location’ of their actual homes. The convenient sense of belonging to Burma that both Ramgobinda and Rajkumar shared until the advent of the Second World War and the Japanese invasion undergoes a major shift when their fellow Burmese start to identify them as alien as the British or the Japanese who colonised or invaded them. The interesting case of Dolly and the royal family of Burma (King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and their daughters) exiled to India for a long period from 1885–1918, present similar undertones of the questions of homes and borders. It is Rajkumar who asks a pertinent question that becomes the central question of both the novels. At a critical juncture of his life unable to decide whether he should leave his life’s possession in Burma and escape to India, he tells Dolly,

When I first came to Mandalay the nakhoda of my boat said: This is a golden land—no one ever starves here. That proved true for me, and despite everything that has happened recently, I don’t think I could ever love another place in the same way. But if there is one thing I’ve learnt in my life, Dolly, it is that there is no certainty about these things. My father was from Chittagong and he ended up in Arakan; I ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to Ratnagiri and you’re here too. Why should we expect that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives here? (2000: 310)

While accepting that ‘there is no certainty about these things’, he ponders over the ‘stateless’ nature of the lives of people like him and asserts that ‘…it doesn’t matter whether I think of Burma as home or not. What matters is what people think of us. And it’s plain enough that men like me are now seen as the enemy on all sides’ (2000: 310). It can be mentioned here that cross border migrations of various kinds, especially in the context of states that bear the influx of migrants are time and again regulated by political intrusions. Commenting on the history of migration to the North-eastern states of India that escalated with colonialism, Uddipana Goswami refers to the Burmese influx to India and especially to Manipur during the Second World War in which the route via Burma became the popular route even for internal migrants from Madras. She also refers to such periodic migration of about 25,000 Burmese people to North-east India in 1967 after the Ne Win government implemented the Aliens Act, and the migration of Burmese students and activists post 1987 owing to the repression of Arakan Hill Tracts (Goswami 2007). These migrations alongside other influxes from Bhutan, Nepal and mostly from Bangladesh have constantly been monitored and measured by the state in different ways.

Unlike Rajkumar in The Glass Palace, the acceptance of uncertainty around questions of belonging does not come easily to Ramgobinda in Jangam though he finally realises that there is no other way but to leave Burma owing to the political turn of events. He says to his Burmese well-wisher Jayanao, the wise village headman of Manku at Mandalay,

‘Are you telling us to flee? You are asking us to escape by all means possible, aren’t you?’… But where will we go? Ramgobinda asked again, his tone calmer and more composed than earlier. ‘We are citizens of Burma. We were born here, everything we possess is here. We belong here, just like you. Isn’t there anyone in this country who can explain this simple fact to the Burmese rebels?’ (1982: 46–47)

Dolly asks similar questions and recognises home as a constantly shifting location. More than the place, it is the people within her social ambit who provide her with a sense of belonging. Indeed, belonging is more of a social experience for her than political. When her friend Uma counsels her to go back to Burma, she relives her past as an orphan girl and clarifies that, having spent her entire life with the royal family, she recognises home as the place with their company and at their service, even if that comes at the cost of her individual life. She states,

If I went to Burma now I would be a foreigner—they would call me a kalaa like they do Indians—a trespasser, an outsider from across the sea. I’d find that very hard, I think. I’d never be able to rid myself of the idea that I would have to leave again one day, just as I had to before…. (2000: 113)

The predicaments like these, where migrants are either forced to leave or stay, or they choose one over the other, allow us to observe the intricacies and nuances behind the notions of nation. Also, it is not just the so- called (ethnic) citizenry outsiders like the ‘kalaa’ people whose claim of belonging is contested time and again; rather, both the novels introduce far more complex terrain in terms of belonging. Especially Acharya points out the internal conflicts that drew several other borders between the Burmese nationals after the World War II. The narratives of internal migration and displacement present such recurring motifs of belonging and non-belonging not only in Burma but also in other states like India having a diverse history of ethnic conflicts.

Everyday Life as a Perilous Site

The everyday lives of the commoners in both the novels are spaces where they constantly realise the unpredictability and uncertainty in the way the state may view them. Jangam narrates the otherwise ordinary lives of poor tenant peasants such as Ramgobinda undergoing turmoils; similar is the fate of the rich Indian landowners such as Ballabh and others. Replying to Guchenpung’s political analysis that the time of divisions and borderlines do not spare anyone, Ramgobinda says,

‘I don’t understand such highfalutin chatter. We are poor peasants, sons of the soil, the earth is everything for us. We spent our entire lives tilling the soil. Now we have lost our way floating helplessly in this flood’…. ‘This is my own country, you are my countrymen. We will stay here on this assurance.’ (1982: 51)

Dolly states similar thoughts in The Glass Palace as she initially rejects Rajkumar’s proposal to escape to Burma after having lived her entire youth with the exiled royal family at Ratnagiri,

Mr Raha, you must understand. There are things you cannot change no matter how much money you have. Things might have been different for us in another time, another place. But it’s too late now. This is my home. I have lived all my life here. (2000: 164)

How are we to understand this displaced sense of belonging that these characters seem to continue to identify with physical and social spaces despite being forbidden to do so legally and politically? It might be useful to refer to Alonso’s (1994) notion of ‘temporalisation and memory-making’. Ramgobinda seems to associate more with Burma while Dolly prefers to stay in India, even if their cultural affiliations nudge them otherwise, or at least this has been the populist (and states’) reasoning imposed on them somewhat brutally. Eventually, owing to these pressures, and possibly wishing to gain some political acceptance on perceptions about their belonging, both Ramgobinda and Dolly leave their earlier homes to the places where they were born (Ramgobinda from Burma to India and Dolly to Burma from India). They are never ‘at home’ in their newly ascribed residences. Perhaps, as Joane Nagel (1998) says, there is a tension between ideology and action which could be invoked at the level of state- and nation-building but also involving intimate and personal choices of individual common people. Even if a cursory reading of the novels I discuss hints at individual idiosyncrasy and agency, a deeper reading of these narratives and their subversive retellings—as Nagel would argue—necessitate situating these national individuals within the broader frames of class and culture (and gender).

A cursory look at the data on how Indians left Burma points to its class distinctions. Along with the British colonial aristocrats and bureaucrats, the privileged Indian officials left Burma by air, rail and sea while the less privileged workers had to leave by road (Leigh 2014). The novels I read validate and build on these social science empirics and humanise this paradox reminding us that no social class exists in isolation nor is the class privilege infinite. In Jangam, Ballabh, a rich businessman from the village of Manku joins the same group of Indians in the march towards ‘home’ whose toil and resources he was earlier exploiting. Ramgobinda contemplates how the terms of the mortgage dictated that a large portion of the stored grain had to be delivered as soon as possible to the Chettiar landlords. Acharya records this operation of the class dynamics among the Indian migrants in Burma, ‘A few Chettiars sold the grain wholesale; the rest transported them to Rangoon. The Chettiars who had amassed a lot of wealth and land by charging interest owned almost all of the low-lying rice fields’ (1982: 20). As the Chettiars are left with no other option and as they eventually join the fellow (poor) Indian villagers on the march towards home, Ramgobinda accepts them to be fellow countrymen but despises them as ‘… [the] aristocratic people of high status who recognised wealth easily but did not pay any heed to the grain in the fields or the poor peasants who expended the sweat of their brows on their ploughshares’ (1982: 20–21).

The financial loss that the Chettiars had to bear was colossal in statistical terms, and this was something which got immediate media and scholarly attention because they had access to the material means of resistance which produced its own archives. Uma Shankar Singh (1980: 826) has documented the financial and mercantile sectors of Burma’s economy earlier controlled and populated by the Tamil and Telugu Chettiars from South India as well as the Marwaris and Banias from North India. Singh does acknowledge that other Indians were mostly involved in agricultural work, which was more about toil than profit. When the daily newspapers’ vernacular voices of Burma began to put pressure on the Indians that they must leave, a counter discourse on nationalism could only be conveyed through business associations such as Nattukottai Chettiar Association and Burma–Indian Chamber of Commerce in Rangoon. Other voices including that of the Burma–Indian Association sought to add nuances to the ongoing discourse on nationalism but struggled to find themselves heard against the bodies like The Dobama Asiayone (‘We Burmans Association’), commonly known as the Thakin Party. ¹ The growing calls for Burmese nationalism became more radical as they argued that the economic depression made it more urgent than ever that Burma displaced the Chettiar privileges by bringing on board the educated youth of Burma. But they equated the privileged Chettiars with all Indians living in Burma and demanded that all Indian ‘immigrants’ must leave the country (Mazumder 2013: 166). What appear interesting in such discourses are the hidden tiers of class between the rich and the poor Indians in Burma. While social scientists have stated this fact, novelists have engaged with it in greater detail and with passion.

Amitav Ghosh writes how disturbed Uma, a close friend of Dolly, was to see the downtrodden lives of the Indian plantation labourers under the oppressive regime set by their fellow Indian rubber estate owners,

Mr Trimble (the Eurasian estate manager working under the Indian and Burmese co-owners) kept attentive watch as the conductors took attendance. His manner varied between that of a strict headmaster and a snappish sergeant. Occasionally he would dart into the ranks, with the rattan cane tucked under his arm. For some of the tappers he had a smile and a quick word of encouragement; with others, he made a great show of losing his temper, gesticulating and pouring out obscenities, in Tamil and English, singling out the object of his wrath with the tip of his pointing cane: ‘You dog of a coolie, keep your black face up and look at me when I’m talking to you….’ (2000: 231)

These clear and exploitative boundaries between the Indian capitalists and labour, however, were forced to collapse as the Japanese attacked Burma and the Burmese lumped all non-Burmese—the invaders, the colonisers, the mercantile offenders and the subaltern labour—as simply ‘outsiders’. Dolly explains to her friend Uma why Indians are targeted by the Burmese,

Things have changed in Burma…. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, and much of it is aimed at Indians…. Indian moneylenders have taken over all the farmland; Indians run most of the shops; people say that the rich Indians live like colonialists, lording it over the Burmese. (2000: 240)

Dolly echoes the common Burmese view, which sees the Indians in Burma as monolithic even though personally she is aware of the unsettling of the rich–poor binary among this category of ‘Indian’. Rather it is the wise Jayanao, the headman of the Manku village near Mandalay, where the Indian migrants and the Burmans in Jangam lived peacefully until the advent of the new nationalist fervour, who sees so well how the fire of revenge does not differentiate between rich and poor. He replies to Ramgobinda’s objection to generalising of all Indians in Burma as mercantile offenders, ‘Their (the Burmese rebels) minds are blazing with thoughts of revenge. They cannot discriminate between right and wrong now. They will burn anyone who stands in their way. We are but mere wisps of straw on their path. What can we do?’ (1982: 47–48).

The thread unsettling the rich–poor binary runs continuously in the pens of both the novelists I discuss. The ‘forgotten long march’ in which 500,000 or so Burmese Indians walked to British India to escape the atrocities of the Japanese and the ethnic violence in Burma (Tinker 1975), which Acharya chooses as his central narrative where we see the distinction and divide between the rich and poor fade away tumultuously and definitively. Amitav Ghosh’s Dolly in The Glass Palace narrates ‘…the march across the mountains and how she and Rajkumar had made the journey from the Indian border, through Assam, to Calcutta’ (2000: 529). Amit R. Baishya in his translator’s introduction to Jangam writes, ‘After a few refugees managed to escape via air and sea, the rest took three successive overland routes: via the Araken to Chittagong, via the Chindwin valley to Manipur, and through the hilly passes of Hukawng valley into Ledo (Lekhapani) in Assam’ (2018, np). It is this third route that was taken by the central characters of both the novels. The sociopolitical context of colonial Burma offers a convenient locale for both the writers to interrogate the feasibility of man-made borders. These alternative glances at the practice of borders at times of crisis lead to layered understandings of what a political nation–state is, and how the social boundaries of class, culture and religion (and gender) might encapsulate within that political construct.

Of the rich (and poor) Indians heading back to India following the xenophobic attacks in Burma, Acharya writes,

After dropping their belongings one by one on the way to reduce weight, the travellers now had their fatigued, emaciated bodies as their only remaining possession…. They had not experienced any agitation or hesitation in carelessly throwing away, like mere pieces of garbage, the objects that they had preserved very carefully all their lives. On the way to Indawgyi, as the weight of the silver coins with the impress of the queen on them began feeling burdensome, the refugees took them out from their boxes and pockets and just tossed them away pell-mell. After that they had to hurl the boxes away as well. (1982: 256–7)

A similar picture of ‘the trails littered with discarded goods—radios, bicycle frames, books, a craftsman’s tools’ (2000: 470) is presented by Ghosh. At the end of the day what mattered for the refugees was food or the means of preparing food instead of money or valuable goods. The basic necessity to survive, thus, connects all these refugees irrespective of their class boundaries and such portrayals of the critical times make one question the necessity of maintaining borders.

Not surprisingly, religion emerges as an important vector in the way people connect with each other, not through ritualistic preaching but the practice of universal compassion and empathy. Both Acharya and Ghosh adopt the trope of religion to subvert the impositions of the political nation–state. They emphasise that these other spaces defined by religion are negotiable and subject to disruption in times of conflict. The compassionate Father Berry, a Christian by religion, accompanies the group of Ramgobinda to flee from Burma where he too as an outsider had to face atrocities. Moreover, what becomes striking is his willing service to all the sufferers that he met during the journey irrespective of their religious identities. He performs his job as a preacher and as a doctor several times to the dead and the disease-stricken Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. Numerous episodes of his prayer for the sufferers whose religions remain unknown, for Ramgobinda’s Hindu mother and wife, his medical help to the wounded people and the newborn child of Ramgobinda and his constant attempt to unite the latter’s family speak of how human compassion trumps political and cultural borders. The episode when he offers his prayer to the dead Burmese rebels despite the opposition from his group speaks a lot about the transcendental qualities of compassion. Even as Father Berry calls his compassion his religion, there are others who transcend their religious garbs as they practise compassion: the Christian Doctor Shimray and a Buddhist nurse Ma-Pu, who devote their lives at the service of the poor victims across borders, accept the service of humanity to be their only religion. There is a certain irony when Father Berry pens a poem about respective gods reconciling among themselves to call for eternal peace,

This war is ensuing between your god And my god; when it ends Your god will lose and become equal with my god. Then both gods will merge and become one And eternal peace will reign on this earth. (1982: 362)

Such proclamations of humanity are equally explored by Ghosh through the relationship between Rajkumar and his Christian mentor Saya John. Rajkumar’s initial days of uncertainty were brought to an end when he met Saya John, the sharp business minded Burmese, and by the end of the story he almost replaces Saya’s son Matthew, who stayed in America until his youth and could spend only 16 years with his father before his death. Rajkumar acquires the zeal for entrepreneurship under the mentoring of Saya John, and the kinship and love that these two families share suggest human goodwill trumping national and other constructs. Despite witnessing the assorted group of foreigners ‘envoys and missionaries from Europe; traders and merchants of Greek, Armenian, Chinese and Indian origin; laborers and boatmen from Bengal, Malaya and the Coromandel coast; white-clothed astrologers from Manipur; businessmen from Gujarat’ (2000: 21) at Mandalay on his first arrival, Rajkumar did not think of himself as one of them as he gradually discovered a new sense of home in Burma. It was the friendship built with Saya John and later with Dolly, two Burmese nationals, which helped Rajkumar navigate through the society and politics in Burma so as to imagine a life for his own. Beyond the hype of monolithic political constructs as Burmese and Indian, we see several relationships evolving through criss-crossing of this nationalistic binary. Meandering through these man-made borders, one finds the courses of love and affection which are discussed frequently in both the novels.

Love, Affection and Marriage as Alternative Agencies

Marriages between Burmese and Indians form another interesting zone in both the novels. Possibilities of a new space transcending monolithic national identities demarcated by borders are hinted in Jangam’s Chinti, an Indian refugee who returns to Burma to begin a new life with the Burmese nurse Ma-Pu. Despite having the opportunity to leave Burma, Chinti decides to stay back. Clearly, this is an individual agency embraced by a subaltern male through intimacy and affection. Of course, there are added layers of coercion and violence when female subalterns choose to exercise agency through intimacy which we cannot ignore. Acharya and Ghosh both discuss motherhood in the context of border conflicts. Similar stories of two mothers and the fate of their infant children are woven into the narratives in both the novels, and eventually it is with the couples of mixed marriages that these newborns find shelter and hope. However, it can be argued that the idea behind such presentations is not only to criticise but also to project the brutal consequences of the dominant practices of nationalism. Furthermore, it leads to the emergence of a new category of people whose sense of belonging to a particular territory called ‘nation’ gets entangled with the stateless lives of their parents. It not only complicates these children’s right to citizenship but also offers a nuanced understanding of how borders imposed by states manifest in resistances occurring in women’s bodies. In Jangam, Ramgobinda’s pregnant wife Lacchmi embarks on an uncertain journey to India and gives birth to their second son on the way. She eventually dies traumatised by the unexpected turn of events as she is separated from her husband. The crestfallen Ramgobinda ends up in the madhouse, and later in an altruistic gesture the novelist suggests the newly formed couple of Chinti and Ma-Pu adopting this newborn as their own alongside accepting Ramgobinda and Lacchmi’s elder son Thanu.

Similar is the case of Manju, the daughter-in-law of Rajkumar and Dolly in The Glass Palace. Just before leaving Burma she receives the news that her husband died in the Japanese’ bombing of Rangoon, and the grief-stricken Manju starts the journey to Rangoon by sea with her cranky and colicky four month old daughter Jaya. Depressed, lonely and unable to come out of the trauma of widowhood, she commits suicide leaving the responsibility of her daughter to Rajkumar and Dolly. The latter couple are also mixed and have been embracing a fluid notion of nationality. Dolly is a Burmese; having lived in India for a crucial period of her life, she married a Burmese Indian and relocated to Burma, only having to finally leave Burma as an outsider. I am not claiming that all mixed marriages transcend national borders; they may simply play on it or exploit intimacy for material benefits. The story written by Ma Ma Lay was suitably invoked by Mazumder (2013) to inform how Burmese popular imagination depicted Indian kala husbands keeping their Burmese wives so well but eventually leaving the wife alone to go back home as the xenophobic attacks begin. Reading the short story ‘I Do not Envy You’ (1963) Mazumder asks if these Burmese women, and their Indian husbands’ professing of love for them, merely a tactic to gain access to Burmese citizenship. There is a popular disdain among the Burmese for such tactics. She refers to the sneer and disgust shared by a group of poor Burmese women against the idle Burmese wife, Ohn Sein, soon to be abandoned by her hard working Indian husband Supra. It offers a glimpse at the collective imagination of the interracial marriages and the class dynamics in projecting the rich Burmese wife against the poor Burmese women. Then there is an added element of religion. The Burman’s use of the term kala to refer to Indians may have been derived from the Burmese words Ka La meaning foreigners or someone who comes from overseas. Another term Zerbadi or ‘Child of God’ is used to refer to offspring from mixed marriages. Burmans usually despised mixed marriages between Indian men and Burmese women as the children adopt the father’s religion bringing a sense of cultural loss (Jaiswal 2014).

The two episodes of motherhood and the safe custody of the descendants with couples of mixed marriage present the writers’ scrutiny of the women’s question as a site gravely affected by the formidable assumption of power by nations. The poignant tales of difficult motherhoods and the subsequent deaths of the mothers are used by both the novelists as significant tropes to question the underpinning of nation’s exertion of power on stateless people. Such claims reaffirm the presentation of women in the project of nationalism as they reproduce members of ethnic groups and create binaries of ethnic/national groups, they participate in the process of ideologically representing the group and disseminate its culture and they also signify ethnic/national distinctions and participate in struggles of national, political–economic and military importance (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). In their opinion, different historical contexts construct these roles in different ways and the centrality of these roles differs. Both Acharya and Ghosh delineate the participation of women in historical struggles and emphasise on the symbolic signification of women in constructing and reproducing national categories. The signs of cultural alienation faced by a Burmese woman married to an Indian man are also present in the character of Dolly as she shares with her friend Uma, and the oscillation between her shifting identity positions reaffirms how political discourses of nationalism affect women. In case of Ma-Pu in Jangam, Acharya does not delineate these dilemmas as he in an epic-heroic gesture hints at the falling apart of these identity claims with the formation of a new fluid nationality through intermarriage.

The most intriguing questions provoked by times of crisis and subsequent self-introspections, however, are being asked by two broad groups of people across the Indo-Burmese border. As mentioned earlier, the first group consists of people like Jayanao, Ba-Mao and Guchenpung, who are Burmese in nationality and at the same time subject to the force of internal conflicts that emerge subsequent to the nationalist movements. Guchenpung mentions the conversion to Christianity under the project of colonialism and the creation of a new group of Anglo-Burmese people practicing a religion far removed from the natives’ beliefs and culture. Given such massive projects of identity formation and the subsequent possibilities of newer conflicts around such sites this group of cultivators from Manku can very well predict a turbulent future in Burma. The fluid binary of insider/outsider in their cases prevents a neat drawing of borders between nations. In an attempt to define the Indians as foreigners as that of the British and hence having no right to live in Burma, Nungnao, the rebellious son of Jayanao draws lines between the Burmans and the others and yet helps the Indians of Manku flee from the village. He eventually gets killed by his fellow rebels for betraying. The group of young Burmans fervently chanting Burmese nationalism to be about expulsion of the Indians suggests a destructive turn where nationalism caters to an imagined fixity of borders whereas the old generation of Jayanao had represented the lived experiences across porous borders. He states in the very beginning of the novel,

We are aliens here as well. We scrambled here from the highlands, searching for cultivable land. One day, we too will have to taste the poisoned fruit of division that the rebels have begun sowing now. (1982: 50–51)

After the untimely death of his son he asserts the same thought that ‘The British, Japanese or Indians aren’t our enemies; our most formidable enemy is ourselves…’ (1982: 223) and replicating this thought Ba- Mao says,

The same crisis that has befallen the Indians will also afflict the Burmese soon. Poison has entered the minds of people. Very soon, this poison will proliferate throughout Burma and splinter the country into tiny pieces. People will desire that evil befall others, petty selfishness and self-centred thinking will take root. These are the signs of erosion, of destruction. Since the poisoned seeds of division and differentiation have taken root, it will be difficult to turn the clock back. They will squeeze the life out of this country. (1982: 223)

The other group of people asking the same question consists of the Indian officers working for the British army and some Burmese Indians fighting for the freedom of India presented in The Glass Palace. The high-rank Indian officers like Arjun and Hardy find themselves fighting against their own countrymen for the safety of the colonisers. Their inclusion in the British army leaves them at a position when they see themselves neither as British nor as Indians. Through the long and elaborate conversations between Arjun and Hardy, Ghosh sheds light on their ‘in-between’ state of national identity and presents the elusive nature of ‘home’ for them. The Japanese invasion and the subsequent turn of events unfurl before them the multifarious project of freedom webbed around the questions of ‘home’ and ‘identity’. The historical context of alternative routes to freedom practised by the Indian rebels against the British empire is carefully woven into the predicaments of those who cannot be neatly clubbed into any stringent category of insider/outsider. It is to define their homes as separate from the British empire’s version of it that both of them join the Indian Independence Army under the leadership of Gianee Amreek Singh and yet at the same time Arjun realises the precarity of such constructed sense of nationalism as he tells Dinu,

Did we ever have a hope? We rebelled against an empire that has shaped everything in our lives; coloured everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain that has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I suppose, is where I am…. (2000: 518)

The precarity of the Indian soldiers is further explored by Ghosh as he writes minor characters like Mohun Singh who decides to break with the British army and form an independent army to free India with the help of Japanese force. Arjun, Hardy and Dinu find themselves tangled between the Indian and British/Burmese predicament further complicated by the entry of the Japanese.

Rajan, a Tamil boy born and brought up in Malaya who joins the Indian Independence Army to fight against British empire without ever being physically present in the geographical locale of India, presents the other side of the same question. Ghosh writes,

And India—what is India to them? This land whose freedom they were fighting for, this land they’d never seen, but for which they were willing to die? Did they know of the poverty, of the hunger their parents and their grandparents had left behind? Did they know about the customs that would prevent them from drinking at high-caste wells? None of that was real to them; they had never experienced it and could not imagine it. India was the shining mountain beyond the horizon, a sacrament of redemption—a metaphor for freedom in the same way that slavery was a metaphor for plantation. (2000: 522)

Conclusion

The multifarious nature of the practices of everyday life entangled within the notions of nations and borders across the Indo-Burmese borders in the colonial and post-colonial times suggest layered understandings of these dominant discourses. As Ghosh suggests, ‘nation’ remains that insurmountable dream for people across class, race and gender, leading them to further divisions and borders within and outside the ‘national’ territory. Probing into what a nation entails in the stateless lives of people, one gets to realise the complex and nuanced performances that people naively assume as insider/outsider, native/non-native. The boundaries built around cartographic lines, ethnic practices, religious faiths, class and gender distinctions trigger war, enmity, hatred and lead to loss of lives and humanitarian values. The predicaments of the characters in both the novels reveal the difficulties of performing their identities regulated by nations and borders; rather they find their lives trapped and dictated by the consequences of the larger political divides around those discourses. The labyrinthine patterns of lived realities created by such discourses are recorded by both Debendranath Acharya and Amitav Ghosh. Through subversive tellings of the manifestations of nations and nationalisms, these narratives capture the untold stories of disruptions in such apparently even domains. Both the writers focus on power conflicts at international as well as intranational levels which hint at the dynamics involved within the apparently singular concepts of nations and borders. Substantiating the intangible nature of borders and nationalist identity, the process of ‘Burmanisation’ in Myanmar suggests that replacing the dominant ‘indophobic’ sentiment of nationalism, the post 1980s Burma witnesses a more ‘islamophobic’ tendency targeting the Muslim communities of Indian origin (Egreteau 2011). The recent exodus of the Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar adds to the emergence of the newly defined ideals of belonging to a nation. Marking its difference from the political discourses of migration and citizenship, the texts offer underplayed narratives of love, compassion and brotherhood cutting across the ‘rigid’ boundaries constructed through class, religion and gender. It is these occasions of understanding the subversive and disruptive features of nations and borders that the works of fiction initiate and disseminate, and assert the necessity of their inclusion in the socio-historical studies of these sites.