Tracing Multicultural Aspects in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and Observing Reverse Nostalgia and Identity Crisis

This paper tries to trace various multicultural aspects in the novel The Glass Palace written by eminent author Amitav Ghosh. This paper will focus on the themes of multiculturalism like displacement, sense of rootlessness and the search of identity and the feeling of reverse nostalgia and identity crisis. The paper will also focus on the migration of the characters in the novel, from Burma to India and then to the USA. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh was published in the year 2000. The novel covers the geographical locations like Burma, Bengal, India, and Malaya. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956 and raised up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He has written highly aclaimed works like The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke. Ghosh has won France’s Prix Medicis Etranger Award, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Pushcart Prize and the very recent Jyanpith Award.