The Creative Process: The Arts of War (Spring 2017)

The Creative Process
In the opening scene, Ghosh describes how the marching soldiers
looked like to the Burmese crowd- “There was no rancour on the
soldiers’ faces, no emotion at all. None of them so much as glanced at the
crowd.” This reflects the inhumanity that developed within the
minds of the people as a result of war. This is reiterated by Saya John
when he says,
“…their willingness to kill for their masters, to
follow any command, no matter what it entailed?
And yet, in the hospital, these sepoys would give
me gifts, tokens of their gratitude. I would look
into their eyes and see also a kind of innocence, a
simplicity. These men, who would think nothing
of setting fire to whole villages if their officers
ordered, they too had a certain kind of innocence.
An innocent evil. I could think of nothing more
dangerous.”
This sense of being mentally controlled is also reflected in the
Collector, who was “haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his
British colleagues,” as well as in the character of Arjun, who remained
loyal to his duty towards the British for a major part of his short life.
Dinu, similarly, fails to realize that the British, much like Hitler and
Mussolini, are ruling through racialism, aggression and conquest.
He, like several other Indians who received a primarily one-sided
Western education, does not question the immorality of the British.
This was, truly, the aim with which Western education was
introduced in India, as clearly stated by Macaulay (who was
responsible for the same).
Edward Said, one of the founders of the academic field of
postcolonial studies, writes, ‘No one today is purely one thing.
Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more
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