Title: Marble, Grass, and Glass
Author: B. Sham Moteelall
Genre: History / Latin America / South America
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 1664184732
Pages: 350
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
The Nobel prize in literature for 2021 was awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah,
for his compassionate depiction of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee
in the gulf between cultures and continents. This Nobel award speaks directly to the
ongoing centrality and relevance of uncovering and publicizing the consequences of the
horrors of colonialism.
Marble, Grass, and Glass, a novel by B. Sham Moteelall, is a necessary link in our evolution toward awareness, refutation and reparation of the centuries’-long damage inflicted by slavery on every continent in the world.
Sham Moteelall’s novel describes in minute and captivating detail the plundered lives of a handful of (subcontinental) Indians who agreed to or who were otherwise flummoxed into indentured servitude. (The distinction from slavery is mostly academic and a matter of word choice; the fact is that many of the 1.2 million Indians who were transported to British Guiana led lives of enforced misery, featuring disease, sickness, and premature death.) Sugar plantations were ‘starving’ for cheap labor and the colonial scheme dovetailed nicely into this need. Moteelal makes the point that for some, the transplantation to plantations in the New World actually meant improved lives and increased well-being. One of the many virtues of this book is its historical accuracy and its heartbreaking narrative of the twin scourges of India’s caste system and of the British colonial rule in India.
Books like Marble, Grass, and Glass are important because they provide windows into the suffering humanity and characters behind the historical events. They are perhaps even more important because depredations such as these continue to this day in many parts of the world.
Moteelall’s book opens the world of a cast of memorable characters who suffer to overcome sometimes pitiless odds in the service of making things better for themselves and their families. The book takes us on a whirlwind tour of births, deaths, marriages, incarnations and avatars that gild history with relatable human drama. The protagonists in the book’s many episodes suffer falls from Brahmin class to beggars, are victims of guile and greed, and emerge as the progenitors of Guyanese descendants, many of whom have heroically emerged as success stories in that South American country and elsewhere.
Read Marble, Grass and Glass for adventure, for history, for the many good stories it contains. Sham Moteelall also succeeds as a convincing and engaging writer: these true-to-life tales are couched in the language of fable contemporary fable–and the prose is smooth, articulate and riveting.
