Beyond the Divide: History and National Boundaries in the Work of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

The force of nationalism has become one of the most potent forces of our present time; witness the increasing number of emergent states and of separatist movements all over the world. Nationalism is born of the notion of a common heritage of a people that stretches over a long past and shared ethnic and/or religious roots. This is particularly so in the post-colonial era where the issue of identity is an urgent quest for Third World countries attempting to assert their individuality as nations and shed the yoke of having been culturally oppressed for a significant period of their history. One does not have to delve very far into history, though, to find that most, if not all, nation-states today are further from the notion of purity, unity, and shared heritage than their official ideologies would like to think. Peoples have moved in time and space and have become culturally and religiously commingled in ways that modern demarcations of nationality fail to consider. Consequently they have become artificial, not only in the sense of being man-made but also in being inadequate: if they unite one group along a certain criterion, they inevitably divide along another. As Amitav Ghosh puts it in an interview, Today nationalism, once conceived of as a form of freedom, is really destroying our world. It's destroying the forms of ordinary life that many people know. The nation-state prevents the development of free exchange between peoples. 1 In this paper, I shall analyze the ways in which the works of Amitav Ghosh explore the issues of national borders, the historical process by which they have come about, and the resulting ironies that affect people's lives at times in incomprehensible ways in the post-colonial era rich with contradictions. Beginning with The Shadow Lines, the issue of borders and partitioning is explored in the specific case of India, resulting in a myriad of insider-outsider configurations and in the problematic of how to narrate this partitioned history in writing. This is then fleshed out in In