Parting, Partition And Purloined Stories In The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines recounts a family story before and after the Indian Partition of 1947. What makes it special, and hence why it continues to receive critical attention, is the way the narrative is structured: multiple layers intertwine times and places to expose the incongruities of memory and to call into question the artificial demarcation of borders. The article argues that the dialectics of line – parting, partition and purloining – does not prefigure something new; rather, in a defiant gesture and in a paradoxical way, it denounces artificial demarcation and its inhuman consequences. In The Shadow Lines separation/partition is never clear-cut, and separation turns out to be an extension, a continuation, something indivisible. Through lines that separate and connect, the novelist brings together family and nation, personal life and communal violence, memory and reality, India and England, India and Bangladesh. The Shadow Lines is told in a non-linear fashion, a ploy that discloses the novelist’s attitude toward linearity uncritically observed. In this way it can also be read as a family journey, not only in search of the home lost, but also to the home found.