Post‐Colonial Melancholy: An Examination of Sadness in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract

The article undertakes an examination of melancholy and sadness in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, concentrating on the forlorn figures of Tridip and the narrator in an attempt to analyse and evaluate the melancholy atmosphere of the novel. Bearing in mind Freud's own understanding of melancholy as the unconscious mourning for a lost love object, the article suggests the moments of sadness in Ghosh's text could be better understood as a form of postcolonial melancholy for the lost colonial object – not in any nostalgic sense, but rather the sadness which arises from the crisis of identity both Tridip and, in a larger sense, the postcolonial intellectual faces who wishes to avoid both the imperial identity forced upon him by colonial powers and, at the same time, the narrow, bullying hegemony of an artificially constructed nationalism. The sadness of The Shadow Lines, the article suggests, does spring from the irresolvability of this dilemma.