Abstract
This essay examines the palpable presence of books and the printed word in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) and its entwinement with the brief, “bookish” life of the character Tridib, who plays a pivotal role in the narrative. It draws upon a phrase from Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre–the “real reader”–to explore the idealized figure of the reader and storyteller embodied by Tridib. This idealized figure, as this essay highlights, has a history stretching back to the early days of print in colonial India, and important antecedents in the modern Bengali literary canon. It is also a figure constituted by material dimensions of book-ownership and by dominant ideologies on the cultural value of book-owning and reading. What does the tale of the “bookish” storyteller stand for in the postcolonial context, in a narrative that holds his readerly qualities in the highest esteem?
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