Inventing or Recalling the Contact Zones: Transcultural Spaces in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Space as a place of contact as well as conflict is an important dimension in the oeuvres of Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh. This paper sets out to address the representation of "transcultural spaces" in Ghosh's memory novel The Shadow Lines.
By recalling and imagining the interplay between private and political lives, Ghosh's narrator/protagonist commemorates a Bengali family saga in post-independence India.
By spreading the story over diverse geographical and national landscapes in which memory and imagination reinvents historical reality, Ghosh highlights how the "shadows" of imaginary and remembered spaces haunt all characters in the novel as they struggle to narrate their personal and collective histories to each other. At the same time, these "shadows" in the form of "national boundaries" not only manipulate private and political spheres, but also demonstrate an individual's lifelong struggles to win over artificial borders, invading the space of home, territory, and motherland. Thus by examining connectedness and separation, Ghosh uses the fate of nations (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) to offer observations about a profoundly complex political conflict in the post-partition subcontinent between two major ethnic communities of Hindus and Muslims.