Analysis Of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

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Amitav Ghosh is prominent Indian writer who has worked both on fiction and non-fiction.His works includesnovels such asThe Circle of Reason (1986),The Glass Palace (2000), and The Hungry Tide (2004).Ghosh’s second novel The Shadow Lines (1988) is beautifully written. It reminds of Rushdie in terms of its formal experimentations with geography and chronology. However, unlike Rushdie, it is written in an understated, condensed prose that comes close to poetry. The themes of this novel revolve around arbitrariness of partition and the invention of the past. It moves between between India and the UK, Calcutta and London, the Second World War and present.
KEYWORDS:PARTITION,NATIONALISN,PUBLICHISTORY,PRIVATE HISTORY,NOSTALGIA
INTRODUCTION:
Exploring history in context of literature is an interesting psycho social exercise. History is not only about ‘great’ events and personalities but entails a lot more of a web. History sometimes tends to take elite routes. The powerful sections of the society may tend to dominate the way history gets represented, circulated and accentuated. However, Ghosh in his works highlights the voices that may be unheard of. Voices of the marginalized sections of the society particularly find their expressions in his work. Forinstance, his novel Shadow lines, entails the tale ofThamma about partition seen from her perspective. Similarly, in Hungary tides, Kusum also a victim of partition, has her own tale of saving lives of other people. Individual lives,

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