Cross-Cultural Aspects In Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

This paper is an attempt to present cross-cultural aspects in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines is an attempt to give voice to the stony silences and exhume the unclaimed corpses is the catacombs of “unhistorical historiography” (Prasad 99). Ghosh not only presents the reader with a political vision that questions the ethno-linguistic and cultural divides created by the fiery resurgence of nationalist ideologies but also interweaves that vision with the human story he delineates in the novel. In other words, the author seeks to elaborate on the larger politics of post-colonialism in affirming the identities of ordinary people and their cultural anchors. According to Edward Hower of the New York Times book review Ghosh’s second novel is “A stunning book-amusing, sad, and truly international in scope” (Prasad 99-100). Maria Couto endorses that verdict by declaring that in The Shadow Lines Ghosh has found his distinctive voice-polished and profound. The ability of Ghosh’s texts to draw on various cultural traditions, along with his own diasporic subjectivity as an Indian of Burmese origin who spent time as a child in Bangladesh, Iran and Sri Lanka, has done his writing in Egypt, and now does it in the US, corresponds well with the subjects of emigration, exile, and cultural displacement addressed in his work. His diasporic subjectivity and the subject matter of his fiction have led many critics to see him as a blossoming post-colonial writer.