Going Away By Amitav Ghosh Analysis

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The Padma Shri awardee, writer and anthropologist, Amitav Ghosh has widely written in English language and has taught in various Indian as well as American universities. His writing corpus includes novels, travel essays and other forms of literary and historical writings. Among his ten major publications six are novels: The circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004) and Sea of Poppies (2008). Bengali by birth, Ghosh depicts Bengali way of life, history, behaviour and social consciousness alongwith concerns of humanity in general as Murari Prasad opines:
Amitav Ghosh stands out among his peers for the admirable directness and lucidity of his prose as well …show more content…

Mayadebi with her husband goes on visiting different countries of the world. Similarly her sons also go on crossing the borders of nation state. Her another son Jatin-Kaku who “[i]s always away too, somewhere in Africa or South-East Asia, with his wife and his daughter Ila.” (6)
The second part entitled “Coming Home” deals with coming back to India. For Tha’mma, India after partition has become her home so she wants her uncle Jethamoshai to come home for the rest of his life. The novel goes on shifting from individual to the public and from public to the individual. The episode of dividing the house between two brothers who were united in the earlier times portrays the division of the large country into two parts.
Ghosh has very technically structured the novel to move between past, present and future. The author has tried to show that our understanding of the present is based on our earlier perceptions that is why the narrator tries to link every present movement with its past. The novel The Shadow Lines portrays history of Partition of India (1947), riots in Calcutta and Dhaka (1963-64), world war (1939), economic crisis and other events from history. It is a commentary on how British policy of ‘divide and rule’ exploited the uneducated and superstitious people as well as the discourse of communalism and violence overtook the feeling of humanity. Prasad avers, …show more content…

Most of the subcontinent’s subjects, born as free citizens of their nation do not find something tragic about what happened in the year 1947. Those who have experienced it call it partition and those who find it just in history books call it the moment of independence. The event has different connotations for different people. The idea of partition has been overcome by the romantic idea of freedom. No doubt it is something to celebrate liberty from the clutches of British colonialism but its basis is the partition of a nation geographically as well as

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