The Representation of Space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, and studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford. He is one of India’s best-known writers in Indian English Fiction. He has written many well-known fictions and non-fictions and received many prestigious awards for his writings. Amitav Ghosh’s writing deals with the variety of dimensions for his fictional narratives such as history and memory, political struggle and communal violence, agonies of dislocation made by the Partition, etc. Here, in this paper, I have taken up Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) for its formal experimentations with the challenge to be overcome by the projection of imagination and utter desire until the space gets dissolved. The focus of the paper is to show how the major characters deal with the blurred and complex space in a seamless continuity in this novel.