Dictionary.com defines border as “the
Dictionary.com defines border as “the
BOOK REVIEW Novel : The Shadow Lines AUTHOR : Amitav Ghosh Awards : winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award (1989). Bibliography : The Shadow Lines(novel), Wikipedia(Internet). Main Characters : Mayadebi, Tridib, Ila, May, Narrator, Nick, grandmother. POLITICAL SCENERIO : The novel is set against the backdrop of historical events: 1.Swadeshi movement 2.Second World War 3.Partition of Country 4.Communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta CHARACTERS ANALYSIS : The characters in this…
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh Such moments are rare indeed these days when one takes a book in the hand and is completely captivated by it after reading the first few pages. That happened to me recently when I started reading "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. "The Shadow Lines," Ghosh's second novel, was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the Prime minister, Indira Gandhi's assassination. Written when the homes of the Sikhs were…
may not be someone else’s reality. Amitav Ghosh in his book The Shadow Lines (1988) dwells on reality as a construction, that is, reality as an individual creates it for him/herself. This paper will look at the construction of reality for us by the Author, narrator and the various other characters in the story and thus giving the reader the reality effect or realism. One of the ways in which reality is constructed in The Shadow Lines (1988) is by the use of detail. For one Amitav Ghosh naturalizes…
Difference in Memory MAHUA SARKAR Sociology, Binghamton University, SUNY Everyone lives in a story . . . because stories are all there is to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose . . . (Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines)1 INTRODUCTION The study of popular memory is necessarily relational. It involves the exploration of two sets of relations: (1) that between dominant memory and oppositional forms across the public field, including academic productions; and (2) the relation between…
After seeing this house, Ila and the narrator qurrel about the importance of radical politics. Ila considers the death of Alan, Mike and Dan who raised their voices against war-mongering as sad because they were casualties of a ruthless nationalism. She also thought that Alan and his friends, who were witness to the war and the fight against fascism, must have been happy as she was in her political activism. The quarrel about courage and political activism continues between Ila and the narrator…
is lost in the name of partition, nation and borders. Ghosh attempts a revival for humanism in his The Shadow Lines. The novel portrays the futility of war, riots, violence and partition and also re-searches the lost humanism that has been thrown into the recesses of modern busy life. This paper attempts to prove that the concept of borders and boundaries are illusions. These illusionary lines blur human sight and shrouds humanism in the name of nation and patriotism. It concludes that these illusions…
The photos of ‘Shadows’ on the opposite page are images taken by me and other artists of the different types of shadows you can get. With the images that I found on the Internet, the shadows range from those that are created by people to those created by objects. My favourite one is the one with expressions painted in the sand with a shadow of somebody’s face above it. I like this one because it’s simple but effective and one that you can recreate easily yourself. One of my other favourites is…
The Narrator’s Perception of Cosmopolitanism in Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines” “The whole world is a man’s birthplace.” This quote by the Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius shows us the basic idea of cosmopolitanism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as “the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated.” In other words, cosmopolitanism is the theory that…
and societies. Shadow Lines wakes us up to the furiously changing geo-political scenarios and governmental regulations that have led to the formation of the modern world as we know it. The process of othering, i.e. the creation of a certain sense of "us" and "them" has inevitably been created between nations and people due to the creation of boundaries or ‘Shadow Lines’ as Ghosh puts it. In this paper, I aim to analyze the feasibility or the desirability of these intangible lines that separate us…
Introduction: Inky Shadows Movie Actors Scribbling Letters Very Fast in Crucial Scenes The velocity with which they write – Don’t you know it? It’s from the heart! They are acting the whole part out. Love! Has taken them up – Like writing to god in the night. Meet me! I’m dying! Come at once! The crisis is on them, the shock Drives from the nerve to the pen, Pours from the blood into ink.…