History and boundaries in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

  In the past couple of decades an entire generation of Indian writers took up the project of narratising the history of the nation. The voices are rather crucial to recover lost pieces of history that could have slipped like sand from the hands of the selective nationalistic memory. Amitav Ghosh, in most of his novels, has tried to retrieve such events which were lost to the pages of history. This narrative sketches few historical events like the partition of the Indian subcontinent, freedom movement in Bengal, and the communal riots in Bangladesh and India. In his second novel, The Shadow Lines the first person narrator narrates the events from a retrospective distance of about two decades making his memory the very structure of this narrative. There is blurring of  any boundary of dividing line in time and place as the narrator transforms the experiences that he narrates. There is more reconstruction of the past that he undertakes through the places that he had visited in the stories of Tridib, of London houses, photographs, maps, road names, etc.