LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 24:4 April 2024
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

Celebrate India!
Unity in Diversity!!

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

Poetic Encounter
Available in https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09TT86S4T

Poems
Naked: the honest browsings of two brown women
Available in https://www.amazon.in

Decrees
Available in https://www.amazon.com

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2024
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Memory as ‘The Prime Mover’ of The Plot in
Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Kamrun Nahar, M.A., Lecturer in English


Courtesy: www.amazon.com

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most significant literary voices to emerge from India in recent decades. The Shadow Lines was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The Shadow Lines can be read as a memory novel where the characters are maneuvered and manipulated by the memory of Tridib’s tragic death. Each of these characters is affected differently and their experiences weave into a single plot. The narrator in The Shadow Lines calls up a stream of recollections in the form of flashbacks, a testimony that the nature of these memories is unpleasant and haunting. The past invades the present, enriches and transforms it, and even reshapes the progression of the events eventually strengthening the structure of the plot. As memory provides the narrative trigger in this novel, Amitav Ghosh allows his narrator’s memory to play freely and form loops of stories inside the story rendering chronology and space redundant. Violence has many faces in the novel, but Tridib’s tragedy subtly resonates till the end of the book and comprehends the total senselessness of the post-Partition riot that claimed Tridib’s life. Being a memory novel, it captures the shock of emotional rupture and estrangement, giving voice to the silence resulting from the personal and national trauma in the subconscious of the characters. This critical investigation would focus on Ghosh’s use of memory as a fictional device to pull the memory fragments into plotting the story.

Keywords: The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh, Memory; Imagination; Psychoanalysis; Nostalgia; Trauma; Reconstruction; Partition; Riot

Introduction

Every attempt to describe historical events necessarily relied on narratives, that as Hayden White points out, “display the coherence, integrity, fullness and flowers of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (1987, p. 24). The emphasis is on the imaginary dimension in all accounts of events relying on various forms of imagination that have more in common with the production of a narrative or fiction. Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988), demonstrates how individual and family memories mirror social and historical transformation. Not only does the novel point to the importance of historical events shaping private lives, it also underlines the role of displacement and relocation in shaping the imagination and memory. Since memory is at the heart of the novel, this article seeks to highlight its significance by critically examining the role of memory in the plotline. All these stories-within-stories are united by the thread of memory and imagination as the novelist treats both memory and imagination as a driving force of the narrative. Within the flashback narrative framework, the narrator traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of the Second World War to the late twentieth century, observing how political events invade private lives. According to French philosopher Pierre Nora “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name (...) History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer” (1989, pp. 8-9). While for Nora “History is perpetually suspicious of memory and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (1989, p, 9), for Ghosh memory is always skeptical of literary history that can be manipulated by politicians and historians.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Kamrun Nahar, M.A., Lecturer in English
Department of English Language and Literature (DELL)
University of Science and Technology Chittagong (USTC)
Foy’s Lake, Khulshi – 4202, Chittagong, Bangladesh
Email: kamrun@ustc.ac.bd
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.