Questing Border: The Search for Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

This paper is a modest attempt to analyze Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines in terms of tracing the notion of identity which depends on institutionalized frame of reference. The construction of one’s personal identity is intricately associated with the geo-political demarcations; furnishing a legitimate space to one’s social and cultural position as well. The making and unmaking of identities is a complex process which inevitably includes the fragmentation of a composite selfhood along with the despicable politics of disintegrating one’s country. This partitioning of national ‘self’ comes with the creation of illusive borderlines that delimits an individual to expand his/her consciousness and also confines him/her into a restricted physical space where s/he is engrossed in divisive machinations of power. This paper humbly seeks to fathom how Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines limns a relentless search for self-identity, which unfolds as mutable and inconstant in respect of religion, race, ethnicity and culture.