One of the most interesting aspects of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) is the convergence of folklore, nature, and the complex realities of environmental conservation. The novel’s setting is the mangrove-rich Sunderbans, “the country of the eighteen tides”—a vast region at the border of India and Bangladesh.

July 11, 1956 (age 64 years)

2004

Gun Island

The Circle of Reason

Amitabha Ghosh is an Indian researcher, administrator and educator. He is an Emeritus Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Fellow of The National Academy of Sciences, India, of which he was elected a Senior Scientist Platinum Jubilee Fellow in 2012.

Ghosh was a prolific Indian Bengali writer belongs to the Diasporic community. All his novels influenced by the effect of loneliness. The immigration and alienation as a fact holds a great place in Diasporic writings. All his novels explores the sense of nostalgia.

contribution to literature

February 2004

Sankara Kurup

Awards. The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar.

The Narrator remains anonymous throughout the novel. He recounts stories from his life as he grows up in Calcutta, studies in Delhi, and visits London. He is very close with his uncle, Tridib, and his cousin, Ila.

Tridib is the narrator’s uncle. He’s about twenty years older and is a very skilled storyteller. He often tells the narrator stories about the year he lived in London with the Prices.

In 1964, in the heart of the city of Dhaka, Tridib is brutally murdered. He is a main character in Amitav Ghosh’s renowned novel The Shadow Lines. His death, along with many others, comes with what is known today as the East Pakistan riots. The riots got worse, and so did the pseudo-nationalism.

How does class politics play in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines? Still, a certain class phenomenon can be attributed to the grandmother too, as the characterization make her a product and onlooker to the class politics.

Tridib taught him in childhood to see things clearly without the shadows of inhabitations or illusions. A strange bond exists between the two. The young narrator considers it his ‘unique privilege to understand Tridib. ‘ In this sense, Tridib is also a narrator.

These shadow lines are what they try to base their identity on. They are to them the signifying acts that construct notions of discrete identity. The grandmother, too, bases her identity as an Indian, as distinct from a Bangladeshi, on the lines that separate India and Bangladesh.

In The Shadow Lines, maps and borders symbolize the often arbitrary nature of countries. Someone can “draw another line somewhere,” and suddenly there’s another separate country or territory. The mutability of boundaries might be further symbolized in Tridib’s trans-cultural tales and in London’s immigrant communities.

Tridib

Therefore, when the state has used an organized and apparently ‘justified’ form of violence to attain its goal against another state, people of at least the lesser damaged nations come to believe that they have actually won the war. …

Though she’s correct, Tridib dies when he gets out of the car to protect her and his great-uncle Jethamoshai. May lives the rest of her life wondering if she killed Tridib, though she eventually comes to belief that Tridib sacrificed himself for her.

The Shadow Lines centers on the relationship between freedom and how people try to achieve that freedom. In this way, the novel seeks to parse out the meanings of different kinds of freedom and how one’s perception of freedom influences their identity.

The Shadow Lines is a novel, which deals with post-colonialism impact on society and culture; the riots, cultural deviations, migration and its consequences, political turbulence, religious clashes, identity crisis, lack of belongingness and more so.

Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (Western colonizers controlling the colonized). Therefore, a post-colonial critic might be interested in works such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe where colonial “…