Dissolved Boundaries and Fluid Spaces: The Spatial Imagination of Amitav Ghosh in the Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines is a classic exposition of the defining postmodern notion of the fluidity of space. The novel, through its overt transnational character, explores the idea of dissolution of space through its conceptual dismantlement of national boundaries across the globe. Through various events and episodes that occur in the text, its characters continually transit across national borders thereby breaching the spatial confinements created by them and unleash themselves into the limitless arena of transnational space that is fluid, unstable and categorically transversal. The text, whose plot spans across the pre-and post-independent times in the subcontinent, overtly exemplifies how the postmodern space defies all notions of structuration, stability and territorial confinement for it is fluid, indeterminate and fluctuating in nature. Based on these precepts, this article analyzes the fickle and indeterminate nature of the fluid space that permeates across conceptually dissolved national boundaries and frontiers in the subcontinent as effectively demonstrated in Amitav Ghosh's award-winning novel The Shadow Lines.