Postcolonial Approach to Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

The present article turns round exploring the elements of postcolonialism in one of Amitav Ghosh’s novels: The Shadow Lines. He has interwoven and scrutinized the impacts of colonialism on the culture and society of two main neighboring cities, namely Calcutta and Dhaka. Presenting a thorough political and cultural change, the novel throws light on initial awareness of the social, psychological, and cultural inferiority enforced by colonizers, and displays struggle of subaltern people for ethnic, cultural, and political autonomy. Throughout the novel the writer explicitly and implicitly emits sparks or traces of postcolonial principles to show his interest in depicting the aftermath of colonization especially in an era after the emancipation. The article, therefore, aims to explore the overall structure of the novel through postcolonial approach and provides examples from the novel regarding the application of some postcolonial elements such as obscurity, memory, imagination, identity, essentialism, otherness, ambivalence, nationalism, space/place, worlding, diaspora, hybridity, unbelonging, independence…etc.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p247