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HI SHIVAJI UNIVERSITY, KOLHAPUR CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION M. A. Part-II : English Semester-IV : Paper G3 E5 Special Author : Amitav Ghosh Semester-IV : Paper C-10 Critical Theory-II (Academic Year 2019-20 onwards) KJ M. A. Part-II English Paper G3 E5 Special Author : Amitav Ghosh Unit-1 The Shadow Lines : General Introduction Amitav Ghosh Contents 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 History and Narrative 1.1.2 Life and Works of Amitav Ghosh 1.1.3 Check Your Progress 1.1.4 Terms to Remember 1.2 Plot and Summary of the novel The Shadow Lines 1.2.1 Check Your Progress 1.2.2 Terms to Remember 1.3 Major and Minor Characters 1.3.1 Check Your Progress 1.3.2 Terms to Remember 1.4 Themes and Other Aspects in The Shadow Lines 1.4.1 Theme of borders, violence, and political unrest presented in the novel The Shadow Lines OR partition, identity and communal violence in The Shadow Lines : 1.4.2 The Shadow Lines – The novel of memories. 1.4.3 The Theme of Nationalism 1.4.4 Significance of Title 1 1.4.5 Historical Factors and Their Narratives in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines 1.4.6 Check Your Progress 1.4.7 Terms to Remember 1.5 Summary 1.6 Answers to Check Your Progress 1.7 Exercises 1.8 Further Readings 1.0 Objectives: After studying this unit you will be able to • Understand the great contribution of Amitav Ghosh in the field of post colonial Indian English Literature • Understand the social disturbance that occurred through partition • Study the characters in the novel and the problems they confront • Study the sources, setting and structure of the novel. 1.1 Introduction: This unit discusses the concept of narrative and history, life and works of the famous Indian English novelist, Amitav Ghosh. It also presents the detailed summary of his popular novel The Shadow Lines , the major and minor characters in the novel and commentary on theme, title and other aspects of the novel. 1.1.1 Narrative and History It was considered for long time that narrative and history were sisters of art as both consider the reader’s mind and represent experience faithfully. From Herodotus to Victor Hugo to Georg Brandes to Benedetto Croce and A. J. Toynbee, that is from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century it was the belief that the historian along with his skill should be a good narrator. Vice versa, a good story teller can’t avoid incorporating some elements of historical, i.e. communal significance. 2 A narrative is an account of how and why a situation or event took place. It unfolds a complex historical event with the details like time, setting, actions and the personages that involve in it. It also evaluates the actual reasons of it and also possible things to avoid it. Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a story-based form. It involves history-writing based on reconstructing series of short- term events. Since the writing of Leopold von Ranke on professionalizing history- writing in the nineteenth century it has been associated with empiricism . The term narrative history thus overlaps with the term histoire événementielle ('event- history') coined by Fernand Braudel in the early twentieth century. He analyzed longer-term trends of forms of history-writing. A crucial and unavoidable feature of narrative history is the fact of selectivity. The narrative historian is forced to make choices and selections at every stage: between "significant" and "insignificant", between "side show" and "main event", and between levels of description. Another crucial feature of the genre of narrative history is the tension between structure and agency. Historians differ about where to set the balance between limiting structures and choosing agents. Though history is considered a social science, the story-based nature of history approves the addition of a greater or lesser degree of narration in addition to an analytical or interpretative exposition of historical information. It is divided into two subgenres: the traditional narrative and the modern narrative. Traditional narrative focuses on the chronological order of history. It is event driven and tends to center upon individuals, action, and intention. For example, in regard to the French Revolution, a historian who works with the traditional narrative might be more interested in the revolution as a single unit (one revolution), centre it in Paris , and rely heavily upon major figures such as Maximilien Robespierre . The traditional narrative focuses too much on what happened and not enough on why it happened. Moreover, this type of narrative reduces history neatly. On the other hand, modern narrative centers on structures and general trends. A modern narrative would break from rigid chronology if the historian felt it explained the concept better. In terms of the French Revolution, a historian working with the modern narrative will use general traits of the revolution that were shared by revolutionaries across France but would also illustrate regional variations based on general trends. He may use different sociological factors to show why different types of people supported the general revolution. The modern narrative overburdens the 3 reader with trivial data that had no significance in history. That may cause the readers to believe that minor trivial events were more important than they were considering major events. Amitav Ghosh is honored with several awards. Almost all his literary works are entangled with history. His fiction is characterized by strong themes that may be sometimes identified as historical novels. His themes involve emigration, exile, cultural displacement and uprooting. He illuminates the basic ironies, deep seated ambiguities and existential dilemmas of human condition humanism, cosmopolitanism, communalism, colonial power and history. He, in one of the interviews, has observed, "Nobody has the choice of stepping away from history" and "For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality". He remarkably manifests a previous period and missing experiences to life through vividly realized detail. He has contributed to the development of ideas on the postcolonial in particular and its relation to post modernism. His work spans genres from contemporary realism to historical fiction to science fiction, but has consistently dealt with the dislocations, violence, and meetings of people and cultures incoporated by colonialism. 1.1.2 Life and Works of Amitav Ghosh : Amitav Ghosh was born on 11 th July, 1956 at Calcutta (Kolkata). He belongs to a Bengali Hindu family. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh was a diplomat in Indian army officer. Because of his father’s job, Amitav Ghosh, in the childhood got an ample opportunity to travel a lot in the country as well as outside country. His travel provided him the opportunity to grow up and see the different cultures, especially of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Iran besides India. Amitav Ghosh started his education from Doon School, Dehradun,. Later he received his higher education in St. Stephen’s College from University of Delhi where he completed his graduation in Arts in History. Thereafter he received his Masters degree in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics. After completing his Masters of Arts, he earned a diploma in Arabic from Institute Bourguiba Des Langues Vivantes, Tunis, Tunisia. He is an omniscient personality that reflected even at his college days. While getting higher education he emerged in the field of journalism. He instigated the reporting and editorial work for a newspaper. But he 4 left the job and went to England for his doctoral research. He got admission in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford from where he was awarded Ph.D. in Social Anthropology on 1982. Ghosh married to Deborah Baker, the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994. Ghosh has two children- Lila and Nayan. He started his career by working in the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. Then he turned towards teaching field. He worked as the Professor in various universities. He taught at Columbia University in NYU, Queens College of the City University, American University in Cairo, Harvard University and many other. He worked as a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He also joined the prestigious Queens College, City University of New York, as Professor in Comparative Literature. He worked as a visiting Professor at the Department of English of Harvard University too since 2005. Ghosh has also taught at several colleges in Delhi. Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padmashri by the Government of India in 2007. Currently he is living in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker and is working as the Senior Editor at Little, Brown and Co. In December 2018, Ghosh became the first writer in English to be chosen for the conferment of the Bharatiya Gnyanpith Award, the highest literary award in India, for “outstanding contribution in literature” in any of the official Indian languages. Amitav Ghosh’s Literary Career A) Historical Fiction: Amitav Ghosh began his literary career with his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986). It is set in India and Africa and winner of the 1990 Prix Médicis Étranger. It focuses on the central character being accused of terrorism and his journey to Africa. It is considered as postcolonial and postmodern literature for its treatment of the colonial factors and the inter-textual nature. This is followed by his next widely popular novel, The Shadow Lines (1988).

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