Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic edited by Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO and Alessandro VESCOVI «QuadRi» Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI The scholarly essays which are gathered in this issue of “QuadRi. Quaderni di RiCognizioni” have been selected as a result of a call for papers among those presented at the International Conference on The Shadow Lines Thirty Years After, held at the University of Milan and the University of Turin on 12-13 November 2018. New contributions have also been added, due to the enormously rich and rewarding response. We thank the Italian Association for the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English (AISCLI www.aiscli.it) for sponsoring both the conference and the present publication, which is published thanks to the co-funding by Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne and the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università di Torino. Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic. E. Adami, C. Concilio and A. Vescovi (eds), Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne, Università di Torino, Torino 2020 – ISBN 9788875901738. Cover image: Going Away and Coming Home, courtesy of Pikist.com Graphic project and editorial layout by Arun Maltese: Progetto grafico e impaginazione: Arun Maltese (www.bibliobear.com) «QuadRi» Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI XI 2020 I «QUADERNI DI RICOGNIZIONI» «QuadRi» – Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI è la collana curata dal Comitato scientifico e dalla Redazione di RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne, edita online dal Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne dell’Università di Torino. La rivista e i suoi Quaderni nascono con l’intento di promuovere ri-cognizioni, sia trattando da prospettive diverse autori, movimenti, argomenti ampiamente dibattuti della cultura mondiale, sia ospitando interventi su questioni linguistiche e letterarie non ancora sufficientemente indagate. I Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI sono destinati ad accogliere in forma di volume i risultati di progetti di ricerca e gli atti di convegni e incontri di studio. ISSN: 2420-7969 COMITATO DI DIREZIONE Direttore responsabile • Paolo Bertinetti (Università di Torino); Direttore editoriale • Carla MARELLO (Università di Torino) COMITATO EDITORIALE Elisa CORINO (Università di Torino), Roberto MERLO (Università di Torino), Daniela NELVA (Università di Torino), Matteo REI (Università di Torino) COMITATO DI REDAZIONE Pierangela ADINOLFI (Università di Torino), Elisabetta BENIGNI (Università di Torino), María Felisa BERMEJO CALLEJA (Università di Torino), Silvano CALVETTO (Università di Torino), Gianluca COCI (Università di Torino), Massimo MAURIZIO (Università di Torino), Patricia KOTTELAT (Università di Torino), Enrico LUSSO (Università di Torino), Alessandra MOLINO (Università di Torino) COMITATO SCIENTIFICO Ioana BOTH (Universitatea «Babeş-Bolyai», Cluj-Napoca), Suranjan DAS (Università di Calcutta), Andrea CAROSSO (Università di Torino), Emanuele CICCARELLA (Università di Torino), Giancarlo DEPRETIS (Università di Torino), Thierry FONTENELLE (Translation Center for the Bodies of the European Union, Luxembourg), Natal’ja Ju. GRJAKALOVA («Puškinskij Dom», Accademia delle Scienze di San Pietroburgo), Salvador GUTIÉRREZ ORDÓÑEZ (Universidad de León), Philip HORNE (University College, London), Krystyna JAWORSKA (Università di Torino), Ada LONNI † (Università di Torino), Maria Grazia MARGARITO (Università di Torino), Fernando J.B. MARTINHO (Università di Lisbona), Francine MAZIÈRE (Université Paris 13), Riccardo MORELLO (Università di Torino), Francesco PANERO (Università di Torino), Virginia PULCINI (Università di Torino), Giovanni RONCO (Università di Torino), Michael RUNDELL (Lexicography MasterClass), Elmar SCHAFROTH (Universität Düsseldorf), Mikołaj SOKOŁOWSKI (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Warszawa), Michelguglielmo TORRI (Università di Torino), Claudia Maria TRESSO (Università di Torino), Jorge URRUTIA (Universidad «Carlos III», Madrid), Inuhiko YOMOTA (Kyoto University of Art & Design), François ZABBAL (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris) EDITORE Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne Palazzo delle Facoltà Umanistiche Via Sant’Ottavio, 20, Torino SITO WEB: http://www.dipartimentolingue.unito.it/ CONTATTI RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne SITO WEB: http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ricognizioni/index E-MAIL: [email protected] Issn: 2384-8987 3%4 5 $ 6 7 6!!8 "$9@A B Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic edited by Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO and Alessandro VESCOVI DIPARTIMENTO DI UNIVERSITÀ LINGUE E LETTERATURE STRANIERE E DI TORINO CULTURE MODERNE The published contributions have been submitted to blind peer review. The editors are responsible for this procedure and testify to its validity. CoNTENTS Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO, Alessandro VESCOVI (eds) InTRODUCTION 11 Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO, Alessandro VESCOVI • The Topicality of The Shadow Lines. Bordering Texts and Foreshadowed Contexts 19 Amitav GHOSH • A Letter Sent to the Participants in The Shadow Lines Thirty Years After I. BoRDERING TeXTS 23 Supriya CHAUDHURI • The Absence of a Hyphen: Borders, Crossings, Identities in The Shadow Lines 41 Alessandro VESCOVI • The Shadow Lines as a Work in Progress. A Genetic Approach to some Pages from the Typescript 63 Eleonora SPARVOLI • “An Alternative Modernism”: Proust’s Lesson in The Shadow Lines 71 Vishnupriya SENGUPTA • Polemics of Nationhood: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men 81 Federica ZULLO • The Language of Violence and Fear in The Shadow Lines. A Stylistic Analysis 95 Asis DE and Nirmalendu MAITI • Shadow Lines: The Border, the “Other”, and the Eco-literary in The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement 109 Lucio DE CAPITANI • Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh’s Political Imagination. From The Shadow Lines to Gun Island II. FoRESHADOWED CoNTEXTS 125 John THIEME • Through the Looking Glass: Sameness and Difference in The Shadow Lines 135 Silvia ALBERTAZZI • Maps, Houses, and Shadow Lines: Amitav Ghosh’s Masterpiece Thirty Years After 141 Binayak ROY • The Shadow Lines and the Dialogism of Adda 157 Carmen CONCILIO • Borderless Ageing. A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines face to face with Caterina Edward’s Finding Rosa. What History Teaches and Geography Cannot Learn 171 Francesca ORSINI • Significant Geographies in The Shadow Lines 187 Sumit RAY • The Bengali Bhadralok as World-traveller in The Shadow Lines 193 Anna NADOTTI • Quasi trent’anni dopo la traduzione di The Shadow Lines AuTHORS’ BiONOTES INTRODUCTION THE TOPICALITY OF THE SHADOW LINES Bordering Texts and Foreshadowed Contexts Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO, Alessandro VESCOVI Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), was notoriously conceived in 1984, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when Delhi was upturned by bloodthirsty mobs that attacked the Sikh community killing, raping, and looting. This was the “madeleine” that brought the would-be novelist (he was halfway through writing The Circle of Reason) back to 1964, when a similar mob attacked Hindus in Dhaka, where Ghosh, then a child, was living with his family. Thus The Shadow Lines became a historical novel about Bengal in the Sixties, a portrait of post-Independence India, a Bildungsroman, or indeed a Künstlerroman, about a young Bengali, an Indian reply to both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915) and Remembrance of Time Past (1922) that enthused a generation of Indian intellectuals. Indeed, The Shadow Lines is the first and so far only novel by a living author to be included in University syllabi all over India. Unsurprisingly this is, among Ghosh’s books, the most written about, especially in South Asia. At the beginning of the 1980s, Midnight’s Children (1981) recounted the story of Indian Swaraj in a kind of mock-heroic poem that sardonically encompassed several decades in hundreds of pages virtually launching that mode of writing that Linda Hutcheon would later categorise as historical metafiction. Rushdie’s novel problematised the possibility of writing history through his famous metaphor of chutney. Like fruit in a chutney jar, historical facts can indeed be preserved for the future, but only a whiff remains of their original taste. Nonetheless, they may be delicious in their new way. Midnight’s Children reacted to the corrosive critiques of the very possibility of writing history presented by Nietzsche and his disciple Foucault. History is teleological, Nietzsche would argue, always written by the winners to magnify the present. Every historiography is but a narrative that connects odd facts chosen in order to prove a certain theory, mostly that the present is better than the past, and the present rulers have a moral right to be in their position. Thus the English narrative in the XIX century implied that India was going through a decadent period when the British arrived and rescued it, helping Hindus to regain their old splendour. Nothing could be better for Indians than the British Raj, which guaranteed peace, equality (among subjects), legal rights, and the liberty to cultivate ancient Indian wisdom and philosophy. Nationalism exposed the hypocrisy of this view but appropriated