The Postcolonial Metropolis: A Study of the Cityscape in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh isprobably the most celebrated Indian writer of the day. Though dubbed, primarily, as a historical novelist, Ghosh seems to belie such categorizations because his artistic indulgences owe as much to history as to “travel, migration and lived experience of cosmopolitanism.” (Desai 125)Many of his works imply an “imperial context” where characters travel across the national and cultural boundaries; unsettling and settling and inhabiting many places. However, his novel, The Shadow Lines, seems most notable for its unique projection of place, a key point in the postcolonial discourse. Here, the writer weaves his contemplation of place together with the concerns of identity, partition, migration, frontier and violence in an intricate narrative of the cities of Calcutta, London and Dhaka of the pre-independence and post-independence times.These cities are put parallel as “seat of cultures” and seem to evolve due to their”ambivalent and charismatic intersection with time” (Location of Culture 141). Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of city, therefore, the paper attempts to illustrate the three metropolises as post-colonial cities.