«Not A Coming Or A Going At All». Looking for Home in Amitav Ghosh’s «The Shadow Lines»

Abstract

The article considers the complexity of the concept of “home” in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines (1988). I will examine how matters of migration and homesickness intersect a contemporary idea of a global borderless space, as well as the interrelationships and the exchangeability among topics like border, space, and home in Ghosh’s work. I will demonstrate that different characters of the novel correspondingly embody different ways of perceiving home and themes of crossing-borders: the narrator’s grandmother Tha’mma is the fictional representation of an ancient conceptualisation of borders and geo-localisation, while the narrator himself and his uncle Tridib are emblems of an innovative perception of space.

Also, the relationships between characters consequently produce an idea of home in movement. This may lead to a significant change in the ancestral perception of home seen as a supportive milestone for human life: borders, space, and home are exploited by Ghosh in a sort of unceasing circle in which each element influences and completes the others. After all, the task that primarily concerns Ghosh is, as well, «not how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent movements; and the challenge would be how to locate such events, how to give them a social and historical value» (Carter 1992, 101).