Memory as ‘The Prime Mover’ of The Plot in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most significant literary voices to emerge from India in recent decades. The Shadow Lines was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The Shadow Lines can be read as a memory novel where the characters are maneuvered and manipulated by the memory of Tridib’s tragic death. Each of these characters is affected differently and their experiences weave into a single plot. The narrator in The Shadow Lines calls up a stream of recollections in the form of flashbacks, a testimony that the nature of these memories is unpleasant and haunting. The past invades the present, enriches and transforms it, and even reshapes the progression of the events eventually strengthening the structure of the plot. As memory provides the narrative trigger in this novel, Amitav Ghosh allows his narrator’s memory to play freely and form loops of stories inside the story rendering chronology and space redundant. Violence has many faces in the novel, but Tridib’s tragedy subtly resonates till the end of the book and comprehends the total senselessness of the post-Partition riot that claimed Tridib’s life. Being a memory novel, it captures the shock of emotional rupture and estrangement, giving voice to the silence resulting from the personal and national trauma in the subconscious of the characters. This critical investigation would focus on Ghosh’s use of memory as a fictional device to pull the memory fragments into plotting the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]