The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

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Recommended: Establishing personal or cultural identity

OED defines diaspora as “the dispersion or spread of any people from their homeland”. This notion of 'homeland' and whether this helps to form your cultural identity is problematic, as we question who or what defines you. Is it really true that home helps fundamentally form your sense of self and your conception of identity and therefore your cultural identity. If you have a sense of self does that help form a strong cultural identity? Do we need to have 'real' territory to have cultural identity or can imaginative geography and history help intensify ones cultural identity and belongingness? In this essay, I will use Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. I will examine through the characters of Tha'mma and Ila in Ghosh's novel and Ashima and Gogol in Lahiri's novel and how their depictions of diasporic experience results in; vexed questions of identity and a quest for the Self through either the rejection or embrace of the native cultural identity. Many of the diasporas characters are unhappy with their hybrid cultural identity. Mishra Vijay states that diasporas “do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passport” This non-hyphenated identity on passports is ambiguous and may leave the person feeling uncertain as to how to establish their cultural identity in society leaving a notion of feeling connection to both their native and adopted cultural identity but never feeling belongingness to either.
The Shadow Lines depicts the notion that “diasporas have been seen to result from the migration of borders over people, and not simply from that of people over borders” (Brobaker 3) It tells the intimate story of a family deeply influenced by the aftermath o...

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...w Lines." Journal Of Commonwealth Literature 41.3 (2006): 45-65
Roy, Anjali. "Microstoria: Indian Nationalism's 'Little Stories' In Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." Journal Of Commonwealth Literature 35.2 (2000): 35-49.
Song, Min Hyoung. "The Children Of 1965: Allegory, Postmodernism, And Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly And Critical Journal 53.3 (2007): 345-370.

Kuortti, Joel. "Problematic Hybrid Identity In The Diasporic Writings Of Jhumpa Lahiri." Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition. 205-219. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2007.

Anderson, Benedict.1992. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.

"diaspora". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press, n.d. Web. 13 January 2014. .

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