Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2024
DOI:
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A Rhizomic Quest for home: A Critical Study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
Dr. Sandip Sarkar
ABSTRACT:
Postcolonial writings often reflect the trope of rootedness and rootlessness, where characters often echo the entangled sentiment towards–the ‘real’ home where they were born and grew up and the ‘constructed’ home where they are tethered to. The present paper analyzes this issue of spatial de-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2005:32) in the novel of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines-written in the backdrop of creation of two nations. Home is an elusive entity in for those who migrated to other part of the world. Thamma in The Shadow Lines (2019) is a character, torn between her ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie 2010)-Dhaka and the ‘real’ home where she belongs toCalcutta. Though, geographically she has migrated and settled in India still the umbilical bonding with her old country remains intact. Her antithesis Ila is a globe trotter, having no specific ground beneath her feet to be called home. She is floating free in the ‘global non-space’ (Connor 2004). It is the past which eclipses the ‘ontic-ontology (Elden 2001:217)of these characters.
keywords: home, de-territorialization, interstice, non-space, ontic-ontology