Chapter Significant Geographies in The Shadow Lines

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Approaches to world literature often think through binaries of local/global,
major/minor, provincial/cosmopolitan, taking them as given positions on a single world map.
To an extent, this is true of Amitav Ghosh’s prize-winning essay “The testimony of my
grandfather’s bookcase” (1998), which reflects on his grandfather’s collection of world
literature books to think about the relationship between his grandfather’s provincial location
in Calcutta and the world. Yet in The Shadow Lines Ghosh takes a much more complex and
interesting approach to space, the world, perception and narration. In the novel’s complex
narration, space, time, and self always appeared mirrored through other people, times, and
spaces. Places also acquire reality and meaning only after they are first narrated and imagined,
often several times, and before they are experienced directly. This is a stance that has deep
existential but also epistemological implications that go beyond “simply” critiquing colonial
and national border-making. This essay explores how (and which) spaces become
“significant” in the novel, and how the novel’s approach to space can be productive for
thinking about world literature.

H2020 European Research Council

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