MAPS, HOUSES AND SHADOW LINES Amitav Ghosh’s Masterpiece Thirty Years af!er

This contribution highlights how The Shadow Lines is based on post-colonial paradigmatic concerns, such as identity, colonial history, independence, but also novelties, particularly as far as the search for a new language and a new narrative form is concerned. While Salman Rushdie conjugates storytelling and border-crossing as natural inclinations, Ghosh echoes and complicates Conrad’s idea of a shadow line, multiplying and mirroring maps, houses, and borders. Amitav Ghosh’s narrative moves across such symbolic places thanks to postmemory, and narrates the stories of those affected by the artificiality of national borders and historic partitioning. They are the winding stories of the losers not the straight lines of the winners.