Shadowy Lines and Flowing Spaces: Amitav Ghosh’s Heterotopic Imagination in The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow-Lines is a classic exposition of the Foucauldian notion of heterotopic space. The novel, through its exclusive engagement with the notion of space both in the Indian subcontinent and outside, subtly brings out the former’s immensely heterogeneous and inherently conflictual character. In today’s world, as Foucault would categorically assert, we live in a space that is not unified and homogeneous, rather one that is complex, heterogeneous and is filled with many inherently contradictory characters. This is, in his words, a heterotopic space – a space that perhaps most suitably demonstrates our contemporary mode of existence. In the novel, as we can explicitly notice, there are various events and episodes occurring in certain spaces in a scenario where these spaces are filled with multiple transnational and cosmopolitan characters despite they being located in specific locales. They are heterotopic spaces. The text, through various transnational events and episodes that encompass the pre and post-independent times in the subcontinent, overtly exemplifies how these heterotopic spaces defy all notions of structuration, stability, confinement and territoriality for theyare fluid, indeterminate and perennially fluctuating. Based on these precepts, this article intends to analyze the fickle and indeterminate nature of the heterotopic space that permeates across the textual landscape of the novel – a space that is filled with multiple transnational and cosmopolitan significations.

Keywords:

• Space
• deterritorialization
• reterritorialization
• transnationalism
• boundary

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Foucault frequently uses this expression in his mentioned essay to denote a defining characteristic feature of the heterotopia through which it includes extra-territorial qualities and attributes into itself – qualities which challenge and contest its own, inherent spatial character. In other words, heterotopia has this strange but unique ability to localize outer and other spaces.

2 Tridib, while writing letters to May, did not merely think of Lymington Road, rather clearly felt being posited there despite being actually being in Calcutta. The narrator puts it succinctly as: “he didn’t think of Lymington Road; he could see it, quite clearly, as though he were there, with her, sitting under the cherry tree in the garden” (Ghosh 1988, 152)

3 One can refer to Foucault’s example of the tradition of the honeymoon or “voyage de noces” in France. According to Foucault, the train or the honeymoon hotel where the girl’s defloration takes place cannot actually be located anywhere: “The girl’s defloration could not take place “anywhere” and at that time, the train or the honeymoon hotel represented that place which was not located anywhere, a heterotopia without geographical co-ordinates” (1997, 333). The train or the honeymoon hotel is actually a heterotopic space; it is inside the society, yet cannot be located. Likewise, the narrator’s imagined vacuum-space in the German-bomb-devastetedLymington Road is also a similar heterotopic space for it, though belongs to Lymington Road, is actually nowhere. It is imagined as a space without history, without past; it is a vacuum-space that eludes any definitive spatio-temporal co-ordinate. It is a heterotopic space.

4 Foucault uses this term to denote different temporalities which however can coexist and merge in a single spatial field that heterotopia offers. So, the heterotopia can contain in itself multiple temporal possibilities in a single space.

5 Deleuze and Guattari have introduced the concept of “lines of flight” in their introductory chapter on “rhizome” in their collaborative book A Thousand Plateaus. A rhizome, according to them, is a representative postmodern structure that is perennially unstable as it is fluid and subject to continual ruptures, breakages and corresponding reconstitutions. The ruptures are effectuated by the “lines of flight” which are lines that break the structure along its boundary thereby causing its structural disorientation. Ila continually violates the orthodox cultural codes of the Indian nation by rupturing its restricted cultural territory and flees into foreign countries adopting their ways of life. She acts as a “line of flight” that in a way dismantles and breaks away from the cultural boundary of the Indian nation.

6 Deleuze and Guattari introduce their famous concept of “map without tracing” while explaining the perennially fluctuating and indeterminate structural features of a rhizome which according to them, is a map without tracing since a tracing always threatens the former with the imposition of a definite territoriality onto its structure. In this way, the map continues to remain an open entity without any fear of rigid territoriality forcibly attributed to it. In a similar fashion, the cartographic features that Ghosh imagines for the subcontinent escape any rigid territorial structuration and hence, the subcontinent, in a way, continues to remain a “map without tracing.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sambit Panigrahi

Sambit Panigrahi teaches English at Ravenshaw University. He holds a Ph. D. degree on Joseph Conrad from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He specializes in modern and postmodern literature. His research articles have appeared in journals of national and international repute that include journals like Italica, The Explicator, Notes on Contemporary Literature and Academic Deliberations etc. Dr. Panigrahi has also published a poetry collection entitled The Lost Earth and the Other Poems.