’’ Imagination and Reality’’ in Shadow Lines

                                                 

Name   : Savani Manisha R

SEM: II

M.A: I

Paper:  E-c 202indian writing in English

Topics:’’ Imagination and Reality’’ in Shadow Lines

Submitted to,

Dr, Dilip Barad,

Department of English,

Bhavnager University

                                                                                                                                                         Amitav Ghosh’s shadow lines resist classification. It is basically a memory novel, that weaver together past and present, childhood and adulthood, India and Bangladesh and Britain. Hindu and Bangladesh and Britain. Hindu and Muslim story and happening through the ‘coil within coil of memories unfurl within it. The novel remains still under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.

                                                        The shadow Lines begins with a statement about a journey, one that Mayadebi, the narrator’s great-aunt her husband and Tridib,her son, undertook in 1939’ from India to England a journey which will be undertaken again and again, and by other character in the novel, too both physically and the in imagination,sometimes,however from England to India will Tridib’s father is a diplomat, living abroad or in behind and only occasionally visiting Culcutta,but Tridib himself prefers to stay on in their family house in an upper middle class neighbourhood of Calcutta with his elderly grandmother.Everone  in the novel, in fact, house over the shadow lines between imagination and reality , everyone has his or her stories and memories that are based partly on imagination partly on reality, and when they are retold they are relived as well. They interlink and participate in each other so that in the end the boundary between fact and fiction, imagination and reality, disappears, and imagination perceived experience of real life. The shadow lines between people and countries .they inhabit and call their own too, merge and become one. When therefore, Illa shouts out that she has chosen to leave India and live in London because she wants to be free of her past, of her people and of the inhibitions they impose on her, the narrator shots back at her, you can never be free of me.

                  Imagination is not just a part of reality .it can and does create is own reality. Rumor can start a riot, so that the story of the loss of the prophet’s hair in faraway stringer can kill Indian Hindus in Dhaka and make vast crowds of people believe that their water supply has been poised and break up a friendship in Calcutta .For it is imagination that links a people together, not the fact of geographical contiguity. The Bengali feels closer to what is happening on the Indian subcontinent than to evens in china .Which ardor china in china .Which are closer to Calcutta than Delhi or Srinagar, while places in Europe as for away from each other as Khulna and stringer ,in south Asia remain uninvolved with each other , for there is no imaginative connection between them., indeed the Physical fact of geographical boundaries between nations is of no real important the border drawn between the two Bengals has in fact pulled them even closer togher.so closer together. So close that I, in Calcutta/had only two took into the mirror to be in Dhaka, a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other locked into an irrepressible symmetry by the line that was to set us free our looking glass border.

               The Grandmother Memories the Dhaka of her childhood are so sharp, vivid and concrete that her grandson can easily visualize it for himself in another kind of imagination reconstruction of reality. When she gets an opportunity to go there again as an old women, she is at first a little reliant for reality often destroys memories and dreams.