Where Do I Belong? Identity, Home, and Displacement in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

  • Unique Paper ID: 204364
  • Volume: 13
  • Issue: 1
  • PageNo: 1677-1681
  • Abstract:
  • This paper looks at how identity and belonging are dealt with in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines (1988), and how identity is not fixed but fluid, constructed but negotiated, inherited but not innate, or even confined to a single place. This paper examines the characters of the three main characters of the novel, the narrator, Tridib and Ila, and the post colonial theories of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Avtar Brah and how Ghosh disrupts the easy notion of home as a place that the narrator is born into and naturally belongs to. Rather, the novel proposes that such a sense of belonging is never received, but always constructed for those who have been formed by Partition, diaspora and colonial history. It is a novel about people who are losing their homes, but it’s also a novel about the people who are learning how to live without the illusion that home was ever that easy.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{204364,
        author = {Aishwarya Roy and Mr. Ayush Vatsa},
        title = {Where Do I Belong? Identity, Home, and Displacement in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {1},
        pages = {1677-1681},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=204364},
        abstract = {This paper looks at how identity and belonging are dealt with in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines (1988), and how identity is not fixed but fluid, constructed but negotiated, inherited but not innate, or even confined to a single place. This paper examines the characters of the three main characters of the novel, the narrator, Tridib and Ila, and the post colonial theories of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Avtar Brah and how Ghosh disrupts the easy notion of home as a place that the narrator is born into and naturally belongs to. Rather, the novel proposes that such a sense of belonging is never received, but always constructed for those who have been formed by Partition, diaspora and colonial history. It is a novel about people who are losing their homes, but it’s also a novel about the people who are learning how to live without the illusion that home was ever that easy.},
        keywords = {},
        month = {June},
        }

Cite This Article

Roy, A., & Vatsa, M. A. (2026). Where Do I Belong? Identity, Home, and Displacement in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 13(1), 1677–1681.

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