The Mainstream and the Periphery: A Search for Missing Link between Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories
While discussing Hegel, Bertrand Russel in his History of Western Philosophy argues that the philosopher’s system of thought and philosophical ideas “could never have arisen if Kant’s had not existed” (661). Any system of thought, any literary tradition or any text is a production of earlier thought...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Sarat Centenary College
2024-01-01
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| Series: | PostScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://postscriptum.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pS9.iAnindya.pdf |
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| Summary: | While discussing Hegel, Bertrand Russel in his History of Western Philosophy argues that the philosopher’s system of thought and philosophical ideas “could never have arisen if Kant’s had not existed” (661). Any system of thought, any literary tradition or any text is a production of earlier thought or tradition where the latter one may pose a dialectical stance or just be a continuation of the former one. Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories is one such fictional narrative that can be introspected against Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Both these texts of Indo-Anglican literary tradition reflect postcolonial concern of nation building and ethnic violence vis-à-vis ethnic identity, some narratorial connections and thematic (dis)similarities. Since Kashypa’s text is a much later addition to Indo-Anglican writings, this paper will predominantly focus on how The House with a Thousand Stories can be a case of comparative continuation of The Shadow Lines from multiple perspectives, and attempts will be made to critically show how and why this comparative method is helpful in inferring greater knowledge about how Indian society in larger and smaller backdrops functions with respect to ethnic identity formation and nation building. While the so-called bifurcation between writings from India’s mainland and periphery is debatable, this paper endeavours to critically relook into the debate with respect to textual and thematic (dis)similarities that are very much apparent between the two texts. |
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| ISSN: | 2456-7507 |