The Shadow Lines
novel by Amitav Ghosh
The Shadow Lines (1988) is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It is a book that captures perspective of time and events, of lines that bring people together and hold them apart; lines that are clearly visible from one perspective and nonexistent from another; lines that exist in the memory of one, and therefore in another's imagination. A narrative built out of an intricate, constantly crisscrossing web of memories of many people, it never pretends to tell a story. Instead, it invites the reader to invent one, out of the memories of those involved, memories that hold mirrors of differing shades to the same experience.
The novel is set against the backdrop of historical events like the Swadeshi movement, Second World War, Partition of India and communal riots of 1963–1964 in Calcutta and East Pakistan.
The novel earned Ghosh the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. The novel was translated by Shalini Topiwala into Gujarati In 1998.
Plot summary
Split into two parts ('Going Away' and 'Coming Home'), the novel follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and then follows with the experiences he has in London.
His family – the Datta-Chaudhuris - and the Price family in London are linked by the friendship between their respective patriarchs – Justice Datta-Chaudhuri and Lionel Tresawsen. The narrator adores Tridib, his cousin uncle, because of his tremendous knowledge and his perspective of the incidents and places.
“The Shadow Lines” enters the record as novel by Amitav Ghosh. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shadow, Lines and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Shadow Lines” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Shadow, Lines and novel provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7763545. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1963, 1964 and 1989.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Shadow Lines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.