Indian Partition of 1947 as Traumatic Rapture: An Analysis of Trauma and Memory Through Bakhtin’s Chronotope in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

One of the significant events that created a rapture in the political, geographical, and psychological history of South Asia is the division of India in 1947, which resulted in instantaneous destruction and psychological trauma. In the fiction of partition, it is represented as an overarching chronotope with dislocation and disjuncture in time. The Shadow Lines (1988) by Amitav Ghosh is an important work of fiction on the topic of partition and it attempts to portray partition in its artificial borders and violence as an event that is not in the past but continues to shape the present. Through the non-linear and dialogic narrative structure, Calcutta, Dhaka, and London come together as chronotopic spaces through the interweaving of memory and imagination, where trauma and violence of partition bring a fractured identity which transcends time and geographies. The aim of this article is to examine Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as a literary text of partition trauma and memory through the theoretical framework of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope. The study is guided by trauma theory and postmemory, where partition is considered a continuous process that challenges time and space, creating dialogic recollection. The article argues that Ghosh’s text creates a transformation of partition, not as a historical event, but rather as a spatial-temporal concept in terms of physical borders, violence and memory. The study's chronotopic reading advances postcolonial literary criticism by illustrating that trauma in The Shadow Lines is spatially embedded and temporally recursive, facilitating dialogical healing.