Comparing The Shadow Lines And The Hungry Ghosts

In The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Ghosts, both Amitav Ghosh and Shyam Selvadurai, critique the emphasis that society puts on geo-political borders by acknowledging that we live in a world that is deeply inter-connected. Spanning different countries and continents, both of the novels explore issues of identity and belonging that are unique to the diaspora. This is accomplished through the characterization of a grandmother who is displaced from her homeland due to the Bengal Partition and the struggles faced by young Shivan Rassiah who moves to Canada with his family to avoid the violence and political instability of Sri Lanka during its Civil War. What is interesting about both novels is that despite highlighting the identity struggle that
To accept this level of human bloodshed as a norm, the grandmother has dehumanized the other side of the border as nothing more than the “enemy-state.” However, her deeply flawed idea of nationhood is bound to crumble. Before her impeding trip to the place of her birth, she becomes uncomfortable at the thought that upon boarding the airplane “she would have to fill in ‘Dhaka’ as her place of birth on that form … and at that moment she had not been able quite to understand how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality,” (286). While, her beliefs regarding nations and nationhood are deeply emotional and rooted in nationalistic sentiment, the fact that she is born in Dhaka causes her discomfort, because it is not an emotion or an
Struggling to feel accepted in Canada, he finds in himself the rising of “a great longing to be back in Sri Lanka and also, paradoxically, a revulsion against being there,” (443). This inability to reconcile what you truly feel for a place is similar to the experience of the grandmother in The Shadow Lines, who is torn between feeling hatred towards Bangladesh, the nation with whom her own country shares a violent history with, and feelings of nostalgia for her childhood. Likewise, for Shivan, Sri Lanka is the place where he loses the love of his life, Mili, but it is also the place where he does not feel isolated and different and a place full of his childhood memories. Yet the reality of the matter is as Sriyani points out to him, “you misjudged this country, because you are now foreign to it. You wanted poor old Sri Lanka to love and accept the person you became in Canada. But it cannot,” (389). Although this exchange is then cut short, the reader can surmise that Sriyani is referring to Shivan’s wishful thinking that it would be possible for him and Mili to continue their affair in a country which is strictly against homosexuality. Shivan’s identity as a gay man further complicates his struggle to fell accepted in any one country. Although in Sri Lanka, he no longer feels