Formal innovation as postcolonial response: From A Passage to India to The Shadow Lines

Abstract

This thesis examines the colonial barriers that E. M. Forster demonstrated in A Passage to India (1924) and how these barriers are depicted as a postcolonial response in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). By confiding on the theory of hybridity by Homi K. Bhabha, this study argues that the non-linear, fragmented narrative that Ghosh constructs is a formal response to the strict categorical division that colonialism imposed. Forster’s text shows the limit to which the British Raj deliberately blocked the possibility of a hybrid identity and genuine cross-cultural relationships, and suggests that friendship between a colonizer and colonized man was impossible under colonialism. The analysis shows how the colonial power operated by establishing fixed temporal, geographical, and identity categories which is a direct violation of the “third space” as theorized by Homi K. Bhabha. Ghosh’s postcolonial narrative directly addresses this impossibility, through formal innovation and hybridized characters. The novel’s fragmented structure implements at the fundamental level, what colonialism did not allow to happen at the political level, placing the idea of borders as “shadow lines”. This study adds to postcolonial literary criticism by depicting how the narrative form alone can serve as a political intervention and open up a literary space that allows colonial categorical thought to penetrate imagination and memory. The comparative approach shows that postcolonial literature inherits from colonial literature, but it changes impossibility into formal possibility, in other words- it creates new literary devices that coherence with the expression of hybrid consciousness.