International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) has attracted sustained scholarly attention for its treatment of borders, nation, and communal memory, but its representation of family — as a structure of kinship, desire, and generational fracture — remains critically under-explored. This paper argues that the novel stages a crisis of the Indian family through three interlocking registers: the narrator’s unrequited desire for his second cousin Ila, which exposes a tension between cosmopolitan individualism and normative kinship expectations; the fractured household of Thamma and Jethamoshai in Dhaka, where familial partition prefigures national Partition; and the unconsummated cross-cultural bond between Tridib and May Price, which tests the limits of kinship across civilisational divides. Drawing on Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between the material and spiritual domains of anticolonial nationalism, and on Eleanor Newbigin’s analysis of the postcolonial Indian family as a site of contested sovereignty, the paper contends that Ghosh’s families do not merely reflect the national fractures the novel is celebrated for depicting; they constitute the very ground on which those fractures become legible. What the novel reveals, read from this angle, is not a normatively “aberrant” family but a family form caught between incompatible orders of belonging.