Reading the Body-text: A Study of the Culturally Inscribed Bodies in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram

Body studies form a significant branch of cultural study in the contemporary era. Cultural geography, a branch of human geography, uses geographical terms to denote body. Body is treated as a space in present geographical studies. Body is one of the important spatial scales and it stands in close union with many other spaces. Material places like home, street, roads, city, prison, etc., and the cultural places like religion, politics, and history play a crucial role in shaping the body. In a close analysis, body is defined by the material, cultural and institutional places. This paper tries to locate the entanglement of the body-text and the cultural writings in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, a novel published in 2003. It is influenced by real events in the author’s life. The novel can be defined as a Bombay chronicle narrated from a foreigner’s perspective. Lindsay’s explorations into Bombay’s material landscape are accompanied by his interactions with innumerable number of people who inhabit Bombay’s territories. The process of recording his life in turn becomes a documentation of a thousand other identities that inhabit the cultural space of Bombay. The novel is rich with Lindsay’s memories and perceptions about this multitude of people. His attempt to narrate his memories about various characters in turn reveals the multiplicity of cultural factors that define and decide bodies and identities. Body is also revealed as a site of cultural inscription. Numerous cultural factors like religion, fashion, profession, political ideologies, social interactions, personal choices and group affinities engrave its messages on body spaces.