War and the Photographic Vision in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

This article engages with representations of the Second World War and the 1962 Indo-China War in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. More specifically it examines how the centrality of the Second World War is sought to be “provincialised” and upturned by the presence of the Indo-China War and 1964 Calcutta riots, and how the presence of these “local” histories is conveyed through the description of the Tresawsen family photographs. The article argues that this photographic vision is central to the aesthetics and depiction of wartime in the novel. The documentary status of the photograph and its relation to the photographic memory of Tridib and the unnamed narrator, the role of photography in colonial discourse, the creation of photographic subjectivity, and the relation of the photograph with death are thematic concerns that the article analyses. The characteristics of the status of the photograph, in particular the war photograph, are thus central to the aesthetics and depiction of wartime in the novel. This highlights the novel’s poetics as immersed in what the article defines as “the photographic vision”.