'Coming Back' And Partition: Mobility and Memory Creating Liquid Borders in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand

The idea of borders has been historically designed for the sake of maintaining a power politics of spaces, properties, bodies, and even life and death. Borders, both physically and metaphorically, embody a sense of control, obedience, restriction, and order; and therefore, are perceived in terms of impenetrability and solidity. Such a perception further triggers militarized violence, technological abuse, and criminalization of anything that could potentially be a threat to the established narrative of border politics. However, Partition narratives and anecdotes reveal the gaps in the meta-narrative of borders by unmasking the ‘liquid’ nature of it. This unmasking is triggered by memory and mobility that motivates both a physical and a mental movement across the borders, further demystifying the rhetoric of ‘other’ through mental maps, cultural hybridisation, and memo-narratives. This paper studies how memory and mobility endanger the meta-narrative of border and associated border politics in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, by channelising agency through subversive gendered bodies.