Violence in the City: A Look at the City-scape in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

With the fragmenting of the world around us and the disintegration of narratives of culture and religion and a
re-questioning of what constitutes reality, the city-space has emerged as one of the key areas of interrogation
and analysis over the past few decades. If previously the urban landscape was taken to be the canvas against
the backdrop of which the political, social and cultural contours of a society and state were played out, it has
now become a site of power struggle, and the future of the said landscape a mirror and the future of the
nation-state. The city I choose to look at is Calcutta (now Kolkata). My paper, would interrogate the changing
dimensions of the city, after sectarian and political violence erupts in the city, as has been portrayed in Amitav
Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.
Violence, specially, communal violence brings into sharp focus the dichotomy and the problematics of the
binary between 'good' (state sponsored or approved) and 'bad' (against the interest of the nation state)
violence. Violence can bring a city together (as it happens sometimes during a coup or most recently in the
case of the Catalunia Referendum), and sometimes fractures and shatters the myth of a unified social,
community space. In The Shadow Lines, the narrator is shocked to find the city that he once called his own to
have suddenly become so alien. Calcutta has recovered from the gashes of those violent days. My paper would
look at the way violence affects the city, its people, how it problematizes the notion of national unity and
comradeship and the role memory plays in configuring and reconstructing the way we perceive the city.