Negotiating Cultural Memory and Postcolonial Identity in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of The Day

Abstract

This paper makes a comparison between Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day to explore how cultural memory and inherited history influence individual identity in the wake of empire. Both narratives are retrospective and first-person; both are journeys, and both characters have to deal with a past they have not caused. Through a comparative postcolonial approach, the study seeks to combine close textual analysis with the latest scholarship in the fields of memory, diaspora, border, and belonging. It explores the reconstruction of the past, the conflict between personal memory and official history, the displacement and politics of belonging, the silence and emotional sublimation, and each protagonist's negotiation of an identity that is informed by colonial legacies. The focal point of the study is the presentation of two novelistic models of the function of memory. Ghosh's narrator mines his family's memory and others' for his cousin Tridib's story, and this shared memory becomes the grounds for transcending political boundaries. Ishiguro's memory is a private and protective story: Stevens's memory shields him from the truth of his own story, and his institutional code of dignity is indistinguishable from his complicity. Taken together, the novels make the point that cultural memory is not a record of the past but a continual negotiation, and that a postcolonial identity depends on the kind of memory one exercises: generously or defensively. The study makes a significant contribution to comparative postcolonial criticism by offering a reading of the South Asian and British fiction as a relationship of settlements with a shared imperial past.