Love in Strange Lands: Fetishising the Foreign Subject in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

The idea of interracial desire and the conflict it tends to bring in the postcolonial discourse of looking at the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser remains a topic of debate. This idea is further problematised when the roots of an interracial sexual relation are rooted in the male desire that fantasises the foreign woman as a strange, exotic and mysterious subject. Here this desire is not limited to just a quest for love, but it tends to take the shape of a fetish that is often projected as a love quest. The aim of this paper is to explore the intricacies of interpersonal relationships in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, with the focus on the treatment and fetishisation of female characters by the male characters in the novel. This paper intends to explore the depiction of interpersonal relationships between people from different nations, cultures and races through a close reading and textual criticism to explore the issues that such relationships tend to bring in The Shadow Lines which indicates the possibility of a foreign fetish as its root. It also attempts to understand the orientalist connotations and the role of colonialism at its foundation. Apart from this, the paper explores the idea of lands and spaces and how they work as a drop back to the fantasy and desire for a foreign and strange subject in terms of spaces as well as people.