An attempt has been made in this paper to analyze The Shadow Lines as a novel which, in Lukac's words, is a work wherein the technique employed is not merely a stylistic device but a ``formative principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of characters.'' Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) is the story of the family and friends of the nameless narrator which has its roots in broader national and international experience. In the novel the past, present and future combine and melt together erasing any kind of line of demarcations. The title is a good example for showing us the symbolist and the realist elements. For Lukac realism is the literary mode which is capable of representing the totality of society. Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines is rooted in reality and yet it looks beyond. First of all, there is the use of simple language. Another significant factor the novel has is that the main characters are very real, almost rounded. The text deals with the concerns of our period, the search for identity, the need for independence, the difficult relationship with colonial culture. The Shadow Lines interweaves fact, fiction and reminiscence. It is a continuous narrative which replicates the pattern of violence not only of 1964 but also of 21^st century. Lukac's ideology gets reflected in The Shadow Lines, which cannot be termed a `realist' novel but a novel written with roots in modernism and post-modernism.

Amitav Ghosh, in one of the interviews, has observed, "Nobody has the choice of stepping away from history" and "For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality" and George Lukac, in his essay The Ideology of Modernism writes, "A gifted writer, however extreme his theoretical modernism, will in practice have to compromise with the demands of historicity and of social environment".

In view of the above, the present paper aims to analyze The Shadow Lines as a novel, which, in Lukac's words, is a work wherein the technique employed is not merely a stylistic device but a "formative principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of characters" and as "a literature which aims at a truthful reflection of reality which demonstrates both the concrete and abstract potentialities of human beings in extreme situations of this kind" and where "protest against social conditions finds a central place" and dynamic approach to reality is accepted and it also has a concept of `normal' to place distortion.

Lukac felt that modernism was another name for antirealism and he supported the doctrine of socialist realism and that man is the focal point of all content and has tried to find the bourgeois realism in our times.

Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) is the story of the family and friends of the nameless narrator, which has its roots in broader national and international experience. The lives of the narrator's family undergo a change as a consequence of Bengal's partition between India and Pakistan in 1947 and the experience of the East Pakistan civil war in 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh.

English Studies Journal, Amitav Ghosh, Colonial Culture, Post-Modernism, Theoretical Modernism, Social Environment, Aesthetic Form, Literary Presentation, Lukac Realism, Social Environment, Corporeal Reality.