Ghosh is a talented, innovative and an experimentalist writer. He has been churning out books after books, be it a work of fiction, travel writing or essays. His books are borne out of a conviction, and ideas run his books. The thought contents in his works are strong, his characters, incidents and the places convey thoughts and feelings that are genuine and true to his own ideals. The Shadow Lines is one of the best-known works of Ghosh. The basic idea propounded in this book is the shallowness of international borders, lines of control, frontiers and boundaries. The description of the pain of partition, riots and communal hatred brings home the notion of unreal borders. This book is scrupulously structured around the exploration of possibilities for making the connections across the cultural differences. In the last pages of the book, the sexual encounter between an Indian narrator and the English woman May, becomes a metonym for such possibility.

This paper aims to study such cross-cultural collisions in the book and to investigate the possibilities, if any, of making connections across the cultural differences. It also undertakes to examine the concept and importance of nationhood in cross-cultural confrontations.