70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST differential access to social power to which the institution of the family is not immune? It is significant that Ghosh does not extend the problems that emerge from the narrator's social difference with his slum-dwelling refugee aunt. Further, the capacity of the family as an institution to create differences by allowing some members to exercise oppression and control, is not something that enters the terms of Ghosh's enquiry. The problem of power is taken up by Ghosh as a problem of colonial institutions. The analogy between law and nationalism, embodied in the relationship between grandmother and her uncle, gains a more concrete association when we take into account the narrator's characterisation of England as representing the state together with the implied reference to the Partition of the country encoded within the dramatisation of the riots. The inference is that the nation-state, like law, creates the original divisions. Such an understanding, however, tends to put the sub-continent into the role of a victim, a suggestion that gains larger resonances of fatalism when we see that the family (the location of possible realisation of intimacy) is being rendered, through other processes, increasingly nucleated and diasporic. The prospect of collective self-realisation dissolves into the moving, but individual symbol of sexual union with May at the end of the book. The problem of creating another condition for the achievement of collective intimacy remains. My qualifications of both The Shadow Lines and Trotter Nama begin with the question of power. It is, admittedly, a difficult problem. Cultural heterogeneity (in the sense of the ways in which different collectivities think) cannot be ellided into the problems of social distribution of power. Nor can they be clearly separated. In a more sepcu-lative and prescriptive tone, it could be proposed that a novelist needs a double location to explore the interconnections between these two areas. However, what is more inr^mediate and palpable, is the achievement of these novels. An important move is made when they identify the problem of heterogeneity as a certain epistemological location within a field of differences and cultural significations. The idea of heterogeneity is detached from a simple celebration of pluralism (that is based on the collectivity of separate spheres). In the process it releases the possibility that the experience of overlapping heterogeneities itself can be counterposed to the violent, sub-continental insistence on cultural purity and communal division.