NOTE 35 guaranteed by its ubiquity and anonymity—a transcendental self.6 This 'trancendental self is then placed in relation to History, God or Art which function as the 'objective* categories for its self-realisation. The most important ideological function of realist fiction, as Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey have argued, is the endless display of autonomous subjects who are the origins of their actions.7 The focus of the realist novel, they suggest, then shifts to the opposition between the universal 'self and various essentialist 'objective' categories. Such a subject object opposition, they argue, performs the function of bourgeois ideology by displacing class-conflicts within society onto a socially autonomous realm in which they are then imaginatively resolved. Within the specific context of post-colonial India, the endorsement of the nineteenth-century West European definition of the 'self* further implies the reiteration of a discourse generated by the pressures of the West European metropolis. It cannot therefore produce a historically analytical and yet culturally specific definition of the contemporary Indian metropolis. In fact, as Partha Chatterjee has suggested, the endorsement of the West European bourgeois epistemology in the Indian context signifies the continuing relationship of dominance between metropolis and former colony.8 Having outlined the larger political implications of the production of essentialist identities in the contemporary Indian situation, I will now analyse the self-representations of some of the major characters in The Shadow Lines (the hero/narrator, his mentor Tridib, his cousin Ila and his grandmother Tha'mma) in order to see if they challenge these continuing unequal relations of power. I will use Stephen Greenblatt's concept of 'self-fashioning' to analyse the subjectivity produced through The Shadow Lines. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning enables us to consider literature 'as a manifestation of the concrete behaviour of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behaviour is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes'.9 The entire "narrative of The Shadow Lines is constructed from the perspective of the hero/narrator. I wish to suggest that by ultimately shifting the focus of his narrative, through the narrator, from a materialist interpretation of the Indian nation to the relation of the transcendental 'self with the essentialist category of 'sacrifice' (extinction of self), Ghosh's novel is perhaps unable to offer any radical redescription of the post-colonial situation. Tha'mma is undoubtedly the most important mother-figure in Ghosh's novel. The nationalist ideology, suggests Partha Chatterjee, was based on a selective appropriation of western modernity by a separation of culture into a series of distinct, mutually reinforcing dichotomous spheres—the material and the spiritual; the world and the home; the masculine and the feminine. On the question of the