0Shadow Lines and The Concept Of Nation

A major issue of emphasis in Amitav Ghoshs novel The Shadow Lines is the notion of
conceiving a nation, its boundaries and its identity. The author believes that these
boundaries are constructed, ethereal and arbitrary. These Shadow Lines are just an
illusion, a manifestation of the force of nationalism, a force that Ghosh dreads being
capable of inducing wanton bloodshed.
Challenging the very idea of national borders, of any boundaries whatsoever, acquires the
pivotal place in the Shadow Lines. The author uses a narrative style where the boundaries
of time and space get blurred, the narrative consistently moving from one country to
another, from one time frame to another.
In the novel, distances cease to have a corporeal meaning for the narrator, who is shown
to be disillusioned about the faade of boundaries.
The idea of considering nation as a myth or a fabrication like Benedict Anderson and
considering nationalism as harbinger of violence like Tagore does, is embraced by the
narrator.
The paper will deal with the ideas of nationalism associated with the different characters
in the novel.
Tridib, the narrators uncle is represented as a person with a global consciousness.
Blessed with a keen sense of imagination and perception, he gives the narrator worlds to
travel, even when he remains in Calcutta. He exerts vast influence upon the people
around him, especially the narrator.
Tridib identifies himself with Tristan, a man without a country who falls in love with a
woman across the seas. This identification seems to imply that Tridib is without a
country. But, why is that so?
The narrator believed that Tridib was happiest in places of neutrality. He knows about a
vast spectrum of things from Eastern European Jazz to the Senna Dynasty. He was
equally at ease with the Gole Park people as he was with the Prices in London, falls in
love with a foreigner. Does this cosmopolitanism imply the fruitlessness of boundaries?
Or does Ghosh fail to look at the broader picture, where millions of people, not
cosmopolites like Tridib, who find solace within these lines?
Ilas character is diametrically opposite to Tridibs. She too has traveled around the
world, but unlike Tridib, who uses his imagination with precision, she constructs a haven
for herself from reality. She might be considered a beauty by her relatives, she wishes to
be good looking in Anglo-Saxon terms. Her insecurity about her features gains a physical
representation via Magda, her doll having blonde hair, fair complexion and blue eyes.
For her freedom means the ability to do whatever she wants. So, she earnestly believes
that she is free in England and not in India. Bit she is definitely not free because she can't

be free of the Indians of her features. She cannot hide it by cutting her hair short or
wearing western attire. Though Ghosh believes in the uselessness of the boundaries, he
cannot wholly dismiss the differences between the countries. Even the notion of beauty is
dynamic with relation to a specific region.

The grandmothers nationalism is treated as a relic from the past. Etched into the
grandmothers psyche from the time of being under British rule is a nationalism that
rationalises killing for freedom. She strongly believes being fidel to national boundaries.
She believes in the physical presence of a nation, in the physical nature of boundaries,
just like the wall that divided her old house in Dhaka. According to her, a nation creates
itself upon the bricks of blood and war, rising from a history of bloodshed to its present
existence. The partition has played a cruel trick on her, rendering her without any
coordinates of the place of her origin.
By depicting the effect of events in Srinagar as being of an equal intensity in Dhaka and
Calcutta, a world where Khulna existed nearer to Hanoi than Srinagar, Ghosh depicts the
irony of shadow lines created by the partition. People in the bordering nations are
surprised at looking at their mirror image in their neighbouring country.
Like Toba Tek Singh, Tridibs death questions the logic behind the partition .