Chapter 3

THE SHADOW LINES

The Shadow Lines is the second novel by Amitav Ghosh. It was pub­
lished in 1988 and established Ghosh’s reputation as a novelist far and wide.
The novel demonstrates the emotional range of his thematic concerns, his ca­
pacity to dive deeper into the psyche of his characters and also the remarkable
novelty of his narrative art. Amitav Ghosh comments on the distinction be­
tween his first and second novel:

Looking back, it strikes me that The Circle of Reason could be identi­

fied as an exodus novel, a story of migration in the classic sense of having its
gaze turned towards the future...1

He adds:... The Shadow Lines became a book not about any one event
but about the meaning of such events and their effects on individuals who live
through them ... I had to resolve a dilemma, between being a writer and being
a citizen.2

The foremost uncommon feature of the novel is its title which lends it
the overall significance. The novel owes its title to Joseph Conrad’s novella
The Shadow Line (1917). In respect of Conrad’s protagonist. ‘The Shadow
Line’ means an invisible line that divides youth from maturity while in Ghosh’s
work it refers to geographical boundaries arbitrarily drawn by men to frag­
ment humanity. The roots of The Shadow Lines lie deep in 1984 - a momen­
tous year in Indian history. Ghosh himself recalls the events in his prose -
piece ‘The Ghost’s of Indira Gandhi’ - the assanination of Mrs. Gandhi,
separatist violence in Punjab, the operation Blue Star on The Golden Temple,
riots in several cities in its wake, and Bhopal Gas disaster. Thus violence and
deaths shook the nation to its very roots. The aftermath of these events kindled
the aesthetic sensibility of Ghosh to look backward in time to earlier memo­
ries of riots witnessed in childhood. The plot of this novel is a serious exposi-

42
tion of the repercussions of violent events which leave indelible marks on the
mind of the people. Nandita Sinha rightly commented:

It is not what happened, but the meaning of what happened that is the
central concern and the meaning emerges when the past and present are con­
sidered together.3

As a matter of fact, the novel combines together the strengths and pre­
occupations of Amitav Ghosh - the centrality of location in terms of disloca­
tion, historical situations, sensitivity of perception and indigenous quality of
language. And all these derive their significance from the atmosphere and the
individuals in the book. It subsumes in its canvas three generations of the
narrator’s family and the quality of cultural trauma that gripped their con­
sciousness. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer underscored the mul­
tiple facets of the book thus:

In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found his own distinctive voice -
polished and profound. A narrative of three generations - the narrator’s Bengali
family in pre-partition Dhaka and Calcutta, and their English friends, the Prices,
whose histories encompass both world wars, the Left Book Club and shades
of contemporary London - The Shadow Liens does not tell yet one more tale
of the Raj but sets out to illuminate the absurdities of borders and frontiers,
the lines of disillusion and tragedy that intersect with private lives and public
events.4

The opening section ‘Going Away’ begins with Ghosh introducing his
characters. On one hand is the narrator’s family of his grandmother, his par­
ents and on the other are his grandmother’s sister Maya Debi, her diplomat
husband, and her three sons Jatin an economist with the United Nations, Tridib
and narrator’s uncle and mentor, Robi, and her grand-daughter Ila (Jatin’s
child) who is always away with her parents. The narrator’ grandmother is a
product a bygone era. She has within herself an unflinching faith in the sanc­
tity of political freedom and she is an example of the moulded character of the

43
historical forces and an understanding of the present. The narrator through his
framework brings together the forms of the autobiographical novel and the
family chronicle when he mentions in the opening lines:

In 1939, thirteen years before I was bom, my father’s aunt, Maya Debi,
went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib.5

Maya Debi was his grandmother’s only sister. His grandmother never
approved of Tridib, whom she considered lazy - and in her opinion, wasted
time soon begins to stink. The narrator disagreed with his grandmother’s esti­
mation, since he loved Tridib’s healthy imagination that resulted in an endless
supply of stories that never allowed time to stink and Tridib took ample ad­
vantage of the narrator’s tendency towards gullibility. In fact, Tridib was the
only one of the three brothers who had spent much of his life in Calcutta,
living in the sprawling old family house in Ballygunge Place with grandmother.
The narrator thought that his grandmother didn’t just disapprove of Tridib,
but actually feared him. Mrs. Price, her daughter May and her son Nick, lived
in north London. Her husband, Price, who had been one of her college teach­
ers, had recently died. As it happens, Mrs. Price’s father, Lionel Tresawsen
had been stationed in India when she was young, and he had become a good
friend of Tridib’s grandmother, who was a judge in the Calcutta High Court.
The narrator met May when she came to India for a visit some years later, and
then did not see her for another seventeen years, when he returned the favour
and visited England. He was, at that period, spending a year in London doing
research at the India office library for a Ph.D. thesis on the textile trade be­
tween India and England in the nineteenth century. By that time, May had
become a cellist in an orchestra, but when she had visited India, she had been
learning the basics. When he attended one of her concerts, they began a friend­
ship, and she filled in many of the details of her life that the narrator had been
wondering all those years. She noted, for example, that in 1959, when she was
nineteen and Tridib was twenty-seven, they had begun a long correspondence.
He had been sending her family Christmas cards ever since he had left Lon-

44
don in 1940, but now he began writing specifically to her alone.

Ila is the narrator’s cousin, just a few years older than he. As the daughter
of Jatin, the diplomat, she has traveled widely and seen a lot of the world, and
she lives very decidedly in the present. She is more sophisticated than the nar­
rator, even a bit jaded, but is more than a little insecure in her personal relation­
ships. She marries Nick and lives in Mrs. Price’s house in London, but the nar­
rator picks up tensions between Ila and her philandering husband. Some years
earlier, Nick had not defended Ila in an incident at school when she was ridi­
culed; in fact, he had left her to avoid being seen with her. Desperately proved,
Ila tries to cover up the story.

The narrator goes back to Delhi to take his University examinations, since
his grandmother’s condition had improved a bit. But she dies in Calcutta in his
absence arid is cremated, and he feels guilty:

“She had always been too passionate a person to find a real place in my
tidy late - bourgeois world I had inherited, in which examinations were more
important than death.”6

Near her death, his grandmother correctly surmises that he had visited
prostitutes in Delhi, and she passes the information along to his dean. In order
to save his academic career, he denies the accusation. He marvels at his
grandmother’s inductiveness, but also at her uncanny knowledge- Part One
(‘Going Away’) ends with the narrator looking back eighteen years when Ila
went away to London for university even though she knew he loved her, and
thereby “wrenched (him) into adulthood by demonstrating for the first time,
and forever the inequality of (their) needs.7

Part Two ‘Coming Home’ begins in 1962, a momentous year for the
narrator’s family. It was the year the narrator turned ten, the year his father
became General Manager of his firm, the year his grandmother retired as head­
mistress at a girls’ school where she had spent twenty-seven years. In a year or

45
two, his grandmother gradually receded to her room, where she began sharing
her memories of her girlhood home in Dhaka. Grandmother tells the narrator
how she had eventually married an engineer and spent the first twelve years of
her marriage “in a succession of railway colonies in towns with fairy - tale
names like Moulmein and Mandalay ... (but) to her, nothing ... in that en­
chanted pagoda - land had seemed real enough to remember.”8

In this, as we shall see, she is remarkably like Ila. The narrator’s father
had been bom in Mandalay in 1925, and grandmother took him back to Dhaka
once a year. But when he was six, grandmother’s parents both died. The
narrator’s father and grandmother seldom visited Dhaka again, but stayed in
Mandalay. In 1935, grandfather died of pneumonia when grandmother was
just thirty-two. After partition she had never retuned to the city. She used her
degree in history from Dhaka University to get a teaching job.

But in 1964, by chance grandmother meets up with a poor distant rela­

tion who lives near a dump, and learns that her family house in Dhaka is now
occupied only by grandmother’s uncle Jethamoshai, who is now over ninety,
and by Muslim refugees from India. Her sister Maya had moved to Dhaka
when her husband had become Councilor in the Deputy High Commission
there, and so grandmother decides to take this occasion to visit Maya and
bring Jethamoshai back to India. This decision startles everyone: his grand­
mother “had never pretended to have much family feeling: she had always
founded her morality, school mistress like, in larger and more abstract enti­
ties.”9

Something is calling her back to that split house, in a desperate last-

minute attempt at reconciliation and wholeness.

She goes on the third of January 1964. The narrator is eleven at the
time. Tridib decides to accompany grandmother and to bring along May Price,
who had been visiting him from England. This trip is momentous for every­
one. Jethamoshai, when they find him, doesn’t want to go with them back to

46
India:

Once you start moving you never stop. That’s what I told my sons when
they took the trains. I said: I don’t believe in this India - Shindia. It’s all very
well, you’re going away now, but suppose when you get there they decide to
draw another line somewhere? What will you do then? Where will you move
to? No one will have you anywhere. As for me, I was born here, and I’ll die
here.10

But they manage to get him in the car, and attempt to leave. They soon
find, however, that their way is blocked by a mob. May urges Tridib to get out
of the car and retrieve Jethamoshai, who had wandered into the mob. When he
tries to do so, Tridib is overcome by the mob and killed. After Tridib’s death,
the narrator is sent to stay with his mother’s brother in Durgapur; Tridib is
cremated, and May leaves for London that same day; Maya Debi and her fam­
ily return to Dhaka.

The foregoing plot of the novel indicates that it reconstructs and rede­
fines history in terms of individual memories and private life-histories. Pallavi
Gupta thinks:

The motif, which dominates Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, is

memory and the exploration of the mnemonic process. Memory functions as a
legacy, inheritance, and prized possession... However, it is not a collective
memory; the memory of each individual is measured against the intensity which
he/she shares with the other person. The narrator’s memories of Tridib far
exceed those of Ila, in quality and intensity, because of the intense relation­
ship he shares with Tridib.11

Obviously, the memories of individuals in The Shadow Lines once

more foreground Ghosh’s concern with past and its bearing on present. Hope
and fear act, like catalysts, in the historical process, for the novel deals with
the effect of fear on memory and one’s engagement with the world. The memo-

47
ries of 1964 riot traumatize the narrator, and he successfully blocks them until
a chance remark that he overhears during the 1984 riots prompts a personal
crisis and a detailed unpacking of the earlier trauma. As he recounts the events,
he recalls snippets of conversation with friends and relatives that suggest that
they, too, had been redefined by their experiences that day. In her conversa­
tions with him seventeen year after the actual events for example, May Price
looks back, still wondering if she had visited India when she did because she
was infact in love with Tridib - and she still cannot answer her question:

“I don’t know whether everything else that happened was my

fault: whether I’d have behaved otherwise if I’d really loved
him.”12

The partition of Indian sub-continent into three parts - so to say nations

- India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - lies at the heart of the novel. And the
consequences of partition can be seen in the form of predicaments of indi­
viduals who belong to these nations. The histories of both individuals and
nations in question are evoked through memories and the recurring question
‘Do you remember runs’ throughout the novel as a leitmotiv. As Savir Kaul
puts it:

The pressure of this question - do you remember, generates the form of

the novel: its partial answer, its digressions, its looping, non-linear, wide -
ranging narrative technique... for The shadow Lines is an archaeology of
silences, a slow brushing away of some of the cobwebs of modern Indian
memory, a repeated return to those absences and fissures that mark the sites of
personal and national trauma.13

Kaul wisely broadens the narrator’s experience and makes it India’s,

for this is not simply a Bildungsoman, a story of one man’s coming of age. It
is rather, one man’s embodiment of the ‘national trauma” that lives on in the
lives of today’s South Asians. What Ghosh has done in such a masterly fash­
ion is to find an apt process for demonstrating the neurosis that has resulted.

48
The novel brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s nervous breakdown, coupling personal prob­
lems with the effects of a World War, and his fragmentary masterpiece, The
Wasteland (1922) that seeks a means to embody the poet’s desire to piece him­
self and his culture back together. Like that collection of the shards of a poet’s
memory, The Shadow Lines is a non-sequential and hesitant journey back and
forth to the centre of trauma - the murder of his uncle - that is as remarkable
for its psychological sophistication as for the resulting novel’s complex theme.
It is as much about how the imagination works as it is about the arbitrary nature
of nations and borders, but in The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found a wonderful
vehicle to merge the two ideas.

Ghosh is fascinated by the interaction of space and time and his unnamed
narrator is fascinated throughout the novel with the impact that a particular place
- an alleyway, a darkened living room - can have on one particular individual,
while others pass it by unscathed. Meenakshi Mukherjee has aptly commented:

“time and space are dimensions of an individual’s desire in which

the actual and the imagined co-exist harmoniously.”14

Every representation of space in the novel - rooms, houses, neighbor­

hoods, city, country, borders and maps, -assumes a semiotic signification over
the literal context. Equally significant is time in the novel through which his­
tory of the individuals and nations are brought into focus. Nandita Sinha has
emphasized the dimension of time as follows:

The Shadow Lines is a novel about time, about growing up, not so
much in years as in understanding. It is not what happened that is the central
concern and the meaning emerges when the past ad the present are considered
together.15

The characters, incidents and situations derive their meaning from the
relationship between time and space in the novel. For instance, Ila is not af­
fected by the concept of space, whereas the narrator is very much susceptible to

49
the connotations of place. One of the reasons, in fact, that his uncle Tridib’s
death has had such a traumatizing impact on the narrator’s memory is that
“Tridib had given (him) worlds to travel in and he had given (him) eyes to see
them with.”'6

No one had done this for Ila, and she was therefore, simply set adrift in
an undifferentiated world without an imaginative map to interpret what she
was seeing. Ila, writes the narrator, “who had been traveling around the world
since she was a child, could never understand what those hours in Tridib’s
room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred
miles from Calcutta.”17

When the narrator visited her in London, it was as though he had stepped
into the set of his favourite film: he marveled at everything that made Tridib’s
stories concrete - but Ila simply grew impatient:

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it had to
be invented in one’s imagination... so that although she had lived in many
places, she had never traveling at all.18 What he admired in Tridib was this
gift: “the one thing he wanted to teach me, he used to say, was to use my
imagination with precision.”19

Much like Wordsworth, for Tridib, an experience was fine when it hap­
pened, it became more wonderful and potentially meaningful, when it was
relived in the imagination. But for Ila “the current was the real: it was as
though she lived in a present which was an airlock in a canal, shut away from
the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates.20

She had, as it were, no sense of history. She had no connections with

the person she once was, and was consequently very unsure of where she was
headed:

Tridib ... had said that we could not see without inventing what we
saw, so at least we could try to do it properly. And then, because she shrugged

50
dismissively and said: Why? Why should we try why not just take the world as it
is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative was not
blankness -it only meant that if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free
of other people’s inventions.21

This, of course, has ramifications in grandmother’s story: as we shall

see, and in those of any one affected by partition; but one might see the impli­
cations for some one like Ila, as well, in the world that was ‘imagined’ for her
by Nick and others like him; they gave her a cramped world, despite her trav­
els.

Evidently, the narrator is like his uncle, in the long run - very much
alive to the place in which he is living, and alert to the potential emergence of
other places in his imagination. Even more than his uncle, though he is sensi­
tive to the history of a place. His imagination is an index of his intellectual
integrity and he has learnt to use his imaginative faculty from Tridib’s insis­
tence on ‘seeing’. A critic has perceptively noted this point:

Memory and imagination occupy prime place in the business of ‘see­

ing’ for memory enlivens the present with the past while the imagination helps
to ingest the vicarious, the distant and thereby widen one’s world.22

The narrative in the novel takes on the characteristics of a palimpsest,

with incidents from the past bleeding through to the present. Under Tridib’s
tutelage the narrator had become a walking tour guide for particular streets
and houses in London, even before visiting them. It is clear that the narrator
valorises Tridib’s sense of adventure in imagining places in time as well as in
space, and he underscores what Ila has lost in her insistence on a flat imme­
diacy of experience. But the novel does not end there, for it is equally inter­
ested in exploring the problematic nature of the projections that Tridib’s imagi­
native trips evoke in the narrator. Grandmother is offered as a case in point.
When she finally makes the momentous trip back to Dhaka, she refuses to
believe that she is, in fact, there:

51
 The Dhaka she was thinking of was the city that had surrounded their old
house... I could see all that, because people like my grandmother, who have no
home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection:23

It is not until the car turns down her old street that her memories fall into
place and present can intersect the past. As they approach her old house in Dhaka,
grandmother becomes very alert, looking for familiar landmarks ‘kana-babu’s
sweet-shop,’ ‘the lime trees her mother had once planted.’

Such experience are common but what creates trouble is a number of

passages in the novel that ponder the meaning of borders between countries,
and between individuals, which are described as similarly flawed imaginative
projections. Grandmother is rightly mystified by the notion of borders. And
the border emerges as a focal point in the larger thematic framework of the
novel. Obviously it raises serious issues of politics and history, which have an
immediate and intrinsic relation to the individual in the given context. For
instance, grandmother asks the others in the car:

But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I
mean, where’s the difference then. And if there is no difference, both sides
will be the same; it’ll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch
a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping
us. What was it all for then - partition and all the killing and everything - if
there isn’t something in between?24

This observation by the grandmother renders the notion of borders- and

by implication that of nation state too- inadequate and meaningless. It is at
this juncture that the title of the novel The Shadow Lines acquires a signifi­
cance with a clear message to the readers that all borders are inertly shadow­
lines. As a matter of fact, Grandmother’s confusion is a fatal blow to the idea of
nationhood and borders. Looking back on the situation the narrator recalls he
laughed hysterically at her confusion. But he found it rather difficult to laugh

52
when he looked back on the trip where it happened. He realises that, she liked
things to be neat and in place - and at that moment she had not been able quite to
understand how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her
nationality.25

The narrator is surprised to find that people invest such power in the
lines of maps. Not surprisingly the narrator himself had learnt a lot about
spaces - particularly London from The Bartholomew Atlas which occupies a
distinct and palpable space in the novel. A brand new copy of The Atlas which
was given to nine year-old Tridib as a birthday gift in a bomb-devastated Lon­
don reappears forty years later in a tattered form at the bottom of a bookshelf
in Delhi. Tridib, he mentor pointed out to narrator the places in the Bartholomew
Atlas while telling him stories. According to the narrator Tridib had given him
eyes to see the places so that long before he actually moved out of Calcutta,
his world had expanded to include many parts of the globe through hearing
and reading about these places - London, Cairo, Madrid, Cuzco or Colombo.

Despite his preoccupation with places marked in the map, the narrator
recognizes in Grandmother’s mania for definition of who ‘we’ are - that had
led to his uncle’s (Tridib’s) brutal death:

... each city (Dhaka and Calcutta) was the inverted image of the other,
locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free - our
looking-glass border.26

Thus, the issue of borders takes on a new dimension when Tridib’s

brother Robi later puts the question in angry terms:

Why don’t they draw thousands of little lines on the whole subconti­
nent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a
mirage. The whole thing is a mirage.27

This raises a serious question here - whose nation? -which leads the reader
inevitably to Ghosh’s enduring question: Whose history? This is the subject of

53
the biggest argument between the narrator and Ila, in which she praises the Marxist
students with whom she is living because... we may not achieve much in our
little house in stock well, but we know that in future political people every­
where will look to us - in Nigeria, India, Malaysia, wherever ... You wouldn’t
understand the exhilaration of events like that - nothing really important hap­
pens where you are.28

Many years elapse, when reflecting over the experience, the narrator
concludes:

She seemed immeasurably distant then, in her serene confi­

dence in the centrality and eloquence of her experience, in her
quiet pity for the pettiness of lives like mine, lived out in the
silence of voiceless events in a backward world.29

Nevertheless, Ila’s Marxist friends relegate her to a stereotype, and in

the process denigrate her as she now denigrates her cousin. Her life is surely
no more important than the narrator’s. She triumphantly accuses the narrator
of knowing nothing about England, and he admits she is correct. However, he
adds, ironically, that he knew nothing about England except as an invention.

In the end, although the narrator’s experience may resonate in the lives
of many readers, this is a personal story. These are individuals who share a
history of a particular trauma, one that marked them indelibly. As it happens,
it arose from and now signifies that larger national trauma that is called the
partition, but it is above all lived by the particular individual that Ghosh re­
members. The central trauma is remembered in physical terms:

We were stupefied with fear... It is a fear that comes of the knowledge

that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets
one inhabits can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in
a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit
the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music

54
- it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war
between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.30

This perception of the narrator characterizes not only the individuals in

the novel it also brings out the predicaments of all the individuals in the sub­
continent who have been invariably the victims of history. A clearer view of
the narrator’s growth from childhood to maturity emerges as he realises later:

I was a child, and like all the children around me, I grew up believing
in the truth of the precepts that were available to me: I believed in the reality
of space: I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I
believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the bor­
ders there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary per­
mitted between those separate realities was war or friendship.31

As an expression of hero’s mature view, this is a highly significant pas­

sage. But it is also significant in a larger sense, for it indicates how much
more The Shadow Lines is concerned with than just nationalism. There are
individuals like Nick and May Price who fill up the gaps in the narrative,
although the centrality of Tridib’s personality in absentia informs and defines
their presence at the thematic level. For instance years later May Price con­
cludes that she had not in fact been responsible for Tridib’s death, albeit it had
been a question that had plagued her. She tells the narrator:

He gave himself up ... It was a sacrifice. I know I can’t understand it. I

know I mustn’t try, for any real sacrifice is a mystery.32

However, it seemed uncharacteristic of Tridib, when he suddenly hops

out of the car and enters the mob. He has been the man who lives in the imagi­
nation, the favourite uncle who tells a good yam. His influence on the narrator
is simply immense:

Tridib laughs and shakes me by the neck and tells me... Everyone lives in
a story, he says, my grandmother, my father, his father, Lenin, Einstein, and lots

55
of other names I hadn’t heard of; they all lived in stories, because stories are all
there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose.33

The same Tridib, according to May, seems to have chosen to live the story
of Tristan, a veiy sad story about a man without a country who fell in love with a
woman - across-the seas. But it is this man who lives in stories who uncharac­
teristically walks towards the very real mob.

It is quite likely that May attempts to live the particular dream in which
Tridib becomes Tristan. When she received her fourth letter from him, he had
told her that he wanted to meet her:

... in a place without a past, without a history, free, really free, two
people coming together with the utter freedom of strangers ... But, of course,
if that was to happen, she would have come to India. They would find a place
like that somewhere.34

It is obvious from the above that Tridib’s desire for a lack of history
corroborates May’s assumption. She thought that in stepping out of the car to
intervene in history he has made a sacrifice. What Tridib most desires, it seems,
would be a leap over the arbitrary borders and distractions and consequent
rivalries and hatreds have accumulated with history, and return somehow, to a
truer sense of commonality. As Suvir Kaul puts it:

Tridib’s yearning, addressed to a time and space before sub continental

borders, before the historical alimentation of culture and self, exists as an
unqualified, untrammeled, trace memory of psychic wholeness and identity.
Such desire can, of course, only exist prior to historical or geographical calcu­
lation, and is manifestly unrealizable. In its function as critique and as utopian
hope, however, it is quite as real as the shadow - lines that mock the limits of
our political consciousness and imagination.35

But to live in that dream is to step outside history. Tridib’s heroism, there­
fore, was to recognize the absurdity of history, and to step into the melee none-

56
theless. It is not surprising, therefore, that Tridib’s death by a mob of rioters in
Dhaka in 1964 emerges as a parallel to Calcutta and Srinagar riots in the same
year. In fact, riots in the novel appear as configurations of the larger themes of
nationality and border - lines. Regarding the communal rioting in Srinagar,
Calcutta and Dhaka in 1964, the narrator in The Shadow Lines remarks that.

It actually took me fifteen years to discover that here was a connection

between my night mare bus ride back from school and the events that befell
Tridib and the others in Dhaka ... I believed in the reality of nations and bor­
ders.36

Ghosh’s fascination with chance informs The Shadow Lines in a marked

way. It is reminiscent of the chance memory that launched the author’s literary
hero, Marcel Proust, into his vast autobiographical novel Remembrance of
Things Past. For Proust a very long chain of memories had been suddenly
triggered by the taste of a particular cookie dipped in tea, a taste that reminded
him of his grandmother’s house, his father’s death and everything else. The
same is true of Ghosh in a different way:

The Circle of Reason had grown upwards, like a sapling rising from
the soil of my immediate experience; The Shadow Lines had its opening
planted in the present, but it grew downwards, into the soil. Like a root system
straining to find a source of nourishment. It was in this process that I came to
examine the ways in which my own life had been affected by civil violence. I
remembered stories my mother had told me about the Great Calcutta Killing
of 1946; I remembered my uncles’ stories of anti - Indian riots in Rangoon in
1930 and 1938. At the heart of the book, however, was an event that had
occurred in Dhaka in 1964, the year before my family moved to Colombo: in
the unlit depths of my memory there stirred a recollection of a night when our
house, flooded with refugees, was besieged but an angry mob. I had not thought
of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me... I went to librar­
ies and sifted through hundreds of newspapers and in the end, through perse­
verance, luck and guesswork I did find out what had happened. The riots of

57
my memory were not a local affair; they had engulfed much of the subconti­
nent.37

Johan C. Hawley notes how memories form an organic whole in The

Shadow Lines:

One of the wonders of The Shadow Lines is the technique

that Ghosh has found to demonstrate the confusion from which
his memories slowly, piece by piece, come to the surface and
gradually coalesce. The reader is made to experience the pro­
cess along with the narrator, in a book that is anything but
linear.38

The first half of The Shadow Lines is titled ‘Going Away’ and ‘The
second half is ‘coming How.’ Where that home might be is the question haunt­
ing all of Ghosh’s subsequent writing. The depth of that uncertainty can be
felt in his description of the incident in which Nick deserts young Ila to her
persecutors - at school. The narrator is relentless in his analysis of his cousin,
observing her with heartfelt clarity:

Ila walking alone in a drizzle under that cold grey sky: Ila who in Calcutta
was surrounded by so many relatives and cars and servants... Ila walking alone
because Nick Price was ashamed to be seen by his friends, walking home with
an Indian.39

She is, perhaps, the most complicated character in the book barring the
narrator himself. She functions very much as the narrator’s double, her like­
ness close enough for her differences to cause him to reflect upon himself. In
a particular sense, The Shadow Lines represents Ila as bearing most heavily
the burden of other people’s expectations, and her unhappiness as the product
of deep cultural contradictions. She is surely the most deracinated character in
the novel. The first person to accuse Ila is grandmother who apparently feels
no pity for her (as an Indian in self-imposed exile) and declares that she has

58
no right to live in England because the citizens of that nation have given their
blood to define themselves, and Ila is a mere interloper. This reveals
grandmother’s harsh tone and her almost bloodthirsty dreams for her offspring.
The narrator remembers his grandmother as someone bigger than life, a bub­
bling cauldron of nationalist fervour:

[The English] know they’re a nation because they have drawn their
borders with blood... That is what it takes to make a country. Once that hap­
pens people forget they were bom this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or
Punjabi: they become family bom of the same pool blood. This is what you
have to achieve for India, don’t you see?40

Such nationalism, is surely not valorised in Ghosh’s writing but grand­

mother has ironically identified its factitious commonality. It is surprising to
hear such real politic coming from the mouth of a little old lady, until we later
learn of the revolutionary nationalistic impulse in her youth. The narrator’s
insight into his grandmother, however stern and rigid her dismissal of Ila, is
an all - embracing (metaphorical) huh. He explains to the reader:

All she wanted was a middle class life in which life the middle classes
the world over, she would thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and
territory of self-respect and national power; that was all she wanted - a mod­
em, middle-class life, a small thing, that history had denied her in its fullness
and for which she could never forgive it.41

In effect, grandmother’s character, no less than Tridib’s assumes tre­

mendous proportions in the novel, given the book’s violent climax and given
the narrator’s struggle to make sense of emotional memories rooted in civil
conflict. She was brought up on stories of great revolutionaries like Khudiram
Bose and Bagha Jatin. She exemplifies the militant nationalism and is one who
has lived the nationalist dream and experienced the setbacks and successes that
give it its character.

59
 By contrasting Ila and grandmother, the narrator learns to distrust the
dreams and ideals through which one interprets the raw data of daily experi­
ence. Meenakshi Mukherjee puts it very succinctly:

Although Ila and grandmother are in many ways mirror images of each
other across generations in their absolutism and rigidity about their own con­
cepts of freedom, their situations in the novel are not symmetrical. Ila is con­
fident in her belief that history can only happen in Europe. What happens in
India, Malaysia or Nigeria - famines, riots and disasters ‘are local things after
all... nothing that is really remembered’... he grandmother on the other hand
never had a readymade script... she (Ila) is not a victim of history in as obvi­
ous ways as the grand mother is.42

If Ila has the self-deceptive fa9ade of cosmopolitanism the grandmother

had somehow been taught an enduring bloodthirsty nationalism, and she would
not permit herself the self-deception that make up the fantasy world of ‘a
modem middle-class woman. This becomes evident in her recounting to the
narrator her youthful days in the college. She told him about a young man who
had been her classmate long back and had been arrested for plotting to assas­
sinate a British official. Her response to the incident is so sharp that the narra­
tor is astonished:

I would have been frightened, she said. But I would have prayed for
strength, and God willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our free­
dom: I would have done anything to be free.43

The narrator, at the time, saw his grandmother sitting perched on the
edge of her chair. She was smiling at the growing astonishment on his face as
he tried to fit her into that extraordinary history. This is, no doubt, about her
strong will but the narrator finds her smile rather terrifying.

Ila’s is another story. The narrator has loved her all his life, but she never
really loves him. Only gradually does he recognize how self-absorbed she is.

60
Before the narrator comes to this realization, Nick represents for him rival for
Ila’s affections. What is more, Nick’s personality epitomizes the British and
their impossible demands that people like the narrator change their spots and
become something they are not.

However, when he meets Nick who had been ‘a spectral presence beside
me in my looking glass’, he thinks that he has found at last the kindred spirit he
had never been able to discover among his friends. Nick, of course becomes a
part of his imaginative and emotional world only because of Ila.

In fact, Ila and grandmother claim the narrator’s allegiance and meta­
phorically they serve as two magnetic poles tugging at his ego. It is, then, a
mark of his growing maturity that he stays the course and finds his own path
between the two. His choice inevitably falls on complexity, which might be
termed differently as hybridity:

I thought of how much they all [Ila, grandmother, and others like them]
Wanted to be free, how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to won­
der whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound: whether I
was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices
within me.44

Thus, he will not choose the militant nationalism of his grandmother, nor
the life outside time and space that seems Ila’s fate. Rather he identifies with
his uncle Tridib’s choice. He does not choose freedom in its conventional sense
- the freedom of his grandmother’s free nation, the freedom of Ila’s nationless
state - but instead he chooses the freedom of imagination, a freedom that de­
bunks the myth of fixities and false stasis. And the novel The Shadow Lines has
its genesis in this freedom of imagination. To come to this choice the narrator
recognizes the journey he has undertaken and he seeks to record its contours:

I was determined now that I would not let my past vanish without a trace;
I was determined to persuade [others] of its importance.45

61
 From the foregoing discussion of the novel it is evident that the play of
shadows - by implication individuals and their memories - forms the complex
network of imaginative discourse of history. It is a realistic examination of
protagonist’s search through his memories. At the same time it comes to terms
with disparate cultures and the idea of universal humanity as Robert Dixon
comments:

The Shadow Lines is a fictional critique of classical anthropology’s

model of discrete cultures and associated ideology of nationalism. The reality
is the complex web of relationships between people that cut across nations
and across generations ... [so that] The Shadow Lines builds its critique of
cultural borders upon the notion of a universal humanity.46

In a sense, The Shadow Lines focuses on individuals and their pre­

dicaments, as they are caught in the currents of time, space and history. The
next novel In An Antique land grapples with history in a more important but
different manner. The chapter that follows is a discussion of this novel.

Reference

1 Amitav Ghosh, “The Greatest Sorrow”, The Imam and the Indian

62
 Delhi, Ravi Dayal, 2002, P.314.

2 Ibid, pp.60-61

3 Nandita Sinha, Perspectives in Time: The Narrator as child in Amitav

Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines in R.K. Dhawan ed., Indian Literature
Today (New Delhi: Prestige Brooks, 1995) Vol.l, p.179.

4 Maria Couto, “Threads and Shards”, Times literary supplement, 4465

(Oct. 28, 1988), 1212

5 Amitav Ghosh. The Shadow Lines, Delhi, Ravi Dayal, 1988, p.3.

6 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p.90

7 Ibid. p. 110.

8 Ibid. p. 122.

9 Ibid. p. 127.

10 Ibid., p.211.

11 Pallavi Gupta, Private history, Individual memory, and the Amateur

Historian: A Study of The Shadow Lines, in The Fiction ofAmitav
Ghosh, (ed.) Indira Bhatt. Indira Nityanandam, Delhi, Creative Books,
2001 pp.75-76.

12 The Shadow Lines, p. 172.

13 Suvir Kaul, Separation anxiety: Growing up International in Amitav

Ghosh’s The Shadow lines, in The Shadow Lines, New Delhi
Oxford Univ. Press 1995, p.269.

14 Meenakshi Mukheijee, Maps & Mirrors: Co-ordinates of meaning in The

Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines, New Delhi, O.U.P., 1995,
P.260.

63
15 Nandita Sinha, Perspectives in Time: The Narrator as Child in The
Shadow Lines in R.K. Dhawan (ed.) The Novels of Amltav Ghosh, New
Delhi; Prestige 199, p. 144.

16 The Shadow Lines, p.20.

17 Ibid, p.20

18 Ibid. p.21.

19 Ibid., p.24.

20 Ibid.,p.30.

21 Ibid. p.31.

22 Seema Bhaduri, of Shadows, Lines, Freedom: A historical Reading The

Shadow Lines in R.K. Dhawan (ed.) The Novels of Amitav Ghosh,
p.109.

23 The Shadow Lines, p. 190.

24 Ibid, p.149.

25 Ibid, p.149.

26 The Shadow Lines, p.228

27 Ibid, p.241.

28 Ibid. p. 102.

29 Ibid. p. 102.

30 Ibid, p.200.

31 Ibid. P.

32 Ibid, p.246.

64
33 Ibid. P.179.

34 Ibid. 141.

35 Suvir Kaul, Separation Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in The

Shadow Lines, in The Shadow Lines, New Delhi, OUP, 1995, pp.284-
285.

36 The Shadow Lines, p.214.

37 ‘The Greatest Sorrow’, The Imam and the Indian, Delhi, Ravi Dayal, 2002,
p.315.

38 John, C. Hawley, Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction, Delhi, Foundation

2005, p.76

39 The Shadow Lines, p.75

40 Ibid. p.76.

41 The Shadow Lines, p.77.

42 Meenakshi Mukherj ee, Maps and Mirror: Co-ordinates of Meaning in

The Shadow Lines, The Shadow Lines, New Delhi OUP. 1995,
pp.263-64

43 The Shadow Lines, p.39.

44 Ibid. p.88.

45 Ibid, p.217.

46 Robert Dixon; Traveling in the West: The Writing ofAmitav Ghosh, in

Tabish Khair (ed.) Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, Delhi,
Permanent Black 2003, p.20.

65