02 March 2020 NAMAN BANSAL

1. Discuss the Narrative Structure of The Shadow Lines?

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, weaves a narrative intermingling history with
fiction as deftly as possible. The Shadow Lines is a memory novel, dealing with
multiple stories across three nations and spanning over a time period of 50 years,
related through the recollection of the narrator. The narrative structure of the
novel, though apparently simple, is in fact a jigsaw puzzle of time, place, events
and incidents.

There are sixteen sections in the first part, titled ‘Going Away’ and fifteen chapters in
the second part entitled ‘Coming Home’. Both the titles appear ironic because the
impression that emerges from Ghosh’s handling of distance is that a person can
neither ‘go away’ nor ‘come home’. Also, the two sections do not coalesce or create
an organic whole with a beginning, middle and an end. The author uses a non-linear,
multi-layered narrative in The Shadow Lines, moving backward and forward in time,
fusing spaces and blending stories.

Often treated as a bildungsroman, the novel traces the coming of age of our narrator
through his understanding of the memories that connects him and his family
members. However, it stands in sharp contrast to the precise attention to details
given to the other stories that are narrated, that the narrator’s name and description
are withheld. The transparency of the unnamed and un described narrator allows, as
Mukherjee points out, “to see the narrator’s consciousness as a porous space that
absorbs other lives and other experiences until their colours leak into each other
and reveal a pattern”.

The anonymous narrator who refers himself as ‘I’ relates events and experiences of
the past, most of which he was never a part of. He narrates hand-me-down stories
he has inherited from his uncle Tridib about his sojourn in London, about the family
of Price with whom they stayed, the stories of the Second World War as Tridib
witnessed in his childhood. What haunts the reader is the narrative tone, at once
judicious and reflective and in spite of knowing that the narrator has never
experienced these things first-handed, we are convinced of the authenticity of the
stories.

Memory plays a vital role in shaping the narrative structure of the novel. Much of
the novel depends heavily on the mnemonic ability of the narrator, who recounts
obscure stories he has heard from his family members, with almost pictorial detail.
It is astonishing, sometimes even absurd, how he remembers every tiny detail about
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every tale that he has been narrated, as if he has not just heard them but watched
them happen in front of his eyes. Like Ila, the readers, too, are forced to ask, “how
do you remember?” The narrative often becomes sporadic and fragmented as we
move through the consciousness of the narrator where stories overlap, collapse,
coalesce and are often left halfway. But each story has its independent existence
until it becomes a part of the larger narrative. “The Shadow Lines may be said to
‘happen’ in all places at once. Every corner of it involves all its space and every
moment all its moments.” [Kaul].

The narrator also traverses a time span from 1960s to 1980s onto 1940s and even
earlier. The narrative begins in 1939- with the break out of World War II and ends
in1964- with the eruption of a cycle of violence in India and Pakistan. Ghosh seems
to be very particular about dates. But these important dates seem to follow each
other in an arbitrary order. For example, 1959 is followed by 1940, March 1963 in
Kolkata and 25th September 1940 in London melt into a December night in 1980 in
the cellar of the Price house. A sequence in 1979 Delhi slides back to October 1962,
the days of the Indo-China war. Thus, Amitav Ghosh uses a zigzag movement,
constantly moving backward and forward to present a complex pattern of time. Time
in this novel can be illusory as well as concrete- same as space.

To Conclude, In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh weaves temporal and spatial dimensions
into a personal texture on which the anonymous narrator builds his identity. The
experience of the narrator is not limited to his own life, for beneath the surface of
everyday happenings, he lives a truer life in his memories and imagination. The
Shadow Lines is, therefore, a memory novel which dexterously blends private life and
public events in the mosaic of history. The narrator’s story unfurls through the
fragmentary streams of consciousness where the turmoil of the private life is
reflected in the public chaos. It is of sheer beauty how Ghosh gradually
metamorphoses an unnamed, undescribed narrator into an omniscient one.

Works cited –

1. Kaul, A.N. ‘A reading of The Shadow Lines’, The Shadow Lines. Educational Edition. Delhi,
India. Oxford University Press 1988, 1995.
2. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. ‘Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines’.
The Shadow Lines. Educational Edition. Delhi, India. Oxford University Press 1988, 1995.
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2. Comment on Amitav Ghosh’s problematization of nation in Tha’mma’s

identity in “The Shadow Lines”?

“People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very
skilled in the art of recollection.”

The Shadow Lines circumferences around the idea of a nation and the variety of
identities that shape themselves around it. Ghosh aims at questioning the political
cognizance intensely wrapped and tightly enmeshed inside the national flags. In this
World Tha’mma finds herself in between the extremes of the existent and non-
existent realities.

Tha’mma’s position is precarious: on the one hand, she advocates the militant
nationalism of revolutionaries as is evident through her contemptuous attitude
towards the refugees living in shanties on the outskirts of the city and her
Nationalist fervour, during her college days, against the colonial rule sharpened her
sense of nationhood. She extends that antagonistic logic to the formation of the
Indian nation-state in the post-independence context- a nation, whose borders are
confirmed in war. On the other hand, Tha’mma’s disappointment with the Indo-Pak
border on her trip to Dhaka when she could not spot a tangible difference, a physical
demarcation between the two nations. Her nationalist faith gets a severe jolt at such
an absence, which actually rips apart her whole ideology: “what was it all for them –
partition and all the killing and everything – if there isn’t something in between?”

Tha’mma’s nationalist vocabulary is couched in the language of modernity, which,

particularly in its colonial derivation, required the syntax of good citizenship and an
exclusive national pride. It is in this light one may understand Tha’mma
enthusiastically telling her grandson about the British history of bloodshed: “War is
their religion. That’s what it takes to make a country.” As physical strength is a
prerequisite for any aggressive military action, she insists that her grandson take
physical exercises daily: “you can’t build a strong country, without building a strong
body.” Her ecstasy at contributing to the War Fund is symptomatic of her tenuous
situation. The Nationalist rhetoric which thrives only in a national-crisis, be it Indo-
Pak or any other war: “we have to kill them before they kill us; we have to wipe
them out.”

One major component missing in this prognosis is that she is a rootless refugee from
East Pakistan, suddenly thrown into a financial crisis owing to the partition.
Consequently, she gets declassed, much against her wish. Her predicament is that of
countless Bengali Hindu refugees in post-independence Bengal, who had been
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rendered penniless- in stark contrast to their erstwhile financial edge over the
Muslim peasants and workers in the unified Bengal province. Thus, as her grandson
rightly point out; her tragedy is the tragedy of the entire middle-class:

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

However, Tha’mma’s class-consciousness never allows her to identify herself with

the plight of the refugees living in unhygienic slums on the outskirts of the city.
Following the same logic, she is contemptuous of her relatives who too belong to the
same category. She cannot relate to Calcutta as her home; nor can Dhaka satisfy her
construct at home.

“Home” is now forever a memory for Tha’mma, a fond recall which she can share
with her grandson. To borrow Paul de Man’s words, memory for Tha’mma is the
retrospective recording of her failure to overcome the power of time. Born in Dhaka,
separated from her birth place by a history of blood shed and lines on the map,
Tha’mma loses her grammatical coordinates evident in her confusion about
“coming” and “going” home. Her strictly disciplinarian and regimented mind seems
unable to understand “how her place of birth had come so readily at odds with her
nationality”. She suffers form a post-partition “angst” typical of the East Bengalis,
rendered “immobile” like their homeland. Like a typical character from an absurd
play, she is an alien, a stranger, unable to come or go. This angst precisely accounts
for her pathological hatred for her erstwhile neighbours in Dhaka during the war of
1965: as for her theatre of the war cleanses the messy mob violence of streets of
which she had been a witness.

Tridib is the polar opposite of Tha‘mma owing his quality to transcend barrier of the
mind. He is a man without a nation, a Tristan incarnate, in love with a woman-
across- the –seas. May misses the point when she interprets Tridib’s murder as a
“sacrifice”: it is actually a defiance of nationalistic rhetoric, a refusal to accept the
state- imposed boundaries which close human mind and denigrate humanitarian
values.

To conclude, through the narrator’s grandmother, Tha’mma, with her Eat Bengali
background and memories of her childhood days in Dhaka, the narrative takes the
reader back in time to the era prior to the Partition, and through her fateful return to
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her original home in search of her uncle, Jethamoshai, it makes the reader aware of
the calamitous consequences of the Partition. The political and social upheaval that
followed upon the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947 has left
legacies that continue to haunt the two countries. The partition enabled the
thunderous forces of violence and displacement to tear the pre existing cultural and
social fabric so systematically that the process of repair hasn’t even begun.

Works cited –

1. Violence in The Shadow Lines: Nationalist Rhetoric and Historical Silence. –

Baleswar Reddy
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Bibliography

1. The Plight of A Hero in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart -Patrick C.

Nnoromele
2. The Depiction of Masculinity in Classic Nigerian Literature
Frank Salamone.
3. Crash Course World Literature – John Green.