The Shadow Lines is a postcolonial text both in terms of its narrative structure and the time it is set in. It punctures the neat linearity of the western Bildungsroman by the postcolonial subversion of sporadic back-and-forth movement in time. It relays the journeys of two families, the Datta-Chaudharis and the Prices, as their stories intersect and overlap across time and space. The personal history of the characters serves as an optic lens for the narrative to explore the palimpsestic nature of our lived reality, as it is constantly shaped by the larger history of the world. The text thus emerges as a meditation upon the shadow that lines of memories, maps, and borders cast on the identity of the postcolonial subject.
Memory plays an important role in the text, serving as the building block for the fabric of the narrative. Pairs of memories are juxtaposed to highlight the intertwined personal histories of the characters, the Indian subcontinent and the world. Through this intersection of synchronic and diachronic time, the text spans a period of roughly four decades from 1939 to 1979. With the backdrop of the Second World War, the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India, and East and West Pakistan, the independence of Bangladesh, and India’s wars with China and Pakistan, ideas of nationalism, borders, freedom, violence, and a sense of belonging remain central throughout the text.
The long-drawn freedom struggle against British colonial rule in India had taken many forms. The narrator’s grandmother, Thamma, subscribes to a radical militant nationalism that began with Bhagat Singh, Aurobindo Ghosh, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Subhash Chandra Bose. It believed in revolutionary armed struggle as the quest for freedom. Growing up in Dhaka as a girl, and later as a young woman in Calcutta, Thamma had witnessed the anti-colonial movement closely. And thus, this muscular nationalism forms the core of the values she had inculcated in her youth. It is a nationalism deeply invested in the nation-building project and sacrifices one’s life in service of that nation. A nation whose citizenship had been earned at the heavy cost of the blood of its freedom fighters.
“My grandmother didn’t approve of Tridib. He’s a loafer and a wastrel… It didn’t sound terrible, but in fact, in my grandmother’s usage. There was nothing very much worse that could be said of anyone.” (Ghosh 4)
But it is a nationalism that is rooted in fixities and finitude of borders that were drawn with bloodshed and war. Situated in the unchanging and static memory of the struggle, it thus remains entrenched in a narrow sectarian identity with rigid definitions of the self and the other. Driven by a psychotic hatred of the other, it slowly turns into a jingoistic hypernationalism. Consumed by national identity and pride, it inherits a normalisation of violence based along those lines.
“I gave it away, she screamed. I gave it to the fund for the war. I had to, don’t you see? For your sake; for your freedom. We have to kill them before they kill us; we have to wipe them out.” (Ghosh 172 )
Wedded to the state-making ideology, the map holds immediate and literal importance in this worldview. Drawn with the blood and toil of the freedom fighters, the borders occupy a sacred position. She loathes Ila, calling her “the memsaheb whore” because she chooses to live in London, the colonizer’s country, rather than her own motherland. To her, there is no greater disrespect.
“It’s not freedom she wants, said my grandmother… She wants to be left alone to do what she pleases; that’s all that any whore would want. She’ll find it easily enough over there; that’s what those places have to offer. But that is not what it means to be free.” (Ghosh 67)
However, this nationalism is undercut in the text by a kind of cosmopolitan imagination that Tridib epitomises. It is the cosmopolitan imagination that is borne out of the intertwined history of a world that cannot be understood or experienced in isolation. It is an imagination that transcends the boundaries of time, space, race, and culture, one which appeals to humanity as citizens of the world. For Tridib, the borders remain lines drawn on maps, merely a tool to understand the world better, rather than a limitation.
“I could not forget because Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with.” (Ghosh 16)
Tridib emerges as the ethical centre of the text, around whom the life of the unnamed protagonist unfolds as a grid of memories and post-memories. The imaginative continuity of the text becomes one with Tridib’s character, drawing to a close with his death. It is his legacy of an ever-expanding worldview that shapes the narrator’s coming-of-age story. Unlike Thamma’s rigid definition of the self and the other as fixed in one’s nationality, the imaginative fecundity strives for human solidarity with the world. It raises the narrator as an itinerant traveller of the mind, symptomatic of the historian, the artist and the writer, voices that are unbridled by nations and belong to the world. Just as much as they belong to each other.
As memories are superimposed over one another, Ghosh presents history itself as an imaginative journey into one’s own past. Journeys that allow us to access and learn from worlds that lie far removed from our own immediate reality. The use of photographs in the text is one such example. From Ila’s photographs in her school yearbooks, the photographs that May and Tridib exchange, to those of the Price family along with Alan Tresawsen and his friends, provide a glimpse into the inner worlds of the characters. They allow both the narrator and the reader to imagine and understand the characters as complex wholes. It is this nuanced understanding of the human condition, recognition and acceptance of the other in the self and the self in the other that forms the pivot of Tridib’s cosmopolitan imagination.
“…a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.” (Ghosh 23)
While this cosmopolitan imagination is epitomised in Tridib, it is not limited to him. Ghosh contests Thamma’s muscular nationalism with the philosophical structure of the text itself. While revolutionary nationalism believes in the finality of its understanding of history, the text contests that the past can never be fully known. It is thus visited and revisited again and again as one discovers something new every time. Written in the wake of the 1984 riots, The Shadow Lines is Ghosh’s attempt to understand and give words to the historical past that was constantly shaping his own present. It tackles the difficult question of sectarian violence, a legacy that the nation has inherited from the blood-soaked moment of its birth. He submits to his readers the ‘problem of distance’ that restricts one from understanding how the intertwined histories of the nations so born continue to affect each other.
“the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines — so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city 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.” (Ghosh 170)
Stuck in its rigidity of in-group and out-group hostility, it is this legacy of Thamma’s muscular nationalism that pushes Tridib’s death into a chasm of silence, rendering it trivial and everyday. A mere casualty in one of the many riots that have followed since 1947. The violence is normalised to the extent that in many instances it goes unrecorded as formal history. This gap between the projected idea of nationalism and the reality it transpires into is echoed in Thamma’s own words,
“What was it all for then — Partition and all the killing and everything — if there isn’t something in between?”.
The statement provides vent to her anger at history’s denial of an ordinary middle-class life that she had envisioned for herself, as it realises self-reflexively the ephemeral nature of borders. Juxtaposed to this legacy of sectarian violence is the legacy that Tridib passes on to the narrator, and to May Price. It is the constant search for meaning by learning from the past, the fluidity of a worldview that continues to change and evolve. It is the ability to imagine the other as human, as complex and as a reflection of one’s own self that humanises Tridib’s death and finally allows the narrator to make sense of that redemptive mystery.
“…there was a connection between my nightmare bus ride back from school and the events that befell Tridib and the others in Dhaka… 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 border there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of that silence” (Ghosh 159)
Text in Focus: The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
“Full text of “The Shadow Lines Amitav Ghosh” — Internet Archive.” https://archive.org/stream/The-Shadow-Lines-Amitav-Ghosh/TheShadowLines_djvu.txt.
