The Shadow Lines And The Indian History

English Literature Essay

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Ghosh is an extraordinary writer of Indian writing in English because he has a

different and vibrant approach to post colonialism as he “gives agency to those who
are seen as objects and not subjects of history. His critique of Eurocentrism is through
giving a voice to the lost or suppressed histories.” [1] Although he is not as
extensively critiqued as Salman Rushdie, he is equally if not more celebrated and read
by critics and readers. His novels have always been intriguing and highly complex as
they deal with the emotional aspects of his characters and his work is imbued with
intricate details of the given time and circumstance. The Shadow Lines is Ghosh’s
second novel and having written several novels, he is easily able to reinvent himself
repeatedly.

The title of the novel, The Shadow Lines, hints at the lines and borders drawn by
people to separate nations and these boundaries only exist in one’s imagination.
Nature makes no borders similarly human thinking traverses these physical
boundaries easily and without documents. Ghosh does not limit the use of the
shadow lines to delineate maps and boundaries; he takes the metaphor further to
indicate the “transition from youth to maturity, the past from the present, and those
intangible but deeply felt markers of identity that mark oneself off from others, one’s
own community from others.” [2] These shadow lines have no physical presence as
they are ‘invisible borders’ which create a sense of division in the minds of the
people. Therefore Tha’mma, the narrator’s grandmother ‘wanted to know whether
she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane.’
She is shocked to realize that ‘if there is no difference both sides will be the
same.’ [3]

Ghosh manages to speak excessively of shadows, darkness and light, weaving them
subtly into the context of his story. He uses the terms both realistically and
metaphorically that what we believe in the first understanding may not be true
because it is half told. He cleverly uses the meaning related to shadows to show the
fact that human relations are like shadows although they are a part of us they are still
detached from us. The novel outlines the intertwined threads of historical incidents
and its predicament on unsuspecting individuals who do not shape history but are
victims of its meandering course. The shadow lines are not just the borders
separating two countries but have significance beyond the title.

The writer is interested in going beyond the limited information written in history
books and political occurrence to the myriad of human relationships and people that
are affected by historical events. History is made subjective and each character
articulates historical accounts through his or her own personal experience. Likewise as
Mondal says that as far as history is concerned “Ghosh shares the postmodern
disavowal of universal historical narratives that encode ideas about modernity,
development and progress, focusing instead on those fragments of human
experience that have been occluded from the historical record, and which find no
place in such grand designs.” [4] As he writes the novel, the narrator wrestles with a
chronological view of history, passed on by the ruling English and now part of the
Indian national consciousness. This historical model needs a linear narrative to
describe its cause and effect and is a very narrow and strait jacketed way of history
telling as one already knows the end and is merely linking it retrospectively to its
beginning. The act of creating and writing down of history then becomes an
ideological act, designed to support political and moral systems. The narrative of the
novel clearly demystifies, overrules and disrupts a chronological narration and the
established systems of narration in general and creating of histories in particular.

Further, Ghosh was deeply disturbed by the assassination of the then prime minister,
Indira Gandhi, by her own bodyguards and the subsequent riot and pogrom that
culminated in mass murder of innocents. This event shook the entire fabric around
which the newly independent state of India was constructed. The narratives and
valorization of India’s struggle against the colonial rule seemed to be fabricated as its
own people were suffering at the hands of the powerful. Most importantly the belief
in national unity and Nehru’s dream of a secular and democratic India were
completely shattered. The disillusionment with the current political scenario and the
communal disharmony became the catalyst for the writing of The Shadow Lines and
in this novel Ghosh categorically deplores, exposes and critiques any kind of
disharmony and bloodshed caused due to political, religious or territorial disputes.

Moreover, the single most defining historical event of partition has deeply impacted
the psyche of millions of people on both the sides of the border of India and
Bangladesh. The violence and resulting bloodshed is still fresh in the memory of its
people and this same theme of violence and suspicion is the underlying thread that
runs throughout the novel. The description of communal violence and riots is
detailed towards the end of the text highlighting the fact that a disturbing incident
and in this case the traumatic experience of partition never fades away from the
memory of the people. In the novel we see the way violence moves from the public to
the private lives of the individuals forcing us to question ourselves whether we are
really free from the dormant sense of bloodshed and basal bestial instincts. For many
Indians especially those who suffered and uprooted from their homes due to the
partition, the bifurcation and formation of new nations does not signify
independence rather it is a day that marks a division of communities and the futility
of demarcating and separating nations based on religious affinities.

The city of Dhaka comes alive to the narrator due to the childhood stories told to him
by his incomparable grandmother who was born there. Although he never visits
Dhaka but it is the city that affects him the most because of the violence that
unfolded on its streets and took away Tridib, the narrator’s uncle. Violence is depicted
differently in the novel and a palpable sense of violence is subtly present till the end.
Its description is not voyeuristic rather Ghosh correctly comprehends the absolute
senselessness that engulfs any violent act. The narrator describes a calculated and
numbing riot that tore Calcutta apart in his childhood in the year 1964 and seemed as
if ‘the streets had turned themselves inside out: our city had turned against us.’ He
also invokes the idea that the two communities are a mirror image of each other, yet
there is a prevalent and underlying sense of distrust, hate and anger, which leads to
confrontation between the communities leading to a “special kind of loneliness that
grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the
mirror.” [5] Meenakshi Mukherjee reflects that “Private and public narratives
interpenetrate in the novel, history surging around ordinary lives to determine their
colour and shape and both are perceived through the image of reflections in
mirrors.” [6]

Baseless violence and disruption of human beings in the name of divergent religious
affinities is debated and heavily critiqued by Ghosh. He comprehends the politics
behind it and explicates the fact that dividing nations on the basis of religious beliefs
is a specious method of appeasing a few and creating an emotional, psychological
and physical divide for the rest. No fundamental group could ever be satisfied by the
arrangements made and their demands could never be fulfilled; also a ubiquitous
sense of unavoidable violence will always be felt and the social fabric of communal
harmony and peace will be easily overthrown by perpetual sense of distrust and
suspicion among various communities. Mondal asserts that “The Shadow Lines
probably represents Ghosh’s most direct confrontation with nationalism and national
identity. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the motif of the map appears throughout
the text.” [7]

National identity is not limited by only one’s religious beliefs rather it encompasses
customs, traditions, rituals and language of a particular place. It is also a work of
mental construct that recognizes one community and a place as of one’s own and
“Nations are both real and imaginary, material and immaterial.” [8] Hence drawing a
line on land and separating people by demarcating borders is a futile attempt at
creating divisions and these borders are mere shadow lines. In the words of
Meenakshi Mukherjee distance in the novel is “a challenge to be overcome through
the use of imagination and desire until space gets dissolved.” [9] Further, the
implication of the term ‘shadow’ in the title could also hint at the things that the
characters in the novel have hidden from one another. The pivotal incidence of the
brutal death of the narrator’s uncle Tridib is hidden from the narrator and he is given
only bits and pieces of information that he pieces together to arrive at a poignant
conclusion.

Besides, the city of Calcutta has been a great influence on Ghosh’s imagination and
the novel is full of reference to numerous places in the city. He admits that the city of
Calcutta is a “kind of constant that runs through all his my books […] the centre of
my imaginative world.” [10] The status of Calcutta as being a cultural and intellectual
centre is reflected in his works. The Shadow Lines talks about the bhadralok or the
middle class gentility that is formed by the political, cultural and intellectual elite.
Calcutta is one of the oldest port cities of the world and the British Empire set up its
company here first. There has been a great impact of western education and culture
on the Bengali society because of its colonial wealth and privilege and the traffic
between Indian and European ideas helped construct a vibrant and modern culture.
In the novel we see a steady rise of the narrator’s family in society, as the narrator’s
father rises up from being a clerk to holding important office in his field of work and
becoming a part of the bhadralok community. Meenakshi Mukherjee describes the
narrator family’s social mobility as “The spatial movement, from a flat in Gole Park to
a house in Southern Avenue with the ‘conversation loving stretch’ of Gariahat Road
occupying a central space, charts his Calcutta moorings precisely. The relentless
educational compulsions of this class and the tension of conflicting values between
its dominant and deviant members are evoked with as much telling detail as the
frequent shifts of locale and the sequence of public events that frame his
life.” [11] Even as the narrator grows up in Calcutta his imaginative potential is not
restricted to this city only because he is to travel to far flung places through the
stories told to him by his uncle and his cousin Ila.

A subtle influence of Tagore’s ideal of nationalism is apparent in Ghosh’s work as

well. Tagore’s idea of nationalism as being above and devoid of petty notions of
political nations is upheld in The Shadow Lines. The writer condemns and lashes
against the division of nations based on a misguided understanding of freedom and
sovereignty, ‘people shot by terrorists and separatists and the army and the police,
you’ll find somewhere behind it all, that single word; everyone is doing it to be
free.’ [12] Ghosh exposes the truth behind forging borders between people and
dividing by illuminating the fact an incidence occurring in remotest part of a country
affects people miles away who are not related to that place of the mishap. Tridib is
killed in a mob attack on the minority community in Bangladesh during an agitation
caused due to the missing relic in Srinagar. The unreasonable death of Tridib
underscores the fact that violence and a sense of hatred does not distinguish
between the culprits and the innocents.
The Shadow Lines depicts the lives of people during and after India’s independence
and the effect partition of the nation has on those who are tied to their roots. Much
of Ghosh’s work focuses on families. The novel centers on the lives of a middle class
Bengali family that is sucked into riots and violence which ruptures and disorients
their placid, uneventful lives. Ghosh’s novel has multiple narrators and begins in the
voice of an unnamed young narrator who remembers the story for the readers in a
haphazard, unreliable and non- linear way. He is willing to share the burden of
narration with five other narrators. The story seems to be a jigsaw puzzle overtly and
the reader has to make the connections, yet it is tightly framed and extremely
cohesive, where everything falls in its correct place towards the end. The precision
with which the narrator remembers particular incidents on particular significant dates
is noteworthy, however, he falters at times owing to the back and forth workings of
his memory and is corrected by the other narrators. According to critic Meenakshi
Mukherjee in the novel there is “a repeated insistence for the freedom of each
individual to be able to create his own stories in order to prevent getting trapped in
someone else’s construction of reality.” [13]

The narrative also depends on historical records, research in libraries and newspaper
articles. They chart out a very different trajectory as they reflect merely the mega
narratives and the big events unlike individuals who give important to sundry things.
The history has a massive and sweeping method of unfolding itself and at times it is
prejudiced too. The narrator reminiscences an indelible incident of his childhood and
struggles to find any record for the day that the tragedy occurred but the newspaper
has only a fleeting reference to it because to the framers of history individual
histories are easily and readily overlooked

Quickly we turned the limp, yellowing pages back until we came

to the front page.

So where’s your riot ? said Malik.

The lead story had nothing to do with riots of any kind nor with

Calcutta […] It’s really strange that you should remember a riot that

happened in Pakistan. [14]

By trying to uncover the reason for his uncle’s murder the narrator embarks on a
painstaking journey of reading newspaper articles of that day and trying to find an
explanation for the silence about the communal riots in documents and the media.
Finally he arrives at the conclusion that difficult facts are not revealed for the good of
the nation and only defining moments are publicized to maintain the nation’s sense
of self- image and semblance of unity and coherence. The public memory is very
short and old tragedies are quickly forgotten and completely erased when new
incidences occur. Ghosh is questioning the whole process of narrativising a national
identity which involves a linear and strait jacketed structure of progress. Thus, in a
broader sense The Shadow Lines unfolds a trajectory of events that is peculiar to
certain individuals and the impact of larger history and happenings that shape and
alter the lives of people.

It is important to note that the novel spans forty one years but the action is limited to
only thirty one days which is detailed and singled out. The narrator constant question
to other characters in the novel is whether he or she remembers a particular incident
or conversation. Suvir Kaul explains that the question posed by the narrator “shapes
the narrator’s search for connection for the recovery of lost information or repressed
experience, for the details of the great trauma or joy that have receded into the
archives of public or private memory.” [15] The novel starts when the narrator is
twenty seven and he reflects back on his childhood days and on the life of the most
important character of the novel – Tridib, the narrator’s uncle and his alter ego. He is
an archaeologist and an interesting narrator of tales who teaches the narrator to view
stories and history differently. Tridib has an overarching presence throughout the
novel. The whole sequence of his death is the crux of the narrative and the narrator
joins the divergent facts together to learn more about the circumstances leading up
to it. His death is a filial tragedy that affects only the family members, yet through his
death we analyze the whole idea of nation states, we shift from the private to the
collective memory.

The narrator’s quest to piece the circumstances leading to Tridib’s death is

problematic because those who were present during the death wish to forget about it
as its reminiscence cause them a great amount of grief and torment. It is only
towards the end of the novel that the narrator pieces together the jigsaw puzzle of
Tridib’s death with the help of Robi, Tridib’s younger brother and May, Tridib’s
girlfriend, who retell the circumstances of his death. Similarly there are certain events
and failures too that nations wish to erase and these events are not published in the
newspapers and are deliberately hidden from public scrutiny. The narrator hopes to
reconstruct the history of his family and the historically significant times they lived
through. Hence, as the narrative progresses we realize that the novel is not merely
concerned with death of Tridib but with the birth of nations. Within which there are
important questions of its failures – partition, communalism, riots, violence and
militancy. The facts presented to us conceals these set backs and failures because
there is a lot of angst and misery attached with its recollection.

Tridib encourages the narrator to use his imagination while he describes a place to
the young narrator. He also tells the narrator to build the ability to be able to tell his
own story so that he is not trapped and constricted by the stories created by others.
It is a legacy bequeathed on the young narrator to look beyond the master narratives
that are available through the experience of the majority. He instills in the narrator
the archaeological habit of digging deep to find results as ‘one could never know
anything except through desire […] there was no border between oneself and one’s
image in the mirror.’ [16] Further, Tridib’s romance with May is continued by the
narrator. The letter which he sends May is a semi- pornographic letter in which he
expresses the desire to meet her ‘ as the completest of strangers – strangers across
the seas […] in a place without a past, without history, free, really free.’ [17] His
desire to meet her at a place without history, borders and timeless can be understood
to be a need for the colonized to meet the colonizer on equal terms, without a pre-
existing hierarchy. His idea of the world is almost utopian, in which he wishes to
transcend the barriers created by nationality, colour and culture.

As we read the novel, the general perception that we construct for the character of
Tridib, is that of a humanistic and idealistic person. His eccentricities, especially the
practical jokes that he plays on those who are gullible enough to take his nonsensical
advice seriously, make his personality more realistic and endearing. He is killed by a
mob in Bangladesh while trying to rescue May and Jethomoshai, which seems to be a
selfless act and a huge sacrifice. Tridib, who generally remains passive rapidly
changes and becomes proactive, regretfully falling prey to communal violence. May,
who has lived her entire life with the guilt of being the one responsible for his death,
finally redeems herself by confessing to the narrator that ‘He gave himself up; it was a
sacrifice’ [18] and reasoning to herself that no one would have harmed her because
she is white English lady in a third world nation Tridib’s death also brings to fore the
fact how easily the world conspires to destroy an innocuous idealist because of
political maneuvers and fuelling of communal misunderstandings and nationalist
fundamentalism. Significantly, in the end of the novel the narrator consummates the
unfinished sexual relationship between Tridib and May and continues the bonds that
Tridib had established between past and present and between people and
communities.

As Meenakshi Mukherjee calls the narrator a ‘porous space’ [19] and highlights the
fact that “We never get to know the narrator’s name nor can we visualize what he
looks like, except through occasional glimpses of the various other persons whose
mirror image he is supposed to be.” [20] . He is a reservoir of memories and stories
and about his family. The narrative of the novel mimics the way human mind
functions, Ghosh uses the ‘stream of consciousness’ method of narration “in which
time and space is fluid and constantly shifting from one location to another, and from
one given moment to another without any forced transition.” [21] The novel is to a
large extent a narrative in reminiscence and it successfully intersects historical
happenings with personal events. In his journey to recapitulate Tridib’s death the
narrator realizes the proximity of cities separated by cartographical demarcations but
bond together: ‘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.’ [22] John Thieme elaborates that the notion of looking glass does not only
illustrate a sense of distance as well as similarity and between two nations but also
between the narrator and an English character, Nick Price, who becomes a ‘spectral
presence[…] always bigger and better and in some ways more
desirable.’ [23] Although the narrator views himself as the inferior partner, his
knowledge of the colonizer’s world is far superior. It becomes his duty to narrate the
stories imaginatively where remembrance and nostalgia become a reason to find
meaning, connection and enables him to define the present through the workings of
his memories. All individual memories are supposed to come together and make
sense, to complete the picture. To recollect a traumatic event is therapeutic and
enables the characters to overcome the pain caused by that event.

The novel debunks the idea that one should live and believe in the narrative of
another person. Ila, the narrator’s cousin, lives only in the present as the past to her
means a reservoir of unpleasant memories. She does not want to relive her past
through the stories of other characters and is focused only on living in the present.
The incident in the novel in which Ila narrates the racial attack on her by constructing
a fabricated tale about Magda is retold by May Price and the narrator senses the hurt
and discrimination felt by the young Ila. She is a misfit in both the societies, Bengali
and English of which has inadvertently become a part. She wants to be free of
patriarchal norms and expectation created for the sexes in the Indian society and tells
the narrator that she aims to be ‘Free of [his] bloody culture’ [24] which forces her to
be docile and imposed numerous inhibitions.

For the young narrator Ila is an adolescent fantasy because of her western clothes,
appearance and behavior which make her look ‘improbably exotic’ [25] to him. She
awakens the repressed sexual desire in the narrator as Suvir Kaul elucidates that the
narrator “learns all manner of lessons from his relationship with her, lessons about
asymmetrical emotional relationships, about cultural dislocations and
maladjustments, about the compromises that accompany life lived at home and
abroad.” [26] She also occupies a central position for the narrator’s search of identity.
She is an object of desire for the narrator and remains at the level of an erotic desire
and is a symbol of unrequited love. Her life is a complete contrast to the life of the
narrator, who is brought up in a strict, middle class conventional way in which success
is recognized through one’s academic achievement and a stable government
employment. While Ila, ostensibly lives an adventurous life abroad, lacks imagination
like the narrator and visits various places without ‘worlds to travel in’. Her vain
attempts to find roots in the English society are exposed to us through her
insignificant political activities. Unlike Ila, the narrator remains rooted to the Bengali
society. Ghosh seems to be critical of the concept of the ‘global citizen’ through his
characterization of Ila and her situation reveals the shallowness of a Western world
that is only superficially non- racist.

She marries Nick Price, May’s unemployed younger brother but they have a failed
marriage. Nick is unfaithful to her and he is etched out as a colonial exploiter who
marries her to exploit her resources, in this case her father’s money, thus replicating
the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. She is entrapped in the
marriage deluding herself that she has left behind the squalor and restrictions of a
third world country behind her. She is exoticized and is also objectified by Nick who
sees her as ‘a bit of variety’ in his endeavor to travel and traverse cultures. She is
‘othered’ by him and even through their marriage she is not accepted in the Western
culture. They are not on equal terms and she is a victim of Nick’s desire for variety.
Her predicament is that of a failed cosmopolitanism as she is unaccepted and caught
between the two cultural contradictions and finds herself a misfit in the upper class
Bengali milieu and English society.

The Indian society has always been conflicted in completely accepting the western
culture and norms. Since independence there has been a growing concern about the
portrayal and role of Indian women in the society. As is true in all patriarchal societies
that women are the bearers of cultural responsibility, therefore, there is a need to
control women’s sexuality and impose restrictions on them. Women are forced to be
docile, virtuous, and chaste and sacrificing by the society so that the next generation
is clean and pure. They bear the burden of a community’s honor and with their
contamination there is a fear of the whole community’s contamination. Hence Ila is at
odds with the cultural control on her as she wants to distance herself from societal
expectations. She is portrayed as a nomadic figure, rootless and always on the move.
Ila is perceived as a threat to Tha’mma as she epitomizes the figure of a nomad who
exists on the fringes of the society without adhering to any rules or regulations.

Tha’mma belongs to the generation that suffered the most due to partition as they
had to leave their homes, property and at times relatives behind. Her generation paid
a heavy price for independence and to her nationalism and freedom has a very
different meaning and connotation. To her understanding and belief the sacrifices of
so many people should not go in vain and has to be protected and reinforced in the
society through religious and cultural rigidity. She lives in India and believes it to be
her home and wants to bring back her uncle back home. Her senile uncle’s views on
the issue of nationhood and migration reveal the inherent contradiction and futility of
creating borders between communities: ‘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?’ [27]

In the description of Tha’mma’s journey to Dhaka after independence to bring back

her Jethomoshai, Ghosh touches on the issue of migrancy and the way memories are
attached with one’s place of descent that it seems to be from a different time and
place. Tha’mma ‘had not been able to quite understand how her place of birth had
come to be so messily at odds with her nationality.’ [28] Her constant search for the
Dhaka she remembers is futile. To the migrant the place of one’s origin remains in her
imagination as a place of opportunity and promise from the land she has been exiled.
In case of Tha’mma the journey back is unfulfilling and disenchanting because the
new place that she visit contrasts and contradicts the image which she had created
for her place of birth. Diasporic literature highlights the dichotomy between one’s
reminiscence and imagination of one’s place of origin and the place to which one has
now become a resident of. The difference between the cultures, traditions and
language of a western country and an eastern country is obviously stark, and in case
of Tha’mma the difference is not extremely exaggerated as the cultural difference
between East and West Bengal is minimal. Yet she is at lost and keeps looking for the
Dhaka she knew and constantly repeats, ‘I’ve never seen any of this. Where is Dhaka?’
hinting at her sense of bereavement and loss with the place she had attached a lot of
fond memories.

Interestingly, Tha’mma symbolizes extreme nationalistic fervor and to her Ila is an

aberration and a corrupting influence on the narrator. She has an extreme