CHAPTER III

THE SHADOW LINES

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The very beginning of The Shadow Lines is significant to understand the
novel: In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my fathers aunt, Mayadebi, went to
England with her husband and her son, Tridib (3).It is quite appropriate to say that
the novel begins as a recollection of events that have taken place not in the life of the
narrator but in some one elses. It is also important to note that there is a very rich
narrative texture. The story is told in layers, mixture of private and public events
working towards unity. It is, however, very difficult to define the theme, perhaps at
the same time very easy to do so, for, it is a novel of search search for selfknowledge and self-identity. Though the novel is written in the first person, we never
come to know the name of the person even after the novel is read completely. There
seems to be a deliberate attempt on the part of the novelist that the reader should not
try to find out the name of the story teller. For Ghosh the story teller is not only an
individual but also the supreme consciousness that pervades the life of every
individual. So, the narrator says, I knew that a part of my life as a human being had
ceased: that I no longer existed, but as a chronicle (112).
This supreme consciousness or the individual consciousness becomes a
battlefield in which there is no victory or defeat. The narrator describes the events that
he had heard from Tridib- his cousin now deceased- when he is eight and undertakes a
journey. It is therefore quite appropriate to call Tridib the mentor and alter ego of the
narrator. When the narrator begins to identify himself with Tridib, the narrators
grandmother chides him, for, she does not approve of Tridib. For the grandmother
Tridib is a loafer and wastrel(3) who wastes his time:
In my grandmothers usage there was nothing very much worse that
could be said of any one. For her time was like a toothbrush: it went
mouldy if it wasnt used. I asked her once what happened to wasted

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time. She tossed her small silvery head, screwed up her long nose and
said: It begins to stink.
As for herself, she had been careful to rid our little flat of everything
that might encourage us to let our time stink. No chess-board or any
pack of cards ever came through our door; there was a battered Ludo
set somewhere but I was only allowed to play with it when I was ill.
She didnt even approve of my mother listening to the afternoon radio
play more than once a week. In our flat all of us worked hard at
whatever we did: my grandmother at her school mistressing; I at my
homework; my mother at housekeeping, my father at his job as a junior
executive in a company which dealt in vulcanized rubber.
Our time wasnt given the slightest opportunity to grow
mouldy. That was why I loved to listen to Tridib : he never seemed to
use his time, but his time didnt stink. (4)
In The Shadow Lines the action takes place in different continents Europe,
Asia, and Africa and in different countries India, Bangladesh, and England. The
novel is divided into two parts: Going Away and Coming Home. There is a shift
of time from the past to the present and from the present to the past. Going Away
can be interpreted as going away from the self and Coming Home can be
interpreted as coming back into the self; So, there is the concept called coming and
going (not belonging) which is expressed as part of familys secret lore:
You see, in our family we dont know whether we are coming or going
its all my grandmothers fault. But of course, the fault wasnt hers at all: it lay in
language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away
from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a
journey which was not a coming or a going at all ; a journey that was a search for
precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. (153)

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As P.D. Dube observes, one is constantly plagued by doubts in the novel as
to whether the characters are going to Calcutta or coming to Calcutta or coming to
London or going back to London. The two parts of the novel indicate this enigma of
non-belonging. When the dwelling place is uncertain, borders also compound the
problem.1 Joshi also says that the novel is arranged in such a way that important
situations/incidents come after a prelude as if to provide a catalyst for the narrators
memories.2
The shadow Lines tells the story of the narrators family of three generations

which are spread over London, Dhaka, and Calcutta, and draws characters from
different nationalities, cultures, and religions in the world. The first generation is
represented by the grandmother Thamma, Jethamoshai, Mayadebi, and Saheb. The
father, the mother, and Jatin represent the second generation. May, Nick, Ila, and the
unidentified narrator represent the third generation.
Ghosh employs an educated young man who frequently travels between
Calcutta and London in 1981 to narrate the story. As mentioned earlier, the story
contains many layersmultiple stories to be precise: stories of his grandmother and
her sister, of his uncles Tridib and Robi, of his cousin Ila, who married an
Englishman, and of May Price, a family friend in London.
The novel depicts urban middle class life. For urban middle class, education
and professional jobs are important. These people are addicted to work because
education and profession only see to it that they earn their daily morsel. The work
environment so moulds them that they cultivate the virtues of hard work, obedience,
saying yes to all the dictates of the boss; and thus they zealously fall in line with the
norms of society. But this class of society gets seriously disturbed when misfortunes
strike them. For them, life ceases to exist when struck by the sudden eruption of

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violence like a volcano in public sphere. In these cases life for them loses all its
meaning and comes to a standstill. The two parts Going Away (3-112) and
Coming Home (115-252) are used to refer to going and coming with home as the
central symbol, a place where one is born and brought up and is deeply attached to.
This attachment is more so if one is away from home for a long time for different
reasons. The feeling of citizen of the world may be ideal, but it is not within the
reach of all people. They either go away from their home or come home. We find that
characters in The Shadow Lines go away from homes in Calcutta or Dhaka or come
home to Calcutta or Dhaka. But what transpires to them at the end is that peace is as
elusive as ever, wherever they are either at home or abroad.
Thamma may be said to be the central character of the novel. It may
even be said that the novel, in fact, is her story. Tridib calls her a modern middle-class
woman. Like all middle-class women, Thamma wants to lead a trouble-free life; she
is a great patriot and believes in the unity of the country. But she becomes a sort of a
rebel when the life that she wants to live is denied to her by the cruel fate of time. She
spends most part of life in Calcutta, but she becomes a witness to a most horrible
scene when she visits Dhaka to bring back her uncle. In that visit her aged uncle and
also her nephew meet tragic death. She becomes a sort of dangling woman suspended
by the history. The story Thamma is told to the narrator by herself (121-26). She was
born in Dhaka, and grew up as a member of
a big joint family then, with everyone living and eating together: her
grandparents, her parents , she and Mayadebi, her Jethamoshai her
fathers elder brotherand his family, which included three cousins of
roughly her own age, as well as a couple of spinster aunts. She
remembered her grandfather, although she had only been six when he
died: a thin, stern looking man with a frown etched permanently into

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his forehead. In his presence everyone, including her father and
Jethamoshai, spoke in whispers, with their heads down and their eyes
fixed firmly on the floor. But when he left the house for the district
courts, where he practiced as an advocate, the house would erupt with
the noisy games of the five cousins. Every evening the five children
would be led by their mothers into his study, where they would each
have to recite their alphabets Bengali first and then English with
their hands held out, palm downwards, and he would rap them on the
knuckles with the handle of his umbrella every time they made a
mistake. If they cried they were rapped on their shins. (121)
But as it almost always happens, the ancestral house had to be partitioned,
after the death of her grandfather. She came to know about the terrorist movements in
Bengal which was in fact the nationalist movement to free India from the clutches of
the British imperial regime: about secret terrorist societies like Anushilan and
Jugantar and all their off-shoots, their clandestine networks, and the home-made
bombs with which they tried to assassinate British officials and policemen; and a little
about the arrests, deportations and executions with which the British had retaliated
(37).
She was studying B.A. in History in Dhaka. She had a great liking for
revolutionaries like Kudhiram Bose and Bagha Jatin, and in her young romantic
imagination had even wanted to become a revolutionary. A shy young man of her
class was arrested on the charges of conspiring to kill an English magistrate. He was
tried and deported to the cellular jail in the Andamans :
Shed been expecting a huge man with burning eyes and a lions mane
of a beard, and there he was, all the while, at the back of her class,
sitting shyly by himself. She could so easily have talked to him. He
would have been handsome too, she had decided later, if only he would
shave that beard of his. Lying in her bed, she would think to herself if

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only she had known, if only she had been working with him, she would
have warned him somehow, she would have saved him, she would have
gone to Khulna with him too, and stood at his side, with a pistol in her
hands, waiting for that English magistrate. (39)
She wanted to work for the revolutionaries, to run errands for them, cook their
food, and wash their clothes because they were fighting the enemy of the country.
When the narrator asks her whether she would have killed the English magistrate, she
replies, I would have been frightened. But I would have prayed for strength, and
god willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our freedom: I would have done
anything to be free (39).
But all her romantic sojourn with revolution came to an end when she was
married off and went to Burma. Her married life also proved to be short-lived, as she
bore a child in 1925 and became a widow in 1935 when she was just 32.She had to
start a new phase of life in Calcutta as a school teacher in 1936 to fend for herself.
There is not much depiction of her life from here onwards, and the reader is expected
to construct the story from the links dropped by the author now and then. She had to
live in a one-room tenement in Bhowanipore. She would dream of the old house, her
parents, Jethamoshai [her uncle], her childhood (125) in Dhaka, but she could never
go there. The saga of partition and the attendant problems of refugees had no direct
impact on her life as she had left Dhaka long back. She had more pressing problems
in getting her son educated, declining the help offered by her sister. The next
happenings of her life her son getting employment in a private company, his
marriage, the birth of a grandson in 1952, her own retirement in 1962 as the
headmistress of the school she had joined are all revealed in an indirect way.
Thus Ghosh portrays Thamma as a typical middle-class Indian, suffering and
braving odds that confront her. She can be considered the real heroine of the novel

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with all her peculiarities. She is a sincere, heard working, and time-conscious lady for
whom wasting ones time is an inexcusable crime. She tells the narrator, her
grandson, that if one wastes time, it starts stinking. The typical middle-class Indian
mindset is revealed when she refuses help from her sister. As the narrator senses:
the fears she had accumulated in the long years after my
grandfathers premature death, when she had had to take her school
teaching job in order to educate my father : I could guess at a little of
what it had cost her then to refuse her rich sisters help and of the
wealth of pride it had earned her, and I knew intuitively that all that
had kept her from agreeing at once was her fear of accepting anything
from anyone that she could not return in exact measure.(33)
This mindset is in contrast with both upper and lower class of society as the
former is used to receiving favours, where as the latter cannot deny on account of its
helplessness. We can also sense a kind of a feminist in Thamma. For her, all men are
like Tridib: at heart she believed that all men would be like him if it were not for
their mothers and wives (6).As a teacher, she was sincere and innovative. She was
always working to develop new techniques and methods for the benefit of her
students. As the narrator says:
When she was headmistress my grandmother had decided once that
every girl who opted for Home Science ought to be taught how to cook
at least one dish that was a specialty of some part of the country other
than her own. It would be a good way, she thought, of teaching them
about the diversity and vastness of the country. (116)
Thammas character can be said to be a tribute to many unrecognized women
who are responsible for the growth and sustenance of family in our country. Though
she loves and shows concern for the narrator, she can never reconcile herself to the
breach in his character. When he visits her on hearing news of her ill health, she

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accuses him of his worshipping of Ila and visiting cheap women in Delhi. The
narrator is shocked at what he considers her cruelty. Adding to this, just before her
death, she writes a letter to the principal of the college where her grandson (the
narrator) is studying to oust him from the college, citing his unethical conduct. Of
course, the narrator is able to convince the principal of his conduct blaming the
sickness that might have affected Thammas reasoning faculty. The narrator thinks,
I have never understood how she learnt of the women I had visited a couple of times,
with my friends; nor do I know how she saw that I was in love with Ila so long before
I dared to admit it to myself (93).
Though Thammas is very strict as far as spending time is concerned till her
retirement, after that with stinking time, she gets deviated from her path. She gets
overpowered by her thoughts about family, her uncle in Bangladesh, and others. This
new change in her life costs her dearly, for this change claims a precious, young
life. Thamma takes up a mission in her old age. This is to find and bring back her
uncle Jethemoshai in Bangladesh. She says, It doesnt matter we recognize each
other or not. Were the same flesh, the same blood, the same bone, and now at last,
after all these years, perhaps will be able to make amends for all that bitterness and
hatred (129). She is at loss to understand the evil in humans. It is well said that old
bitterness cannot be put to an end, try how well one might be. But Thamma only
succeeds to meet Jethamoshai, now a man without any memory. At first he fails to
recognize her, but when Tridib reminds him of his connection with them, he suddenly
recognizes: The old mans face lit up. They died! he said, his voice quivering in
triumph. They had two daughters: one with a face like a vulture, and another one who
was as poisonous as a cobra but all pretty and goody-goody to look at(214).The
irony is this old man is spitting venom against the same people who have come to

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rescue him from the wretched life he has been leading. In this attempt, they are also
going to lose a very precious life! Thammas visit to Dhaka can be said to be her
hamartia and she has to pay for that. It is her new passion for relatives that brings
doom on them. Tridib, Jethamoshai, and Khalil, the rickshaw-puller get killed in the
communal frenzy when they try to return to India from Dhaka after convincing
Jethamoshai to accompany them. This tragic incident has its own bearing on the
psyche of Thamma, for her perception of human relations changes drastically indeed.
This lady, who has been talking about peaceful co-existence among people of
different countries hitherto, begins talking about a kind of pre-emptive strike to keep
Indians safe. She donates her gold chain to the fund for war. When the narrator
questions her about her decision of donating the chain, she emotionally says, We
have to kill them before they kill us; we have to wipe them out (237).
Childhood is one of the major themes of The Shadow Lines. Tridib, the
narrators older cousin, exerts a great influence on the narrator. The narrator looks at
the world with Tridibs eyes, which have a kind of detached sensibility. For the
narrator, Tridib is a perfect role model as he tries to identify himself with Tridib. The
narrator says, I was nervous now: I could see that he was waiting to hear what Id
have to say, and I didnt want to disappoint him(28).The narrators identity takes
shape in and through his responses to the characters he engages with and the
responses he elicits. He remains unnamed and the reader constructs his image and
physical traits by events narrated.
Great fiction bases itself on human psychology. This is quite natural. So, it
also appears some times that these novelists might have smuggled psychological
precepts from texts of psychology. In psychoanalytical literature, castration fear in
male children is a major theme. This is exploited by Tridib when he tells a story to the

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narrator and Robi: He (Tridib) had smiled and gone on to tell us in ghastly detail
about the circumcision rites of one of the desert tribes. And then, spectacles glinting,
he had said: So before you leave youd better decide whether you would care to have
all that done to your little wee-wees, just in case youre captured (19).There is also
what is known as coming together of complexes in childhood and growing. The
narrators relatives come from different places and with different stories to tell. The
complex has such a great impact on the narrator that he cannot think of these people
as his blood relations; he says,I could not bring myself to believe that their worth
in my eyes could be reduced to something so arbitrary and unimportant as a blood
relationship (3).This can be the reason why the narrator fails to establish any
relationship with Ila. He is noticed only when Ilas relationship with Nick gets
spoiled. The narrator falls a prey to inferiority complex when he compares himself
with Nick. Ila says, He is very big. Much bigger than you: much stronger too. Hes
twelve, three years older than us (49).Life changes for the narrator with this
encounter:
after that day Nick Price, whom I had never seen, and would, as far
as I knew, never see, became a spectral presence beside me in my
looking glass; growing with me, but always bigger and better, and in
some way more desirable I did not know what, except that it was so
in Ilas eyes and therefore true. (50)
The narrators relationship with Ila is only one sided. He wants Ila, but Ila is
not interested. Maybe the narrators middle-class family background is the reason.
Another significant peep into child-psychology is exemplified by the narrators
coming to know about Tradibs death. Tridib was very close to the narrator, as his
friend, philosopher, and guide. His influence on the narrator is immense. Yet when he
comes to know about his death, I felt nothing no shock, no grief. I did not

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understand that I would never see him again; my mind was not large enough to
accommodate so complete an absence (239).This feeling is also experienced by
many children. So, when a person dies, they innocently ask questions like Why are
you crying? or Why is grandpa lying like that? The elders cannot answer such
questions because they do not know what to say.
Irony of fate works in matters of love. Pain comes mainly because of love.
Love eludes definition. Love is a kind of emotion that centres on a single individual.
This individual could be mother, father, sister, brother, or any one. So, it is a wrong
notion that love exists only for a suitable mating partner or the opposite sex. Love has
a very wide scope and is very much misunderstood. Another aspect is that love
demands suspension of logic. Love and logic are natural enemies and so are love and
other rationalities equality, justice, etc. So, when one is irrational, the mindset will
be uncertain, exited, and confused. When an individual thinks only of himself/herself,
discarding others, control over emotional life gets disturbed. By looking at love from
this angle, one can say that the narrator is in love with Tridib, Thamma, and more so
with Ila, his eccentric cousin.
It may be appropriate to say here that the narrator fails to get back the love in
the same measure he shows to others. He gets what is known as reciprocity. Tridib
reciprocates his hero-worship to an extent; May drains the very meaning of his life: I
was jealous, achingly jealous, as only a child can be, because it had always been my
unique privilege to understand Tridib, and that day at the Victoria Memorial I knew I
had lost that privilege; somehow May had stolen it from me (170).With Thamma
also his relationship gets strained. This is because Thamma never changes her rules
or code of conduct. He tries to shake off the chains of his body: I jerked my head out
of her hands. She met my gaze and smiled. I could not believe that this withered,

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wasted, powerless woman was the same person that I had so much loved and feared
(91). This is how the relationship breaks. With Ila, there seems to be no way for any
reciprocity since she was not at all concerned about the narrator. In London, he spends
much time trying to talk to her, see her, and hear her speak but in vain. The narrator
explains the connection between love and human tendency to enumerate and
quantify (95).The novel here expresses the complexity of love. Love cannot be
purchased with gifts; it just happens. So, applying the ordinary ruler of wealth and
power to normalize it is a mistake. By applying the metaphors of normality, (96) we
expect justice in love. But it does not turn out that way. The narrator tries his best to
get Ilas attention and reciprocation. But, what he gets is:
She would open the door and say Nice to see you, come in, but I hope
youre not expecting any dinner and I would tell her, smiling brightly
Ive walked eight miles, it took me exactly two hours and ten minutes and
she would arch her eyebrows in surprise and say: Why? Is it some kind of
health kick? (96)
Ila does not reciprocate for the one who loves her so passionately. She loves Nick,
who is not sincere in his love. This is the baffling aspect of love.
The Shadow Lines suggests multiples ideas. It has to do with trans-border

situations. It has also got relevance to the civilization-growth and international

borders. The title suggests that all lines are shadow lines; they are not real. The very
notion of modern nation states has been questioned. According to the author these
lines only succeed in dividing people, not uniting them. The very concept of
nationhood is a mirage since it is not logically based. The lines drawn by nature in the
form of mountains, oceans, and rivers are real. But lines drawn by humans in the form
of borders are shallow and hence unjustifiable. Jethamoshai speaks well when

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Thamma and others ask him to return to India:
Once you start moving you never stop. Thats what I told my sons
when they took the trains. I said: I dont believe in this India-Shindia.
Its all very well, youre 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 any where. As
for me, I was born here, and Ill die here. (215)
Being rooted is a great idea and Amitav Ghosh conveys this through
Thamma. The message of living in ones own country is very subtly said in the
novel. Ilas sad experience is attributed to living in an alien land. It was bound to
happen; one can see that she has no right to be there; she does not belong there. But
for people like Ila, India does not hold any fascination. For her India is a backward
country full of superstitions, restrictions, and conservative outlook. She tells the
narrator that she wants to be part of greater events. The present culture has lost the
sanctity and has become shallow. This is what the author is trying to point out here.
An incident in the night club clearly illustrates this aspect. When Ila goes to a night
club with Robi and the narrator, she starts flirting with a two businessmen. Unable to
control himself, Robi pushes one of them. The mirth stops and the trio move out. Ila is
very annoyed and humiliated. She shouts:
Do you see now why Ive chosen to live in London? Do you see? Its
only because I want to be free.
Free of what? I said.
Free of you! She shouted back. Free of your bloody culture and free
of all of you. (88-89)
One view is that women are naturally attracted to power. They have the desire
to conquer the world through their mates. This may be partly because of the
restriction imposed on women to confine themselves to the house. This domestic

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domain seems to create cunningness in women. The narrator says that housewives
accumulate manipulative worldliness (169). Maybe it is their only tool of survival.
The author means to say that this is what happens if a woman is restricted to the
chores and domestic existence. However the role of housewife is depicted with all its
grace. The narrators mother showers great care and attention on his father. He enjoys
the bliss of conventional married life. There is a description of how the narrators
mother waits for her husband, how she brings the dress for him, how the wifely
atmosphere is so touching. According to Coomaraswamy, A single generation of
English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript
supercritical being deprived of all roots.3Ila seems to be a product of this kind of
education. She rejects her roots, her relatives, her cars, and servants in India and seeks
an identity for herself all alone in an alien land because she wants to be free (92).
This passage clearly portrays our present culture. The present generation
wants to be free free from commitments, free from relationships, free from
everything. Live for your own self that seems to be the motto. So naturally these
crazy generations cannot taste the nectar of true love, which demands surrender
without any conditions. The bliss of experiencing the true love is simply beyond their
reach.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of The Shadow Lines is the tension
between Hindu and Muslim communities as result of communal hatred and seeds of
partition. The riots that follow tensions lead to destruction of property, public as well
as private. But as long as one is a mere spectator to this violence, there seems to be
not much of a problem, but if one gets caught in this, s/he understands the real
problem. Riots and their components panic, fear, rumour, and hatred are shown to
be the same everywhere. The response of children to these riots is shown in vividness.

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They are struck with fear. The narrator says, The streets had turned themselves
inside out: our city had turned against us (203).
It is very difficult to say whether this novel has got an organic unity. The first
part consists of 16 sections, whereas the second part consists of 15 sections. There
seems to be no proper beginning, middle or ending. As Nivedita Bagchi observers:
The story or the chief narrative line evolves sporadically and is constantly
interrupted and diverted by other narratives. The only fixed centre is that of the chief
narrative voice through whom the other narratives are filtered.4 For example the
narrator shuttles between Calcutta and London and also across the loom of time from
1981 to 1960s on to 1940 and even earlier. The revelation of Tridibs death to the
narrator has a great impact It is a timeless moment in the shattered psyche of the
entire family.
This novel is also great because of its kaleidoscopic presentation of India. The
authors compassion for India, albeit with his own reservations, does not leave him.
The importance of Hindi songs, the role of cricket in India, Indian womens love for
gold and ornaments everything is put beautifully in this book. The narrator, for
example, wants to see Ila in western outfits. If she wears the typical Bengali dress
white sari with red border for him she looks just like an ordinary next-door girl. He
repeatedly comments on her western dresses: She was wearing clothes the like of
which I had never seen before, English clothes (43). Again, She looked improbably
exotic to me, dressed in faded blue jeans and a T shirt like no girl I had ever seen
before except in pictures in American magazines(81).
The male domain of watching girls and women also known as bird watching
is very beautifully described. The cultural connotations come to the mind if one
reads the narrators account of watching Ila: She was walking slowly, looking down

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at the pavement, preoccupied, oblivious of the people who stopped to stare at her. I
pushed myself back against the pillar, willing her not to see me; I wanted to watch her
walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible (180).Valuable information about
women in India and women in general can also be got by reading The Shadow Lines.
The narrators mother is fascinated by Saheb and his power when this gentleman talks
with her: My mother was touched that so important and distinguished a man should
take so keen an interest in such trivial and unlikely matters (40-41).
Ghosh seems to acknowledge in this novel that he no longer believes that a
remedy for the worlds ills can be found by escaping into a world of imagination
where all lines between human beings are merely shadow lines; or into a
reconstructed past, as In An Antique Land; or into a transcendental state of
immorality, as in The Calcutta Chromosome.
It is pronounced that The Shadow Lines is a memory novel where the shadow
of the past over-hangs the present. No character is able to detach itself from the past
and present its identity to the present, i.e., their identity is marred by the past. All the
deep burned secrets of the past present themselves nakedly to every character and thus
help them to construct a new future for themselves which is more meaningful. Time is
boundless and limitless in this novel, and as Mary Mount remarks about Amitav, He
is the most original of the lot. No body links time and space like him. Hell stand the
test of time.5
The Shadow Lines uses the notion of the double with all its connotations of

complicity, betrayal, love, guilt, and mystery as its structural narrative centre. The
obvious reference is to Joseph Conrads famous story The Shadow Line. The first
person singular nameless narrator of the story is the mirror image of the self of Tridib.
In fact, as we read the novel, we come across twin heroes one hero narrating the

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story and the other participating in the action. As it has already been stated, the story
begins even before the narrator is born, and, significantly, he is not given any name.
The story is of the individual self sucked into history and public events; as a
consequence, absurdly enough one is either totally obliterated like Tridib or left badly
scarred like the narrator. Ghosh draws heavily from his personal experience and
brings in collision personal lives and public happenings with locales shifting and
merging between Calcutta, London, and Dhaka.
Amitav Ghosh creates from the world within and from the world without. The
narrator of the novel goes into the self turns inwards in search of meaning out of the
irrationality and absurdity of the prevailing human condition. He questions the very
idea of political freedom in the modern world and the force of nationalism which
draws in innumerable shadow lines between people and places and becomes the
source of terrifying violence annihilating the self. In The Shadow Lines, Ghoshs own
self manifests itself in the form of the twin protagonists Tridib and the narrator
investigating the individual self against the forces of history and worlds political
reality. Because the individual self is more and more endangered in the modern
world, the autobiographical element in the modern fiction has become more
pronounced. For the discovery of the self, both past and future beyond ones
immediate experiences are required. Howard Wolf observes :
The field of experience beyond ones immediate boundaries both past
and future becomes a more demanding standard by which the self
discovers and tests itself in looking inward or outward, the
autobiographical writer finds traces of its opposite : Self yields history,
history yields self. In either case, the writer is tested :In discovering
history in the self, the writers conscience is tested, for he must now
judge his actions by a scale larger than his own; by discovering self in

73
history, the autobiographical writer must face the impersonality of his
experience, wound to the ego.6
This is very true of all writers, particularly of writers of fiction.
Amitav Ghosh alternates past and present to place the self in history
history that unfolds the full meaning of the present and an insight into future. The
nameless narrator goes to England on a years research grant to collect material from
the Indian Office for a PhD thesis on the Textile Trade between India and England in
the Nineteenth Century. He meets May, Tridibs English girl-friend seventeen years
after her own visit to India. While eating dinner at Mays place, the narrator discovers
that in 1959 when Tridib was twenty seven and May nineteen they had begun a long
correspondence which developed into an intimate relationship. That night the narrator
comes to know that Tridib had received Mays photograph the day he told his friends
at Gole Park the made-up story of his relatives in London and his marriage with May.
The story in the novel is told in the first person. The Calcutta locale and
environs of the upper middle class family are portrayed with authenticity and
vividness, and yet the protagonist remains, strangely enough, a vague, undefined,
unobtrusive, and unassertive person almost to the very end. The story moves back and
forth in an extremely unusual but effective association of incidents; the protagonist is
almost always present. But he is never the prime mover nor apparently crucially
essential to the action. But he is there; always as a consciousness within which
everything exists.
This passivity, almost anonymity, perplexes the reader but never really annoys
him. Somehow the reader is made to sense that this anonymity is deliberate and is a
consequence of a serious purpose. It is almost at the very end that the protagonist
emerges from the shadows, the shadows of Ila and Tridib and it is then that we realize

74
why he had been kept away from the focus. We are never allowed to get fully
acquainted with the protagonist because he himself had not fully recognized or
understood himself. The novel, therefore, is a quest to explore and to come to terms
with his (the narrators) self-consciousness and the moral milieu and the intellectual
climate which have shaped his consciousness. As he so tellingly says, I no longer
existed, but as a chronicle (112).
He sets out with no preconceived notions or predetermined categories, but he
explores his heart and those of others, who, he feels, are extensions of his own self; he
ransacks his own memory so that he may discover and come to terms with himself.
The multifarious infrastructure of The Shadow Lines chronological,
geographical, cultural, and political is broad enough to make it, with in its
limitations, something like a microcosm of the world. Its events and characters extend
over some countries which are on the whole more important for us than the others
India (undivided and divided), England, and the USA. The India of the novel, its
main threatre, extends in time from the early thirties to the middle sixties with a
profoundly illuminating extension up to the late seventies, thus splashing on the
screen of the novel the period of half-a-century from the 1930s to the late 70s, a
momentous period of events involving characters belonging to different countries, age
groups, mental make-ups and social strata, and focusing on a large family initially
united, then divided and then, after a re-union too brief, ending with a chilling
tragedy. But noticeably, neither its protagonist nor the narrator live through the whole
period one dying too early and the other being born too late. This unusual
structuring makes the narration with an omniscient narrator a challenge, and also
suggests that the real emphasis of the novel is neither on the plot nor on characters as
such but on the ideas and concepts. The protagonist Tridib the etymology of whose

75
name (Tridev) implying a combination of all the three deities of creation,
preservation, and annihilation followed by a new creation seems to suggest the
eternity and indivisibility of time, while the anonymity of the narrator, who
pervading the whole universe of what he sees, what he hears and what he imagines
may be interpreted as a symbol of space which fills and permeates the whole universe
indulging all its objects from their outside to their very depth.
The multi-faceted perspective of the narrator seems to bear a close
resemblance to that of the cosmopolitan author who in his different works moves
from place to place. T.S. Eliot expresses the continuum of time in his Four Quartets
thus :
Time present and time past
Are both present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.7
It may be told that foretelling the future or recalling the past of an unknown person is
not possible. But literary authors have made at least the backward travel in time
possible through the uncoiling of memory and the play of imagination. Ghosh has
manipulated what is material through these speedy psychological processes which
appear to compete with the speed of light. The narration is remarkably fine tuned with
the present intermingled with the past so inextricably that it is difficult to separate the
one from the other:
Those empty corners filled up with remembered forms, with the ghosts
who had been handed down to me by time: the ghost of nine-year-old
Tridib, sitting on a camp bed, just as I was, his small face intent,
listening to the bombs; the ghost of Snipe in that far corner, near his
medicine chest, worrying about his dentures; the ghost of the eightyear-old Ila, sitting with me under that vast table in Raibajar. They
were all around me, we were together at last, not ghosts at all: the

76
ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance for that is all
that a ghost is, a presence displaced in time. (181)
I see it in the mouths of the ghosts that surround me in the cellar: of
Snipe, telling it to Tridib, of Tridib telling it to Ila and me, in that
underground room in Raibajar; I see myself, three years later, taking
May, the young May, to visit the house in Raibajar the day before she
left for Dhaka with my grandmother and Tridib.(185-186)
Thus we see that time seems to exist in one block through which one can
travel from the future to the present and the past and back to a more distant future.
Imagination or memory in fiction makes time-travel a reality unlike the one in
Einsteins theory in which one has to perform the impossible, viz., exceeding the
velocity of light. Ghosh combines memories of characters to make the past more
realistic, as in the case of the snake seen by Ila and the incident probably described to
the narrator already.
The issues such as time, freedom, and history are related to postmodernist
thought. Jean-Francois Lyotard defines Postmodernism as incredulity towards met
a narratives.8The politics of the postmodern thus includes debunking absolute truths
and realities; focusing on differences rather than totalities. The novel also focuses on
various aspects of freedom, which are treated as a number of competing discourses.
The narrative form, time sequence, and plot merge together to highlight the
ambivalence of the above mentioned issues. The narrative does not follow a linear
pattern of time sequence and arrangement of incidents. The back and forth movement
of the narrative and the story told in scattered pieces reflect the fragmental thought
processes of the narrators mind. The incidents are scattered in time as well as space.
There is a sudden shift from Calcutta to Dhaka to London without an account of a
proper sequence of time, which ranges from 1939 (the year Tridib first went to

77
England) to 1964 (the year Tridib died) and 15 years after that when the mystery of
Tridibs death is resolved. Similarly, the narrator is a child or an adolescent at times,
while at other times he is a mature adult.
The Shadow Lines are not only boundaries between nations; they are also the
lines which separate human beings from one another. Moreover, they are deceptive
(therefore shadow lines) because the most intimate relationships end in distaste and
estrangement ( Ila and the narrator), and surprisingly strangers across-the-seas
become most intimate friends (Tridib and May).Time, space, human emotions, and
even freedom are dynamic forces. Therefore, every notion of freedom is as fictitious
as it is real.
The narrative attempts at breaking away from constraints of time and space;
nevertheless it forms a coherent whole. Through the coherent plot Ghosh tries to show
the incoherence of reality which can only be grasped in the process of narrativizing.
Thus, within a single story, the writer shows how each character lives in the story of
his/her making. As mentioned earlier, the novel is divided into two sections. The first
section, Going Away, ends with the narrators coming face to face with Ilas
indifference towards him. It also ends on a note that Ila possessed his life and her
going away meant death to him. The second section, Coming Home, ends with the
narrators regaining self-possession; his getting over his love for Ila, union with May,
and acceptance of Tridibs death. The incidents taking place in India as well as abroad
are scattered all over the novel. Yet they are coherent and create a structured plot.
Infact, difference or distance of one place from another does not matter for any
character in the novel. Even the grandmother ultimately finds her own old Dhaka in
the large complex of the new city. She basically embodies the union of the two places,
Calcutta, and Dhaka. Her visit to Dhaka is both going and coming to the

78
amusement of others coming to her ancestral house for the first time as a bride
and going as a widow. Her paradoxical status as a widowed bride and her choice
of a plain white sari with red border are symbolic of the underlying unity of time and
place which, though initially puzzling to her, harmonizes remarkably well. Spatial
oneness seems to emerge from the authors division of the novel into two parts.
Going and coming, used probably for Calcutta and Dhaka, seems to demonstrate
that the man-made divisions of space are artificial artistically, scientifically, and
philosophically.
Eudora Weltys observation, made in another context in the article Place in
Fiction, seems to be quite relevant here: There are as many ways of seeing a place
as there are pairs of eyes to see it. Some times two places, two countries are brought
to bear on each other and the heart of the novel is heard beating most plainly, most
passionately, most personally when two places are at meeting point.9 Dhaka seems to
be the crucible in which the relativistic discourse of the novel is tested and clarified. It
is here that the heart of the novel beats most fervently, which, with the changing
contexts of the three dimensions, seems to become four-dimensional at least for the
grandmother, who reconciles herself only when she reaches the Dhaka of her
nostalgic past.
The Shadow Lines is a perfect specimen of partition. It has the story woven

around the narrators grandmother, Tridib, Ila, and May Price, with the pendulum of
memory swinging from past into present and back into past. Every characters deeds
and actions leave an imprint on the mind of the other characters thereby helping the
novel to grow and surpass the rigid barrier of time, place, and action. The narrative of
the novel forces the reader to feel and understand various delicate issues like partition,
inter-personal relationships, and religious cults. The narrator is always in awe of his

79
cousin Tridib and looks upon him as his role model. Ila, his niece who had been
brought up in an aristocrat atmosphere of London, loves nothing but her freedom
which the Indian culture always denies her. May Price an alien possessed of love for
India would be going to Delhi and Agra first and then to Calcutta before flying to
Dhaka. But the most impressive character who helps the narrative weave around the
concept of memory and socio-political situation is the grandmother, who, after
serving as headmistress, retires and begins her journey on roads of the faded
memories, remembering her house in Dhaka.
The ghost of bygone times always continues to cling to every person in the
novel, which never permits the novelist to lose touch with the fact that the memory
forms the basis of the entire novel: I cannot remember when it happened, any more
than I remembered when I first learnt to tell the time or tie my shoe laces (3).The
very beginning seems to set the view into a clear perspective:
When I go past Gole Park now I often wonder whether that would
happen today. I dont know, I cant tell: that world is closed to me,
shut off by too many years spent away: Montu went away to America
years ago and Nathu Choubey, I heard, went back to Banaras and
started a hotel. When I walk past his paan-shop now and look at the
crowds thronging through those neon-lit streets, the air-conditioned
shops filled with rickety stalls and the tarpaulin counters of pavement
vendors, at the traffic packed as tight as a mail train all the way to the
Dhakuria overbridge, somehow, though the paan-shop hasnt changed,
I find myself doubting it.(7-8)
A shadow line hovers between imagination and reality. The interpersonal
relationships are partly based on imagination and partly on reality, and when they are
retold they are re-lived as well. The narrators silent love for Ila always makes him
have a protective disposition towards her. Ila, according to the grandmothers

80
thinking, is a greedy slut, living in America only for money and comforts. But the
narrators love always shields her from all these accusations of the grandmother: She
has to live on pocket money; she doesnt have the money to buy things like that.
She spends her spare time going on demonstrations and acting in radical plays for
Indian immigrants in east London (79).
In The Shadow Lines, the meaning of what happens is the central concern.
People and events encountered in childhood are brought into focus when the adult
narrator views them from a perspective of cumulative knowledge. This novel is also
famous for its debate on partition. As Kushwant Singh observes: Its the best work
on partition. It operates at many levels memories, boundaries et al that one is totally
soaked in his narrative.10

The novel also discusses nationalism at length. We can

say that Thammas nationalism is quite different from the dictionary meaning. The
Shadow Lines undercuts nationalism by questioning history, the official version of

history, on which the idea of a nation is constructed. However, as far as offering

solutions to the problems of nationalism are concerned, the novel refuses to oblige.
For an understanding of the novels stance vis--vis nationalism, one has to begin by
analyzing Thammas concept of nationalism and what constitutes her nationalism.
Hutchinson and Smith observe:
Nationalism was, first of all, a doctrine of popular freedom and
sovereignty. The people must be liberated that is, free from any
external constraints; they must determine their own destiny and be
masters in their own house; they must control their own sources; they
must obey only their inner voice. But that entailed fraternity. The
people must be united; they must dissolve all internal differences; they
must be gathered together in a single historic territory, a homeland; and
they must have legal equality and share a single public culture 11

81
Thammas idea of nationalism comprises almost all the above-mentioned
characteristics. She is exited at the idea of doing something: Ever since she heard
those stories, she had wanted to do something for the terrorists, work for them in a
small way, steal a little bit of their glory for herself (39). Thammas brand of
nationalism is that which
shunts other people out; which defines Us against Them. To call
yourself Australian or Chilean or Sri Lankan is to draw a psychological
as well as physical boundary around yourself, and those who claim the
same national identity. The fact that we are inside that boundary, or
border necessarily means that they are outside it.12
For Thamma anyone not living in India is an outsider and hence should be
suspected. It is this abstract entity of nationalism that inspires her to bring the old man
to India: Poor old man . Imagine what it must be to die in another country,
abandoned and alone in your old age (135).
The views of Thamma are reminiscent of Earnest Renans idea of a nation
propounded in his famous essay Quest cequune nation? published in 1882. For
Renan,
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two things, actually,
constitutes this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is
the present. One is in the possession of a rich legacy of remembrances;
the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to
continue to value the heritage which all holds in common. A heroic
past is the social principle on which the national idea rests. To have
common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have
accomplished great things together; to wish to do so again, that is the
essential for being a nation. 13
By highlighting the fact that even after partition there might not be any
difference between the two regions across the border, the novel questions the ideology

82
of nationalism. By stressing the identity rather than the differences across the border,
the novel questions the primordial view of nationalism the view that the
grandmother holds. Paul R. Brass observes that from the primordial point of view
Hindus and Muslims, due to the cultural differences, were destined to separate into
two distinct nations. He states:
From the primordial point of view, which was also the view of Muslim
separatism, Hindus and Muslims constituted in pre-modern times
distinct civilizations destined to develop into separate nations once
political mobilizations took place. The differences between the two
cultures were so great that it was not conceivable that assimilation of
the two could take place and that a single national culture could be
created to which both would contribute. The contrary view is that the
cultural and religious differences between Hindus and Muslims were
not so great as to rule out the creation of either a composite national
culture or at least a secular political union in which those aspects of
group culture that could not be shared would be relegated to the private
sphere. From this point this point of view, Muslim separation was not
pre-ordained, but resulted from the conscious manipulation of selected
symbols of Muslim identity by Muslim elite groups in economic and
political competition with each other and with the elite among
Hindus.14
The narrative undercuts the view based on the difference between the created regions
in the subcontinent by highlighting the similarities between Dhaka and Calcutta: after
partition the two cities are seen as an inverted image of each other (223).
The narrative accomplishes the task of undercutting the ideology of
nationalism by questioning the received/official version of history. The various
characteristics of the primordial view of nationalism, as exemplified through
Thamma, have a common basis or emerge from a common source, that of history. In

83
fact the whole idea of a nation-state revolves around history. The idea of nationalism
nourishes on past glories :
Simon Bolivar in Colombia, Juan and Evitaperon in Argentina,
Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi in India, are all used as icons
on which to hang the emotions of current nationalisms. In former
Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic linked old stories about Croat
atrocities with promises of Serbian greatness to fill the emotional and
economic hole left by Titos death. The ultra-right nationalist Vladimir
Zhirinovsky continually harks back to Russias for men greatness to
harness current discontent. 15
Some critics seem to be of the view that the ending of the novel is mawkish.
This criticism seems to be unwarranted. This novel is enriched as a version of
bildungsroman, and the ending adds to its rich texture. Thus, the ending leaves the
reader with the sense that reality or history is but provisional. The Shadow Lines ends
but does not conclude. It raises serious questions about our roots, our identities, and at
the same time questions: Why war? Why riots? Why partition? Why borders? Why
Shadow Lines? Here we may invoke the spirit of a very worldly philosopher, the great
twentieth century economist John Maynard Keynes, who once raised a toast
proclaiming economists to be the guardians, not of civilization, but of the possibility
of civilization.16 This honour can also be handed over to Amitav Ghosh.

84
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Basavaraj Naikar. Indian English Literature: Vol.I. New Delhi: Atlantic
Publishers and Distributors, 2002.93.
2) Joshi, u. Narrative Techniques in The Shadow Lines.Interpretations: Amitav
Ghoshs The Shadow Lines ed. Nityanandan et al. New Delhi: Creative

Books, 2000.112.
3) Neogy, Alpana. Two Exiles and One at Home: A Study of The Shadow Lines
in Novy Kapadia ed. Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines. New Delhi:
Asia Book Club, 2001. 219.
4) Bagchi, Nivedita. The Process of Validation in Relation to Materiality and
Historical Reconstruction in Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines.
Modern Fiction Studies, 39.1, Winter 1993. 188.

5) Bhatia, Meetu. Amitav Ghosh: Transfiguration of Memory in The Shadow

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New Delhi: Rawat Publications. 2002. 262.

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7) Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.
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publishers, 1998. 509-10.

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