CHAPTER THREE

THE SHADOW OF LINES

 The Shadow of Lines

The Shadow Lines would be a remarkable novel by any a

standards. Indeed many facile adjectives such as 'cerebral',

Cunputdownable' and 'well-wrought' . spring to mind. For

sheer craft and compelling story-telling, few recently

produced 'Indian' novels touch it. With nothing identifiably

'Indian' .details of time and place and history, the

nationality successfully to join an order of world fiction.

Louis James comments on the artistic and thematic

" quality of The, Shadow Lines:

Ghosh's novel introduces a family "tree," but

it not the legally-defined family of European

society, of Galsworthy's fotsyte Saga or Thomas

Mann's Buddenbooks—rather it is the Asian extended

family of loyalties, affections and associations.

This becomes so complex that even the narrator

confesses confusion and the novel is to some

extent about the meaning of family relationships

in a disintegrating world.1

The narrative of The Shadow Lines skims or pauses over

a crowded -tapestry of the past spanning of years from 1939

to 1979. The novel begins when the first person na'rrator,

[ 84 ]
who is never named, is about eight years old, living in

Calcutta, ID admiring Tridib, his intellectual uncle, who

is about twenty-nine. Certainly it records with vividness

the inner life of the growing child, but Tridib, who

shapes the narrator's youthful personality and Ila, his

beautiful cousin who almost defeat it, could really be

called the most important people in the novel. We summarize

the novel in the words oLRobert Dixon:

The narrator's family are. Hindus who fled from

their home in Dhaka to Calcutta after the formation

of East Pakistan. There, during the Second World

War, when Europe itself lies in ruins, they

befriend an English family, the Price's and the

two families are woven together by a complex

series of cultural crossings. Mrs. Price's

father, Lionel Tresawson, lived in India before

Independence, and is a type of the travelling

Englishman, having left his home in Cornwall to

travel widely in the Empire:In Malaysia, Fiji,

Ceylon and finally Calcutta. The narrator's

uncle, Tridib, went to London and lived with the

Prices during the war. ... He is writing

shortly after his return to Calcutta from

England,where he too becomes involved with the

Prices. . .for in the narrator's recollections

the lives of three generations of his family are

woven together, as are the cities in which their

l

lives have been acted out: Dhaka, Calcutta and

London.2

[ 85 ]
 So far, Amitav Ghosh writes about the narrator's family

and the Prices before India's Independence. He goes on to

write the latter half thus:

The second part of the novel climaxes in the

narrator's return visit to the family home in

Dhaka in 1964' with But this homecoming abounds

Ironies.His grandmother wants to bring her uncle

back from' Pakistan, the land of their Muslim

enemies,. to her home in Calcutta-but Pakistan

is her real home, the goal of her ritual homecoing.

She is nostalgic for the "classical" conception

of cultures. She believes that her children

should not be mixing with English people, and is

particularly critical of the narrator's cousin

Ila for living in England. . . . But when the

grandmother looks down from the plane as they

pass from India into Pakistan in 1964, she is

surprised that there is no visible border on the

ground........ The elderly relative in Dhaka

delivers the final blow to her view of the world

when he refuses to back go to Calcutta, even

denying its existence in reality. . . .3

He Says :

I don't believe in this India-Shindia. It's all

very well, you're going away now, but suppose

when you get there they decide to draw another

line somewhere! What will you do then? Where

[ 86 ]
 will you move to? No one will have you anywhere.

As for me, I was born here, and I'll die here.4

After this trip to Pakistan, the narrator looks at

Tridib'sold the distances between nations with a on the

distinction between memory, human experience and national

boundaries. He realizes' that the Euclidean space of the

atlas has nothing to do with cognitive and cultural space:

I was struck with wonder that there had’ really

been a time, not so long ago, when people,

sensible people, of good intention, had thought.

. that there was a special enchantment in

lines. . . . They had drawn their borders,

believing in that pattern, in the enchantment

of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had

etched their borders upon the map, the two,bits

of land, would sail away from each other like the

shifting tactonic plates of the prehistoric

Gondwanaland. What had they felt I wonde-red,

when they discovered that. . . there had never

been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of

that map when the places we know as Dhaka and

Calcutta were more closely bound to each other

than after they had drawn their lines.5

These ideas are summed up in the final act of the

novel, the sexual union between May Price and the narrator

on his last night in London, through which he is granted

"the glimpse of ... a final redemptive mystery"6—the

[ 87 ]
mystery of lived human experience that transcends the

artificial borders of nation and race.

Arjya Sircar says: 4"The major concern of the

novel, the theme if you like, is easy and difficult

to define. To me The Shadow Lines appears to be

a quest novel-a contemporary consciousness in

search of self-knowledge and self-identity."7

In this novel, we are, first of all, concerned

with the quest of Ha in self-knowledge and self-

identity. She belongs to a new generation of

post-colonial anglophiles who, like Srinivas of

Kamala Markandaya's The Nowhere Man, belongs

neither to one's motherland nor to an adopted

country. She represents a vast majority of the

Indian youth who, enamoured of the West, tap

impatient heels at their Oriental anchorage. No

wonder her mother prefers butler English plain

Hindi to while SlJeaking to her India maid:

"Shatup Ram Dayal. . . . Stop bukbukking like a

Chokra- boy."8 Grandma nicknames her Queen-

Victoria. In Bengal, even today, a pompous,

snobbish, showy, woman is derisively called Rani ;

Victoria. j
i
!
i

Ha's father was with the UN and a university in the

North of England. Ha's mother was "the daughter of a man

who had left his village in Barisal in rags and gone.on to I

earn a Knighthood in the old Indian civil service."9-The

narrator in the novel says about Ha's father:

[ 88 ]
 It was my grandmother's thyory that the Shaheb's

wardrobe was divided into sets of hangers, each

with its own label: Calcutta zamindar, Indian

diplomat, English gentleman, would-be Nehru,

K.

South Club Tennis player, Non-Aligned Statesman,

and so on. It was certainly true that there was

always a rigorous completeness about the Shaheb's

appearance: in Calcutta the fall of his dhoti

was always perfect-s traight and starched-the

top button of his kurta open in an exact

equilateral triangle. . . whatever he wore,

there was always a drilled precision about his.

clothes. ... He looks like a dressed-up doll

in a shop window....... 10 The narrator, writes

about Ha's dress: "She was weanng clothes the

like of which I had never seen before, English

clothes, a white smock with an applique giraffe

that had its hooves resting on the hem while its

neck stretched almost as far up as her chin."11

Pannikar aptly describes the type of the

anglicized Hindus:

They aristocratic middle class) conversed

in the morning like English gentlemen.

Admission to prestigious schools in.England was

highly sought after and a degree from. either

Oxford or Cambridge became the ultimate in

intellectual attainment.12

Agarwalla comments on this type of Anglophiles:

[ 89 ]
 This madness for phorenophilia is a common

characteristic of the anglicized' Bengali elite,

soaked in everything English, a lapdog of British

imperialism. The Chatterjees of Vikram Seth's A

Suitable Boy belong to this anglicized upper-

middle class Calcutta society.13

The Subaltern School, led by Ranjit Guha, speaks of this

upper-middle class and its role shaping India's

historiography:

The historiography of Indian nationalism has

for a long time been elitism-colonial dominated'

by elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism. .

. . Both these varieties of elitism share the

prejudice that the making of Indian nation and

the development of the consciousness-nationalism-

which informed this process were exclusively or

predominantly elite achievements.14

These bourgeois- elites figure in the Chatterjees and the

family of the "Shahebs." Having the privilege of acquiring

degrees from English universities and exploiting their

positions in the elite-dominated post-independence’ India,

Ha's father enjoys an unprecedented position a and prestige,

denied to subaltern. But these elites, though born in

India, have no sense of belonging to her. A. N. Kaul says:

"It is true ' that for the privileged Datta Chaudhuri's

nationality has ceased to have any significance and crossing

national frontiers means nothing more to them than a

[ 90 ]
smooth transition through customs and immigration at

identical airports."15

Into such a family Ila was born, brought up, educated,

and moulded. Ila had a lot of friends outside India. She

had visited a number of countries with her parents. The

narrator tells about them:

All through her childhood. . . . her family. .

brought back souvenirs. . . . But there was

one kind of souvenir that Ila over thought of

bringing back. They were the Yearbooks of the

International Schools she of whatever city

happened to be.living in. . . . They were always

full of photographs.16

Nivedita Bagchi observes: "The.yearbook photographs, with

their fixed space-time co-ordinates, validate or invalidate

Ha's narrative of Jamshed Tabrizi, Teresa Cassano and

Mercedes Aquilar."17

Ila rejects everything that is Indian and tries to seek

an identity for herself in an alien land: "Do you see now

why I've chosen to live in London? It's only because I

want to be free. Free of your bloody culture and free 'of

all of you."18 She yells, as she is dragged out of the

hotel dance-floor • where she has started dancing with an

unknown businessman. Her cousin Robi checks her outrageous

behaviour by saying: "Girls don't behave like that there.

. . . There are certain things you can't Dohere; that's

our culture."19 She does not want to remain a 'Vedic Dasi."

[ 91 ]
This is one aspect of her character. Following footsteps

of the Western feminists, she adopts some un-Indian cultural

props which Robi asks her not to use in Calcutta, the

nineteenth century England,

New women writers adopted the cigarette an

aesthetic prop, which accompanies the quest for

new words and new forms, the effort to describe

the elusive and enigmatic nature of female

sexuality, feminine consciousness, or feminine

art. . . . For New Woman writers, smoking was a

defiant enactment of Pater's famous aesthetic

injunction to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.20

On the other hand, Bankimchandra Chatterjee assigned a

role to women which required that women control and sublimate

their sexuality in order to "energize men who might easily

fall into temptations otherwise." For Swami Dayanand,

"the function of . . . women. . . was to procreate healthy

progeny"21 to regenerate what was seen as a weakened Aryan

race. "Regardless of the differences in their specific

formulations," says Anuradha Dingwaney Needham,

what comes through clearly is their fear of and

anxiety about women's uncon trolled sexuality

which is then contained by being garnered for

affecting the regeneration of 'Hindu' men and

thus the success of the nationalist cause.22

The post-Independence Indian Indo-English woman writers,

like their counterparts in the Western world, has chosen

[ 92 ]
to overthrow the concept of woman as "Vedia Dasi." Kamala

Das, for example, presents in her works resistant women

characters who exploit their sexuality in their bid for

advancement, thereby reversing the Hindu idealization of

women generally and the nationalistic discursive construct

of a benevolent and protective Mother India specifically.

Kamala Das's Manasi in Alphabet of Lus is the antithesis

of the chaste, Sita-like Brahminic feminine ideal which

informed the Indian independence struggle.

In the 1986 collection Flesh and Paper, which Suniti

Namjoshi co-authored with her lover Gillian Han'scombe,

repeatedly likens her "quest for.an identity as a lesbian,

feminist, diosporic Indian to the search for a.country,

writing, albeit in hesitant interrogatives.

Ila, in The Shadow Lines, is not a "Vedic Dasi" and,

therefore, she castigates Indian culture for prohibiting

her dance with an anonymous businessman. Ila Is Manasi of

Kamala Das and Namjoshi's personhood. All three represent

the voice of feminism in the India of the eighties of the

last century.

The narrator contrasts the cross-cultural perspectives

of Tridib and Ila at several places in the novel. For

instance:

I tried to tell her, but neither then nor later,

though we talked about it often, did I ever

succeed in explaining to her that I could not

forget because Tridib had given me worlds to

[ 93 ]
 travel in and he had given me eyes to see them

with; she, who had been travelling around the

world since she was child, could understand

what those hoursnever in Tridib's room had meant

to me, a boy who had never been more than a few

hund'red miles from Calcutta. I used to listen

' v.

to per talking sometimes with her father and

grandfather about the cafes in the Plaza Mayor

. in Madrid, or the crispness of the air in Cuzco,

and I could see that those names, which were to

. a set. of magical talismans me because Tridib

had pointed them out to me on his tattered Old

Bartholomew's Atlas, had for her familiarity no

less dull than the lake had for me and my

friends..... .23

The English racism rears its head in the Shadow Lines.

She is being beaten up by the English racists, like the

beating of Srinivas iri Markandaya's The Nowhere Man. Like

Srinivas Ila does not return to India. She, subsequently,

did her BA in History at. the University College in London,

took up a job in an office and married Nick Price whom.she

had known for years.

Ha's liberated gestures and overtly off-beat demeanour

arouse Tha'mma's- contemptuous dislike for her. She had

said:

Ila has no right to live there (England).... She

doesn't belong there. It took those people a long

[ 94 ]
 time to build that country. . . . Everyone who

lives there has earned his right to be there with

blood. . . . They know they area nation because

they're drawn their borders with blood.24

In spite of that, Ila lives in London. Ila teaches her

cousin to play Houses with her in the dark basement' of the

family house in the village. Then she talks about Nick

Price, with whom she has evidently played this game

before and whom she described as coming to her rescue when

she is attacked by a group of racist children in London.

It is only late'r that the narrator learns what the reality

was like: that Nick was ashamed of her and had certainly

not gone to her - aid. at all. In spite of this, Ha's

infatuation and marriage with Nick materializes.

As to the dislike of Ila by Tha'mma' and the former's

unfitness to be a resident of England, Tha'mma' judgement

of Ila is wrong. The grandmother lived a period Of terrorist

movement of Bengal. Her desire was to live a free life.

Therefore, the desire of Ila to live in London, rootless,

free of middle class constraints and taboos was disliked

by the grandmother. Ila also has radical'friends in London,

who I picket on political issues. Dan the Trotskyrite who

wrote anti- Nazi pamphlets and Tresawsen who edited a

lefter wing newsletter. Like the grandmother's nationalism,

Nick Price's nationalism has a face. Nick Price gave up a

lucrative chartered accountant's job in Kuwait because of

outdated management practices and interfering Arab business

partners. He still clings to Britain's colonial past. If

t 95 ]
the grandmother is violent so is Ila. In Virginia Woolf,' •

we find the relevant passage:

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be

satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action;

and they will make it if they cannot find it. Women

are supposed to be very calm generally: but women

feel just as men feel; they need exercise for-

their faculties and a field for their effort as

much as their brothers do; they suffer from too

rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,

precisely as men would suffer. . . . It is thoughtless

to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to

do more or learn more than custom has pronounced

unnecessary for their sex.25

■We quote Erich Fromm also:

To feel completely alone and•isolated leads to

mental disintegration. ... An individual may

be alone in a physical sense for many years and

yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at

least social patterns that give him a feeling of

communion and "belonging. "On the otherhand, he

may live among people and yet be overcome with

an utter feeling of isolation. . . . This lack

of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we

may call' moral aloneness. . .. The kind of

relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial,

but even being related to the basest kind of

pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.26

[ 96 ]
 Two views presented finally sum up the quest of Ila for

personal freedom. The grandmother condemns Ila for living

in London. Ila suffered from the middle class social mores

and taboos in India and she decided to exercise her

faculty- elsewhere, that is England. Therefore she develops

friendship with Nick and her radical friends. In India,

she would have stagnated.

Some scholars write that she was alone in London. This

is not a correct of Ila. She was neither physically alone

nor morally alone. She had attached herself to some ideas,

values, which gave her a sense of "belonging" in London.

On the other hand, she lived with her relatives in India

for sometime but bereft of ideas, values, she felt aloneness

in India.

Ila's quest for a space of her own should be studied

even when she was a schoolgirl. Amitav Ghosh brings it out

very deftly. For a schoolgirl, schools are all that matter.

Ila lives in the present. She has no regard for jnemory-

either personal or cultural. Her imagination leads her

into error, and her inventions become self-frustrating

wish-fulfilment when, in school, she is harried and badgered

by the racist Denise. She expects Nick Price to come to

her rescue. "Nick Price knelt down. . . and wiped her face

with the sleeve of his shirt. He helped her to her feet.

. . and taking her hand in his, he said: come on, I'll take

your home now."27 However, the truth is that Nick is

ashamed to be seen by his friends, walking home pth - an

Indian. So harshly does Nick's behaviour dislodge the

[ 97 ]
.Iquilibrium of Ha's emotional make-up that she transfers

this fantasy to the imaginary life of her doll.

I tried then to think of Ila walking back from

school alone through the lanes of West Hampstead.

. . . Ila walking alone in a drizzle under the

cold grey sky: Ila who in Calcutta was surrounded

by so many relatives and cars and servants that

she would never have had to walk. . . as for

alone, there we were. .. . all waiting to walk

with Ila, Ila the sophisticate who could tell us

stories about smart girls and rich boys- in far­

away countries whose names we had learnt from

maps.28

The pathos of a child's search for a space of her own

is brought out by Amitav Ghosh through Ila. Only an

indivisible line, a shadow line divides real and imagined

space, but a child is unable to perceive it. Unfortunately,

in • Ila, this distressfully ’inadequate vision does not

change even when the child attains adulthood, which we

have discussed earlier.

Therefore, the quest of Ila for personal freedom In

London is fully justified. She retains her ideas, values,

belongingness, radicalism, and love. India proved to be

claustrophobic for a New Woman in Ila.

There is another quest in The Shadow Lines, that is,

the grandmother's quest for political freedom. She is the

central character in The Shadow Lines. The narrator remembers

C 98 ]
how Tridib had called her:

A modern middle-class woman. . . . All she

wanted was a middle-class life in which, like

the middle classes the world over, she would

thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and

territory, of self- respect and power: national

that was all she wanted-a modern middle-class

life, a small thing that history had denied her

in its fullness and for which she could never

forgive it.29

We quote Mrs. Mukherjee to compare Ha's and the

grandmother's quest for freedom:

In The Shadow Lines there is a repeated insistence

on the freedom for each individual to be. able to

create his own stories. . . . Although Ila and

the grandmother are in many ways mirror images

of each other across generations in their

absolutism and rigidity about their own concepts.

Of freedom, their situations in the novel are

not symmetrical. . . . The grandmother on the

other hand never had a readymade script. Her

genteel bourgeois background was at odds with a

secret desire to independent life after being

widowed, her involuntary moves from Dhaka to

Rangoon and then to Calcutta, her dispossession

of the region she called home are discontinuous

fragments of a story that she can make adhere

[ 99 ]
 only by the moral glues of family and nation,

duty and discipline.30

Amitav Ghosh presents the grandmother's early life as

a story told by her to the narrator. Born in 1902 in

Dhaka, she grew up as a member of "a big joint family,

with everyone, him living and eating together."31 But when

her grandfather died, the ancestral house had- to be

partitioned because of the- strife that broke out between

her father and her uncle. While at college for her B.A. in

History at Dhaka, she had known the terrorist' movement

among nationalists in Bengal:

about secret terrorist societies like Anushilan

and Jugantar and all their offshoots, 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.32

In her own class there was a shy young man who was a

member of terrorist organization. One day as the lecture

was going on, the police entered the class and arrested

the young man as they had learnt that he planned to kill

an English magistrate in Khulra district. He was tried.and

later deported to the cellular jail in the Andaman Islands.

In her youthful enthusiasm she had dreamt of terrorists

like Khudiram Bose and Bagha Jatin who had been betrayed

by treacherous villagers who in turn had been bought with

[ 100 ]
English money. 'She'd been expecting a huge man with

burning eyes and a lion's mane of a beard,. and there he

was, all the while, at the back of her class, sitting

shyly by himself."33 She had wanted to work for the

terrorists, to run errands for them, to cook their food,

to wash their clothes and to render some help. When the

narrator asks her whether she would have killed the English

magistrate, she replies: "I would have been frightened,

she said. But I would have prayed for strength, and God

willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our

freedom: I would have done anything to be free."34

Suvir Kaul comments on her: "This personal history of

anti-imperialism sharpens her sense of nationhood and of

the formation of the Indian nation-state."35 She says to

her grandson:

They (the English) know they are a nation because

they've drawn.their borders with blood. Hasn't

Maya told you how regimental flags hang in all

their cathedrals and how all their churches are

lined with memorials to men who died in wars,

all around the world? War is their religion.

That's what it takes to make a country. Once

that happens people forget that they were born

this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi:

they become a family born of the same pool of

blood. That is what you have to achieve for

India,, don't you see?36

[ 101 ]
 Suvir Kaul draws his conclusion from this exhortation

of the grandmother about her ideas on nationalism, different

from the internationalism of Ila and her generation:

These, after all, are the values she learns from

her youthful desire to be free, where freedom

was forged in the crucible of often violent

anti-colonial struggle, and, once achieved,

maintained by Extending the same antagonistic

logic to the construction of the nation-state.

War against a common enemy unites, it ratifies

boundaries and deepens ideological the and

international oppositions mould an intimately

to necessary coherent national identity, it

legitimises the claim of the state to be the

sole agent and authority of violence. Tha'mma's

ideas are couched in the language of derivation,

requires the syntax of good citizenship and an

exclusive national pride.37

Seema Bhaduri the nationalism comments of the grandmother:

Tha'mma essentializes the spirit of European

nationalism. She is a typical neo- Victorian

figure in her progressive view of the future and

her Puritan sense of. work and discipline.

Nationalism, the product of those times, carries

for her the earnestness of religion, informing

her every thought and deed. So her grandson must

run rather than walk, that he must be' strong

[ 102 ]
 enough to face the impending challenges to the

nation. Her a preferences likewise are for men

like Robi (Tridib's brother) who have an

unintellectual moral impulse and a commitment

to action-the type that made the firebrand

nationalists of her own you th.,—the type she

. admired and had wanted to join.38

But Amitav Ghosh pronounces that the grandmother could

never get the type of freedom she had dreamt of from

India's independence: she had to eke out the difficult

connotations of widowhood in the class-ridden Hindu society

that independence little altered. She became a foreigner

to her own home in Dhaka, more foreigner than the English

May who didn't need a visa to visit Dhaka. Suvir Kaul

observes: >

Tha'mma's nationalist faith fails her because

she comes "to realize. . . that borders have a

tenuous a existence, and that not even a history

of bloodshed can make them real and impermeable.

. . . In 1964, as she plans to fly to Dhaka, she

wonders if 'she would be able to see the' border

between India and East Pakistan from the plane'.

When her son laughs and asks her if she thought

that 'the border was a long black line with

green on one side and scarlet on the other, like

it was in a school atlas,' she says, 'Of course,

not. . . . When she is told that she might see

[ 103 ]
 some green fields, her musing response sums up

the pathos of an exclusionary nationalism.39

Tha'mma wonders:

But if there aren't any’ trenches or anything,

how are people to know? I mean, where's the

difference.then? And if there's no difference,

both sides will be the same; it will be just

like it used to be before, when we used to catch

a train .in Dhaka. Partition and all the killing

and everything-if there isn't something in

between' ?40

Suvir Kaul defines Tha'mma's rationalism:

Nationalism,. militant and brilliant its anti­

in imperialism, is tarnished in its need for

defining oppositions within, and enemies across,

the borders. ... In the novel, the narrator's

coming to maturity involves his extending the

lessons of the shadow-lines that Tha'mma

reluctantly learns, as she moves from her

. nationalistic certitude to an awareness that

even borders confirm identity though they are

meant to confirm difference. . . .Perhaps the

crowning irony of The Shadow Lines is that almost

as soon as Tha'mma realizes that the legacy of

her birthplace is not separable from her sense

of herself as a citizen of India, her nephew

[ 104 ]
 Tridib's death at the hands of a Dhaka mob

confirms in her a pathological hatred of 'them'.41

Seema Bhaduri sums up the quest of the grandmother for

political freedom succinctly:

With her imagination enslaved to the idea of

nationalism, Grandma couldn't see what was so

obvious, namely, nationalism had destroyed her

home and spilled her innocent kin's blood. The

extent of her subjectivity can be grasped by the

fact that even after this tragedy which affected

her mental balance, she gave away her golden

chain, the only ornament she had retained with

her after her widowhood as a momento of her dead

husband.42

The meaning of political freedom in the modern world is

for the. grandmother in a complicated and an intricate one.

Therefore, her quest for political freedom is liable to

end in failure. She is as much 'uprooted' in her country

as Ila in England.

The theme of journey in The Shadow Lines is implicit in

its title-derived, significantly, from Conrad-and in the

titles 'It! of its two parts, "Going Away" and "Coming

Home." The metaphor

of journey pervades the book and enables it to

extend and to expand spatially and temporally

(a journey, after all, takes place sequentially

[ 105 ]
 and in time) . This is of course a traditional

method for the novel that sets out to discover

the relationship between imagination and

reality.43

Edward Said, the legendary scholar and critic of the Third

World, explains: "stories are at the heart of what explores

and novelists say about strange regions of the world."44

Barat explains that Ghosh's approach:

has in fact a close affinity with Graham Greene's

in Travels with My Aunt and The Captain and the

Enemy, which are likewise concerned with this

relationship and which are similarly based on

the metaphor of the journey.45

The journey in The Shadow Lines is of two types: real

and imagined. In the latter, we take the examples of

Tridib and the narrator. Tridib pointed, out places in the

Bartholomew's Atlas while telling him stories-"Tridib had

given me worlds to travel in and he had given me worlds to

travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with"46-so

that long before he actually moved out of Calcutta, his

world had expanded to include many parts of the globe

through learning and hearing and reading about these

places. Cairo, Madrid, Cuzco or Colombo, names that his

globe-trotting cousin Ila mentioned casually, were for

the narrator "a set of magical talismans"47 to be invested

with reality through precise imagination in the way Tridib

had taught him, though he knew he could never replicate

t 106 ]
the same feat: "And still I knew that the sights Tridib

saw in his imagination were infinitely more detailed, ,

more precise than anything I would ever see."48 Tridib had'

told him of the desire that can carry 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."49

Ila lived in the present, in the external world of Journeys,

lridib lived in the internal world of journeys. The narrator

sees this difference:

Ila lived so intensely in the present that she

would not have believed that there really were

people like Tridib, who could experience the

world as concretely in their imaginations as

she did through her senses, more so if anything,

since to them those experiences were permanently

available in their memories, whereas with her,

when she spoke of her last lover's legs.- .

.For Ila the current was the real: it was as

though she lived in a present which was like an

airlock in a canal, shut away a from the

tidewaters of the past and the future by steel

floodgates.50

For Ila, maps and memory are quite irrelevant. All the

cities she had lived in "went past her in an illusory

whirl of movement, like those studio screens in old films,

which flash past the windows of speeding cars."51

[ 107 ]
 Meenakshi Mukherjee, herself a Bengali, writes about

Bengali culture and the place of journey in this culture:

Names of the unknown places from the litany of

the narrator's childhood not only through the

lore brought back by the foreign service branch

of the family- Bratislave, Konakry, Sophia-but

also through twice-removed reports like the life

story of the Englishman Tresawsen who is said to

have travelled in Malaysia, Fiji, Bolivia, the

Guinea Coast and Ceylon before coming to India,

or through the encyclopedic repertoire of Tridib

who could hold forth on the Mesopotamian Stalae

and East European Jazz as easily as on the

archaeological sites associated with the Sena

dynasty of Bengal. . . . Paradoxically,' though

this subtext of geographical inclusiveness helps

to situate the narrator very firmly in his

specific cultural milieu.

Cartographic imagination has characterised

an aspect of Bengali sensibility in ways that

have yet to be analysed. Whether as a result of

relatively early colonial education to exposure

or as a reaction to it, real journeys within the

country and imagined travels far to places outside

away national boundaries have always fascinated

the Bengali middle class. . . .

Adult literature also often dwelt on the

[ 108 ]
 attraction of unknown spaces. Bibhutibhusan

Banerjee or Jibananda Das had never crossed the

borders of India, yet they wrote of the groves

of cinnamon in equatorial forests and the prairies

across vast continents. Opu, the hero of

Banerjee's two-part novel (Father Panchali, 1929

. and Aparajita, 1931) could, while growing up in

the village Nishchidipur in Bengal, imaginatively

evoke the Mediterranean sea and the distant

lands of South America and Japan. ...

But these travels do not signify any

dislocation because, as in The Shadow Lines so

in Banerjee's novels, time and space are

dimensions of an individual's desire in which

the actual and the imagined co-exist

harmoniously. . . .

A paradigmatic fictional : figure, Tridib,

very easily fits into this inclusive narrative

tradition that privileges the traveller /

imaginist, reminding the Bengali reader

occasionally of the Ghana-da stories by Premendra

Mitra, and sligh tly more peripherally of the

Phelu-da stories by Satyajit Ray in both of

which a boy is held spellbound by a somewhat

older person's encyclopaedic knowledge of other

lands and other civilizations.52

Ortce again we talk of "Going Away" and "Coming Home."

[ 109 ]
Tridib goes away from India to England with his family and

the child relives the experience vicariously through

Tridib's imaginatively vivid, descriptions, so that when

he himself grows up and goes to London, it is an effortless

transition, a 'coming" rather than a "going." Long before

the narrator left home he knew the A to Z map of London so

well-that the first time he came to London he could lead

Nick and Ila confidently along the roads of West Hampstead

as if he had lived there himself.

As mentioned earlier, the imagined world of Tridib

helps the narrator to make a mental journey of different

parts of this world. " Tridib was an archaeologist, he was

not interested in fairylands: the one thing he wanted to

teach me, he used to say, was to use my imagination with

precision."53 'The viewer's exercise of memory and

imagination enables him to 'see' in the mind's eye, more

vividly than in actuality."54

The actual physical journey of the grandmother is the

theme of "Coming Home." The narrator in The Shadow Lines

has a history: the pattern of dwelling in travel. Ghosh

subverts what Sara Suleri has called "The Rhetoric of

English India".55 The opening sentence of the novel

immediately unsettles the rhetoric: "In 1939, thirteen

years bfefore I was father's aunt, Mayadebi, went to England

with her husband and her son, Tridib."56 Robert Dixon says:

Unlike the usual colonial novel, In which

Westerners travel to India to observe an ancient

[ 110 ]
 and self-contained culture, The Shadow Lines

begins with an Indian passage to. England: the

natives are the travellers. The central fact of

travel in this' family's experience immediately

demands that we modify our expectations about

Indian culture and the way it is depicted in

English novels about the Raj. Furthermore, these

Indians are going abroad in 1939, the year Britain

declared war on Germany. Classical ethnography

assumes that the culture of the Western observer

is a stable and coherent point from which to

observe native a society. Ghosh undermines this

notion by a depicting Britain at war with Germany,

so that Partition takes place against the

background of an a equally unstable England.

The parallels between England and Germany, and

India and Pakistan a effectively, undermines and

distinction between East and West, colony and

metropolis, and point to similarities and

continuities that cut across these differences.57

Murari Prasad also concurs with Robert Dixon and says:

Although May (Price) was a little baby when

Tridib saw her in London-and they have not met

since then-a romantic relationship develops

through correspondence between them, transcending

the shadow lines of nationality and cultural

boundary. Amitav Ghosh explores the mysterious

pull between Tridib and May and the abiding

[ HI ]
 intimacy between the two families, when the

countries were pitted against each other.58

Thus, the journey of Mayadebi to England in 1939, when

India was a colonial part of England, the two families,

like the "indivisible sanity" of people beyond borders,

believe in amity, friendship, love and warmth:

Well, she said, laughing, the couple of months

she had spent in London had been so exciting-the

atmosphere had changed so dramatically, even

within the last few weeks. People were becoming

friendlier; in the shops, on the streets, she

couldn't' help noticing. Everyone was so much

nicer now; often when she and Tridib went out

walking people would pat him on the head and

stop to have a little chat with her husband was,

and when he was to have the operation. . .. . Yes,

that's the right word, said Mayadebi:

exhilaration. I've been lucky, I've been able

to watch English coming alive. I wouldn't have

seen it if I hadn't been here now.59

The journey of grandmother to Tresawsenin London in 1939

was a memorable event, etched in the mind of Tridib, and,

subsequently it helps to narrator to say: "Nobody can ever

know what it was like to be young and intelligent in the

summer of 1939 in London or Berline."60 It results, at

least, in the first friendship of Miss Price.

[ 112 ]
 In The Shadow Lines, the narrator shuttles not only

from Calcutta to London to collect material for his Ph. D.

thesis, but across the loom of time from 1981 to the

sixties onto the forties and earlier.

Tridib's father is a diplomat, living abroad or in

Delhi and only occasionally visiting Calcutta; but Tridib

himself prefers to stay on in their family house in an

upper middle- class neighbourhood of Calcutta with his

elderly grandmother.

In the second part of the novel, the grandmother's

Journey to Dhaka becomes a symbolic search for a point of

fixity. Born in Dhaka, separated from her birthplace by a

history of bloodshed and lines on a map, Tha'mma loses her

grammatical co-ordinates as she thinks of 'home'. She is

to distinguish between "going. " "coming" and 'Tha'mma,

Tha'mma I cried. How could you have 'come' home to Dhaka?

You don't know the difference between coming and going"61

The narrator says;

But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it

all 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 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.62

[ 113 ]
 One important reason for the grandmother to journey to

Dhaka was Her desire to see her old house and bring her

uncle, Jethamoshai, to India. No sooner she had spent a

few days in her sister's house than the grandmother

accompanied by Mayadebi, Tridib, May Price and Robi set

out in the Mercedes with a driver and a security guard of

the High Commission. The car had to stop at a particular

point in the bye-lanes of Dhaka, and they had to walk to

the old house. They discovered to their dismay an automobile

workshop in what was a garden in their house. Their house

was crumbling and a large number of families were living

there. Their uncle Jethamoshai, now called Ukilbabu, was

decrepit and bedridden, looked after by Khalil, a cycle-

rickshaw puller, and his family. The old man failed to

recognise them, and spoke " ill of his relatives when they

were mentioned. As for going to India, he had not believed

in that. In fact, he had. told his India-bound sons:

It's all very well, you're going away now, but

suppose when you get there they decide to draw

another line somewhere? What will you do then?

Where will you move to? Noone will have you any

where. As for me, I was born here, and I'll die

here.63

The old man would have gone with his talk, but the car

driver intervened.to say that they must leave immediately

as "there -is going to be trouble outside."64 So the

grandmother and Mayadebi and others depart, arranging

with Khalil that he should bring their uncle to their

[ H4 ]
house in his cycle-rickshaw telling him that he is taking

him out. It' is than that "trouble" starts. In a book

review, Girish Karnad makes the following observation on

this episode:

The grandmother's visit to the ancestral home.

. . is surely one of the most memorable scenes

in Indian fiction. Past and future meet across

religious, political and cultural barriers in a

. confusion of emotions, ideals, intentions and

acts, leading to a shattering climax.65

The "climax" occurs as the grandmother and her sister

are returning in their Mercedes from their ancestral home

and their uncle is following them in the rickshaw ‘(Rabi's

narrative 243-47, May Price's recollection 250-51). When

they come to the hazar area, they find that the shops are

closed and the street is deserted, but for stray people it

was as if they were waiting for the car: In no: time a lot

of men surround the car, break the windscreen and the

driver suffers a cut across his face. The car lurches and

comes to a halt with its front wheel in a gutter. Then the

security guard jumps out and fires a shot from his revolver

and the crowd begins to withdraw from the car. At the same

time the eerie silence is broken by a check, and the

attention of the crowd turns to the sound of a rickshaw-

Khalil's rickshaw-with their uncle in it, and the people

surrounded the rickshaw. Though the sisters could have

driven away, May Price and Tridib leave the car to save

the old man and they get lost in the whirligig of the

[ 115 ]
crowd. The mischief takes less than a moment and the crowd

begins to melt away. The dead bodies of Khalil, the old

man and Tridib lie on the road.

This death of Khalil, Tridib, and the Jethamoshai at

the hands of a Dhaka mob confirms in her a pathological

hatred of 'them'. In 1965, as soon as the war starts, she

gifts her only gold chain to the war fund: "For your sake;

for your freedom; she tells her grandson, 'We have to kill

them before they kill us; we have to wipe them out'."66

Hysterical from the memory of the rioters who killed

Tridib, she takes comfort in the organized propriety of

war: "We are fighting them properly at last," she says

"with tanks and guns and bombs."67 The migrancy and

consequent 'blindness' to and alienation from the world,

her violent intervention in human affairs, all are

represented in the novel in negative terms.

Throughout her visit to Dacca, Tha'mma's search for

the preparation Dhaka of her childhood and youth is projected

as &1 nostalgic return home. Despite her naturalisation

as an Indian citizen, her strong loyalties and affiliations

to the city of her ,birth, which surface during her

journey, to Dhaka, permit Ghosh to investigate the conflicting

claims of roots and belonging, national and boundaries in

the Indian mind. Tha'mma's attempt to identify herself as

a native Dhakaian from the older parts of the city, who is

contemptuous of the alien inhabitants of new residential

localities,- demonstrates her amnesia to her new Indian

identify when confronted with the more compelling claims

[ H6 ]
of an older solidarity. Tha'mma's Itsit to her parental

home, ironically figured as a married daughter's "going

home as a wid' ow,,68-where , she emotionally declares to her

estranged uncle, " "We've come home at last,/69-is used to

explore-the contradiction of local and national identities

further. Anjali Roy's analysis of Tha'mma's lOurney to

Dacca is worth quoting:

The immigrant family's visit to their ancestral

home in their native place becomes the site for

Ghosh's examination of the meaning of presumed

national communities. The narrative reiterates

Tha'mma's estrangement from her home and kin to

turn filial duty and nationalist sentiments

upside down before they culminate in the horror

of the climatic scene of Tridib's death.70

The delayed account of Tridib's death serves the purpose

of providing a detailed account into the meaning of

essential nationalism and underline the need for

"transcending the ways in which meanings get fixed, locked

in moments of history which time nor. social change, nor

personal affiliation can alter."71 Ghosh argues that only

an awareness of the 'invented" nature of communities can

release individuals from the manipulations of political

imaginings. Tha'mma remains imprisoned in the myth of

nation until the end. Her response to Tridib's death,

donating her last few pieces of jewellery to the war fund,

shows steeped she is in nationalist rhetoric.

[ H7 ]
 REFERENCES

1. Louis James, "Shadow Lines: Cross-Cultural

Perspectives in the’ Fiction of " IV Ghosh,. . The

Novels of Amitav Ghosh, ed. R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi:

. Prestige 1,1999), p. 56.

2. Robert Dixon, "Travelling in the West: The Writing

of Amitav Ghosh," JoumalofCommonwealthLiterature,

Vol. XXXI, No.1 (1996), p. 9.

3. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

4,. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal

Publishers, 1988), p,215..

5. Ibid., p. 233.

6. Ibid., p. 252.

7. Arj.ya Sircar, "The Shadow Lines: The Promise of

Another Dawn," Recent Indian Fiction, ed. R. S.

Pathak (New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999), p. 49.

8. The Shadow Lines, p. 25..

9. Ibid., p. .25.

10. Ibid., p. 34.

11. Ibid., p. 43.

12. K. M. Pannikar, Culture and Consciousness in Modern

India (New Delhi: People's Publishing House,1990),

pp. 33-34.
[ 118 ]
13. Shyam S. Agarwalla, "The Blurring of Postimperialism

and Postcolonialism in The Shadow Lines," The Shadow

Lines, ed. Novy Kopadia (New Delhi: Asia Book Club,

2001), p. 195.

14. Ranjit Guha, " On Some Aspects of the Historiography

of Colonial India," Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranjit

Guha (New Delhi: OUP, 1982), p. 1.

15. A. N. Haul, " A Reading of The Shadow Lines," Amitav

Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Cult edition (New Delhi:

OUP, 1995) , p. 303.

16. The Shadow Lines, pp. 21-22.

17. Nivedita Bagchi, "The Process of Validation in

Relation to Materidity and Historical Reconstruction, "

MFS, 39, 1 (1993), p. 191.

18. The Shadow Lines, p. 88.

19. Ibid., p. 88.

20. Elaine Showalter, "Smoking Room," Times Literary

Supplement, 16 June 1995, p. 12.

21. Unal Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic

Dasi?" Recasting Women, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh

Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989) ~eprint,

1997), p. 56.

22. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, "Multiple Forms of

(National) Belonging: AttiaHosain's Sunlight on a

[ H9 ]
 Broken Column," in Modem Fiction Studies, 39.1,

Winter 1993, p. 97.

23. The Shadow Lines, p. 20.

24. Ibid., pp. 77-78.

25. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: ,1929),

p. 104.

26. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Discus

Books, 1941),

27. The Shadow Lines, p. 75.

28. Ibid., p. 76.

29. The Shadow Lines, p. 78.

30. Meenakshi Mukherjee, "Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates

of Meaning in The Shadow Lines," Cult edition (New

Delhi: aup, 1988), pp. 263-64.

31. The Shadow Lines, p. 121.

32. Ibid., p. 37.

33. Ibid., p. 32.

34. Ibid., p. 39.

35. Suvir Kaul, "Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter /

National in The Shadow Lines, Cult edition, p. 278.

36. The Shadow Lines, p. 78.

[ 120 ]
37. Suvir Kaul, p. 279.

38. Seema Bhaduri, " A Historical Reading of The Shadow

Lines," The Novels of Am ita v Glwsh, ed. R.K.-

Dhawan, p. 107.

39. Suvir Kaul, pp. 279-80.

40. The Shadow Lines, p. 151.

41. Suvir Kaul, p. 283.

42. Seema Bhaduri, p. 108.

43. Orbashi Barat, "Imagination and Reality in The Shadow

Lines," in The Novels of Am ita v Ghosh, ed. R. K.

Dhawan, pp. 114-15.

44. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:

Knopf, 1993), p. xii.

45. Urbashi Barat, p. 115.

46. The Shadow Lines, p. 20

47. Ibid., P- 20.

CO

Ibid., P- 29.
•

49. Ibid., P- 29.

50. Ibid., P- 30.

51. Ibid., P- 31.

[ 121 ]
52. Meenakshi Mukherjee, pp. 257-59.

53. The Shadow Lines, p. 24.

54. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, "The Division of Experience

in "the Shadow Lines" The Sahdow Lines , Cult edition

of The Shadow Lines, p. 288.

55. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago

and London: University Chicago Press, 1992), p. 26.

56. The Shadow Lines, p. 3.

57 . Dixon, p. - 10.

58. Murari Prasad, " The Shadow Lines: A Quest for

'Invisible Sanity," The Novels of Amitav Ghosh, p.

90.

59. The Shadow Lines, p. 66.

60. Ibid., p. 152.

61. Ibid., p. 152.

62. Ibid., p. 153.

63. Ibid., p. 215.

64. Ibid., p. 216.

65. Girish Karnad, "Worlds Within' Worlds: Book Review of

The Shadow Lines,) Indian Express Magazine, 18 Dec.

1998, p. 5.

[ 122 ]
66. The Shadow Lines, p. 237.

67. Ibid., p. 237.

68. Ibid., p. 205.

69. Ibid., p. 212.

70. Anjali Roy, "Microstoria: Indian Nationalism's 'Little

Stories' in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines," The

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 35, No.2,

2000, p. 40.

71. Abena Busia, ALA Bulletin, Vol. 19, No.3, 1993, p. 13.

XXX

[ 123 ]