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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 16:9 September 2016

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Theme, Technique and Historicism in Amitav Ghosh’s
The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
Alok Kumar Singh, Research Scholar (English)
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Abstract
Amitav Ghosh has won many accolades for his fiction that is keenly intertwined with
history. His fiction is characterized by strong themes that may be sometimes identified as
historical novels. His themes involve emigration, exile, cultural displacement and uprooting. He
illuminates the basic ironies, deep seated ambiguities and existential dilemmas of human
condition. He, in one of the interviews, has observed, "Nobody has the choice of stepping away
from history" and "For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate
elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion,
family, love, sexuality".

Amitav Ghosh’s success as historical novelist owes much to the distinctiveness of his
well-researched narratives. He remarkably manifests a bygone era and vanished experiences to
life through vividly realized detail. The better reference in this context is his celebrated second

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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
novel, “The Shadow Lines” (1988) which was published four years after the sectarian violence
that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. This
constitutes a logical background in the novel, and it makes readers probe various hammering
facets of violence. Also, his treatment of violence in Calcutta and Dhaka in this novel is valid
even today.

The novel deals with the concerns of our period, the search for identity, the need for
independence, the difficult relationship with colonial culture. It magnificently interweaves fact,
fiction and reminiscence. It is a continuous narrative which replicates the pattern of violence not
only of 1964 but also of 21st century. The fragmentary narratives unfold the narrator’s
experiences in the form of memories which move backwards and forwards.

While focusing upon the text of “The Shadow Lines” I aim to examine and elaborate
elements of historicity in the novel and their implications. I also aim to investigate the theme as
well as technique employed in the novel.

Key words: Post Colonial, Communalism, Historicism, Cosmopolitanism, Nostalgia, Self

identity, multi culture and post modern.

Introduction: Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh, one of the most celebrated authors in Indian English, has won many
national and international awards for his fiction that is keenly intertwined with history. He is one
of most significant literary voices to emerge from India in recent decades, and has contributed to
the development of ideas on the postcolonial in particular, in particular its relation to post
modernism. His fiction is characterized by strong themes of humanism, cosmopolitanism,
communalism, colonial power and history. His themes involve emigration, exile, cultural
displacement and uprooting. He illuminates the human ironies, deep-seated ambiguities and
existential dilemmas of human condition. He, in one of the interviews, has observed, "Nobody
has the choice of stepping away from history" and "For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is
that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric,
politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality".
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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
 Amitav Ghosh skillfully places facts in his narratives, historical events written in the
fictional language and fictional matter treated as history, thus giving the effect of presence and
absence of history at the same time. The public chronicles of nations are interrogated through the
means of graphic details of individual memories that do not necessarily tally with the official
version of history. For instance, the narrator himself is a witness to the riots in Calcutta in 1964,
but when he tries to prove it to his colleagues using the traditional medium of recording history –
i.e. the newspaper – he initially meets disappointment. He has woven fact and fiction in a
complex and absorbing narratives.

Introduction
Amitav Ghosh’s success as historical novelist owes much to his power of documentation
and his distinctiveness of well-researched socio-political narratives. He goes beyond historical
representation. The better reference in this context is his celebrated second novel, “The Shadow
Lines” (1988) which was published four years after 84 anti-sikh communal riot that shook New
Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. This
constitutes a logical background in the novel, and it compels readers probe various hammering
facets of violence. Also, his pathological treatment of violence in Calcutta and Dhaka in this
novel is valid even today.

The novel reconstructs and recapitulates major historical and far-reaching events such as
the Swadeshi movement, the Second World War, the partition of India, the communal riots of
1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta, the Maoist Movement, the India-China War, the India-Pakistan
War and the fall of Dhaka from East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. The events revolve
around Mayadeby’s family, their friendship and sojourn with their English friends the Prices and
Thamma, the narrator’s grandmother’s links with her ancestral city, Dhaka. It is the story of the
family and friends of the nameless narrator which has its roots in broader national and
international experience. In the novel the past, present and future coalesce and melt together
erasing any kind of line of demarcations. . The text deals with the concerns of contemporary
period such as the search for identity, political freedom, communal frenzy, nationalism, the need
for independence, the difficult relationship with colonial culture. It magnificently interweaves
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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
fact, fiction and reminiscence. The text intersects personal memory, family lore and public
history. It is a continuous narrative which replicates the pattern of violence not only of 1964 but
also of 21st century. The fragmentary narratives unfurl the narrator’s experiences in the form of
memories which move backwards and forwards.

The Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines is Ghosh’s second novel, who has overtime secured his place as one of
the India’s most celebrated and finest of post-Rushdie generation of authors in Indian writing in
English. Ghosh’s work is known to be imbued with minute details of the given time, space and
situation, which he writes about and his words are impregnated with a wealth of meaning.
Having penned novels of different genres, Ghosh seems to reinvent himself with his every work
but The Shadow Lines undoubtedly remains one his best. His text straddles the border between
history and fiction.
Amitav Ghosh’s historical world is one of restless narrative motions. His central figures
are travellers and diasporic exiles. He treats national borders and conceptual boundaries as
shadow lines and mere illusions. The shadow lines of the novel are experiential and political, and
challenges political, social and cultural borders. Reason becomes passion; going away is also
coming home and the differences between us and them, now and then, here and there are
disrupted by the itinerant maps of a roaming imagination.

Historical Touches and Their Narratives

While tracing historical aspects and their narratives interlinked with social perspectives in
the novel it is herewith worth-noting that each of his major works direct their narrative force
towards historical facts. In this particular context, it will be proper to discuss the following
points.

1. The New Historicist Approach

New historicist approach concerns itself not only with the big and paramount national
problems like partition and communal frenzy but also with political matters and international
events of the past. The inscrutable and transcendental issues like the indivisible sanity, religion
and alienation, themes of detachment and isolation become very much part of it. The search for
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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
syncretic culture and communal harmony, and deep concern for the individual liberty in an
increasingly collectivized and militancy-ridden society are very well represented in such works.
The Shadow Lines is a story told by a nameless child narrator using mnemonic process. It’s a non
linear narrative, fragmentary, episodic and incomplete. This style of writing is both unique and
captivating; unfolding ideas together as time and space combine and help the narrator understand
his past better and look for a new meaning. Revolving around the theme of nationalism in an
increasingly globalized world, Ghosh questions the real meaning of political freedom and the
borders. In fact, it reflects the fictional analysis of nation state as obstructive and divisive. The
novel traverses through almost seventy years through the memories of people, which the narrator
recollects and narrates with a dual point of view as an adult and as a child. Though the novel
primarily focuses on Calcutta, Dhaka and London, it seems to echo the sentiments of whole
South-east Asia, with lucid overtones of Independence and the pangs of Partition.
2. Impact of Nostalgia and the Question of Self-Identity
The novel also highlights nostalgia and chronicle communal chaos which are an intrinsic
part of history. The characters suffer a sense of loss and belonging. They are always longing for
the past, for those days and for those places that are no longer traceable. For example,
reminiscences of her childhood in Dhaka keep haunting Tha’mma, who has been living in
Calcutta for about two decades. For her, Calcutta can never be Dhaka which used to be her
home, ‘no home but in memory’. It is a story of a middle class Indian family based in Calcutta.
The boy narrator presents the views of the members of his immediate and extended family, thus,
giving each a well-defined character. However, Tha’mma, narrator’s grandmother is the
memorable character in the novel, giving a distinct idea of militant nationalism and the
enthusiasm with which the people worked towards nation building just after independence. It is
chiefly through her character that Ghosh delivers the most significant message of the novel; the
vainness of creating nation states, the absurdity of drawing lines which arbitrarily divide people
when their memories remain undivided. All the characters are meticulously sketched. In Tridib,
the narrator’s uncle, Ghosh draws one of the most fascinating characters of our times. Narrator’s
fascination with him is understandable. It is Tridib who gives him “worlds to travel in and eyes
to see them with” (S.L. 20). Ghosh subtly tries to undo the myth that boundaries demarcate as
there are no barriers in imagination. Ila is central to the narrator’s coming of age.Her portrayal is

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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
crucial to showcase the pragmatic cosmopolitanism of the people who live aloof from their
native place.

3. Omniscient Narrator as Historian

In The Shadow Lines, the narrator’s personality merges with that of the historian. For
him the past exists only in memory and has no visible traces left in the present to go by. Here
memory is more adequate than history, and works as a channel into past. The only resources,
which the narrator-historian possesses to graft history, are memories, photographs, and Tridib’s
stories which are difficult to dismiss because they are factually correct yet set in other time and
space. The events are reconstructed, often as accurately and as carefully by any historian, putting
real people in imaginary situations, and fancy conditions in documentary archives, augmenting
the significance of historical events by plausible and internally consistent depictions of events.
Ghosh invokes the archives as a key organizing principle in his novels making it coherent
historical narratives.

4. Retrospection of Past Events

The Changeability of time and place blur as the process of recollection transforms the
past events into a throbbing sense of what has been lost. The historical events documented by the
novel includes the freedom movement in Bengal, the Second World War, the Partition of India in
1947, and the spontaneous communal combustion in the form of riots in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh) and India following the ’64 Hazratbal incident in Srinagar.3 The novel is not a bare
and bland recapitulation of those tense historical moments; it captures the trauma of emotional
rupture and estrangement as also the damaging potential of the psychological siege within people
sundered by bigoted politics. Ghosh’s novel as re-appropriated history moves through the
narratives and melds the historical moments into a compelling tale. The reconstruction of the
past through houses, photographs, maps, road names, newspapers, advertisements and other
concretisations allows us to collate the text with concurrent co-texts and validate the author’s
perception of the time and milieu covered by the novel. The principal episodes viewed in a
simultaneous focus seem to be part of a historical continuum and the narrator’s insight into the
characters falling into insane frenzy or wallowing in stolid indifference to transcultural currents
can be palpably located.
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5. Concerns about Cross Border Humanity and Cosmopolitanism
While The Shadow Lines explores the author’s major concern about wider, cross-border
humanity with striking insights into the issues of ethnic nationalism, multiculturalism and
communalism, it also reveals new levels of his technical prowess. Ghosh has departed from
Rushdie’s mode of “imaginative serio-comic storytelling” (Hawley 3) or “the disjointed magic
realism” (Mukherjee) evident in his apprentice novel (The Circle of Reason). What he now
offers is a supple and sophisticated mnemonic narrative. He weaves together different strands of
history by mnemonic process or “wistful evocations of memory” (Mukherjee, “Dancing in
Cambodia, At Large in Burma”) to reflect on communal carnage and sectarian tension in the
Indian subcontinent. The novel derives its material from Ghosh’s experience of the fracture
following the Partition and the resultant rupture in the affiliative bonds of the communities
across the border. What makes his experience worthy of investigation is the technique by which
his experience is moulded into a fascinating and coherent narrative.

6. Geographical Fluidity and Cultural Dislocations

Ghosh engages with the limits of essentialist nationalism and barriers to empathy across
geographical borders. The novel eventuates into a search for the strategies for survival in a
violent, hate-filled world of narrow divisions and finds in cross border interaction an effective
antidote to the miasma of ethnic tension. Thus the novel also addresses the challenge of
geographical fluidity and cultural dislocations with a salutary insight into history. For this
purpose he uses the metaphor of ‘family’. The cross-border movement of aliens and immigrants
under the increasingly globalised scenario endorses, or rather validates, the novel’s larger project
of cultural accommodation, of making sense of ontological confusion in intricate spatiality and
seeking adjustment to the emerging demands of multicultural world. As Brinda Bose rightly
notes, it is no doubt fitting that in the age of an extravagantly embracing of globalization, we
may claim to have closed the gap between the other and straddling it; certainly, the legacy of
postcolonial angst today appears to have settled into a potentially numbing acceptance of bi- or
multi-cultural euphoria. In such a circumstance, the diasporic imagination of Amitav Ghosh –
that wrestles with an understanding of bi-culturalism as it ‘yokes by violence together’ discrete

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and distant identities – is essential to our understanding of our history even as it is being created.
(Bose 15-16)

In my view, Ghosh appeals to creative multicultural impulses and communal harmony.

He perceptively shows how different cultures and communities are becoming antagonistic to the
point of no return. He makes a plea for cross-border ties and intercivilisational alliance which
amounts to making a new world order. To quote Edward Said, “the new economic and socio-
political dislocations and configurations of our time [begin] with the startling realities of human
interdependence on a world scale” (Said, Culture and Materialism 401). Such re-appropriations
of history or “desirable constructions of the past” also do away with the partitioning of the past
to open out common doors from the corridors between cultures through “creative
improvisations” (Prasad 58).

7. Demarcations as Arbitrary and Invented Divisions

Ghosh does not totally acede to the claims of historicism. His preoccupation with shadow
lines or demarcations as “arbitrary and invented divisions between people and nations” has also
been closely questioned by A.N. Kaul. In his opinion, The Shadow Lines “ends up attributing
value and a higher reality to a sort of amorphous romantic subjectivity” (Kaul 299). Kaul argues
that unlike Henry James and E.M. Forster, who recognise the barriers to cultural crossings due to
a variety of political and cultural complexities, Ghosh privileges the world of private refuge over
historical and political realities and thus regards these harsh realities or historical formations as
immaterial; at any rate, he blithely disregards them. As Kaul notes, the novel insists on a
sentimental resolution and as such it lacks an authentic resonance. He also underlines some
signifying and profound statements about life in the novel as “postmodern banalities” or mere
“conundrums.” Kaul perhaps sidesteps the implications of Tridib’s advice to the narrator that he
uses his“imagination with precision” (S.L. 24). Kaul further quotes Ernest Gellener’s
unequivocal statement thatnationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”. Tridib’s
insistence on the material moorings of imagination – its temporal and spatial co-ordinates – is
plainly missing from Kaul’s explication of “imagination” as romantic retreat from historical
realities in The Shadow Lines.

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8. A World Torn Asunder by History and Religion
The Shadow Lines embarks upon a journey of discovery of roots and reasons. It also
portrays a world torn asunder by history, and depicts forms of violence that extreme of
nationalism sometimes manifests. Through an intricate web of memories, relationships and
images Amitav Ghosh builds a vivid and moving narrative. It is unlike the novel of previous era,
firstly because it is not linear in narration. The interaction of Indians with English people, their
journey to other continents, their issues of political freedom, self-identity and the forces of
nationalism have all been very vividly described. The first impression one gets in reading this
novel is that the people delineated belong to many different nationalities, cultures and
backgrounds that make the scope of novel formidable. The very opening of the novel describes
the writer’s aunt Maya Debi going to England with her husband and son. This was in 1939 and
since then the interaction with them and separation from them has been projected through
memories. Through the cinematic technique of flashback, the action moves to and fro from
London to Calcutta and to Khulna and Dhaka. Here narrative time coincides with the
consciousness of narrator. In a globalized world, it is no longer possible for any writer to write
the novel in Jane Austen fashion from the centre of her place.

9. Reevaluation of Historical Reality

Although, chronologically, the story begins with a passage of time in colonial India when
the narrator was not even born, it embraces a good deal of postcolonial moments, and all the
episodes are held in simultaneous focus to illuminate the narrative resolution. The novel begins
thus: “In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt Maya Debi went to England
with her husband and her son Tridib” (The Shadow Lines, p.3). The year 1939 is historically
significant for the outbreak of the Second World War and the phenomenal upheavals on the
Indian subcontinent coming in its wake. Mayadebi’s visit to London around this time, her
intimate contact with the Price family and the Tridib-May component of the story are recounted
by Tridib twenty-one years later to the narrator, an eight-year-old inquisitive child. May was a
little baby when Tridib saw her in London. A romantic relationship between them has developed
through correspondence, transcending the shadow lines of nationality and cultural boundaries.
Amitav Ghosh explores the mysterious pull between Tridib and May and the abiding bond

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Theme, Technique And Historicism In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: A Critical Study
between the two families defying distance and physical frontiers even as the countries they
belong to are pitted against each other, and this superbly provides thematic framework of novel.

The narrator’s voice appears to be the author’s voice and suggests that the issues of
boundaries and national culture are illusory and non-existent. There cannot be any divisions of
universal humanity. The concept of time in the story can be taken as a metaphor for the national
borders. It seems to suggest that divisions between nations are illusion and that frontiers between
nations should not exist, and it tends to justify the title of the novel itself. In this way, Ghosh
reveals a firm grasp of socio- cultural and historical material that underlies his narrative.

Conclusion
Thus a historicist approach to text is nothing but an evaluation of a segment of historical
reality as projected by the novelist whose techniques of writing fiction enable him or her to
describe his or her world-vision. In all his writing, Amitav Ghosh's engagement with history is
not the same kind as that of a regular historian, but this does not, in any way, lessen its
significance as historical fiction. The fictional framework renders history more readable and
lively and he is able to involve the reader more than what actual history does. Ghosh's fiction
reveals that the novelist's involvement with history is his prime obsession. Indeed, he interjects a
new dimension into his encounter with history. His fiction is imbued with both political and
historical consciousness. While offering memory as a better or more valid means of assessing
past, Ghosh is thus a novelist who virtually bends his novels to the needs of history; they largely
derive their purpose and shape from it. the novel narrates the events taking place in 1939-40,
1960-63 and 1978-79 in a jumbled way but the adult narrator focalises on these recollections in
the 1980s and manipulates these blurred temporal and spatial fragments into a coherent stretch to
stage postcolonial situations as well as cultural dislocations and anxieties, and presents the issue
of fractured nationalities in close and telling encounters for good measure. All the narration
comes to us filtered through authorial voice.
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===============================================================

Alok Kumar Singh, M.A.

Research Scholar (English)
L.N. Mithila University
Shital – Bhavan Bangali Tola
Laheriasarai 846001
Darbhanga
Bihar
India
[email protected]

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