The Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines (1988) is a Sahitya Akademi

The Shadow Lines
Award-winning novel[1] by Indian writer Amitav
Ghosh. It is a book that captures perspective of time
and events, of lines that bring people together and hold
them apart; lines that are clearly visible from one
perspective and nonexistent from another; lines that
exist in the memory of one, and therefore in another's
imagination. A narrative built out of an intricate,
constantly crisscrossing web of memories of many
people, it never pretends to tell a story. Instead, it
invites the reader to invent one, out of the memories of
those involved, memories that hold mirrors of differing
shades to the same experience.

The novel is set against the backdrop of historical

events like the Swadeshi movement, Second World
War, Partition of India and Communal riots of 1963-64 First edition
in Dhaka and Calcutta.
Author Amitav Ghosh
The novel earned Ghosh the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Language English
Award for English, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's Genre Fiction
National Academy of Letters.[2] The novel was Publisher Ravi Dayal Publishers
translated by Shalini Topiwala into Gujarati In 1998.
Publication date 1988
Publication place India
Plot summary Media type Print (hardback)
Pages 256
Split into two parts ('Going Away' and 'Coming
ISBN 81-7530-043-4
Home'), the novel follows the life of a young boy
growing up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and Preceded by The Circle of Reason
then follows with the experiences he has in London. Followed by The Calcutta Chromosome

His family – the Datta Chaudhuris - and the Price family in London are linked by the friendship between
their respective patriarchs – Justice Datta Chaudhuri and Lionel Tresawsen. The narrator adores Tridib,
his cousin, because of his tremendous knowledge and his perspective of the incidents and places.
Tha'mma thinks that Tridib is the type of person who seems 'determined to waste his life in idle self-
indulgence', one who refuses to use his family connections to establish a career. Unlike his grandmother,
the narrator loves listening to Tridib.

For the narrator, Tridib's lore is very different from the collection of facts and figures. The narrator is
sexually attracted to Ila but his feelings are passive. He never expresses his feelings to her afraid to lose
the relationship that exists between them. However, one day he involuntarily shows his feelings when
she, unaware of his feelings for her, undresses in front of him. She feels sorry for him but immediately
abandons him to visit Nick's (the Price family's son, and the man who she later marries) bedroom.
Tha'mma does not like Ila; she continually asks the narrator "Why do you always speak for that whore?"
Tha'mma has a dreadful past and wants to reunite her family and goes to Dhaka to bring back her uncle.
Tridib is in love with May and sacrificed his life to rescue her from mobs in the communal riots of 1963–
64 in Dhaka.[3]

Characters
Narrator – The protagonist is a middle class boy who grows up in a middle-class family.
Tridib – The enigmatic cousin of the narrator, Tridib is the son of the narrator's great aunt,
Mayadebi. He enjoys telling tales to the narrator and other local boys in Calcutta. He is in
love with May.
Tha'mma (the narrator's grandmother) – She was the headmistress of a girls' school in
Calcutta. She is a very strict, disciplined, hard-working, mentally strong and patient lady.
She is the one who wants to bring her uncle, Jethamoshai, to India to live with her,
eventually leading to his and Tridib's deaths by a mob in Dhaka.
Ila – She is the narrator's cousin who lives in Stockwell, London. The narrator is in love with
her, but she marries Nick.
May – She is the Price family's daughter. She is in love with Tridib and blames herself for his
death.
Nick – He is the Price family's son, distinguishable by his long blond hair. He wants to work
in the 'futures industry'. He marries Ila during the course of the novel, but it is later found
that he is allegedly having an affair. He worked in Kuwait for a brief period of time but quit
his job (it is implied that he may have been fired for embezzlement).
Mayadebi – She is the narrator's grandmother's younger sister and Tridib's mother.

The Educational Edition

The Shadow Lines : Educational Edition is a second version of the original Novel - The Shadow Lines[4]
first published by the Oxford University Press in 1995 and written by the same author Amitav Ghosh. The
Book comes with the original Novel and 4 critical essays which describe and explain the meaning of the
Novel.

The main point of the new edition is to help students and university undergraduates in understanding the
Novel and its meaning.

The 4 critical essays in the book are as follows :

Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines

This is the last of the 4 essays and is written by Meenakshi Mukherjee. It talks about the importance of
maps and mirrors in the Novel's core ideas. A mirror image essentially deals with illusionary space and is
evident in the overlapping memories and perspectives of the Novel's main characters. These mirror
images are shown heavily in the story when the narrator sees that Tridib has done the same actions as his
and therefore concludes that they must be similar, essentially becoming mirror images of each other.
Tridib has told the narrator to carry oneself beyond 'the limits of one's mind to other places and times and
to a place with no borders between oneself and one's mirror image'. Distance in the Novel is thus
perceived as a challenge to be overcome using imagination and desire until space itself gets dissolved.

Names of unknown places form the litany of the narrator's childhood through lore brought back by the
foreign service branch of the family but also through twice-removed reports.

The essay then proceeds to talk about the importance of journeys within the country and imaginary travel
to far away places to the Bengali middle class. It can either be seen as a romanticization of geography or
as a way to escape the colonial grid on which Europe meditates the world in the rhetoric of binariness.

The travels in the Novel do not signify any dislocation as time and space are dimensions of an
individual's desire in which real and imaginary events or places co-exist harmoniously. The essay gives
and example of how childhood fancies collapse into seemingly real adult experiences. The essay then
compares Tridib to other similar characters in other Novels.

The Novel presents information regarding events in very minute details and family relations are minutely
recorded; All spatial movements have been recorded precisely. The spatial imagination and the passion
for entering other lives that the narrator imbibes from Tridib enables him to be mimetically situated in a
specific cultural milieu. This equation between events and their written report have been destabilized by
the end of the Novel due to certain major events and the credibility of a written report based on
knowledge on what has happened has been questioned. This indeterminable nature of written reports adds
a layer of realism to the Novel.

Knowing and not knowing in the novel are so intricately linked that they hold the key to its meaning.
Most places in the Novel have been pin-pointed with precise and exact locations and even the brand
names of objects have been meticulously mentioned. But among all of this minute details, a blank space
is left out - the narrator's name and description. The narrator has never been given a name or described
directly, except through occasional glimpses of various other persons whom the narrator considers to be
his mirror image like Ila or Nick. The transparency and undescribed nature of the narrator lets various
events, people and places luminously enter his story and find new configurations there. The narrator can
be seen as this porous space which absorbs other lives and other experiences until they leak into each
other to reveal a pattern.

Maps in this Novel are not confined to an atlas but also appear in floor plans drawn by children playing
Houses which provide clues to the past and future reality. Every representation of space in this Novel
assumes a semiotic significance over and above the literal context. The stories made up by Tridib
regarding the Prices and by Ila regarding Nick acted as clues for the narrator's imagination and later
turned out to be real people. These imaginations regarding the character's body aren't always correct as is
the case with Nick and are illusions created by the mind. The imagination regarding Nick's height was
found to be false but only made it more evident that Nick was the narrator's mirror image. Other times,
the imaginations grow up to be an image of something else and reveal the mind of a character and his
confidence and anxieties.

Separation Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines – Written by Suvir

Kaul.
The Division of Experience in The Shadow Lines – Written by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.
A Reading of The Shadow Lines – Written by A. N. Kaul.[4]
Awards
The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar.[5]

Footnotes
1. "Sahitya Akademi Awards 1955-2007" (http://www.sahitya-akademi.gov.in/old_version/awa1
0304.htm) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20090331233952/http://www.sahitya-akad
emi.gov.in/old_version/awa10304.htm) 31 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine
2. "Sahitya Akademi Awards listings" (http://sahitya-akademi.gov.in/sahitya-akademi/awards/ak
ademi_awards.jsp). Sahitya Akademi, Official website.
3. Amitav Ghosh - Books, 'The Shadow Lines' (http://www.amitavghosh.com/books/index.php)
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20100830155744/http://www.amitavghosh.com/book
s/index.php) 2010-08-30 at the Wayback Machine
4. Ghosh, Amitav Ghosh (1995). The Shadow Lines Educational Edition (15th ed.). India:
Oxford University Press. pp. 1–309. ISBN 978-0-19-563631-4.
5. Awards for "The Shadow Lines" (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/g/amitav-ghosh/)

Further reading
Roy, Pinaki (2012). " Coming Home: Passage from Anglophilia to Indocentrism in Amitav
Ghosh's The Shadow Lines". Postmodern Indian English Fiction. Ed. Kaushik, A.S. Jaipur:
Aadi Publications. Pp. 62–77. ISBN 978-93-8090-281-4.

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