DSE 5:: Memory As a Major Theme of Amitav Ghosh’s Novel: The Shadow Lines

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines demonstrates how individual and family
memories mirror social and historical transformation. Not only does the novel point to the
importance of historical events shaping private lives, but it particularly underlines the role of
displacement and relocation in shaping the imagination of ordinary individuals in the middle
of a political as well as geographical change.
Memory plays a key function in literature and thereby dominates almost all genre of it
from ancient to modern ages. It is employed in three distinct fashions, which often exist
concurrently in a text: first, to establish the validity and importance of a text based on the
expertise and reputation of past writers; second, as a means of instilling a feeling of nostalgia
in a text; and third, and most universally, as a method of constructing individual and cultural
identity. Memory in literature is the written form of that which has come before and come
from the historical past but is also formed by social, political, and religious events in the lives
of literary characters. Amitav Ghosh’s novels The Shadow Lines is full of memories of their
leading characters. A numerous fold of memories is uploaded in delineating the theme of the
novel. In The Shadow Lines memory is mainly shown through the unnamed narrator and
Thamma. The novelist here intentionally leads his central characters to their ups and down
memory to weave the theme of the novels.
The fragmentary narrative of The Shadow Lines, in which “time and space are
collapsed”, unfolds the narrator’s experiences in different cultural locations and time periods.
The novel was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New
Delhi in the wake of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. In fact, the novel is set
against the backdrop of major historical 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 in 1971.
The story spans three generations of the narrator’s family, spreading over East
Bengal, Calcutta and London. Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, the novel portrays two
families— one English, one Bengali— known to each other from the time of the Raj, as their
lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The unnamed narrator as a family archivist travels
between Calcutta and London in 1981 in order to explore his family history which consists of
stories of his extended family. These stories reveal the emotional and political dilemmas of
his grandmother Th’amma, and his grandaunt Mayadebi, of his uncles Tridib and Robi, of his
cousin Ila, and of May Price, a family friend in London. All these stories-within-stories are
united by the thread of memory and imagination as the novelist treats both memory and
imagination as a driving force of the narrative however (un)reliable.
The genre of memory novel is evident where the content of the entire novel is derived
from the memory of characters. It is at some level a recollection of events and their various
interpretations held by the characters. This memory novel beautifully knits together the
personal lives of the narrator – Tridib, Thamma, lla, Robi, Mayadebi, Nick. The novel
stresses upon the meaning of freedom in a modern world and questions the reader about the
shadow lines that are drawn between people and nations and how these lines act as a barrier
in maimaining peace and harmony. The novelist makes shadow lines an interesting read. The
image of journey is central to the story which is divided into two section of “going away” and
“coming home”. In this novel Ghosh constantly moves forward and backward creating a zig -
zag like pattern constantly to the complex structure of the novel. The story is mystifying and
would attract the reader to read it again. The novel beautifully showcases human relationships
and also talks about the importance of borders, lines and nations. The book shares a very
strong and important message on how the borders demarcating the nations have begun to
demarcate the people as well.

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DSE 5:: Memory As a Major Theme of Amitav Ghosh’s Novel: The Shadow Lines

Ghosh has beautifully carved the story of two families, the Datta Chaudharies, living
in India and the family of prices, living in London which are related because of the healthy
relation between their respective patriarchs. The main protagonist of the story, the narrator
himself has been left unnamed till the end. He adores Tridib. Who is his second uncle by
relation but more like a friend to him in reality. The narrator carves the incidents and the
places shared by Tridib in a way that they become a permanent fixture in his memory. The
narrator’s grandmother, Thamma, a strict headmistress at a girl’s school. The narrator
admires Ila, his cousin who stays in London, but she has someone else in her life to whom
she later marries, few years later. When the narrator visits London, he seems to know the
streets and the building just the way an atlas would know. All because of experiences Tridib
had shared with him. Later we discover that Tridib and may price. Loved each other secretly
but their relationship could not mature due to some mishap which we get to know as the story
unfolds. The same mishap permanently breaks down Thamma’s spirit who was supposed to
be really tough and strong. You will have to read for yourself to find out what could change
so many lives in a go. Ghosh has tried to represent the borders we have drawn separating the
countries them as mirrors which simply reflect us on the other side. These borders can at
most distinguish between the names of the countries but cannot stop or erase the memories of
one side on the other. “The shadow line is concerned with the meaning of political freedom in
the modern world”? or “Is wishing away of troublesome realities freedom”?
Within the flashback narrative framework, the narrator, Indian-born and English-
educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of the Second World War to
the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and the loss of innocent lives,
observing the ways in which political events invade private lives. Hence, the reader learns
that Tridib was born in 1932 and had been to England with his parents in 1939, where his
father had received medical treatment. May Price, with whose family they shared a close
relationship, had begun a long correspondence with Tridib in 1959. Unfortunately, Tridib lost
his life in a communal riot in Dhaka in 1964 while May was on a visit to India. Examining
the ambivalence of cultural and national borders, connecting and separating individuals and
families, the author addresses the fate of nations - India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh - to offer
observations about a profoundly complex political conflict in the postcolonial and Post-
Partition sub-continent between two major ethnic communities of Hindus and Muslims.
By spreading the story over diverse geographical and national landscapes in which
memory and imagination reinvent historical reality, Ghosh highlights how the ‘shadows’ of
imaginary and remembered spaces haunt all characters in the novel as they struggle with the
past in an uncertain present. At the same time, these ‘shadows’ in the form of ‘national
boundaries’ not only manipulate private and political spheres, but also demonstrate an
individual’s lifelong effort to win over artificial borders, invading the space of home/land. In
or-der to bring out the irony of dividing ancient cultures and civilisations by drawing borders
and giving a new name to a piece of mutual territory, Ghosh contends the sinister smoke
screens of nationalism hitherto unknown on the Indian subcontinent until the Partition of the
subcontinent in 1947 through the all-pervasive metaphor of ‘shadow lines’ in the novel.
This novel focuses on the meaning of political freedom in the modern world and the
force of nationalism. The shadow line we illusion and a source of terrifying violence. In 1939
Tridib the narrator’s father’s cousin, then aged 8, is taken to England, and in 1964 he is
murdered by a street mob near his mother’s original family home in Dhaka. His boyhood
experience in war – time London and his violent death twenty-five years later in Dhaka
constitute the end – points of the novel’s essential narrative.
In the novel we can see that the two endpoint of the narrative takes place thirteen
years before the hero’s birth and the details of the second are communicated to him only
years later by may price. It was Tridib’s girlfriend who had actually witnessed that scene of

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DSE 5:: Memory As a Major Theme of Amitav Ghosh’s Novel: The Shadow Lines

terrifying violence in a “new” nation. But Tridib is the hero’s mentor and guiding spirit.
Almost an alter ego, and not only is his boyhood filled with Tridib’s London memories but
his own later visit to London is a reliving of the scenes and events of Tridib’s experiences
there. Thus, the two instances of the destruction force of nationalism mark not the actual,
time span of the novel but its hero’s growth from childhood to maturity.
In this novel Thamma’s attempt to free her uncle and take him on a homeward
journey ends violently and tragically in three deaths - her uncle’s, the rickshaw puller’s and
Tridib’s. But with her imagination enslaved to the idea of nationalism, Thamma fails to see
that nationalism has destroyed her home and spilled her kin’s blood. She says…..“We have to
kill them before they kill us”. Thus, the shadow line by Amitav Ghosh paints a landscape of
symbolism and realism that spans both time and space. The concepts of distance and time are
uniquely borders that divide countries and the imaginary borders that divide human beings.
From the image – conscious character of the grandmother to the riots that explode in the
streets Ghosh takes the reader on a fascinating journey of exploration, dissecting the
characters of the story while simultaneously dissecting the human race.
The major characters in the novel uniquely showcase the relationship between
memory and history just as space and place. Particularly, they tend to experience space and
place as a free entity beyond the artificial markers that may curb freedom of movement.
While going down memory lane, the narrator seems to try inhabiting a space, like Tridib
does, to achieve freedom and liberty in its entirety since freedom is central to every
character’s story in the novel. However, national uprising as a legacy of the Partition of the
subcontinent in 1947 pushes the characters from the old as well as new generation, as
demonstrated by Tridib’s killing in an act of ethnic violence, to the brink of tragedy – a
tragedy that makes the narrator question the validity of national and geographical borders.
Rituparna Roy, therefore, reminds us, “Ghosh’s is an essentially idealistic vision of a world
without borders – the emblems of which in The Shadow Lines happen to be the atlas and the
story of Tristan, which are what Tridib bequeaths to his nephew"
However, Priya Kumar considers The Shadow Lines to be a testimony of loss and
memory since the text compels the reader to concede “the past-in-presentness of partition as a
history that is not done with, that refuses to be past”. Since the past permeates the present, the
narrator is deeply preoccupied with it to understand not only his family history but the history
of his country. In the opening of his essay “Separating Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in
Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines”, Suvir Kaul, therefore, points out that the question if
you remember is the most insistent in the novel that brings together the private and the
public. Kaul declares that this question “shapes the narrator’s search for connection, for
recovery of lost information, repressed experiences, for the details of trauma and joy that
have receded into the archive of private and public memory. While remembering his
grandmother’s journey to Dhaka and Tridib’s untimely death afterwards, the narrator
recollects a series of political incidents in Calcutta and Dhaka simultaneously to bring out the
enormity of the central tragedy in his narration. It started with the disappearance of Mu-i-
Mubarak, the hair of the Prophet Mohammed, from Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir in 1963
and its recovery in 1964. In one of the riots in Khulna, a small town in the distant east of
Pakistan, a demonstration turned violent on the 4th of January 1964. This demonstration is
“branded in [the narrator’s] memory” because it is in this demonstration that Tridib lost his
life. While recollecting an individual’s sacrifice and his community’s struggle with senseless
political and national barriers, the narrator states:
Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with
silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose—have already lost—for even after all
these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence
lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect

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DSE 5:: Memory As a Major Theme of Amitav Ghosh’s Novel: The Shadow Lines

memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state—nothing like that: no barbed

wire, no check-points to tell me where its boundaries lie.
The narrator has a twin motive in narrating from the sources of memory: first, to
communicate the lurking political turmoil beneath the tender veneer of his childhood years in
Post-Partition India; and secondly, to save his memories from slipping into the realm of
forgetting. The struggle with silence is not only a struggle with recollection, but also a
struggle with the fading past in the fast-changing present. It is, therefore, justified to say that
Ghosh’s novel is a fine illustration of post-amnesia as the narrator is anxious to hold on to the
past and to document its significance. In 1979 the narrator recollects the events of 1964 in-
volving his friend because he is determined not to let “the past vanish without trace; I was
determined to persuade them of its importance”. The narrator uses memory not merely to
comprehend the individual and collective cultural past that has been confounding him for
fifteen long years, but also to figure out ‘what’ and ‘how’ to remember. Perhaps this is the
reason that the narrative reflects a constant process of introspection; as Louis James
proclaims, “if Circle of Reason is about knowledge, The Shadow Lines is about knowing”
The title of the novel is perhaps the most philosophical statement Ghosh makes
asserting that the shadow lines or the lines that not only define our human shape but our inner
struggles to choose between darkness and light are an intricate part of all human memory.
While the title The Shadow Lines can be read a thousand different ways, the significance of
shadows throughout the novel can be interpreted with vast distinctions. The shadows that all
human beings reflect are as unique to the individual as each written word is to a talented
author like Amitav Ghosh. Thus, we can say that shadow lines that exist in the memory of
one, and therefore in another’s imagination too: “I know nothing of this silence except that it
lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win,
must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all”. So, the narrative built out of an
intricate, constantly crisscrossing web of memories of many people. It never pretends to tell a
story, rather it invites the reader to invent one. Out of the memories of those involved, it is
the author’s memories that hold mirrors of differing shades to the same experience.
Several memory novels like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Shards of Memory (1995) or
Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) narrate the family saga that focuses on
the ambivalent relationships between parents and children or aunts and nephews and nieces in
the historical context. However, recently there seems to be a trend of dealing with the
relationship of grandparents and grandchildren in a memory narrative. If Vikram Seth
chooses to write a true memoir about his great-grand uncle and great-grand aunt in his true
biography Two Lives (2005), Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as a fictional memoir underlines
the relationship between grandmother and grandson.
The Shadow Lines thus, is not solely a novel about dreamers like Tridib or displaced
individuals like Tha’mma, but more importantly about the plight of the Bengali diaspora.
However, the novel presents the Bengali diaspora on a wider scale by spreading the story
over different countries and continents. By tracing a contrast between personal memory and
political history and between the space of cultural interactions and the place of barbed wires,
Ghosh’s narrator offers different ways of reading larger political design of the fate of three
nations—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Finally, the narrator’s movement back and forth in
time and space is not merely a structural device; it is a means of reminding the reader that the
partition perpetuates in the current political spheres of the divided subcontinent with Kashmir
as a disputed territory. Hence, by remembering a family tragedy, the author makes the impact
of past political events current and shakes the readers out of their apathy, so that they are able
to think beyond the shadow lines and believe in shared spaces and places.

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