Estd.

2008 ISSN 0972-0901

Cyber Literature: International Online Journal (Vol I No. IV)

Shadow Lines: A Postcolonial Novel

-- Dr.Suchita Agarwal

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Dr.Suchita Agarwal

Educational Qualifications: Ph.D. in English, M.A, NET,SLET

Occupation: Lecturer in English & Business Communication Amity

University Sector-125, Noida

Shadow Lines: A Postcolonial Novel

Dr.Suchita Agarwal

The Shadow Lines is a highly innovative, complex and celebrated novel of Amitav
Ghosh. Published in 1988, it received the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award in the
following year. Not only literary critics but also some noted litterateurs have acclaimed it
for what it has been able to achieve as a work of art. Its focus is a fact of history, the post-
partition scenario of violence; but its overall form is a subtle interweaving of fact, fiction
and reminiscence. In my opinion, Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines is probably
the most important fictional work to have appeared in South Asian literature in the last
decade: it sums up and fictionalizes all the major issues of Postcolonial literature – the
search for identity, the need for independence and the difficult relationship with colonial
culture, the rewriting of colonial past, an attempt at creating a new language and a new
narrative form and the use of personal memory to understand communal past.

In Shadow Lines, Ghosh offers us not only a conjugation of the personal and the national,
setting the personal conflict against the backdrop of national turmoil, but very often he
deals with other people's memories of times and places the narrator has never known,
thus showing on one hand that the lines dividing people and countries have always
existed and, on the other, that these invisible borders are - and have always been -
'shadowy', 'illusory', often born out of "different strands of nationalism and ideology"
which can be potential and often disrupting sources of violence. It's no more a matter of a
single 'shadow line', then: there are innumerable borders which divide people from others
and from themselves, borders separating the colonizer and colonized in the past and 'us'
from 'them' in the present; borders changing continuously, as the perspective from which
we look at them changes. Moreover, there are other invisible mental lines separating past
and present, memory and reality, identity and mask, and, last but not least, there are
critical and historiographic borders marking the territories of literature, the different
genres, of course, but also, less obviously, the demarcations separating central canon and
peripheral productions, British writers and postcolonial authors.

In The Shadow Lines, the question of identity is worked through integration rather than
alienation. The novel presents characters who are well-entrenched in their surroundings
even when they are traveling across cultures. One set of characters in the novel are
alienated from their surroundings like Nick and Ila. The novel not surprisingly invalidates
their position as having no positive force in dealing with identity formation. Another set
of characters in the novel are the obverse of this. They are deeply rooted in their cultures.
They are even chauvinistic about their positions: Th’mma and Robi; the novel does not
find any positive force in their position either. The third set of characters are at once
integrated in their environment as well as are open-minded in taking steps towards the
‘others’, those who are traveling beyond the shadow lines: Tridib, May and the unnamed
narrator. The framework that emerges through these characters in Shadow Lines is one
which invalidates both alienation and chauvinism and embraces an inclusive imagination.

Shadow Lines is an amazing story that transgresses multiple borders, one of the key
themes of the story. This is also a concern of postcolonial criticism that examines and
criticises man-made boundaries and borders as attempts to define a particular group as
against another group ("the other"). Postcolonial criticism attempts to rupture these
apparently secure boundaries by examining those who live on the margins of these
boundaries and also deconstructing (taking apart) the notion of the other. This is
particularly true of the "invention" of India the nation, with the Partition of 1947 which
drew imaginary lines across India, creating the countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and
India and also causing much death from the resulting riots.

The narrative in Shadow Lines is constantly transgressing boundaries of space and time,
thus giving the novel its title, as the lines that divide places and even times are shown to
be easily transgressed - "Shadow Lines."

Consider this quote regarding the inherent fragility of boundaries:

{About seeing the border from the air] 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'll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch
a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day . . . (151)

The novel relates the history of an Indian family living in Calcutta, but with roots in
Dhaka on the Pakistan side of the border and connections in Britain. The intertwined
history of the family and their British acquaintances, the Prices, is presented as stories
filtered through the anonymous narrator of the novel. Most of these stories are told by
the narrator's grandmother, his uncle Tridib, his cousins Robi and Ila, and the British
family friend, May Price.
 The stories bring together life in Dhaka before Partition, life in London during the war,
and the life the narrator leads in the Calcutta of the 1960s and London of the 1970s.
Through these stories, a picture is formed of the personal, communal and national
identity of this migrant family living in India with connections both to the then East
Pakistan and Britain. The experience of Partition and of living in the nation-state of
India in the 1960s is presented through the symbolism of lines, be they geographical,
temporal or cultural, or lines dividing differing realities, consciousness or identity. In
general, the novel comments on the artificial nature of cultural, ideological,
geographical and psychological borders in favour of a broader humanism that has
traditionally been very unfashionable in the discourses of postmodernism and
postcolonialism.

Using specifically London as a reference, Jameson states: "the truth of [the] experience
no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited
daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong" (411).
Although the original position and the direction of movement of the colonial and
postcolonial migrant characters in the novel is opposite to those of the Western
modernist writers of the colonial period that Jameson is referring to, obvious parallels
can be found between the two cases: they are both "bound up with the whole colonial
system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual's
subjective life." (Jameson 411).

Although the original position and the direction of movement of the colonial and
postcolonial migrant characters in the novel is opposite to those of the Western
modernist writers of the colonial period that Jameson is referring to, obvious parallels
can be found between the two cases: they are both "bound up with the whole colonial
system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual's
subjective life." (Jameson 411). The novel does not merely change the direction of the
cultural travellers; in it people come and go in so many different directions beginning
from so many different starting points that the directions get blurred into a kind of
status quo of movement. As already indicated, the actual lived experience of the
narrator in the novel is originally that of the Calcutta of the early 1960s and later that of
the London of the late 1970s. But, due to the early influence of stories told mainly by
his cousin, Tridib, the form governing these actual experiences is mainly that of an
imaginary London of 1939, or that of images of various far-away places which have
come to him in the form of these stories.

Tridib is an archaeologist, who has spent an important period of his childhood in

England, and who is in love with an English girl (or an image of one) he has last seen
as a baby. He prefers to perceive reality through the imagination rather than through his
senses and is aware of the relativity of truth. According to him, everyone lives in a
story, "because stories are all there are to live in" (184). It is just a question of which
story one chooses. Tridib chooses to invent his own stories, to construct a reality of his
own. In his view, a place does not merely exist, but it has to be invented. And people
have to invent their own realities and places, otherwise we will never be free of other
people's inventions (37).
In a contrast to Tridib's influence in the novel there is that exercised by another cousin,
Ila. For Ila, who is the cosmopolitan daughter of a diplomat, places appear somewhat
differently than they do for Tridib and the narrator, who has created detailed image-maps
of these places he has never visited, and for whom they appear both exciting and slightly
romanticized. This emerges most clearly in a conversation during one of Ila's visits to
Calcutta:

I began to tell her how I longed to visit Cairo, to see the world's first pointed arch in the
mosque of Ibn Tulun, and touch the stones of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. I had been
talking for a while when I noticed that she wasn't listening to me; she was following a
train of thought in her mind, frowning with concentration. I watched her, waiting eagerly
to hear what she would have to say. Suddenly she clicked her fingers, gave herself a
satisfied nod, and said aloud, inadvertently: Oh yes, Cairo, the ladies is way on the other
side of the departure lounge. (26)

As the narrator puts it, for Ila "Cairo was a place to piss in" (27). This is an instance of
migrant experience, surely, but very different from the kind the narrator dwells in. His
experience is travelling in the mind, the imagination, while hers is travelling actually in
person. The migrant subject does not have to move physically or geographically as Ila
does, but he/she may be migrant on the social and cultural level like the narrator. He is
migrant in his imagination, clinging to influences coming from outside (Dhaka, London,
foreign places on maps) and reducing the actual reality to a minimum.

If for Tridib present reality is of no consequence in itself, but appears merely as the
stimulus for imaginary constructions, for Ila the actual is the real. One day in London Ila
takes the narrator around the city to see used-clothes stalls and the vegetable market (36).
The narrator is bored, but gets excited when he recognizes the old location of the Left
Book Club, where according to Tridib a member of the Price family had worked before
the war. He drags Ila into the office and asks for confirmation, but the woman inside the
store knows nothing of the days before the war. Ila is indignant and surprised at the
narrator. For her, the building now looks like "any musty old office". She is not in the
least interested in the narrator's stories of the Price family or pre-war London. Ila's time
dimension is the present, her world is the actual one and her way of travelling is physical:
for her the current is real. She experiences the world through her senses, not through her
imagination. For her, in consequence, stories have "nothing to do with an excitement
stored in her senses", but are just "a string of words that she would remember while they
sounded funny and then forget" (35). In contrast, Tridib experiences the world as
concretely in his imagination as Ila does through her senses, and for him words and
stories form into experiences that are permanently available in his memory. The narrator,
who is drawn to Tridib's way of handling reality, has problems of communication with Ila
due to these very differences of worldview:
I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in
ones imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine,
neither more nor less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not
understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so
that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all. (27)

On their way to Mrs Price's house, the narrator shows off by naming streets and buildings
as they pass them. He claims that an incendiary bomb had fallen on a house called
Lymington Mansions on Solent Road on October 1st, 1940, and destroyed the whole
street. Robi claims that the Germans had developed that kind of bomb much later in the
war. The narrator insists that his version is correct, because Tridib told him so. "How was
he to know? He was just a kid, nine years old. Every little bomb probably seemed like an
earthquake to him," says Robi (60-1).

Later Robi and the narrator go to take a look at the supposedly bombed-out Solent Road.
The road, of course, looks like any other road in London. The narrator notices a small car
at the side of the road and finds himself "suddenly absorbed in the trappings of the lives
that went with that car." What is peculiar here is that he is not interested in the material
present of Solent Road or the car. He has his images of the road in bombed-out condition
and, on seeing the car, he immediately begins to imagine the lives of the people who use
it. He comments on the present state of the road by saying that naturally he did not expect
to see what Tridib had seen all those years earlier. He continues: "But despite that, I still
could not believe in the truth of what I did see . . . it seemed to me still that Tridib had
shown me something truer about Solent Road a long time ago in Calcutta." (62). Thus the
narrator refuses to integrate received (spatial as well as temporal) versions of London (the
map of the city, the details of official history, even eye-sight) and his own imaginary
construction, which he considers more truthful than the others. In a sense, he stands as
superior to his British friends in this respect: as a member of a colonized group he has
knowledge, and quite intimate knowledge at that, of the colonizer's world.

The contradiction between actual and imaginary in the novel can surely be seen as a
typical instance of both discursive and epistemological alienation characteristic of the
colonial/postcolonial condition. Whether seen predominantly as the product of
postcoloniality or globalization (which are linked as cultural processes), the novel seems
to present a feasible way of narrating what for many people is the contemporary
experience of London.The Shadow Lines does not reinforce the Western notion of an
individual subject or consciousness through which the world is realized. In addition to the
level of individual subjectivity, there seems to be a longing for an inter-subjective space
transcending the boundaries of separate subjectivities.
 REFERENCES:

Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines, London: Bloomsbury, 1988.

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London:
Verso, 1991.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Radhakrishnan, R., "Postmodernism and the Rest of the World", in The Pre-Occupation
of Postcolonial Studies, Eds. Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks.
London: Duke University Press, 2000. 37-70.

Singh, Sulaja. "Inventing London in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines". Kunapipi XXI:
2 (1999), 15-22.

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