1988 novel by Amitav Ghosh
The Shadow Lines (1988) is a Sahitya Akademi 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 in Dhaka and Calcutta.
The novel earned Ghosh the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.[2] The novel was translated by Shalini Topiwala into Gujarati In 1998.
Plot summary
Split into two parts ('Going Away' and 'Coming Home'), the novel follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and then follows with the experiences he has in London.
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 uncle, 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]
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 first 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 has 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 inagination 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]
