CHAPTER-III

INTERROGATING NATIONALISM: AN ANALYSIS OF

AMITAV GHOSH'S THE SHADOW LINES

The forms and subjects of imaginative literature have influenced

the discourse of nationalism in a number of ways. The role of literature is

very decisive in the rise of modern nation-states in Europe in the late 18th

and the early 19th centuries. The emergence of nations was generally

associated with the advent of the ‘national print media’, the novels and

the newspapers. Their impact is found in the standardization of language,

promotion of literacy and the emergence of distinct national literature.

Anderson’s Imagined Communities extensively discusses how the manner

of presentation adopted by the novel and the newspaper allowed people to

imagine the special community that was the nation: ‘[T]he movement of a

solitary hero through a social landscape of a fixity that fuses the world

inside the novel with the world outside. The picaresque tour d’ horizon-

hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes- is

nonetheless not a tour du monde. The horizon is clearly bounded.’(35)

All forms of imaginative literature have contributed to the

formation of nations. Among them the role played by the novel is

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remarkably significant. Even a novel which claims to be completely

apolitical does present some or other kind of vision of the nation.

Timothy Brennen in his ‘The National Longing for Form’ elaborates this

point:

It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of

nations by objectifying one, yet many of national life, and by

mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered

jumble of languages and styles … Its manner of presentation

allowed people to imagine the special community that was

the nation. (50)

Brennan develops this idea with the help of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of

‘heteroglossia’ and ‘dialogism’. Bakhtin observes that the novel

originates in a period when

The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and

irreversibly. The period of national languages, co-existing

but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end…. The

naive and stubborn coexistence of languages within a given

national language also comes to an end-that is, there is no

more peaceful coexistence between territorial dialects, social

and professional dialects and jargons, literary language,

epochs in language, and so on. (12)

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Thus it was in the novel that many languages that were previously foreign

intermingled forming a profusion of ideas and styles indicative of the

heterogeneity within the nation that was forcefully led to accept a

common identity.

The literary genre that the novel parodied in its nation-forming role

was the epic. The epic whose narrative is characterized by certain

expressions like ‘beginning’, ‘first’, ‘founder’, ‘ancestor’, ‘that which

occurred earlier’ forms an excellent rhetoric of nationhood. The novel by

documenting contemporary life and manners represents the nation more

effectively than the epic. The epic fundamentally is a narrative of past

events; whereas the novel is a live record of the contemporary world cast

in an open-ended time frame. The novel, ‘instead of furthering

unquestioning, ritualistic reaffirmations of a people (as in epic) becomes

a contemporary, practical means of creating people’ (Brennan 50). By

exploring the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings, and interests of the

ordinary people living in the present, the novel makes a realistic

representation of the nation.

In my first chapter, I have made a detailed note on the differences

between the socio-political factors that triggered nationalism in Europe

and the colonial world. In the European context, nationalism was a timely

answer to a number of questions associated with the formation of new

identities after the linguistic and dynastic rupture. In the newly formed

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bourgeois society after the fragmentation of papal empire and the decline

of the medieval empires, it was the novel that set new standards for

language and representation. All these factors point to the fact that the

nation was one of the necessary concomitants of capitalism in the West.

Unlike this, the novel emerged in the Third World mostly as an

expression of the subjugated people’s quest for identity and cultural roots.

The major objective behind it was to resist the ongoing cultural

onslaughts from the West. The novel depicted the friction between newer

and older values and a general wish to construct a civil society. Basically,

it embodied the dilemma the anglicized intelligentsia, who were

struggling to strike a balance between the eastern and Western ethos, was

in.

The novels written in the wake of independence mainly focused on

defining and refiguring an indigenously born Indian national identity.

Often the roots of the national identity were traced to the Brahminic

tradition of the Vedic period. In the second chapter, I have tried to

discuss elaborately the contributions of the nationalist historians towards

this end. Unlike histories and historic novels, this task is more effectively

done by the novels. Since the novelists enjoyed more freedom in the

invention of traditions and refiguration of historical facts than the

historians, they proved to be better advocates of nationalism than the

historians. That is the reason why Bankim Chandra’s Anand Math turned

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out to be more efficacious in the nation-making programmes than the

histories produced in the interim. When the initial enthusiasm of nation

building waned during 1970s and 80s, there emerged a number of novels

that questioned the very rationale of nationalism. Simultaneously there

came up a tendency to address regional or sub-regional identities within

the nation. There are many writers who addressed the problems of

nationalism among the Indian-English writers. I will refer to them in this

chapter itself while discussing the shifting positions the Indian English

fiction have adopted towards nationalism in the recent times. These

novels presented the nation as a proliferator of diverse cultures and

territories that should have been otherwise autonomous. Writers like

O.V. Vijayan, V.K.N, Mukundan and Anand in Malayalam undertook

earnest attempts to explore the fissures in the nationalist dream. V.K.N

problematised the political situation in India; Vijayan, Mukundan and

Anand focused on communities like illegal immigrants, linguistic

diasporas and the destitute outside the national boundaries.

The object of my research is as I remarked in the introduction to

analyze four fictional works The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, The

Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, Legends of Khasak by

O.V.Vijayan and Bovine Bugles by V.K.N as discourses on interrogating

nationalism. Two of the texts in this group are in English and the other

two are the English versions of two Malayalam novels. My study aims at

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juxtaposing the Malayalam texts and the English texts in order to identify

the differences in tone, orientation and trajectories of a regional discourse

and a pan–Indian discourse. It has been mentioned in the previous chapter

that Indian nationalism operates on two clearly demarcated levels: the

pan-Indian and the regional. On the pan-Indian level the nation

symbolizes the tradition and practices of those who reside in the national

terrain. The local and provincial ethos rarely finds access or entry in that

realm. As such the novels with a pan-Indian ambience and orientation

miss the real flavour of India. The interrogation of nationalism

undertaken by these novels often fails to address the actuality of the

Indian nation whereas the regional novels pose a real critique of the

nation by voicing much of the ideological deceptions enmeshed in

mainstream nationalism. They posit national identity as the profusion of

countless regional and sub regional identities. They interrogate

nationalism by exploring the specificities of the sub-nationalities within

the nation. The Shadow Lines and The Great Indian Novel are written

more or less from a pan-Indian standpoint. They can be taken as

explorations into the problematics of the nationalist ideology. Legends of

Khasak and Bovine Bugles present different levels of regional responses

against the nationalist ideals. The contrast is essentially between a

sthalapurana (a micro narrative) and a deshapurana (a macro narrative)

with regard to the interrogation of nationalism.

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This chapter examines the various dimensions of the question of

nationalism represented by Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. This

novel, like most of other Indian English novels, views the nation from a

pan-Indian vantage point. Before analyzing the novel from the

aforementioned perspective, I would like to give a brief outline of the

shifting positions the Indian English fiction have adopted towards

nationalism over a few decades. Indian English fiction, being a child born

out of a conglomeration of native sensibility and foreign language, differ

from the regional novels both in terms of their representation and

interrogation of nationalism. The postcolonial totality called ‘India’

figures only in the works of the Indian English novelists. They are

supposed to be the legitimized articulators of Indian identity or

Indianness. In contemporary literature the word ‘Indian’ is used only in

association with the word ‘English’; yes, there is no Indian novel in

Malayalam or in Punjabi or in Telugu. Instead of producing an all-

inclusive national narrative, regional writers have sought to represent the

nation in ellipsis. Most of these writers repudiated the idea of the nation

and preferred to write about their particular locality, culture and

traditions. Whenever they speak about a national issue, their articulations

are represented as emanating from their cultural and linguistic rootedness.

In Indian English novels it is difficult to perceive this kind of vantage

point constituted of a particular region or culture. What we see in them is

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a nation compressed and condensed according to the taste and sensibility

of an international audience. A profound sense of the dynamics of Indian

identity and cultural ethos is missing in them. To a large extent, these

limitations are caused by their restricted linguistic and cultural resources

and poor social affiliations.

As against novels written in other Indian languages, Indian English

fiction had a relatively slow start. Starting from Gandhian-economics

oriented novel Murugan the Tiller (1927) by K.S.Venkataramani, it

gathered momentum. Gradually it acquired new dimensions of power and

recognition with the arrival of the famous trio, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja

Rao and R.K. Narayan. At every stage of its development, Indian English

fiction has been influenced by some dominant literary trends in the Euro-

American world. Some of the major themes commonly found in Indian

English fiction are nationalism, East-West conflict, Gandhian philosophy,

independence struggle, and many other social and economic issues like

casteism, poverty, industrialization, etc. In the post-independence era the

novel has attained enough pluck and maturity to discuss many complex

topics like imperialism, multiculturalism, problems of national identity

and sovereignty of nations.

The early Indian English novels modelled more or less on the 18th

century English social novels, had their immediate context in the

nationalist movement. They were social documents set against the issue

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of nationalism. In India the nationalist movement was inalienably

entwined with social reformation. The novels of 1920s and 30s were

documents of this changing socio-political scenario. Novelists like Mulk

Raj Anand and Raja Rao were distinctive in terms of their preoccupations

with the socio-political issues of the time. Many of the burning issues of

the time like the upliftment of the low caste, women and the poor were

seriously discussed in their works. Raja Rao’s novels, especially

Kanthapura, were often quoted as powerful narratives of resistance

leading to the subversion of the colonizer’s misconception of India as a

passive and backward country. By ingeniously mixing myth and history

Kanthapura challenged the hegemony of Western narrative strategies.

Novels of Anand were also distinctive in terms of their subversion of

British literary imperialism. Anand’s selection of the marginalized as

protagonists for his works was something unprecedented in the literary

history of both India and Europe. He reverted the stereotyped romantic

notions of hero by making a harijan the protagonist in his Untouchable.

He also questioned the authority of conventional narratology by

incorporating a lot of modern techniques in it. This phenomenon should

be viewed as an impact engendered by the superimposition of Marxist

literature on socio-political concerns of the time.

Indian English novels written during 1950s and 60s were

characteristically experimental both in theme and form. They were aptly

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described as novels of East-West encounter. The influence of Western

existentialist thoughts of Sartre and Camus and the so-called Joycean

technique of stream of consciousness were strikingly visible in them.

Generally two types of themes recur in these novels: ‘(i) the search for

self identity in a metaphysical or ethnic sense as in the novels of Raja

Rao, B.Rajan and Kamala Markandaya, and (ii) the introvert’s probing

into the inner mind, as in Anita Desai’s novels’(Kirpal 23).It is

noteworthy here that the disjointed, fragmented sensibility (as noticed in

Joyce’s or Faulkner’s novels) associated with the European experience of

alienation after the collapse of the post World-War society didn’t create

much furor or excitement in India. We had a somewhat corresponding

during the partition when a quarter million Sikhs and Hindus were

massacred and left adrift and homeless. Its reverberations were felt in a

few regions like Punjab and Lucknow. Even those works that embraced

existentialist style of writing, within a few years, bounced back into the

mainstream style of writing. Viney Kirpal’s excerpt is noteworthy here.

He opines:

Although a sense of meaninglessness and the absurd did grip

the refugee families, existentialism as a philosophy has been

more real to post World-War Europe than here.

Existentialism endowed a romantic persona to European

artists and fictional characters as both stood outside society

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to challenge its social, religious conventions, the Church and

the State. Neither as a philosophy nor as a literary

phenomenon did existentialism and Western modernism take

root in the Indian mind. (24)

During 1960s and 1970s, by reason of the general disillusionment

of the time, there emerged a number of literary works exhibiting the

growing apprehension of nationalism. The 1970s were a sort of gestation

period for the revolution in fictional technique and national sensibility

that was doomed to occur in the 1980s. The Emergency period (1975-77)

with its repressive and tyrannical policies shook the Indian consciousness

to its very roots. Novelists of this period once again felt the urgency of a

spirited resistance and opposition against the oppressive system as they

did in 1920s and 1930s against the British. In place of the imperial rulers,

they made Mrs. Gandhi their target of attack and object of raillery. A

great number of novels, ranging from Salman Rushdies Midnight’s

Children to Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Distance explored this theme

and worked out multiple possibilities in the presentation of national

history. Thus the theme of Emergency and Indira Gandhi’s repressive

misrule became a subject for various levels of interrogation and

interpretation as well as an excuse for revolutionized fictional technique.

Unlike the socially committed novels of 1920s and 1930s, these novels

didn’t help to raise any public consciousness or empathy whereas they let

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loose a frontal attack on the State for its authoritarian and ideological

stance towards the people. As a result of these twin revolutions, i.e.,

thematic and formalistic, the official version of Emergency underwent

multiple levels of distortions and reversions. It was in this period that

literature showed a tendency towards regionalism and sectarianism. It

resulted in the production mainly of two kinds of fiction: (i) novels that

presented the nation in negative terms through excessive use of

subversive narrative forms and black humour (eg.Shashi Tharoor’s The

Great Indian Novel and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of the Day), (ii) novels

that explored the regional and sub-regional identities within the nation

(eg. Balraj Khanna’s A Nation of Fools and Pratap Sharma’s The Days of

the Turban – both about Punjab; Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man -- about

the Parsi sub-culture).

Many Indian English writers of the 1980s found Rushdie’s

paradigm i.e., multiple ways of seeing things, hybridization of language,

telling personal stories as national epics, very interesting. Some

prominent new writers like Namita Gokhale (Paro: Dreams of Passion),

Amitav Ghosh (The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines), Upamanyu

Chatterjee (English, August and The Last Burden), Boman Desai (The

Memory of Elephants), Allan Sealy (The Trotter Nama and Hero) and

Nina Sibal (Yatra) are indebted to Rushdie for their executive works.

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Some of the characteristic features shared by the ‘Rushdie-influenced’

novels in general are:

a multigenerational, mock-epic family saga, complete with

family trees, maps, and a long list of dramatis personae, that

tells the story of the protagonist’s family as a national

history; Rege2) a rejection of the traditional, social-realist

novel: larger-than-life allegorical characters and events in

the tradition of magical realism; (3) both a fluency in

standard English and a confidence with the language that

allows the unembarrassed creative use of various kinds of

Indian English; (4) a sprawling, rambling style, full of

digressions and humour; (5) the use of myth, oral tradition,

and different versions and ideas of history; and (6) a playful

irreverence for the sacred cows of nationalism and religion.

(Rege 125)

In short, the national/personal narratives written during 1980s celebrated

the simultaneous identity and duality of self and nation by exploring the

creative potential of ambivalence.

The radical indeterminacy and postmodern free play that

characterized the novels of 1980s were not explicitly present in the post-

Rushdie fiction. These novels were found to be moving beyond

ambivalence and remained ideologically committed to the nation.

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Ultimately The Midnight’s Children set forth the labyrinthine framework

of modern nations and the entanglement of citizens within it. It

simultaneously challenged and reinforced the national framework and

stressed the inability of renouncing it. Post-Rushdie novels, especially

Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass (1995), too expounded the

experiences of being caught up in national history and challenged the

official nationalist version of it. The difference is that it didn’t reject the

nation altogether, but replaced nationalist politics by a local or region-

based loyalty.

Indian English fiction is undeniably one of the booming fields in the

present day literature of the nation. Although it has to its credit quite a

large number of texts of which some are remarkably outstanding both in

terms of theme and technique, a substantial number of critics still regard

this genre as a minor, not-very-important, area of literature. Literatures of

the centre are generally considered to be peripheral literatures that do not

concern themselves with the vast majority of Indians. Even though they

refer to most of the issues in contemporary politics, their socio-political

commitment is dubiously viewed in the mainstream academic circle. In

his article ‘The Indian English Novel 1980-1990: An Overview’, G.N.

Devy explicitly discusses the questions of marginality and the social

consciousness of Indian English writing. Taking into consideration its

lack of a regional base, Devy has assigned it the status of ‘pocket

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literature’. He argues that Indian English fiction that works through

linguistic and cultural hybridization and social exclusion is incapable of

incorporating the cultural tributaries at the regional level (12-14). Since

Indian English fiction addresses primarily an international audience or at

the best the rising middle class in India, its main agenda is to highlight

certain aspects of India that might amuse and entertain its consumers.

The vim and vigour of Indian social life is missing in them. Most of the

writers in this school have no stakes in the Indian society. A very large

number of writers in this group are expatriate writers who do not consider

themselves as Indians; they identify themselves as Canadian or American

or British Asians. About the writers who live in India, the peculiar thing

to be noticed is that most of their books are published abroad. The

colonial mental habits still prevails in the literary circles and our writers

are lured by the false value attached to the books with a foreign,

especially the first nation label. In actuality most of these novels with a

London imprint are not much better in terms of literary merit than an

average fictional writing in the Indian languages. The regional literatures,

as compared to the Indian English literatures, had a very long history

with traditions of established criticism. In the age of global capitalism

and cross-cultural and trans-national literary outputs these literary

expressions failed to gather the proper attention they command. Hence

the discussion on the novels in the Indian English family demands a

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thorough investigation of their generic features constituted by their

bilingual, bicultural, upper class, socially restricted, linguistically cut off

existence.

The relevance of The Shadow Lines as a national narrative lies in

its delineation of the dynamics of nationness and national identity. The

novel problematises the nation by exploring the different dimensions of

the issues of ‘identity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘cross-cultural interactions’. In the

present-day world, that witnessed the collapse of different political blocks

and nation-states, and the rise of international capitalism and global

market, nationalism is no longer considered to be the ‘grand narrative’ of

history. The Shadow Lines explodes the legacy of the colonial political

heritage that affirms the centrality of nations by questioning the relevance

and continued validity of nations in the global society. All in all, the

novel forms an eloquent critique of nationalism and proposes

internationalism as the ideal form of existence.

Ghosh’s reflections on nationalism are more or less an extension of

Gelner’s theory that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist

(169). Ghosh regards the nation, Rudrashish Chakraborty observes, ‘as a

“construct” rather than a concrete reality, having more shadow than

substance. As a logical corollary to this is the idea of “nationalism”

which is fallacious- a propaganda exercise, full of gaps and fissures’

(179). Conforming to this view The Shadow Lines presents the nation as

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artificial and irrational entity which is deeply fractured. The central

concern of the novel is to highlight the failures of nationalism and

nationalist government in accommodating the innate demands and

aspirations of the people. Written against the backdrop of the civil strife

in post-partition East Bengal and riot-hit Calcutta the novel probes the

causes of political unrest and unravels its deep lying impacts on

individual lives and social relations. Focusing on the lives of a group of

characters who went through the trauma of partition, the novel aims to lay

bare the hollowness of homogeneity that was imposed on Indian

nationalism. Ultimately the novel questions the political logic of

partition and the viability of the neatly drawn national boundaries as the

criterion for defining national and cultural identity. The novel also

documents the rise of religious sub-nationalisms and the ongoing inter-

religious and intra-national conflicts triggered by them. The lurking

danger of communal strife and the grotesque logic behind it is very

powerfully depicted in it. Pitted against these events and issues the novel

undertakes a serious investigation into the meaning of political and

personal freedom in the modern world. Ultimately it is a search for an

authentic selfhood and meaningful existence through freedom.

Basically The Shadow Lines is a family saga that unfurls an

international cross-cultural relation between two families- the Datta

Choudhuris of Bengal and the Prices of London- over three generations.

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The abiding relation between the members of the family is illustrative of

the power of imagination that connects places with places and people

with people. The main argument of the novel is that a cross-cultural,

international space that amalgamates different national identities can be

accomplished through an inclusive imagination. The family story and

political history are dexterously woven together in the body of the novel.

The narrative which begins in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second

World War and ends in 1964 with the explosion of post-partition

communal violence in India and Bangladesh forms a brilliant document

of the major socio-political developments of that period. The first

section of the book titled as ‘Going Away’ delineates London on the eve

of the Second World War. In the second section, ‘coming Home’ the

focus is shifted to Calcutta and Dhaka. Here Ghosh recounts the

tumultuous situation caused by the Partition and the resultant

developments like communal frenzy and violence. The focus of the

narrative is to explore the meanings of such events and their effects on

the individuals who live through them. Indian nationalism, the legacy of a

century long life-and-death struggle against the British, lost its meaning

after the partition. The trauma and confusion of the uprooted East

Bengali families after the dismembering of Bengal in 1947is very

powerfully depicted in the novel. The novel presents the nation-making

as a border making programme which ultimately results in the separation

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of people and places from one another. The irrationality and absurdity of

separating people by drawing lines and the shadowy nature of such lines

is emphasized throughout the novel through various images. It highlights

certain issues like political violence, communal hatred, dislocation and

realignment of family as the necessary concomitant of nationalism. The

theme of violence runs as an undercurrent to the narrative thread. All the

major characters in one way or other are victims of political violence.

The novel shows through various instances how violence gets into

personal lives and how the freedom is ultimately tarnished by it. The

implication of the novel is the need for crossing all boundaries constituted

by nation, culture and language and establishing strong humanitarian ties

across cultures.

The preoccupation of the novel that the ideal world without any

national divide can be actualized only through the liberation of the

individuals from the narrow concerns that encapsulate them echoes

Gandhi’s visions set forth in his Hind Swaraj on the construction of a

trans-national society. I have already mentioned in the second chapter

that Gandhi has regarded the liberation of the individual from himself as

the ideal thing to be expected in a nation and such a nation has every

chance of evolving into a universal society. The shadow Lines elucidates

this theme by portraying the evolution of the narrator as a self-

transcended universal citizen. Tridib, the representative of cross-cultural

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perspective in the novel, with his ‘expanded horizons and imaginative

understanding of the world’ (Dharwan 22) teaches the narrator how to

defy the shadow lines of language, religion and culture and explore some

basic traits of human feelings and attitudes which may prevail in all ages

all through one’s life. Tridib enlightens it by making one recognize the

creative potential of the imagination. The narrator to whom Tridib

accords worlds to travel in and eyes to see through finally discovers

himself as an alter ego of his mentor, Tridib himself.

The Shadow Lines explores the meaning of nationalism and

political freedom mainly by analyzing the different dimensions of three

major political movements vis-à-vis the Second World War, the partition

of the Indian nation and the communal riots of 1964 after the

disappearance of the sacred relics from the Hazratbal mosque. Ghosh

draws parallels between wars of Europe and the riots on Indian

subcontinent to explicate the universal nature of political violence. The

novel brings out the horrors of the Second World War through Tridib’s

ruminations on the war-torn London. Tridib was an eight year old child

then. His family stayed with Mrs. Price, their family friend in London for

a whole year when the war started. Tridib told the narrator how they

lived in those days with the terror of German air raids. Mrs. Price’s

brother Alan Tresawsen and his three friends were killed in an attack. All

of them were young intellectuals having a lot of dreams and aspirations

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about future. On them Tridib comments, ‘nobody can ever know what it

was like to be young and intelligent in the summer of 1939 in London or

Berlin’ (68). The Second World War, which was basically an expression

of extremist nationalism, underscores ghosh’s thesis of nationalism as a

breeding ground of sectarianism and violence.

The novel brings out the racist currents pervasive in English

society through the depiction of Ila’s experience of the racial

discrimination at London school. Ila who wrote English better than her

class mates was always envied by the native students. One day, after her

school hours, she was attacked by a native girl. Being a brown-skinned

girl, nobody came to her rescue. Even Nick, with whose family Ila’s

family got an intimate relationship for over three generations, rushed to

his home to avoid being seen in her company. Ila, the daughter of a

distinguished UN official and the grand daughter of Justice Mr. Datta

Choudhuri belonging to an aristocratic family in Calcutta, marries this

Nick inspite of his constant neglect of her. Even after their marriage, Nick

ill treats her and indulges in illicit sexual relations with other women.

Though Nick is jobless and lives on Ila’s income in an apartment bought

by her father, he never feels the necessity of being loyal to this ‘dirty

Indian slut’. When Ila discards her Indian identity by preferring to live in

England and strives after regaining Nick’s love, she is unconsciously

reinforcing her subject position constituted by her Third World identity.

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The novel documents the partition of the Indian subcontinent and

the violence it unleashed as the most traumatic experience in the recent

history of Indian nation. Its trauma continues through three generations

of the narrator’s family. Novels like Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Purb

Paschim, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice

Candy Man, Attaia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, written

around the issue of partition echoes the same theme. The Shadow Lines

also speaks of the agonies of displacement, sense of alienation and the

nostalgic longing for the past. The Bengali diaspora who has been

dispersed to distant lands after the partition cannot escape the

psychological vacuum that pestered their lives for ever. The East

Bengalis recall the 15th August 1947 as a day of partition, not as a day of

Independence. Rather than providing the people a sense of belongingness

and freedom, it ended up in the unleashing of the worst sort of

malevolence and communal frenzy leading to an abrupt end to the long

cherished history of communal amity and common heritage. Ghosh

argues that border lines cannot destroy the fundamental unity of people

living on both sides of the boundary.

In The Shadow Lines the character who typifies the post-

partition syndrome of rootlessness and divided self is Thamma, the

narrator’s grandmother. Like the countless other victims of the partition

she too has gone through the experiences of displacement and

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dispossession, struggle and fear. Thamma, born in Dhaka was forced to

migrate to Calcutta in the wake of the horrid days of partition, represents

certain fossilized visions of nationalism. It is through Thamma that

Ghosh brings to the fore most of the taken for granted assumptions about

nationalism. According to Thamma nation is the only marker of an

individual’s identity in the modern world. Contrary to her belief, she

finds her political identity a big question mark. Like millions of other

victims of partition, Thamma has no ‘home but in memory’ (194).

Though she identifies Dhaka as her home she has no access to it as it is in

another country where she is a foreigner. She interrogates herself by

throwing some questions like, ‘who am I? Am I an Indian merely because

I am a Hindu and live in Calcutta?’(21). For Thamma it is the sad

realization that she has no roots in the nation which acknowledges her as

its citizen.

Central to the conception of the novel is the attempt to deconstruct

the unified notions of national identity. Thamma challenges many of our

notions of homogenous national identity. Her political identity and sense

of belonging remain poles apart. This psychic confusion reaches its peak

when she goes to Dhaka after long years of separation. She visualizes her

journey not as going but as coming to Dhaka. The impact one’s place of

birth leaves on one is so powerful that one can only speak of a journey to

that place only in terms of homecoming. Anterior to her visit to Dhaka

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she hopes that she can see the borders between India and Pakistan from

the aero plane. Her son mocks at her and asks whether she expects a long

black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other as in a school

atlas between these two nations. She finds it difficult to comprehend that

there is no visible symbol of partition between the two places. Her

wonder never ceases and she asks her son,

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 will 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

without anybody stopping us. What was it all for then-

partition and all the killing and everything – if there isn’t

something in between? (151)

Thamma gets utterly puzzled when she is told by her son that ‘the border

isn’t on the frontier: it’s right inside the airport. You’ll see. You’ll cross

it when you have to fill in all those disembarkation cards and things.’

(152). It is at this moment that she realizes the naked truth that ‘her place

of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality’ (152).

Painfully she realizes the truth that she is much more a foreigner in her

native land than May price, the English woman who doesn’t even need a

visa to visit Dhaka. Her Dhaka is no more a reality now. It has

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disappeared into a remote past. Here Thamma becomes a victim of

nationalism, whose desire to get identified by the nation where she is

rooted, is never fulfilled. As stated by Tridib,

All she wanted was a middle-class life in which, like the

middle classes the world over, she would thrive believing in

the unity of nationhood and territory, of self respect and

national power: that was all she wanted- a modern middle-

class life, a small thing that history has denied her in its

fullness and for which she could never forgive it (78).

Ghosh presents Thamma as a staunch nationalist who

cherished certain radical visions of nationalism. She considers

nationalism as a liberatory force; liberation from the fetters of oppressive

forces. She inherits this spirit of freedom from the turbulent socio-

political developments she witnessed as a child and a college-going

student. When freedom struggle reached its peak she was a young girl in

Dhaka. As a student she was exposed to the fierce revolutionary

nationalist spirit that was sweeping through Bengal. She desired to be a

part of that revolution by helping the revolutionaries in circulating

propaganda or transporting weapons or running errands for the terrorists.

She feels that the political freedom obtained after long years of struggle

against the foreign forces, should be protected at all costs. One has to be

ready to die for one’s country or even to kill others. It is this conviction

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of freedom that differentiates her from Ila, her sister’s grand daughter.

Ila, unable to adapt to the society of her relatives escapes to England, a

society which accommodates her sense of freedom and morality. In

Thamma’s words freedom for Ila is a right to do what she pleases in the

permissive society of a country like England. Thamma says that Ila

doesn’t even understand the true spirit of England and she has no right to

live in that country. Everyone who lives in England ‘has earned his right

to be there with blood with their brothers’ blood and their fathers’ blood

and their sons’ blood. They know they’re a nation because they’ve drawn

their border with blood’ (78). She explains the creed of English men as:

War is their religion. That is what it takes to make a

country. Once that happens people forget they were born

this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: They

become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is

what you have to achieve for India, don’t you see? (78)

Thamma’s idealist views about nationalism fade after she

witnessed Tridib’s death at the hands of the rioting mob in Dhaka. Her

sense of identification with her place of birth undergoes a thorough

transformation after this event. Her nostalgic sentiments for Dhaka turn

into a feeling of hatred. When she hears the news about Indo-Pak war on

the radio, she cries: ‘We have to kill them before they kill us; we have to

wipe them out.’ She continues, ‘this is the only chance ....The only one.

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We are fighting them properly at last, with tanks and guns and bombs’

(237). She even donates her favourite necklace, the first gift that she

received from her husband after her marriage, for the war funds. The

news about the war was so disturbing to her that while listening to the

radio news she lets her fist drive into its glass front. When she finds her

hand severely bruised and bleeding, she regains her calm and says, ‘I

must get to the hospital .... I mustn’t waste this blood. I can donate it to

the war fund’ (237). Having gone through the trauma of partition, and

having lost her sister’s son in the riot, she sees the war with Pakistan as

her last chance for survival. Her concern is for the younger generation,

their freedom and well-being. This anxiety haunts her until her death.

About her grandson the narrator, she fears that Ila has cast a vicious spell

upon him. It is in this delirious state that she posts a letter to the Dean of

his college informing him that the narrator was in the habit of visiting

brothels in Delhi and he should not be allowed to continue in the college.

Thus Ghosh portrays Thamma as the most powerful character of the

novel. The shifting positions she adopts towards nationalism suggest the

contiguous nature of the nationalist sentiment. Just as nations, nationalist

sentiments and feelings are also contiguous with a lot of personal and

social factors. As to the nations, nothing is eternal or permanent about it,

either be it the borders, or be it the sense of loyalty one has for it. Just

like national borders, national identity is also an arbitrary thing. In other

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words, it is an ephemeral entity that is continuously revisable and

reproducible in terms of the changes in certain factors like religion,

politics, language, etc.

Another instance of political violence delineated in the novel is the

communal strife in Calcutta, erstwhile East Pakistan and its concomitant

flare up in India. On 27 December 1963, a relic, believed to be a hair of

the Prophet Muhammed, disappeared from the Hazratbal Mosque in

Srinagar. People in the valley demonstrated and took out procession

against it. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t trigger even a single incident

leading to any religious discord or disruption in the Kashmir Valley.

Unfortunately, a demonstration turned violent in Khulna, a small town in

the distant east wing of Pakistan. Tridib, who had gone to rescue his

mother’s Jethamoshai settled down in Dhaka, succumbed to one of these

riots. The tremors of these riots ran all through India and jolted

thousands of people on the subcontinent. The narrator comments on it,

It is a fear that contingent, that the spaces that surround one,

the streets that the spaces that normalcy is utterly contingent,

that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one

inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as

hostile as a desert in a flash flood...... it is the perpetual

quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the, war

between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. (204)

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The narrator, a school going student, was also affected by it. On a

certain day in the early January of 1964, his school plyed with very few

children who were told that the Muslims had poisoned the Tala Tank that

supplied water to the entire city of Calcutta. At school their classes were

let off half way through. On their way home an unruly mob chased their

bus and threw stones at it. This incident sowed the seeds of discord even

in the mind of the young children. After this incident the narrator was

frightened to talk with his best friend, a Muslim boy. The children

realized that the place where they reside and the people with whom they

are in close contact, may turn out all on a sudden, to be very dangerous

and hostile.

Here Ghosh is giving a new dimension to geographic distance and

people’s sense of closeness. These incidents suggest that people and

places can get interrelated either through mutual discord or through

empathy irrespective of geographic distance. The implication here is that

there exists certain levels of identification and commonality of interests

cutting across the national consciousness. There are a lot of questions in

life that interconnect people transcending the interest of nation. He shows

how certain unconnected incidents across national and regional borders

get connected in a most haunting manner. Ghosh argues that communities

by nature are trans-national and the demarcation on them can be

understood only through a looking glass metaphor. The narrator says,

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The simple fact that there had never been a moment in the

four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the place

we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to

each other than after they had drawn their lines- so closely

that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in

Dhaka: a moment when each city was the invented image of

the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line

that was to set us free - our looking glass border.(233)

The quest for freedom is the central motif in the plot of The

Shadow Lines. The novel brings to the fore competing visions of freedom

as represented by different characters. The ideal vision is highlighted by

suggesting the limitations of others. These visions of freedom are closely

connected with the vision of nationalism upheld by each of the characters.

As for Thamma, the representative voice of the Bengali bhadralok

(Bengali word for the middle class people) nationalism, freedom is

liberation from the colonial yoke. Thamma, who inhaled the sprit of

revolutionary terrorism brought about by the secret societies like

Anushilan and Juganter that carried on clandestine activities in Bengal,

upheld a militant vision of nationalism. She has perfect confidence in the

absoluteness of nations and the freedom it may provide to people. Her

liminal position as a national individual often challenges her own notions

of absolute nation. Later on, when the freedom was actualized in 1947,

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she realized that it didn’t yield the desired-for results. It was a sad

realization for her because the political freedom won by the nation paved

the way for new grounds of hatred and animosity. She believed that

partition and the subsequent nation formation might bring about certain

better results and make people politically independent. It was a painful

realization for her that the partition brought in its wake nothing but a

senseless and irrational separation and alienation of people who had been

bound together emotionally and culturally in a bond of intimacy and

comradeship. The tragic and comic aspect of partition is highlighted

through the portrayal of the partition of Thamma’s ancestral home in

Dhaka consequent to a quarrel between her father and his elder brother.

The partition of the ancestral home with a clear demarcation line

bisecting an old toilet throws light on the spiteful comedy associated with

this partition. It implies that the act of partition is tantamount to the act of

bisection of a traditional home commode and the separation of brothers.

When she witnessed the tragic end of Tridib and Jethamoshai in the riot,

her fond memories and cherished dreams about her ancestral house and

native place gave way to an outpouring hatred. We find her in an

extremely frantic and despondent mood in the end as if she were

surrounded by enemies on all sides. She ardently believed that only

nations could provide the political identity and freedom one needs to live

in the modern world. As nations remain always under threat of attack, the

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political freedom in the modern world is also fraught with risk and

jeopardy.

In The Shadow Lines, the person who represents the ideal vision of

freedom is Tridib. Ghosh’s reflections on post-nationalism are mainly

conveyed through this character. Tridib aspires to go beyond the limits of

his mind to other times and other places where, ‘there was no border

between oneself and one’s image in the mirror’ (29). He conceives the

nation as an artificial and indifferent social formation designed by state

imposed boundaries, bereft of humanitarian values. Hence to transcend

these barriers, one should ultimately transcend the barriers of mind by

using one’s imagination precisely. This creative use of imagination

enables him to travel to the interior recess of persons and places and

make his own inventions about them. He says, ‘a place does not merely

exist, it has to be invented in one’s imagination’ (21). Though Ila has

travelled round the world, it is of no use as she is unable to invent those

worlds within herself. It is with this imaginative power that Tridib

establishes such a deep and sentimental attachment with May Price.

Tridib saw May as a little baby when he went to England with his parents

in 1939. Even though he never saw her after that, he wrote an amorous

letter to May when she turned eighteen, expressing his desire to have

sexual intercourse with her. By the time Tridib met May in India in 1962,

this intimacy had ripened into a strong and intense love affair. He

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explains it to the narrator as, ‘one could never know anything except

through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust,

a pure, painful and primitive desire’ (29) even without seeing or talking

with the other one. This ideal relationship invalidates all questions of

national, cultural and linguistic barriers that exist between individuals.

The theme of cross-cultural human ties figures in some other works

written by Ghosh. In Antique Land Ghosh presents certain archival

documents that has given him evidences of a continued friendship

between a Jewish merchant and his Indian slave.

The relation between Tridib and May is central to the thematic

concerns of the novel. Ghosh explains it in terms of the invisible links

between persons that can cross the realities of nationality, cultural and

racial differences. Tridib, while living within the four confines of his

room at Ballygunge, has always thought of living in an ideal world. He

wants to carry the limits of his mind ‘to other times and other places’

(144). When May returns from England as a stranger, he wants to meet

her in a ruin, far from friends and relatives, in a place without a past,

without history, free, really free, two people coming together with the

freedom of strangers.’(144). Thus freedom for Tridib is freedom from all

sorts of bondages constituted by history, nation, society, relatives, etc.

Tridib realizes this ideal freedom only through death. He gets killed

while savouring a helpless old man from being attacked by a frenzied

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crowd. That is the real moment when he is able to cross the boundary

between ‘oneself and one’s image in the mirror’. It is in this context that

the old sad story of Tristan-and-Iseult narrated by Snipe to Tridib about a

homeless man falling in love with a woman across the seas, assumes

significance. Ghosh explains his thesis on the creative potential of

interpersonal ties across cultural and national bounds by comparing and

contrasting Tridib’s and May’s relation with that of Ila’s and Nick’s.

Tridib and May represent his idealistic visions of cosmopolitanism, while

Ila and Nick stand as a counterpoint to it. Like Tridib, Ila is also a strong

advocate of cosmopolitan thoughts. She too wants to escape the

restrictive and limiting bondages of her nation and culture. ‘The bloody

culture of India’ has always acted as an obstacle to her sense of freedom

and free articulation of self. She asserts that nothing really important

happens in India except famines, riots and disasters. Affirming her

solidarity with the grand narratives of Western nationalism, she says that

it is only in English society that the ideal civic nationalism integrating all

the nationals into a common culture over race, religion and language,

does exist. Unfortunately, Ila’s grandiloquent statements on Western

nationalism belies her own experience of racial hatred. It is also a

historic truth that the very foundations of European nation-states are laid

on certain hierarchic notions of race, religion and language. Anyway, Ila,

who regards herself as a free woman, prefers to live in England to escape

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the cultural burden of Indian womanhood. Actually, Ila is not free both

in the restrictive upper class Bengali society where her roots lie and in the

easy-going lower-middle class London society with which she identifies

herself. The freedom Ila boasts of is actually a bondage, a deception of

self, a tacit expression of her submissiveness to the racially superior Nick.

In The Shadow Lines the character who represents the pragmatic

version of internationalism is May Price. The mystic and idealistic

internationalism of Tridib may appear too wavy before the practical

universalism of May. After Tridib’s death May has lead an ascetic life

engaging herself in many humanitarian works under the banner of the

global relief agencies like Amnesty and Oxfarm. For many years she has

blamed herself for Tridib’s death. Later she realizes the great message

behind his death i.e.,‘He gave himself up; it was a sacrifice. I know I

can’t understand it, I know I mustn’t try, for any real sacrifice is a

mystery’(251-252). This realization leaves her free. The narrator who

spends the night with May too feels grateful to her for ‘the glimpse she

had given me of a final redemptive mystery’ (252). Thus May represents

the ideal freedom which one should aspire in the world caught up in the

vortex of violence and murderous rampage. In this context Murari Prasad

observes,

The message of the novel underlines the need for friendly

ambience for co-existence and humanitarian ties across

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cultures independent of political managers. The “indivisible

sanity” of people beyond borders has the potential to ensure

warm and wholesome international amity and exorcise

divisive streaks and madness. (Prasad 94)

The central aspect of The Shadow Lines is a refusal to acknowledge

the nation-state as the organizing principle of Indian civilization and the

last word in the country’s political existence. This cynicism springs

mainly from the novelist’s despair at the riots and political nuances he has

repeatedly witnessed since childhood. Ghosh discusses such issues as has

been set forth in many other novels about the impending dangers of

ethnic nationalism and fundamentalism that sweep India. In The Circle of

Reason he says that ethnic hatred is something like an insidious disease.

Even the air we breathe in is contaminated by its viruses. He identifies

this deadly epidemic as an exclusively South Asian malady. The same

argument is restated in The Shadow Lines when the narrator remarks that

the fear of communal holocaust ‘sets apart the thousand million people

who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world’ (204). In Antique

Land the narrator after his sojourn in an Egyptian village finally reaches

at the conclusion that the Middle East ‘was a world far gentler, far less

violent, very much more humane and innocent than mine’ (210).

Ultimately The Shadow Lines interrogates the viability of national

boundaries as a restricting and sanctioning agent of inter-personal and

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inter-communal relations between people. Basically there is a

generalization of partition as the only strategy employed in the making of

nations. Actually partition is the culmination of the divisive tendencies

within the nation. The various manifestations of sectarian thoughts such

as communalism, ethnocentrism, racism, etc. are the features that

characterises extremist nationalism. As suggested by Tom Nairn the

nation is basically ‘Janus-faced’, looking forward and backward. By

focusing only on the backward i.e., ethno-cultural jingoist nationalism,

Ghosh doesn’t acknowledge the progressive, civic and liberal

nationalism. For the East Bengalis, who have undergone the traumatic

experiences of two partitions, one in 1905 and the other in 1947, this may

be a reality. By generalizing violence Ghosh is downgrading the

liberatory spirit and the radical potential ingrained in nationalism. Instead

of exploring political realities here, the novelist deliberately evades

history. Ghosh doesn’t relate the partition of India and the subsequent

riots in Calcutta and Dhaka to their real roots in colonial period and the

wicked practice of divide and rule policy administered by the imperial

regime. Ghosh’s conviction of nationalism echoes Anthony Giddens’

observations on the same topic in his ground-breaking work The Nation

State and Violence. Giddens argues that state-power is wielded by ‘the

consolidation of centralized control of the means of violence’. (5).

Giddens asserts that the evolution of ‘nation-states’ from the ‘traditional

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states’ of Greece and Rome through the Renaissance absolutist state to

the modern nation-state, has collaborated with an officially sponsored

system of violence. This violence is not always physical or tangible, but

powerful discursive practices devised to circulate the dominant ideology

of the state. In Tagore’s The Home and the World (1915) we can also find

similar sorts of denunciation of extremist nationalism. Tagore eschews it

for its divisive potential in the multicultural and multi-religious social

spectrum of India. Where as he advocates the liberal humanist and civic

nationalism, Ghosh speaks of the possibility of a global living above all

sectarian and binding forces of nation.

To all intents and purposes, The Shadow Lines is a novel that

moves towards a global humanitarianism stemming freedom. Ghosh’s

thesis is that ‘freedom can’t be geo-politically defined or delimited’

(Bhaduri 223). Ghosh’s observations on nationalism stem from the

sensibilities, foibles and insecurities of the Bengali bhadralok. In her

essay ‘Investigating Middle class subjectivity in The shadow Lines, Babli

Gupta speaks about the inevitable limitations resulting from making ‘a

middle class transnational subjectivity’ as the exclusive agent for

exploring themes as vast as the life of a nation and nationalism (252). She

argues that Ghosh’s representation of the nation, especially from a middle

class perspective fails to depict the voices of the working classes and

peasants, the oppressed and the poor. All the major characters in the

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novel are from a middle class background having intercontinental

attachments and travel experiences. Ghosh’s thesis on internationalism

and cross-cultural attachments is applicable only to these people who

were but a minority in the nation. Their conviction of the nation of their

birth is entirely different from those people whose roots are firm in the

soil of their birth and its cultural milieu. The international thoughts that

Ghosh vehemently speaks about are beyond their social circle. In the

novel only Jethamoshai represents the attitude of this class who forms the

majority in the nation. His strong attachment to his place and his

unwillingness to accept a foreign living space is echoed in the following

passage.

Once you start moving you never stop. That’s what I told my

sons when they took the trains. I said: I don’t believe in this

India-Shindia. It’s all very well, you are going away now,

but suppose when you get there they decide to draw another

line somewhere! What will you do then! Where will you

move to! No one will ever have you anywhere. As for me, I

was born here, and I’ll die here. (216)

Here Jethamoshai voices out the feelings of those who consider it suicidal

to have one’s roots severed from the soil of one’s birth. As for that the

idea of nationalism envisioned by Ghosh in The Shadow Lines is limiting

in many ways. Rather than addressing the real inhabitants of the nation

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The Shadow Lines addresses only the international public and the upper

class people of India who float from one continent to another.

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