The chronicles of freedom movement, the partition of India and all other historic events has described in the Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh.  Thus The Shadow Lines gives an historic importance with the feeling and problems of Diasporas.

Though Amitav Ghosh did not use the term nationalism but he uttered this term in the every phases of incidents of The Shadow Lines. Ghosh explores the unreality and invalidity of traditional identity constructions such as nation, nationality and nationalism (Bharali, 2012).

in Characters

 The book is divided into two parts, “Going Away” and “Coming Home”. In the first section, the narrator draws the picture of a war-ravaged London and a family relationship between the Prices and a middle class.

• Tha'mma (the narrator's grandmother):

Tha'mma was the headmistress of a girls' school in Calcutta, who is a very strict, disciplined, hard-working, mentally strong and patient lady. She is the one who wants to bring her uncle, Jethamoshai, to India to live with her, eventually leading to his and Tridib's deaths by a mob in Dhaka.

• Mayadebi:

Mayadebi is the narrator's grandmother's younger sister and Tridib's mother. Mayadebi narrator with his story telling and in-depth knowledge of many places.

• Tridib:

Tridib is one of the most attractive characters of The Shadow Lines who grows up in a middle-class family. He is the narrator's uncle. He is in love with May and romantic by heart. Tridib helps the narrator to find many places similar to his uncle’s description.

As the narrator notes: despite the clear testimony of my eyes it seemed to me still that Tridib had shown something truer about Solent Road a long time ago in Calcutta.(Pp. 57)

• Ila:

The book expresses the complexity of love. Love cannot be purchased with gifts.  In the character of Ila love become great issue. She is the narrator's cousin who lives in Stockwell, London. The narrator is in love with her, but she marries Nick.  

• Nick:

He is the Price family's son, distinguishable by his long blond hair. He wants to become work in the futures industry. He marries Ila during the course of this book, but it is later found that he is allegedly having an affair.

 

In this book Ghosh presented these  characters with a profound knowledge scenecray of that situation. Ghosh referred chacacters with the named, Tridib's father is always to as Shaheb, Ila's mother as Queen Victoria, or the way the grandmother's sister always remains Mayadebi without denoting the relationship (Amitav Ghosh, 2011).

 

Main Story of this Book:

The two part of this book is “going away” and “coming back”. The first part Going Away can be interpreted as going away from the self and Coming Home can be interpreted as coming back into the self. This book follows the life of a young boy who is growing up in Calcutta, education in Delhi and his experiences in London. His family – the Datta Chaudharis - and the Prices in London are linked by the friendship. Adores Tridib, his second cousin, because of his profound 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 he never expresses his feelings to her afraid to lose the relationship that exists between them. 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.The Second World War and partition displaced many people. In The Shadow Lines, the narrator’s family escapes from Dhaka to Calcutta during partition.

 In Calcutta, they got close with the Price family. The two families share a lot of memories. Tridib, the narrator’s uncle, went to England for a short period and lived with the Prices during the Second World War.

The Shadow Lines is about passages to and from England and India. Cross-cultural interaction and displacements occur because of partition and the Second World War with many victims resettling in a new land.

Main Theme of the book:

 This book explores a treatment of the problematic of identity which was sketched from the historical events of  the freedom movement in Bengal, the Second World War and the Partition of India in 1947 and the communal riots in Bangladesh and India.

There is a shift of time from the past to the present and from the present to the past. The two parts Going Away and Coming Home are used to refer to going and coming with home as the central symbol, a place where one is born and brought up and is deeply attached.

The Ideology of Nationalism:

Dhaka was Thamma’s own country before the partition. Tha’mma’s return to her birthplace was not a pleasant experience. Each of her travel companions was treated as foreigners even though Tha’mma thought Dhaka to be her home, albeit one away from another home in India. Reality was too harsh on them. Each of them had to fill in the passport forms to collect visas for visiting Tha’mma’s uncle living in “East Pakistan”.

Nationalism led to communal strife during partition. Both Hindus and Muslims fought against each other then and many died while crossing the borders created by the leaders of India and newly formed Pakistan. Tha’mma’s nationalistic feelings inflame her. Tha’mma is not aware of the definition of ‘the modern border’ which is ‘political but real’, according to her son. Tha’mma finds the freedom of the post-independent period to be contradictory to her idealistic notions of life without borders.

Grandmother cannot believe that she has to write Dhaka as her place of birth and India as her nationality in the passport fill up the form. My grandmother shifted nervously in her chair. What forms? She said. What do they want to know about on those forms? (Pp.167).

She cannot understand why her place of birth has to be differentiated from her nationality. Grandma lives a ‘middle class life in which, like the middle class the world over, she would thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and territory.

Tha’mma visits Dhaka not only to visit her old home but also to bring her uncle back to India. Before returning to Dhaka for a short stay, she dreams of seeing the old Dhaka that she knew in her childhood. But she does not realize that the Dhaka she had left behind and the Dhaka she has seen in her return visit to her homeland are not the same.

The concept of Border of country:

The Shadow Lines suggests multiples ideas. It has to do with trans-border situations. It has also got relevance to the civilization-growth and international borders. The notion of modern nation states has been questioned. The very concept of nationhood is a mirage since it is not logically based.

It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, Years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother’s blood and their father’s blood and their son’s blood. They know they’re a nation because they’ve drawn their borders with blood (Pp. 85).

Many innocent people die in nationalist movements because of various reasons.

Communal Riots:

The partition of India and the 1964 communal riots saw that many people lose their lives because of bloodsheds. The most disturbing feature of The Shadow Lines is the tension between Hindu and Muslim communities as result of communal hatred and seeds of partition. The riots that follow tensions lead to destruction of property, public as well as private. Tha’mma’s notion of the nation and nationalism contributes to the murder of Tridib.

In 1964 communal riots which led to the closing down of many schools and the police baton charging rioters in Calcutta and Khulna.

The narrator noted that, that particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. (Pp. 164).

The main cause of communal riots in this book was the stealing of the prophet’s hair, which was caused by a rumor that had no connection with reality. But Hindus and Muslims fought against each other on that basis of that rumor.

 ….which said ‘the sacred hair of the Prophet Mohammad was reinstalled in the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar today amongst a tremendous upsurge of popular joy and festivity throughout Kashmir. (Pp. 248)

Tragic Moment in this Novel:

Tha’mma returns to Dhaka to meet her Jethamoshai in 1964. She finds Dhaka to be a completely different city. She is not able to relate to many things she had left behind in Dhaka. Her nationalistic feeling is shaken. However, after the death of Tridib, which is the climax of the political theme of this book.

Tha’mma spends most part of life in Calcutta, but she becomes a witness to a most horrible scene when she visits Dhaka to bring back her uncle. In that visit her aged uncle and also her nephew meet tragic death.

Individual Identity and the Reality:

The background of identity in this book has become specific where it is questioned. The theoretical debate about identity concerns its nature, process of formation and its existential questions. The border line puts a question mark to the geographic boundary line between countries or nations and thus its identity.

 

Other Cultural Sketch:

The importance of Hindi songs, the role of cricket in India, Indian women’s love for gold and ornaments – everything is put beautifully in this book. For example the writer noted …….which were held to confer distinction in that milieu: he was not unusually good at sports, just about good enough to keep a place in the college cricket eleven. (Pp. 91).

The narrator, for example, wants to see Ila in western outfits. If she wears the typical Bengali dress, white sari with red border, for him she looks just like an ordinary next-door girl. He repeatedly comments on her western dresses: “She was wearing clothes the like of which I had never seen before, English clothes.

She looked improbably exotic to me, dressed in faded blue jeans and a T-shirt – like no girl I had ever seen before except in pictures in American magazines. (Pp.89).

 

My Favorite Character:

 Tha’mma is a major character in The Shadow Lines. According to Tridib, She is a modern middle class woman. Tha’mma was born in 1902 in a big joint family, with everyone living and eating together. While she is in college doing her BA in History in Dhaka, she comes to know about the “terrorist movements” amongst Bengal nationalists. She wants to be a part of the Indian National Movement and do everything in her power to liberate India. Tha’mma runs secret errands for aspirant nationalists and even cooks food for them. Tha’mma’s receives a setback when she is widowed with a son at the age of thirty-two. She shows her gutsiness by raising her son single-handedly in a patriarchal society.

Tha’mma wants to lead a trouble-free life. She is a great patriot and believes in the unity of the country. But she becomes a sort of a rebel when the life that she wants to live is denied to her by the cruel fate of time.

  

Findings of book with Critics:

 A Follow Chart of a Joint Family:

  A real example of a joint family of that time have ben explore in this book. Over the time how the family has been changed also shown in this book.

”Theirs was a big joint family then, with everyone living and eating together: her grandparents, her parents, she and Mayadebi, her Jethamoshai – her father’s elder brother – and his family, which included three cousins of roughly her own age, as well as a couple of spinster aunts.” (Pp.133-134).

Full filed Character with Events:

It is quite appropriate to say that this book begins as a recollection of events that have taken place not in the life of the narrator but in someone else’. Finally, another important reason this book succeeds is because the main characters are very real, almost perfectly rounded. (Amitav Ghosh, 2011).

The shadow Lines tells the story of the narrator’s family of three generations which are spread over London, Dhaka, and Calcutta.

 The characters are also taken from different nationalities, cultures, and religions in the world. The first generation is represented by the grandmother Tha’mma, Jethamoshai, Mayadebi, and Saheb. The father, the mother, and Jatin represent the second generation. May, Nick, Ila, and the unidentified narrator represent the third generation.

The Concept of Generous Mind:

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. (Pp. 86)

The grandmother reacts on discovering that her old Jethamoshai is living with a Muslim family in Dhaka. The whole house had been occupied by Muslim refugees from India.

Chronicles of History:

“I knew that a part of my life as a human being had ceased: that I no longer existed, but as a chronicle” (Pp. 112).

The two parts of this book indicate this enigma of ‘non-belonging.’ When the dwelling place is uncertain, borders also compound the problem.  This book is arranged in such a way that important situations come after a “prelude as if to provide a catalyst for the narrator’s memories (Joshi, 2000).

Sketch of Urban Middle Class:

This book depicts urban middle class life. For urban middle class, education and professional jobs are important. These people are addicted to work because education and profession which are figured in this book.

Figured out of Child Psychology:

Tradib’s death felt a great impact on Narrtor which give detailts about child psychology in this Novel. I felt nothing – no shock, no grief. I did not understand that I would never see him again; my mind was not large enough to accommodate so complete an absence. (Pp. 239)

 

My Opinion and Recommendation

 

• An investigation of this book as a source and proof of nationality maximize and clears the both concept of identity, nationalism and diaspora. How the society changes with the time and how we react with the situation also give an extra dimension of this book.

 

• The incident of 1964 communal riots which occurred in Calcutta, Dhaka and Khulna, just give an extra image of nationalism and crisis of identity.
• On the other hand, a combination between the price family and the middle calls society also explores the social aspects of that time.
• Affection and love how contract between the two class also explored in this book.
• In a simple sense of the changing society described with the story of grandmother in the second phase of this book. “When she’d first joined, the school had had only fifty pupils and the premises had consisted of two sheds with tin roofs” (Pp. 115)

 

 

 

Conclusion:

 

The Shadow Lines” (1988) by Amitav Ghosh is a  winning novel. Both the traditioan and modern concept of nationality , identity, national boundary has been specified in this papers. The feelings of diaspora has given a new dimension in this book which covers a crisis of nation and nationality and identity.

 

 

Reference:

 

 

1. Amitav Ghosh, 2011. Amitav Ghosh: Reviews - The Shadow Lines. [Online] Available at: https://www.amitavghosh.com/shadowline_r.html [Accessed, 25 March 2016].
2. Bharali, P. (2012). Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines”: Problematics of National Identity. Journal of Humanities and Social Science (JHSS).Volume 2, Issue 2 (Sep-Oct. 2012), PP 44-46.

• Ghosh, Amitav. (1988). The Shadow Lines. Educational Edition. Delhi:  Oxford University Press.

1. Joshi, U. (2000). Narrative Techniques in The Shadow Lines. Interpretations: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines ed. Nityanandan et al. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2000.112.