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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes Another aspect of modern India that the narrator brings out through the novel is the typical 20th
Century phenomenon of Civil strife and rioting especially the one that results from communal
discord. It is important to mention here that The Shadow Lines written in 1988 was the author’s
response to another unprecedented event in Post-Colonial Indian scene: the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots
that swept the nation after the then Prime minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her
Sikh bodyguards. To begin with allegedly State sponsored these riots in their magnitude were
comparable to the earlier communal frenzy of 1947 partition. The novel situates the 1964 communal
riots in Calcutta experienced by the narrator as a young school going boy centrally in the boy’s
psyche as well as in his analysis of the difference of perception that pervades the recording of such
incidents. In the book these riots and the riots at Dhaka become the occasion for the acid test of our
recording systems whether of our history or of our newspapers. The author does a brilliant job by
the use of excessive and mundane journalese that drowns the powerful dominance that it exerts in
the author’s consciousness. The author finds an inadequate portrayal of such historical events in
these sources and then goes on to analyze the reasons behind such silences:
By the end of January 1964 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared
from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished without leaving a trace in the
histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence.
The theatre of war where the Generals meet is the stage on which the states disport themselves:
they have no use for the memory of riots. Through an extensive description of a day during the
1964 Calcutta riots, the narrator tells us of his experiences of the day as a school student. Through
the day he along with the other children are caught in a fear psychosis while going to school. He
describes the empty bus ride home where the driver falters, drives into wrong lanes and makes all
the unexpected detours into unknown, deserted lanes of Calcutta to escape the mad mob. Years
later while talking of the incident to his College friends in Delhi he is surprised to find that none
of them seem to remember the fateful day.
Eager to prove his memory right he leads some of them to the archives where he digs out old
papers to support his memory. To his dismay, the newspapers paint the incident in regular
journalese. While reading retrospectively about his own experience of communal riots in Calcutta
as a child, he stumbles upon other events of the fateful day, one of which is a description of a
similar riot in Dhaka. It is at this time that he is able to link up the two seemingly unrelated events
and the fact strikes him that it was indeed the same riot in Dhaka that had claimed its victim in
Tridib. What the others in his college cannot even seem to remember owing to their location in
places that are far from Calcutta, is ironically a mirror experience of people in another country
(Khulna, Bangladesh, then in Pakistan), ‘the two cities face each other at a watchful equidistance
across the border.’ What follows is the author’s meditation on the idea of distance as a physical
reality and as a political and psychological construct. The insignificant physical distance between
the two cities (earlier one community) is stretched to an unfathomable, unconquerable political
and psychological distance, often making them as different as two civilisations. Returning to civil
strife and its portrayal, why are there these silences in History? Probably because, the author says,
these do not cohere well with constructs like a nation that the state has so painfully nurtured
earlier: ‘the madness of a riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore, a reminder of that
indivisible sanity that binds people independently of their governments. And that prior,
independent relationship is the natural enemy of the government, for it is the logic of states that
to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relation between people... ’ Is history, then an
objective telling of the past events or choosing what to write in order that the underlying form is
not distorted? It chooses to write about that which serves it while the rest is irretrievably silenced.
The author points out that the silence he sees in history results when happenings cannot be
accounted for in a given manner ‘the kind of natural silence that descends when nearness /
distance, friend /enemy become terms that are impossible to define.
However, these definitions in the first place become difficult because artificial differences are
imposed by the state. Riots and their memory become a case in point because as Ghosh puts it they
are an instance of ‘pathological inversion’ -i.e. violence of a state turning inwards unlike in other
conflicts like war where it turns outwards. The clear definition of enemy/friend, ingroup/outgroup,

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